Brief Mention

Abstract

Liminal Whiteness in Early US Fiction. By Hannah Lauren Murray. Edinburgh, UK: Univ. of Edinburgh Press. 2021. viii, 208 pp. Cloth, $105.00; e-book, $105.00.This monograph argues that “liminal” characters and voices in early US fiction signal anxieties pertaining to the construction, durability, and restoration of whiteness. For Murray, the term liminal refers not so much to an in-between status as to a “threat of discorporation”—a felt sense that the white male body in particular has lost standing and needs desperately to reestablish dominance. At a historical moment when abstract ideas of citizenship and national belonging were being established and fused to burgeoning notions of whiteness, spectral figures of liminality haunted novels and short stories to signal the precarity of this fundamentally unstable ideological fusion. Employing a blended methodology sourced from critical whiteness studies, New Historicism, and New Formalism, this study will be of interest for scholars of critical race theory and for anyone invested in early and antebellum US literature.American Sage: The Spiritual Teachings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. By Barry M. Andrews. Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press. 2021. x, 237 pp. Cloth, $90.00; paper, $26.95.Written in an accessible style, this book presents Emerson as a spiritual and intellectual sage—a term applied to him during his life and that Andrews defines as an “ideal figure” whose virtue and character set an aspirational standard for living well. Arguing that this characterization best encompasses Emerson’s myriad talents as a scholar, essayist, speaker, philosopher, and mystic, Andrews works chronologically through Emerson’s life, lectures, and private and published writings. Throughout, Emerson is shown to straddle three major intellectual currents: Romanticism, secularism, and religious cosmopolitanism. Although anchored in up-to-date scholarship, this volume aims to appeal to readers outside the academy, particularly those primed to find in Emerson’s thinking a guide for personal edification.Identification Practices in Twentieth-Century Fiction. By Rex Ferguson. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. 2021. vii, 334 pp. Cloth, $80.00; e-book available.This monograph contends that official methods of identification—of determining a person’s identity through technical and bureaucratic procedures—are fundamentally reductive and therefore incommensurate with subjective conceptions of self-identity. Each of us thinks, feels, and knows ourselves in excess of the government records and bodily traces said to define us. Ferguson argues that (primarily) twentieth-century British and US prose literature provides a uniquely insightful archive to document this enduring mismatch between external identification and internal identity—a mismatch that changes shape depending on the details of any specific cultural context. Eschewing narratives of technological determinism and linear teleology, this study comprises four focused case study chapters on, respectively, fingerprinting vis-à-vis psychoanalysis and Literary Impressionism; identification cards in World War II British culture and realist novels; DNA in midcentury science fiction; and digital culture in postmodern novels.Apparition of Splendor: Marianne Moore Performing Democracy through Celebrity, 1952–1970. By Elizabeth Gregory. Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press. 2021. xi, 264 pp. Cloth, $34.95; e-book, $34.95.This study intervenes in criticism of Marianne Moore’s work by giving a “critical re-appraisal” of the poet’s later texts, focusing not on what the poems lack but on how they engage in a form of “code-switching.” The author argues that Moore’s postwar persona, series of sports poems, works on cultural phenomena, sentimental love poems, and post-1966 reflections on mortality continue the “anti-hierarchical ethics” of the poet’s earlier—more revered—volumes. Closing by discussing Moore’s relationships with Ray Johnson and Andy Warhol, the author illuminates how the writer’s postwar work inspired younger artists to continue subversive and “anti-hegemonic” art and literature.Outward: Adrienne Rich’s Expanding Solitudes. By Ed Pavlić. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press. 2021. 256 pp. Cloth, $100.00; paper, $24.95; e-book available.Tracing what Adrienne Rich calls “the other end,” this study considers how Rich’s poetry engages in the illumination of an “outward beyond the familiar.” Moving through texts from A Change of World (1951) to final revisions of “Fragment of a Libretto” that Rich completed just before her death in March of 2012, Pavlić supplements scholarship on Rich’s work by interrogating the poet’s increasing radicalization via a shift from introspective to “interspective.” Ultimately, the author argues that Rich’s oeuvre crafts a “radical solitude” of individual work and “mutual suffusion.”Deconstruction: An American Institution. By Gregory Jones-Katz. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press. 2021. 370 pp. Cloth, $95.00; paper, $32.50.This volume provides an intellectual and institutional history of deconstruction that is distinctly attuned to the US context. While accounting for transatlantic currents and also recognizing that the term deconstruction has taken on many meanings and been conflated with other concepts such as postmodernism, theory, and poststructuralism, Jones-Katz focuses his study on the narrower, “domestic” purview of the so-called Yale School of the 1970s and 1980s. It was at Yale that particular persons, spaces, publications, pedagogical innovations, and experiments coalesced to institute—rather than merely adopt—deconstruction in the United States. As a thickly textured account of academic production and practice, this book seeks to remain “analytically and rhetorically detached from deconstructionist thought” while nonetheless limning the larger and in many cases enduring cultural meanings of this one particular, much-maligned strain of humanistic inquiry.New Ecological Realisms: Post-Apocalyptic Fiction and Contemporary Theory. By Monika Kaup. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh Univ. Press. 2021. xiv, 332 pp. Cloth, $130.00; paper, $29.95; e-book available.This study traces the ontological turn in contemporary theory by considering four “new realist theories”: Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela’s autopoiesis and enactivism, Markus Gabriel’s “ontology of fields of sense,” phenomenologies of “giveness” and “passion identification,” and Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory and “factish.” Arguing that these theories illuminate “holistic” realisms, the author seeks applications—and even enactions—of these “ensembles, constellations, and configurations” in postapocalyptic novels like the MaddAddam trilogy (Margaret Atwood, 2003–13), Blindness (José Saramago, 1995), the Parable series (Octavia E. Butler, 1993–98), and The Road (Cormac McCarthy, 2006).The Elusive Everyday in the Fiction of Marilynne Robinson. By Laura E. Tanner. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. 2021. viii, 195 pp. Cloth, $80.00; e-book available.Seeking to “reverse [ . . . ] the motion toward sublimity” that many critics read and analyze in the fiction of Marilynne Robinson, this study examines the “uncomfortable ordinary” and disruptive losses in Housekeeping (1980), Gilead (2004), Home (2008), Lila (2014), and Jack (2020). The author examines the discomfort of the everyday—through phantoms, “living dying,” “uninhabitable space,” anxiety, race, and literary imaginary—in these novels, revealing that Robinson treats loss as not just “tragic” and sublime” but also as a phenomenon that requires “labored performance” to sustain the ordinary.Genre and Extravagance in the Novel: Lower Frequencies. By Jed Rasula. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. 2021. xx, 235 pp. Cloth, $90.00; e-book available.Examining the “floating category” of the novel, this study engages with both the “genre” of the novel and texts that feel “extravagant” in their exception to “those normalizing tendencies it’s in the nature of a genre to invite.” The study opens by meditation on genre and extravagance, tracking novels and criticism of the genre emerging simultaneously, before investigating “the aspiration to know all” in encyclopedic novels. The author goes on to consider more odd generic components: interpretations of fairy tales, questions of antinormative consciousness and perspective, “ruminant curiosity” (in W. G. Sebald and Franz Kafka), and “pictorial rendering” and adaptations of classic works.