News of War: Civilian Poetry, 1936–1945 by Rachel Galvin

Abstract

 Reviews work Fading Cloth, which he likens to a trompe l’œil. e oscillation between the materiality of the work (a collection of bottle caps or trash) and the illusion of gold created by the bottle caps is the relationship between artwork and reality that he hopes to unfold. In Part  he links these findings to innovative suggestions for understanding how Black Studies approaches its objects through its archives. Equally important to Best’s thesis is his reading of James Baldwin’s ‘e Dungeon Shook’, which forms the opening of e Fire Next Time () and takes the form of a letter to Baldwin’s nephew. Best observes that Baldwin’s work ‘inspires the difficult leap that a knowledge of belonging disarticulated from the collective requires’ (p. ). Graing together Benjamin and Baldwin, Best establishes a crucial aspect of his thesis, which is that there is something impossible about blackness, ‘that to be black is also to participate, of necessity, in a collective undoing’ (p. ). Deeply researched, from established theorists in a number of fields as well as contemporary critics, from queer theory to Black Studies, the book reads nonetheless as an open conversation with the myriad of scholars, artists, and thinkers with whom Best engages. He explores the works of artists such as Anatsui, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Toni Morrison in order to consider the ‘black radical imagination’ which might lead to a critical turn in Black Studies. At the root of his project is a desire to rescue the discipline from an insistence on trying to use the archives of slave narratives and black fiction as a way of recovering a ‘we’ at the point of ‘our violent origin’ (p. ). e book is accordingly arranged into two parts. e first includes a close examination of the artists and authors mentioned above and how to think about their work through thinking ‘like a work of art’. e second part explores the use of suicide and rumour in the archives of slave narratives, as constructed through the rhetorical concept of metalepsis (a figure of a figure). Best relies upon the work of Gérard Genette (especially the idea of the paratext), and the Derridean reading of a palimpsest, to argue for innovative ways of reading the archives. Responsibly argued and impressively confessional, Best offers thoughtful ways of reconfiguring Black Studies. e questions he raises are adroitly suspended for the reader to ponder, thus reinforcing the importance of performativity, both on the part of the work and on the part of its audience, as a necessary component in the reconfigurations he suggests. A U  P A M C News of War: Civilian Poetry, –. By R G. New York: Oxford University Press. . x+ pp. £. ISBN ––––. News of War contributes to a growing body of scholarship that seeks to include civilian writing in the canon of twentieth-century war literature. Specifically, the book represents an intervention in the field of war poetry that centres the work of ‘civilian poets’ of the s and s—poets who wrote about war without firsthand experience of combat. Unlike the trench poets of the previous generation, these were no soldier poets, but individuals who felt a keen responsibility to write MLR, .,   about war while fully aware of the ethical dilemma of ‘making verse out of other people’s bodily experiences’ (p. ). Situating the book during the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War, Rachel Galvin signals how aerial bombing campaigns meant that the boundaries between civilian and soldier were blurring: ‘war’ could no longer be ‘understood as confined to the battlefield’ (p. ). Nevertheless, when it came to having the authority to write about war, a deeply embedded cultural assumption held sway: that bodily experience of combat was a prerequisite to writing about it. Drawing on Yuval Noah Harari’s concept of ‘flesh-witnessing’, Galvin explores how this assumption was negotiated in the writing of six international poets: César Vallejo, W. H. Auden, Wallace Stevens, Raymond Queneau, Marianne Moore, and Gertrude Stein. While none of these poets sought to diminish the authority of the ‘flesh-witness’, Galvin demonstrates how their war poems decentred the notion that somatic experience offered the...