Modern Language Association Convention Research Articles

In Memoriam: Dr. Steven H. Gale

I first became acquainted with Steve and his scholarship on Harold Pinter in the late 1970s, when he published his first critical monograph, Butter’s Going Up: A Critical Analysis of Harold Pinter’s Work, in 1977, followed by the volume Harold Pinter: An Annotated Bibliography, in 1978. We began corresponding, leading to my meeting and interviewing him a few years later, in 1982, when I began part of my research for my book Pinter in Play: Critical Strategies and the Plays of Harold Pinter (1990, 1995), which involved traveling to interview Pinter scholars in person, in the United States and abroad. With warm hospitality, Steve invited and welcomed me into his and Kathy’s home in Joplin, Missouri, while I conducted and taped our interview in depth, with Kathy providing sustenance for our coffee break and lunch. A main takeaway from our personal interview was how important family was to Steve—how devoted he was as a husband and a father (which is also borne out by the wonderful photos posted online in his memorial “Life Tributes” album, hosted by Harrod Brothers.com). Understanding Steve’s personal values pertaining to family also provided me with insights about thematic emphases in his critical analyses of Pinter’s work.In 1986, during the annual convention of the Modern Language Association (MLA), Steve brought together a small group of us to discuss forming what would become the Harold Pinter Society, extending my own suggestion of basing it on the example of the Samuel Beckett Society (and the Journal of Beckett Studies [JOBS]), which had been launched in the previous decade. Steve became the Pinter Society’s founding president, marshaling its successful application as an Allied Organization of the MLA (following the Beckett Society), and establishing The Pinter Review, which he co-edited with Dr. Francis X. Gillen, of the University of Tampa, published from 1987 through 2011 (after Steve retired from co-editorship, Dr. Gillen edited its final volume before retiring in turn). The Pinter Review has been succeeded by The Harold Pinter Review: Essays on Contemporary Drama (2017–), reformulated and edited by Dr. Ann C. Hall (University of Louisville), who has also been presiding most recently over the Pinter Society (now known as the International Harold Pinter Society). During the 1986 MLA Convention foundational get-together, knowing that I was working on what became my book Pinter in Play, Steve and Frank invited me to develop what became my “Harold Pinter Bibliography” in The Pinter Review. Steve’s initiatives have led to highly productive and long-lasting professional and personal relationships among colleagues all over the world, connected through our mutual interests in the life and work of Harold Pinter and teaching about the media for which Pinter created work.Over four decades, Steve joined with us in academic conferences and related cultural events throughout the United States and abroad to present papers, share insights and anecdotes over drinks and meals, and get to know one another, leading to still-developing collaborations and intersecting communities, and much-treasured institutional and personal memories. Through his own work on Pinter’s oeuvre, Steve was a prime mover: he led to much of our own scholarship, performances, and productions, across media and cultures, and we will all miss him. My condolences to Kathy and to all of Steve’s lovely family.

2023 Announcement

Previous articleNext article Free2023 AnnouncementPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThe Wordsworth-Coleridge Association is sponsoring a lunch and a scholarly session at the Modern Language Association Convention in San Francisco, January 5–8, 2023.LunchThe lunch will begin with drinks and appetizers at 11:45 a.m., and the main course served about noon on Friday, January 6, in a private room at John’s Grill, 63 Ellis Street, San Francisco. The recipient of the annual Marilyn Gaull Book Award will be honored on this occasion. All are welcome to attend. Advance reservations are requested by December 1. For further details, and to make a lunch reservation: www.johnclare.org/WCASession 603: Romanticism And SexualitySaturday, January 7, 5:15–6:30 p.m.Sierra Suite J, Marriott MarquisProgram arranged by the Wordsworth-Coleridge AssociationPresiding: Charles Waite Mahoney, University of Connecticut, Storrs1. “Blake’s Vegetable Loves,” Noah Heringman, University of Missouri, Columbia2. “Elizabeth Moody’s ‘To Dr. Darwin,’ Women’s Writing, and Sexual Transgression,” David Sigler, University of Calgary3. “Queering Liberation in The Woman of Colour,” Halina Adams, Bridgewater State University Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 53, Number 4Fall 2022 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/724503 © 2022 The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

ANS Call for Papers for MLA 2023 Conference

The American Name Society is issuing a call for papers for the Modern Language Association Convention 2023 which is scheduled to take place January 5-8, 2023 in San Francisco, California.

Eight Dogs, or "Hakkenden": Part One—An Ill-Considered Jest by Kyokutei Bakin

Reviewed by: Eight Dogs, or "Hakkenden": Part One—An Ill-Considered Jest by Kyokutei Bakin William C. Hedberg Eight Dogs, or "Hakkenden": Part One—An Ill-Considered Jest. By Kyokutei Bakin. Translated by Glynne Walley. Cornell University Press, 2021. 348 pages. ISBN: 9781501755170 (hardcover; also available as softcover and e-book). Pity the scholar of early modern Japanese narrative with proselytizing ambitions. While our colleagues researching Renaissance England or Golden Age Spain can be reasonably confident that a mixed audience at a Modern Language Association convention is at least passingly familiar with the historical context and plotline of, say, Macbeth or Don Quixote, those in our field are afforded no such luxury. When presenting our research to nonspecialists at conferences, we reluctantly become participants in Monty Python's All-England Summarize Proust Competition, racing our way through tedious but necessary summary in the hope of securing a few short minutes for explication and analysis before we end. Even among peers, the twists and turns, concealed identities, and multigenerational vendettas central to genres such as yomihon, jōruri, and kabuki defy easy summary and require valuable space in our conference talks and publications to adequately contextualize. Confronted with the relentless avalanche of names, titles, battles, and historical allusions found in a baggy monster like Kyokutei Bakin's Nansō Satomi hakkenden, one is initially [End Page 344] tempted to sympathize with the novelist Martin Amis, who in describing Quixote wrote, "The question 'What happens next?' has no meaning, because there is no next … there is only more."1 Or is there? Among scholars of Edo-period literature, one of the most welcome critical interventions of the past thirty years has been the insistent and long-overdue argument that the texts we study are undergirded by a rigorous system of narrative logic that is readily discernible to any reader willing to pay attention to the author's (often heavy-handed) hints about how to read the work. Seminal scholarship by, most recently, Peter Kornicki, Jonathan Zwicker, Satoko Shimazaki, Patrick Caddeau, and Rebekah Clements has directed our attention away from the narrative proper and toward the prefaces, interlineal commentary, illustrations, maps, charts, lists of characters, commemorative poems, postfaces, and advertisements that explained how texts like Hakkenden were meant to be interpreted and that were, for early modern readers, inseparable from the narrative itself. Most of these paratextual features were excised in modern typeset editions of the works, and despite our frequent reliance upon these modern editions, it is a useful exercise to think of them as butterfly specimens that have been pithed and mounted in a display case: readily visible and easily legible, but wholly shorn of the life, movement, and context that gave them meaning as social beings. It is to Glynne Walley's immense credit that he brings the materiality of early modern Japanese fiction to the forefront of his translation of Nansō Satomi hakkenden (The Lives of the Eight Dogs of the Satomi of Southern Fusa; 1814–1842) and, in so doing, gives us a keen sense of the paratextual density and cosmopolitan dimensions of this text. Eight Dogs, or "Hakkenden": Part One—An Ill-Considered Jest contains the inaugural volume (shū) of Hakkenden and four chapters of the second volume, sensibly concluding at a natural break in the narrative with the canine Yatsufusa's immaculate impregnation of Satomi Yoshizane's daughter, Fusehime; the release of the embryonic spirits of the eponymous dog-knights; and the beginning of the warrior-monk Chudai's quest to locate and gather the warriors. As Bakin himself reminds the reader in a postface to the final chapter included in the translation, "everything from the 1st Book of the Inaugural Volume through to the end of the present Book constitutes but the opening stage of the whole" (p. 292), and as Walley notes in the translator's introduction, An Ill-Considered Jest comprises less than one-tenth of the complete Hakkenden. Before discussing the translation itself, I must give due praise to its translator for his Yoshizane-esque ambitions in embarking on such a venture, and to Cornell University Press for supporting an epic project and ensuring that the job is done well. An Ill-Considered...

The Wordsworth-Coleridge Association Call for Papers

Previous articleNext article FreeThe Wordsworth-Coleridge Association Call for Papers Modern Language Association Convention, Washington, DC, January 6–9, 2022PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThe Wordsworth-Coleridge Association is an Allied Organization of the Modern Language Association that meets annually during the MLA Convention. Along with an annual festive lunch, the Wordsworth-Coleridge Association is allowed to propose up to two scholarly sessions. For the MLA Convention in Washington, DC, proposals are invited on the following topic.Romanticism and DataWhat was “data”—and what were data—in the Romantic era? According to the OED, a “datum” is “an item of (chiefly numerical) information, esp. one obtained by scientific work” and “something given or granted; something known or assumed as fact, and made the basis of reasoning,” both senses being in use during the period. This call is open to: different kinds of data (e.g., bibliographic, colonial, demographic, fiscal, historical, industrial, literary, personal, scientific, sensory, slave trade); techniques, media, forms, and formats of datafication; data collection projects from the period, big and small; critiques of data and dataveillance; Romantic epistemologies, epistemological hierarchies, facts, truth, and negative capabilities; documentalities, informational genres, information management, and categorizations; computational approaches (paper or electronic) to Romantic-era texts or Romantic studies over the years. Papers that explore the relationship between literature and data are especially welcome.Please submit abstracts (maximum 300 words) by March 15, 2021, to James McKusick ([email protected]). The MLA requires (in addition to an abstract) a brief biographical statement (circa 300 words), written in the third person, including the presenter’s name, title, affiliation, final degree institution and date, scholarly interests, and publications. Particularly relevant are scholarship and publications that directly relate to the proposed session topic. Please include some persuasive points about the importance, significance, and contribution of the proposed presentation and any previous work you have done relating to the session topic.All MLA program participants must be members of the Modern Language Association by April 1, 2021. For information on the MLA Convention, go to http://www.mla.org/convention.All subscribers to The Wordsworth Circle are members of the Wordsworth-Coleridge Association. Essays selected for presentation at MLA will be considered for publication in The Wordsworth Circle. Please address any questions regarding the Wordsworth-Coleridge Association to the President of the Association:Dean James McKusick (e-mail: [email protected])Honors CollegeUniversity of Missouri–Kansas City5030 Cherry StreetKansas City, MO 64110 Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 52, Number 1Winter 2021 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/714667 © 2021 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

2021 Announcement

Previous articleNext article Free2021 AnnouncementPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThe Wordsworth-Coleridge Association is Sponsoring a Scholarly Session at the Modern Language Association Convention in Toronto, January 7–10, 2021Romanticism and WildernessProgram arranged by the Wordsworth-Coleridge Association.Presiding: Charles Waite Mahoney, University of Connecticut.Session 516. Saturday, 9 January 2021, 5:15–6:30 pm.1. “Picturesque Wilderness and the Human Problem,” Markus Poetzsch, Wilfrid Laurier University2. “A Local Habitation, Not a Name: The Preservation of Wildness in Wordworth’s Poems on the Naming of Places,” Cassandra Falke, Arctic University of Norway3. “Walter Scott’s Wilderness Borders,” Kyle McAuley, Seton Hall University4. “The Rewilding of Dorothy Wordsworth,” Lisa Vargo, University of SaskatchewanRespondent: James C. McKusick, University of Missouri–Kansas City Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 51, Number 4Fall 2020 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/712829 © 2020 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

From the Editor

From the Editor Brenda Machosky On Editing Dedicated to the Memory of Helen Tartar, editor extraordinaire Before I wrote my first book, I didn't fully understand how the "editor" really worked. In shepherding that first book to publication, I had the good fortune and excellent guidance of Helen Tartar, longtime humanities editor at Stanford University Press, underappreciated there and in a fit of downsizing, forced to relocate to Fordham University Press, where she was given the means and the opportunity to flourish, especially in her forte, working with young scholars. My book had its particular fits and starts and a bit of a challenge getting past the review board. I'll never forget sitting with Helen at a book exhibit, probably at the American Comparative Literature Association annual convention, a moment of quiet while everyone was in sessions, and figuring out the last revisions to my manuscript. It wasn't a long conversation, or a demanding one, but somehow, she was working her magic. I left that convention knowing exactly what I needed to do, and I marveled at her ability to help me figure that out. At that point, I started to know what an editor could do, to understand when writers talked about "my editor" and all that this relationship implied. I realized the full power of a talented and successful editor at the memorial service for Helen Tartar after her untimely death, again at a meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association in New York City. Attendees were encouraged to bring copies of their books to display—too many to count and an awesome display of her range. But the stories told by those, like me, who were fortunate enough to work with her as an editor, deepened my understanding of what a good editor can do. Here were people, now well respected and established scholars, talking about their own "quiet moments" receiving her advice to get their struggling books through to publication. So now I am an editor, of a journal, a different kind of editing, and I am new at it. After a few issues in which I have learned the process, how to work with the publishing platform, and started to develop systems for solicitation and reviewers, I can now reflect on what it means to be an editor of this journal, Antipodes, and the editorial decisions I have already started to make. As I reviewed this issue's content, while simultaneously working on new submissions and calls for future issues, I started to reflect on my role, and responsibility, as an editor. The people I've admired most in academia have all been like Helen. They make the time to "pay it forward" to the next generation. Kuleana is an untranslatable Hawaiian word for something like fundamental responsibility. As an editor, my kuleana is to treat each submission with respect and encouragement. Teaching at a university without graduate students, editing is an opportunity for me to work with scholars making [End Page 3] their way into publishing, as an associate editor at Speculum did for me with my first article (when I barely knew what a page proof was, and the proof came in the mail!). And being an editor is a growth opportunity for me as I work with established scholars on publication. In editing a journal sponsored by an organization, the American Association of Australasian Literary Studies (AAALS), I have been thinking of ways to make the project of each issue more shared, more collective. In the first issue I edited, there was already a special section devoted to the work of Alexis Wright, edited by Belinda Wheeler (33.1). And then, fortuitously, an opportunity to publish a special section on the topic of Southeast Asian Diasporic literature in Australia emerged from a Modern Language Association convention session that AAALS cosponsored (33.2). With volume 34, a pattern established itself, with a featured writer in the first issue of the volume and a special topic in the second. In this first issue of volume 34, Peter Mathews has edited the featured writer section about Brian Castro, and following, Eva Rueschmann is editing a special topic on film in...

Letters’ Other Side: The Archive as a Fate of Rereading

Letters’ Other Side: The Archive as a Fate of Rereading Al Filreis 1. Creative Reading FROM THE EARLY 1980s through the mid-1990s, I visited the Huntington Library a number of times.1 Two visits were extended residencies (for one of which I was a “Huntington Fellow” and worked daily in the manuscripts room for several months), and there were at least two other substantial stints, and several shorter ones. I also worked closely by mail and phone with Sara “Sue” Hodson, Virginia “Ginger” Renner, and other special collections librarians and archivists through those years. During this time I managed to call up nearly all the boxes in the Stevens papers. I pulled almost every folder in every box I called, and read all the letters and other materials in those folders. The result of this work was three books and, arguably, as I’ll note here by way of conclusion, a fundamental influence upon a fourth, although that book makes just one passing mention of Stevens in 422 pages. My first visit was in 1982. The Modern Language Association convention was in Los Angeles that year. Although I was a graduate student, a scholarly novice residing on the other coast, and certainly not yet looking for jobs, I traveled to southern California, attended the conference, stayed with my teacher and friend David Wyatt at his father’s far-out home in Laguna Beach, and on December 28, 1982, made the long drive from Laguna Beach to San Marino. Although he was not a Stevens critic per se (Frost, Yeats, Williams, Moore, Eliot, Jeffers, and Ashbery were—and are—more congenial to his ideas about modern poetry), David Wyatt was supportive of my unfashionable interest in reading Stevens’s poems through whatever biography, through literary and personal relationships, one could construct from the correspondence. We had read and discussed Holly’s 1966 selection of letters together and were fascinated by what could be deduced about the other side of all that letter writing. Who was this person, “J. Ronald Lane Latimer”? We imagined several exciting scenarios for Latimer, whose stance and very name hinted at unexplained pseudonymity. Why did Stevens give over so much time to Hi Simons, the Chicago-based amateur [End Page 161] bibliophile-critic whose approach seemed plodding and average? How did the remarkable literary and curatorial Irish figure Thomas McGreevy feel about Stevens’s response and, at times, nonresponse to McGreevy’s mix of avid Catholicism and devout modernism? And Leonard van Geyzel, his procurer of Sri Lankan tea in Colombo: why exactly did their correspondence evolve into so much more—a discussion, for instance, of the obsession among the Ceylonese academic and civil service elite with I. A. Richards’s Practical Criticism? My point was and is that van Geyzel and McGreevy, for their part, significantly drove the relationship. The social structure of this was perhaps obvious, but what in fact were the particular circumstances? And which poems bear traces of those specific contexts? Before arriving at the archive, I might have posed the problem as follows: what actually did we know about José Rodríguez Feo only from Stevens’s letters to him? Would knowledge of the Cuban editor’s situation help us identify the “queen of ignorance” beyond the maternal symbolic moon in that open-ended poem “A Word with José Rodríguez-Feo,” included in Transport to Summer (CPP 292)? It shouldn’t have been a goal to close up such openness, but to offer additional readings to support the poem’s inventiveness. Yes, it had been David Wyatt’s idea that I come to The Huntington and systematically read both sides of the correspondences. During the long drive, as I recall it, he told a meandering academic’s story, which began with some details of his and his fellow students’ intellectual encounter with the presence of Geoffrey Hartman at Yale. I didn’t follow what this had to do with the experience I was about to have. But David is always teaching, so I listened and sought to discern the relevance. He spoke about the influence of Hartman’s book The Fate of Reading (1975). And David—by...

41st Annual Northeast Modern Language Association Convention: Montréal, Québec, April 8-11, 2010

A review of the 41st Annual Northeast Modern Language Association Convention: Montréal, Québec, April 8-11, 2010.

James Baldwin: Interventions

“Interventions” was the organizing term for the presentations of three Baldwin scholars at the Modern Language Association Convention in Chicago in January of 2019. Baldwin’s travels and activities in spaces not traditionally associated with him, including the U.S. South and West, represent interventions of a quite literal type, while his aesthetic and critical encounters with these and other cultures, including twenty-first-century contexts of racial, and racist, affect—as in the case of Raoul Peck’s 2016 film I Am Not Your Negro—provide opportunities to reconsider his work as it contributes to new thinking about race, space, property, citizenship, and aesthetics.

The Wordsworth-Coleridge Association 2020

Previous articleNext article FreeThe Wordsworth-Coleridge Association 2020PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThe Wordsworth-Coleridge Association is sponsoring a lunch and a scholarly session at the Modern Language Association Convention in Seattle, January 9–12, 2020.LunchThe lunch will begin with a cash bar at 11:30 a.m. and the main course served about noon on Friday, January 10, location TBA. This event is co-sponsored by the John Clare Society of North America. The lunch is open to members and non-members of the Association and the MLA. All are welcome to attend.Advance reservations are requested by December 30. Please remit $35 per person, payable by check or credit card through our web page: www.johnclare.org/WCASession 107: British Romanticism and ChinaThursday, January 9, 3:30–4:45 p.m.Room 611, Washington State Convention CenterProgram arranged by the Wordsworth-Coleridge AssociationPresiding: Charles Waite Mahoney, University of Connecticut, Storrs1. “John Murray and China,” Peter Kitson, University of East Anglia2. “British Shipboard Narratives and the Romantic Authorship of the Chinese Coast,” Elizabeth Chang, University of Missouri, Columbia3. “Coleridge, Taoism, and Romantic Pantheism,” Chris Murray, Monash University4. “Silencing Poetic Voices,” Jennifer L. Hargrave, Baylor University Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 50, Number 3Summer 2019 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/705531 © 2019 The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Introduction

Introduction Rodrigo Lazo Philip Roth started it. Interviewed by The New Yorker about his book The Plot Against America, Roth dropped that the most important fictional forebear to explain the Trump presidency is The Confidence-Man (Thurman). Five months later, Ariel Dorfman followed up in The Nation (in an article that performed memoiristic rereading of Melville via Dorfman's personal history) that Melville's con-man was relevant to Trump in that "he displays an arsenal of false premises and promises to dazzle and befuddle his victims with absurd and inconsistent projects that seem workable until, that is, they are more closely examined—and then, when cornered by demands that he provide proof of his ventures, the scamp somehow manages to distract his audience and squirm away" (Dorfman). Such pronouncements generated significant buzz on web pages; in turn, I proposed to convene a panel at the Modern Language Association Convention that would give Melville scholars an opportunity to consider those types of connections between present circumstances, political or not, and Melville's book. The pieces here answer the call to re-read The Confidence-Man today, and they do so in ways that implicitly challenge or complicate the readings first proposed by Roth and Dorfman. But I must admit a political disappointment. If Roth and Dorfman had given us a bump and a set, to use a volleyball metaphor, I expected our university-based readers to spike it. I figured many American literature scholars would want to talk about the president: If we considered "a man in cream-colors" as a man in orange colors, would the latter come off as more repulsive than the guy with the white fur hat aboard the Fidèle? But as it turned out, Melvilleans (surprise!) wanted to talk more about The Confidence-Man than about the president or the present (in some cases). An interesting tension emerged between those who emphasized the historical context of the 1850s (e.g. economics, cultural artifacts) and those who ventured into discourses that are prominent today (gender, avatars). These essays as a group raise an important question: does The Confidence-Man offer a type of language and a set of contexts that differ in important ways from the current political discourse and news accounts? If a Trumpian comparison is appealing [End Page 7] (and it is), there are also plenty of passages in which The Confidence-Man displays elaborate, informed, and intellectually provoking scenarios that facilitate the taking advantage of people. To my mind, a fine example is when the cosmopolitan waxes eloquent about the press toward the end of chapter 29, describing it as "defender of faith in the final triumph of truth over error, metaphysics over superstition, theory over falsehood, machinery over nature, and the good man over the bad" (166) The cosmopolitan's irony is far from Trump's blatant proclamations that the press manufactures fake news and threatens the republic. In other words, the 1850s con man has a certain language finesse. He raises lying to an artifice, not a sound bite. In response, our contributors show that careful reading can be more insightful than quick, if interesting, connections. A common point among the contributions is that The Confidence-Man warns against hasty interpretations and prompts readers to engage with the hermeneutic challenges of both Melville's fiction and historical criticism. My own rereading followed this line. In preparing for the MLA panel and reviewing the essays developed from the presentations, I returned to the question: how does one read The Confidence-Man? As John Bryant has shown, The Confidence-Man presents a peculiar set of interpretive challenges and has prompted different types of critical turns over time. I concur with critics, some of whom Samuel Otter references in his contribution, who find the book difficult and even impenetrable. Impenetrability can be a challenge for a literary scholar, and thus I take the criticism as an invitation. But I would use a different adjective to describe the book—unreadable—in part because The Confidence-Man interrupts the flow that is common in fiction of its length. Unlike a novel, this is not a book to be read continuously, and thus it is unreadable...

The Wordsworth-Coleridge Association Call for Papers: Modern Language Association Convention, Seattle, January 9–12, 2020

Previous articleNext article FreeThe Wordsworth-Coleridge Association Call for Papers: Modern Language Association Convention, Seattle, January 9–12, 2020PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 49, Number 4Autumn 2018 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/TWC4904183 Views: 118Total views on this site © 2018 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Introduction

Introduction Catherine R. Montfort (bio) and Christine McCall Probes (bio) Journeys are the midwives of thought. Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel (54) The project of a volume on Women and Traveling originated at the Modern Language Association Convention in Chicago (January 2014) after a table ronde organized and presided by Christine McCall Probes, Voyages de femmes, entrepris et rapportés: Représentations littéraires et/ou artistiques, was particularly well received. Speakers included Linda Alcott, Hélène Diaz Brown, Arline E. Cravens, Molly Krueger Enz, Perry J. Gethner and Catherine R. Montfort. Soon after the MLA, Christine McCall Probes and Catherine R. Montfort sent a call for papers inviting scholars to submit essays on the topic Les femmes et le voyage for a Special Volume of WIF Studies. Our stated goal was to include articles ranging from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century that focused on the literary and artistic representations of women travelers—in forced voyages or not—and the rhetorical strategies employed in the past as these voyages were recorded. At the MLA session, genres and topics included representations of women travelers in plays, fantastic and mystical voyages, memoirs, epistolary novels and women travelers of color. In this volume we present case studies of women travelers and a number of analyses of travel narratives in the pre-modern and modern periods. Of course we realize that this volume is only a small token in the analysis of a genre that has encompassed "a bewildering diversity of forms, modes and itineraries" (Thompson 1-2).1 There have been many studies on traveling and many studies on male travel writers in France such as Montaigne, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Chateaubriand or Nerval to mention just [End Page 6] a few. There have also been studies on British and American female writers (see among others Shirley Foster, Sara Mills, Mary-Louise Pratt and Yaël Schlick).2 Strikingly there have been many fewer studies on French and Francophone female travelers and writers until recently, mostly due to historical and cultural differences.3 From Odysseus to Aeneas to the Knights of the Round Table, to Columbus to more modern times, travel has functioned as "a defining arena of agency" for men and male travel narratives have been inseparable from masculinity (Sidonie Smith ix). Marie-Christine Gomez-Géraud notes in Écrire le voyage au XVIe siècle en France that Nicolas de Nicolay wrote in Dans l'Empire de Soliman le Magnifique, texte de navigations et de pérégrinations: "La raison veut et nature semble le commander à l'homme, de chercher, visiter et enquérir, savoir et connaître tous les ȇtres, toutes les parties et mansions de son universelle habitation" (44-45). Men, then, have been crusaders, adventurers, scientists, missionaries, entrepreneurs—and always narrators. While the man of the Middle Ages chose pilgrimages in his spiritual journey to God and generally had little curiosity about this world,4 the Renaissance and 17th century traveler in contrast wanted above all to be an informer telling the truth and being the "miroir du monde" here on earth. Followed "le grand tour" and educational voyages stretching roughly from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century. And then in the nineteenth century, there was a shift to subjectivity. As exemplified by Chateaubriand, the "moi" prevailed and "le sujet qui voyage est l'objet du récit au mȇme titre que les territoires évoqués" (Bénédicte Monicat, Itinéraires 1). In contrast the relation of women to mobility has been problematic. In the Middle Ages, "the underlying principle that a woman's proper sphere was the private one prevailed" (Webb 80): and similarly, "the message of many prescriptive Renaissance texts was that the virtuous woman stays at home" (Hackett 126). And yet, women too, like men, have always traveled, from pilgrimages to Jerusalem and the Holy Land5 to voyages to "spas" or for health reasons, to voyages for familial obligations (especially marriages),6 to scientific voyages to accompany their husband, to lonely voyages to far-flung lands to flee the role patriarchy had allotted [End Page 7] them, but récits de voyage have...

Verse-atility: The Novel in Verse and the Revival of Poetry

Verse-atility:The Novel in Verse and the Revival of Poetry Michelle Ann Abate (bio) Crystal Sands, in an article titled "Why Children Need Poetry," observed: "Poetry is a form of expression that we all seem to love as young children. The rhythms in poetry are exciting to small children who love to dance and move to rhythms and sing rhymes" (par. 1). Indeed, childhood is filled with poetry. In examples ranging from Mother Goose and Shel Silverstein to Dr. Seuss and Edward Lear, the writers that many boys and girls encounter first—as well as the ones that they enjoy the most—are poets. While poetry is a favorite genre among young children, this situation changes drastically for most when they grow older. As Sands reports, "by the time we're adults, something has happened to our love of poetry. A national poetry survey in the mid 2000s indicated that 9 of 10 American adults do not enjoy poetry" (par. 1–2). The experiences that kids have with verse in classroom settings are often responsible for this shift. Especially amid the rise of standardized testing, poetry no longer represents a venue for encountering fun linguistic rhythms, playful word rhymes, and clever rhetorical arrangements. Instead, it becomes a realm for engaging in prescribed forms of analysis in order to obtain the "correct" interpretation. Through this process, poetry shifts from being a source of pleasure to a source of dread; from a locus of verbal exploration to one of rote memorization; and from a site of boundless creativity to one of rigid conformity. The end result is that, by the time young people enter high school, they have gone from loving poetry to loathing it. Given the antipathy toward poetry among middle-grade and young adult readers, the rise of the verse novel—or "novel in verse"—during the 1990s is especially astounding. As the name implies, this genre is already a narrative paradox or literary oxymoron in its own right. After all, it uses poetry to compose a type of text that is commonly written in prose. While the roots or origins of the verse novel date back to at least the nineteenth century in [End Page v] the West,1 these books increased both in their frequency and in their popularity during the closing decade of the twentieth century. In examples ranging from Karen Hesse's Out of the Dust (1998) and Ellen Hopkins's Crank (2006) to Thanhha Lai's Inside Out and Back Again (2011) and Jacqueline Woodson's Brown Girl Dreaming (2014), verse novels enjoyed both laudatory reviews and equally impressive sales. By the second decade of the new millennium, in fact, they constituted one of the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful genres in Anglo-American children's literature. This special issue of The Lion and the Unicorn gives much-needed critical attention to this vibrant but currently understudied area of children's and young adult literature. As the essays in the pages that follow demonstrate, not only is the verse novel a rich and innovative genre in its own right, but it is also reinvigorating enthusiasm for poetry. Whereas young people in middle school and especially high school previously avoided verse, they are now voluntarily as well as eagerly reading it. In so doing, verse novels are not simply getting youth audiences excited about reading; they are helping to revive audience interest in poetry as a whole. Moreover, as Julie Fogliano's recent article explains, verse novels can also be a rich, fertile, and productive venue for discussing issues of social justice. Both fiction and nonfiction works can help to foster empathy, generate compassion, and address trauma. The issue opens with three essays that are expanded versions of presentations from a panel about the verse novel at the Modern Language Association Convention in 2016: Richard Flynn's "Why Genre Matters: A Case for the Importance of Aesthetics in the Verse Memoirs of Marilyn Nelson and Jacqueline Woodson," Mike Cadden's "Rhetorical Technique in the Young Adult Verse Novel," and Karen Coats's "Finding the Poetry in Middle Grade and Young Adult Verse Novels: Form as Metaphor." These essays examine the genre from an aesthetic...

Introduction: Fanon in the Present

Introduction: Fanon in the Present Sheri-Marie Harrison (bio) This project began as a collaborative roundtable organized by the Postcolonial Studies Forum and the Marxist Literary Group for the 2017 Modern Language Association Convention. Under the title “Fanon in the Present,” this roundtable foregrounded Frantz Fanon’s relationship to global protest movements and the resistance they engendered. Stressing oftentimes violent civil unrest and protests against domineering or dictatorial state forces admittedly offers only one angle on Fanon’s wide ranging and nuanced thought. Fanon’s theories about violent resistance, particularly by the ranks of society’s besieged, are central, more often than not, to how his work is remembered. As Hannah Arendt suggests, though, “Fanon himself . . . is much more doubtful about violence than his admirers. It seems that only [The Wretched of the Earth’s] first chapter, ‘Concerning Violence,’ has been widely read” (2014, 14). This criticism of Fanon’s reception remained central to us as we assembled the roundtable. We sought to mitigate this critique on the one hand through the collaboration between two groups inclined to approach Fanon from different angles, but also and more directly via our selection process. One of our goals was to solicit participation from scholars from various positions and locations in the profession, people who might not only say different things about Fanon but might also say them from different platforms. To the extent that Fanon persists [End Page 1] as an indispensable interlocutor in fields as varied as postcolonial theory, anti-colonialism, postmodernism, and psychoanalysis, it was imperative to us to bring together scholars from a variety of disciplines. In this way, we thought, we would enable ourselves to consider the continued relevance and urgency of Fanon’s writing to a range of themes, histories, and geopolitical concerns. Since its inception, though, this project has sought to think about how Fanon’s work can help to navigate the problems of civil inequity, precarity, and instability that continue to plague our present. We turn toward Fanon’s ideas, in both practice and in theory, at what we imagine to be a moment of extreme timeliness. The Martinique born psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary, and writer seems uniquely suited to reflections on current moments of global civil unrest and protest. Fanon’s engagement with anti-colonialism and anti-racism, and his direct involvement with the Algerian and other African independence movements, makes his work a particularly fruitful site for thinking about the global clashes between citizenries and their governments that, in their most recent form, began with the Arab Spring in 2010. Our present is one interspersed with civil unrest the world over—unrest that is more often than not punctuated by violence, as we have seen in places ranging from Tahrir Square to Kiev in the Ukraine to Ferguson, Baltimore, and Standing Rock in the United States. While the present may not literally reflect the realities of colonization and imperialism as Fanon experienced and wrote about them, the continuities between his time and our own rest in the less obvious ways particular groups, peoples, and locales subordinate to the demands of neoliberal capitalist economies are kept in check by increasingly militarized domestic security forces. How, for instance, might Fanon’s perspectives on the violence that attends independence and decolonization struggles of former colonies help us to understand the clash between security forces and citizens in Ferguson, Missouri, in the wakes of Michael Brown’s murder and the failure to indict Darren Wilson for the young man’s death? In Ferguson, as elsewhere, the very fact that the community took to the streets cannot be thought of outside local and state governments’ decision to deploy heavily armed police and National Guard forces against citizens. The impulse to revisit Fanon, to query what his ideas might tell us about our present, is not one that is unique to this project. John Edgar Wideman’s 2008 novel Fanon, which Mathias Nilges discusses [End Page 2] in more detail in his essay, was recently joined by Robert Young and Jean Khalfa’s extensive 2015 edited volume of Fanon’s previously uncollected miscellaneous writings, Écrits sur l’aliénation et la liberté (2015). Young and Khalfa’s collection not only...

Honorary Membership Citations

Honorary Membership Citations

Introduction: Black Periodical Studies

Introduction:Black Periodical Studies Eric Gardner (bio) and Joycelyn Moody (bio) This introduction summarizes the contents of this special issue and situates it among a host of exciting developments in black print culture studies. We offer the original articles that follow as exemplary models of the range of topics and methodologies representative of this growing field, and specifically of the nexus of African Americanist inquiry and periodical studies embodied in the phrase “black periodical studies.” We call for the expansion of scholarship on black print cultures, as, despite the prevalence of this scholarship now, we all have so much more to seek, gain, and know. We thus see this special issue as very much in dialogue with broader interventions in the study of black print cultures. Joycelyn Moody, to cite one example, is co-editing with Howard Rambsy II a special issue on black print culture for MELUS: The Journal of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States. The essays in that issue alert us to some of the new research emphasizing such understudied print forms as antebellum black women’s friendship books, slave narratives circulating in transatlantic newspapers and “little books,” and ephemera surrounding the institutionalization of African American Studies in the academy, among other forms. With respect to black periodical studies, the MELUS special issue includes essays devoted to serials ranging from the Christian Recorder before the Civil War, and the Cleveland Gazette after the war, to the Crisis of the twentieth century.1 We thus see an organic, informal synergy between the special MELUS issue and this issue of American Periodicals, and we invite editors, organizations, and scholars to explore ways to formalize and make even richer such collaborative efforts. Our work on this issue certainly builds from other collaborative efforts, too, including panels at a number of major conferences as well as other print and online publications. The Research Society for American Periodicals (RSAP) has offered deep engagement that has fostered our efforts. Initial [End Page 105] discussion of the special issue came out of an RSAP roundtable on “New Directions in African American Periodical Research” at the 2013 American Literature Association Conference in Boston, which featured work by Koritha Mitchell, Hollis Robbins, Andreá N. Williams, Nazera Wright, Arika Easley-Houser, and Ellen Gruber Garvey. RSAP offerings since have included a panel on the intersection of visual culture and African American periodicals, held at the 2015 ALA convention, and a panel on ethnic American women and illustrated periodicals at the 2015 meeting of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers. A 2014 session at the Modern Language Association convention, “Early African American Print Cultures: Reflections and Directions,” organized by Ben Fagan and including talks by Rian Bowie, John Ernest, Barbara McCaskill, Fagan, Gardner, and Moody—planned for late 2016 publication as a forum in Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers—similarly featured lively discussion of the intersections between African American literary studies and print culture studies, with concentrated attention to black periodicals. All of these efforts have shaped our thinking. Diverse contributors, submitters, and readers also drew both inspiration and knowledge from the University of Wisconsin’s September 2014 Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture’s conference on “African American Expression in Print and Digital Culture” organized by Brigitte Fielder, Anne Palmer, Jonathan Senchyne, Cherene Sherrard-Johnson, and Ethelene Whitmire. The two-issue Legacy feature in 2013 and 2014, beginning with P. Gabrielle Foreman’s important essay, “A Riff, A Call, and A Response: Reframing the Problem That Led to Our Being Tokens in Ethnic and Gender Studies,” and concluding with a curated collection of responses, offered even more exigent and engaged consideration.2 Select online initiatives have also highlighted black print cultures and especially black periodical presences. The “Just Teach One: Early African American Print” site, co-sponsored by the American Antiquarian Society and Commonplace, for example, chose “Theresa,” a short story serialized in the first known African American newspaper, Freedom’s Journal, for its initial text.3 In addition, the Colored Conventions Project promises to change approaches to black print cultures, and both its website and its 2015 symposium at the...

The Provincialism of Time

In his introduction to The Reinterpretation of Literature (1928), Norman Foerster cautions against a of that he considers far more insidious than that provincialism of place from which criticism suffered in last century (xiii). Defining term as the measure of past by ideas and moods of a narrow present (xiii), he could just as well have used it to issue a warning to critics about presentist hubris we display when we forget Ecclesiastan wisdom: that there is nothing new under sun. It is a critical imperative--or so it seems--to underscore our breaks with past, to be, as it were, unprecedented. Ralph Waldo Emerson enjoined his generation to enjoy an original relation to universe (Emerson 7), and Ezra Pound issued his modernist mandate in three words: Make it new! While I would not argue that critical imperative to newness is uniquely American, United States certainly has a history of such declarations. Accustomed to a narrative of linear progress, I am thus humbled every time an occasion, such as an anniversary of a journal, prompts me to look back at some of founding moments of my chosen field of study. I am of course reminded of changes in critical terms, practices, and assumptions: Foerster would scarcely recognize field he pioneered. But I am also surprised by what has persisted: recurrent themes and debates about what constitutes American literature, about how and why it should be studied and taught, and about relationship of field to a crisis in humanities. The self-conscious declarations of independence in manifestos of a new field throw into relief both changes in and persistence of endeavor we continue--perhaps (still) tentatively--to label study of American literature. I offer this meditation on two such founding moments against provincialism of time. THE ORIGINS OF AMERICAN LITERATURE The first conference of early scholars took place in Palmer House of Modern Language Association (MLA) convention in Chicago in 1965, against backdrop of rising social unrest. The year 1966 witnessed formation of Literature Section of MLA out of Literature Group (ALG), which had been founded in 1921, in response to relative absence of field at annual meetings of MLA and in pages of its journal, Publications of Modern Language Association. While idea of an American literature is inevitably bound up with national politics, these founding moments attest to jaggedness of connections between national and institutional politics. The manifestos on study of (including founding editorial statements), moreover, show how debates about field concerned nature of literary study more broadly, and they attest as much to persistence as to progress. The idea of an American literature, expressed as a wish, followed closely on emergence of nation. Noah Webster was not alone in recognizing role of cultural forms in defining an identity for nascent political entity. Calling for an America ... as independent in as she is in politics, as famous for arts as for arms, he sought at once to declare cultural independence from England and to unify a diverse group of people that had already formed themselves into discrete entities. Similar struggles are evident throughout first half of nineteenth century, as self-proclaimed literary nationalists founded journals and published anthologies and literary histories designed to promote expression of a national culture in arts and letters. Universities sporadically offered classes in from early nineteenth century, but they appeared more consistently in last decades of century, when, as Michael Warner documents, study of was just beginning to professionalize. …

Elizabeth Baldwin, Lawrence M. Clopper, and David Mills, Cheshire Including ChesterCheshire Including Chester. Edited by Elizabeth Baldwin , Lawrence M. Clopper , and David Mills . Records of Early English Drama. 2 vols. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007. Pp. x+1231.

<i>Elizabeth Baldwin, Lawrence M. Clopper, and David Mills,</i> Cheshire Including Chester<i>Cheshire Including Chester</i>. Edited by Elizabeth Baldwin , Lawrence M. Clopper , and David Mills . Records of Early English Drama. 2 vols. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007. Pp. x+1231.