Northwestern University Press Research Articles

Three Quintessential Books to Add to Your “Russian Masters” List

IT IS NOT UNUSUAL FOR those on a quest to understand Russia to plough through Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, and Tolstoy ; the more adventurous add Bulgakov and Pasternak to their lists. Yet Russia of the twenty-first century is as far removed from the world created by its literary classics as is Europe or America. It is a nation haunted by its violent past and struggling to find meaning in the ideological void left by several collapses of statehood. The three books discussed below convincingly and imaginatively articulate reality as it is today for many Russians while remaining true to the high principles set by the literary masters of the past. Svetlana Alexievich Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster Trans. Keith Gessen Picador Svetlana Alexievich’s books constitute a genre of its own, in which individual narratives merge into something akin to a Greek chorus that the writer moves from the periphery to center stage. Voices of Chernobyl narrates the catastrophic aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident . In the narratives of survivors—wives of firemen, refugees, resettlers, soldiers, pilots—the desire to forget wrestles with the obligation to remember; the veneration of heroism with rage at the country that has consumed their sacrifice but failed to save them. Like most of Alexievich’s books, Voices of Chernobyl cannot be bought in Moscow bookstores. Victor Pelevin Hall of Singing Caryatids Trans. Andrew Bromfield New Directions A society is best understood through the plight of its frailest; in Russia, women, routinely referred to as the “weaker sex,” often bear the brunt of economic and military disasters. Victor Pelevin’s surrealist novella takes place in a post-Soviet, money-crazed Moscow, where a young girl by the name of Lena wins the dubious opportunity to entertain the well-to-dos in an elite club. The strangeness of her job increases by the minute, and as Lena plugs along, in a tale reminiscent of Kafka, Pelevin offers a compelling psychological portrait of a human being forced to live in cruel and absurd circumstances. But that doesn’t mean she is not searching for a way out. Venedikt Erofeev Moscow to the End of the Line Trans. H. William Tjalsma Northwestern University Press Written in the 1970s and passed around in samizdat, Venedikt Erofeev’s postmodernist “poem in prose” has been described, alternatively, as an odyssey, a pilgrimage, a confession, a lamentation, and a Dantean journey through hell. Moscow to the End of the Line is a story of an alcoholic poet traveling on a local train to a utopian town, where his beloved and their young son await him. As he drinks, Venya communes with angels, demons, and fellow passengers. From these conversations, which mix existential outpourings with cocktail recipes based on paint thinner, emerges an unforgettable picture of Russian reality—and of the soul’s quest to break free. Remarkable for its first-person narrative (highly unusual for Russian literature ), the poem brings forth a voice that manages to be at once naïve and ironic, learned and folksy, hopeful and suffering—and, on occasion, incredibly funny. A must-read for a deep dive into the Russian mind. Russian American writer Anastasia Edel has written a novel, Past Perfect, a collection of literary essays, a short-story collection, and a nonfiction book, Russia: Putin’s Playground. She holds an MFA from Pacific University and lives in San Francisco with her family. what to read now Three Quintessential Books to Add to Your “Russian Masters” List by Anastasia Edel Notebook 6 WLT MARCH / APRIL 2016 ...

Bodily Desire, Desired Bodies: Gender and Desire in Early Twentieth-Century German and Austrian Novels and Paintings. By Esther K. Bauer. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014. ix + 193 pages. $79.95.

Bodily Desire, Desired Bodies: Gender and Desire in Early Twentieth-Century German and Austrian Novels and Paintings. By Esther K. Bauer. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014. ix + 193 pages. $79.95.

Incapacity: Wittgenstein, Anxiety, and Performance Behavior. By Spencer Golub. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014; 290 pp. $89.95 cloth

<i>Incapacity: Wittgenstein, Anxiety, and Performance Behavior.</i> By Spencer Golub. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014; 290 pp. $89.95 cloth

Narratives Unsettled: Digression in Robert Walser, Thomas Bernhard, and Adalbert Stifter. By Samuel Frederick. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2012. xi + 239 pages. $79.95 hardcover, $29.95 paperback.

Narratives Unsettled: Digression in Robert Walser, Thomas Bernhard, and Adalbert Stifter. By Samuel Frederick. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2012. xi + 239 pages. $79.95 hardcover, $29.95 paperback.

Cultural Technique in Creative Practice: Exploring Cultural Embodiment in the Movement of the Body in a Studio Space

Cultural Technique in Creative Practice: Exploring Cultural Embodiment in the Movement of the Body in a Studio Space

Tbilisi Evening

Tbilisi Evening Titsian Tabidze (bio) Translated by Rebecca Gould (bio) March 15, 1927 Tbilisi evening almost died of crying with the music’s voice. The strings carried the heart’s sorrows from the river’s left bank. That’s how the raft man sang, his pine logs bound with swans, his sudden refrain reduced to new hopes’ ashes. My still heart keens with what I have or what I had, what was cast into the fire as I stand naked on the black mountain. I praise the wind of industry. I want to destroy the old country. Icarus’s honeyed wings were melted by the sun’s rays. Forgive me, if I cry for the milky dew of Tbilisi mornings. I envy the flute-player raised on heroic poetry. [End Page 37] I recline on the old raft I cry, bound to the pine swans. My song sings past the old refrain. I live with these dreams. [End Page 38] Titsian Tabidze Titsian Tabidze (1895–1937) was one of most eloquent and sophisticated poets of the literary modernist movement that dominated Georgian literature during the early decades of the twentieth century. Born in rural western Georgia, he passed most of his adult life in cosmopolitan Tbilisi, where he became close friends with Russian and Georgian poets, including his translator Boris Pasternak (winner of the 1958 Nobel Prize for literature), Sergei Esenin (d. 1925), and Osip Mandelstam (d. 1938). Like many Russian and Georgian poets of his era, Titsian perished in a purge directed by Stalin’s police chief Lavrenty Beria. In Titsian’s case the stimulus for his execution was his refusal to denounce his close friend and fellow poet, Paolo Iashvili. To date, Titsian’s work has only been systematically translated into Russian, but an interview with his descendants is available in English at https://www.guernicamag.com/interviews/tabidze_8_1_10/. Rebecca Gould Rebecca Gould is a translator of Persian, Russian, and Georgian poetry as well as a scholar, critic, and writer. Her work has appeared in the Hudson Review, Gettysburg Review, Guernica, and Literary Imagination, among many other venues. Her translated volume After Tomorrow the Days Disappear: Poems of Hasan Sijzi of Delhi will be published by Northwestern University Press. Gould has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Association of Literary Translators, and is currently an assistant professor in the humanities at Yale-NUS College in Singapore. Copyright © 2015 University of Nebraska Press

The Ethics of Witnessing: The Holocaust in Polish Writers’ Diaries from Warsaw, 1939-1945 by Rachel Feldhay Brenner (review)

THE ETHICS OF WITNESSING: THE HOLOCAUST IN POLISH WRITERS' DIARIES FROM WARSAW, 1939-1945 Rachel Feldhay Brenner. Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2014. ix + 198 pp.Language and words took on new meanings during the Holocaust. The act of writing a diary took on new meanings as well. Rachel Feldhay Brenner's The Ethics of Witnessing: The Holocaust in Polish Writers' Diaries from Warsaw, 1939-1945 offers a glimpse into one of these new meanings of bearing witness as a non-victim through her examination of these five Polish writers' diaries. Through her research and analysis of the five prominent Polish writers and non-victims living in Warsaw during the Nazi occupation, Brenner suggests that these diarists' (Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz, Maria Dabrowska, Aurelia Wylezynska, Zofia Nalkowska, and Stanislaw Rembek) contemporaneous responses to the Jewish genocide deepen our understanding of the ethical, mental, and emotional challenges that face any witness of terror (4). Brenner's text highlights how these wartime diaries provide a glimpse of the self-examining personal, emotional, psychological, and religious quandaries facing non-victims living on the of Nazi-occupied Warsaw.Through a simple and well-organized layout of the six chapters comprising this book, Brenner successfully guides her readers through her analysis of the private and literary writings of Iwaszkiewicz, Dabrowska, Wylezynska, Nalkowska, and Rembek. Each chapter focuses on a particular diarist and the lens through which they viewed their situation in Germanoccupied Warsaw. With several subheadings included in each chapter, the reader is able to seamlessly follow Brenner's approach to and analysis of each of the diarists. Brenner's analysis of these authors' writings (literary work created before, during, and after the war), and the lenses through which they viewed their life and experiences while living in the Aryan side of German-occupied Warsaw, provide her readers with a unique perspective of some of the personal conundrums facing theses diarists.In addition to focusing each chapter solely on one of the five diarists, Brenner provides subsections that reveal the diarists' backgrounds, thus providing context to the philosophical and personal ideals to which each author clung. Consequently, in addition to shedding light on these five writers and their life works, Brenner introduces her readers to their various antisemitic attitudes and tendencies which were woven throughout their concerns of maintaining and sustaining Enlightenment-era inspired humanism (Jaros3aw Iwaszkiewicz and ZofiaNa3kowska), steadfastly embodying nationalism (Maria D1browska), striving for the aesthetical and ethical (Aurelia Wyle?ynska), and remembering Poland's Romantic Messianic destiny (Stanis3aw Rembek). …

Romanticism: a German Affair. By RüdigerSafranski. Translated by Robert E. Goodwin. Pp. xiv, 361, Evanston, Illinois, Northwestern University Press, 2014, £28.50.

The Heythrop JournalVolume 56, Issue 2 p. 344-345 BOOK REVIEW Romanticism: a German Affair. By Rüdiger Safranski. Translated by Robert E. Goodwin. Pp. xiv, 361, Evanston, Illinois, Northwestern University Press, 2014, £28.50. Patrick Madigan, Patrick Madigan Heythrop CollegeSearch for more papers by this author Patrick Madigan, Patrick Madigan Heythrop CollegeSearch for more papers by this author First published: 28 January 2015 https://doi.org/10.1111/heyj.12239_32Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume56, Issue2March 2015Pages 344-345 RelatedInformation

Dostoevsky and the Catholic Underground. By Elizabeth A. Blake. Studies in Russian Literature and Theory. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2014. xiii, 292 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Illustrations. $45.00, hard bound.

Dostoevsky and the Catholic Underground. By Elizabeth A. Blake. Studies in Russian Literature and Theory. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2014. xiii, 292 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Illustrations. $45.00, hard bound. - Volume 74 Issue 3

The Body in Mystery: The Political Theology of the Corpus Mysticum in the Literature of Reformation England. Jennifer R. Rust. Rethinking the Early Modern. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2014. xx + 250 pp. $39.95.

The Body in Mystery: The Political Theology of the Corpus Mysticum in the Literature of Reformation England. Jennifer R. Rust. Rethinking the Early Modern. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2014. xx + 250 pp. $39.95. - Volume 68 Issue 1

Faithful Translators: Authorship, Gender, and Religion in Early Modern England. Jaime Goodrich. Rethinking the Early Modern. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2014. xi + 244 pp. $39.95.

Faithful Translators: Authorship, Gender, and Religion in Early Modern England. Jaime Goodrich. Rethinking the Early Modern. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2014. xi + 244 pp. $39.95. - Volume 68 Issue 2

Women with a Thirst for Destruction: The Bad Mother in Russian Culture. By Jenny Kaminer. Studies in Russian Literature and Theory. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2014. viii, 198 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Illustrations. $45.00, hard bound.

Women with a Thirst for Destruction: The Bad Mother in Russian Culture. By Jenny Kaminer. Studies in Russian Literature and Theory. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2014. viii, 198 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Illustrations.$45.00, hard bound. - Volume 74 Issue 2

The Novel in the Age of Disintegration: Dostoevsky and the Problem of Genre in the 1870s. By Kate Holland. Studies in Russian Literature and Theory. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2013. ix, 251 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $45.00, hard bound.

The Novel in the Age of Disintegration: Dostoevsky and the Problem of Genre in the 1870s. By Kate Holland. Studies in Russian Literature and Theory. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2013. ix, 251 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $45.00, hard bound.

Where Are the Trees Going?

Mohsin Hamid. Discontent and Its Civilizations: Dispatches from Lahore, New York, and London. New York. Riverhead Books / Penguin. 2015. isbn 9781594633652 Mohsin Hamid, novelist and essayist, has lived in Pakistan, England, and the United States, cultivating a tension over identity that pervades his essay collection Discontent and Its Civilizations. The collection’s essays span from 2000—pulsing on the cusp of the attacks of 9/11—to 2014, offering the perspective of a new father who has returned to Pakistan to raise his daughter. The book’s sections—“Life,” “Art,” and “Politics”—offer succinct, previously published essays, which Hamid uses to express his urgent concern for the world. The most recent essays focus on Pakistan, where his daughter will grow and learn. In the title essay, Hamid discusses covering her window with blast-resistant film; he worries that his desire to protect her “will dim my daughter’s view” of a favorite “yellow-blooming amaltas tree.” The desire to protect without sheltering permeates the collection, for Hamid loves and is repelled by much of what he sees happening in life, art, and politics over the course of the first decade of the new millennium. Choosing along with his partner to return to Pakistan to participate in that country’s reimagining, Hamid summarizes in “Personal and Political Intertwined” the experience of many of the essays: “Things in the country around me these past few years have been mixed. Much is horrible, much is beautiful, and much is in between.” His ability to see all sides of the story makes reading the essays feel like having a conversation with a partner, a person who wants to convince the reader there is much at stake, that a world needs literature even more when there are drones flying overhead, that one needs to look at the majestic tree through a window shadowed by blast-resistant film. Hamid admits in “My Foreign Correspondence ” that he is inventing himself, his argument, and his understanding of nationhood as he goes along. He lays bare his complicated quest for identity—in religion , nationality, even parental status—to convey the necessity for change resulting in global stability. He lives in a country tensed with the threat of violence: “America’s 9/11 has given way to Pakistan’s 24/7/365.” His hope for Pakistan, the world, and his daughter in the face of terrible events is the nerve center of this fine collection. Colleen Lutz Clemens Kutztown University Vénus Khoury-Ghata. Where Are the Trees Going? Marilyn Hacker, tr. Evanston, Illinois. Northwestern University Press. 2014. isbn 9780810130081 Born in Lebanon, Vénus Khoury-Ghata has lived in France since 1972. She has published forty books of novels, poetry, and translations, which earned her the 2011 Goncourt Prize for her entire body of work. Four volumes of poems have appeared in English since 2000 thanks to talented fellow poet and translator Marilyn Hacker. Where Are the Trees Going? was crowned in its French version by the 2013 Pierrette Micheloud Poetry Prize. The English version contains selections from two prose volumes; several of its poems have appeared in print and online in British, Lebanese, and American literary magazines, sometimes in different versions. The prose excerpts constitute a canvas that helps organize the poems into polyphonic threads. Khoury-Ghata’s rhythms are part lullaby and part incantation: “If one moth left the lamp the evening turned to night / The mother put us to bed head-to-foot with trees the same age as ourselves.” Objects, trees, humans, wind, or water perform Leo Tolstoy Strider: The Story of a Horse Louise Maude & Aylmer Maude, tr. Borderland Books Famed Russian writer Leo Tolstoy wrestles with questions of aging and mortality in this lesser-known novel. Told largely from the viewpoint of an old horse recounting his story and his owner’s as they go through life and experience decline, Tolstoy’s sharp prose pierces to the heart of humanity and shows us our true selves. Survivors: Hungarian Jewish Poets of the Holocaust Thomas Ország-Land, ed. & tr. Smokestack Books Out of one of the greatest historical tragedies of the twentieth century comes this anthology of poetry written by sufferers of the Holocaust...

Late Coleridge and the Life of Idealism

GREG ELLERMANN Late Coleridge and the Life ofIdealism i. Introduction T he fortunes of romantic idealism are changing, for decades the object of deconstructive and historical-materialist critique, idealism is beginning to be regarded as a resource rather than a problem. Idealist sys­ tem building, for instance, is invoked in current reflections on the disci­ plines and the organization of information. More surprisingly, Romantic idealism also informs new ecological thought. Once held to be indifferent, or even hostile, to the external world, idealism is now seen to be at its most daring, and most startlingly prescient, when theorizing nature as a network of nonhuman forces.1 Of course, contemporary uses of idealism are not identical to those of the Romantics. One influential strain in the return to idealism expresses a strong resistance to what, historically, was its central concept: “the abso­ lute,” or the metaphysical ground of all contingent things. As Leon Chai points out, the idealism invoked by modern theory is often “idealism with­ out absolutes.”2 The argument is that idealism is worth salvaging, but only when rid of its epistemological hubris. Instead of an absolute idealism, the goal is now a finite idealism—no longer oriented toward being in itself, but bound by the skeptical and critical horizons of our moment. Yet this approach threatens to recapitulate the very anti-idealist argu­ ments it wants to move past. To give up on the absolute is to accept the fa­ miliar charges: idealism privileges totality at the expense of singularity; it overlooks epistemology and language; it reduces difference to identity. Most egregiously, it speculates about the nature ofwhat “exist[s], in and by I. For some examples of this reevaluation, see Kate Rigby, Topographies of the Sacred: The Poetics of Place in European Romanticism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004) and Tilottama Rajan, “The Encyclopedia and the University of Theory: Idealism and the Organization of Knowledge,” Textual Practice 21, no. 2 (2007): 335—58. 2. Chai, “Prospects for Idealism,” Modern Philology 104, no. 1 (2006): 61—82. SiR, 54 (Spring 2015) 33 34 GREG ELLERMANN itself, outside our engagement with it. ”3 But by purging Romantic idealism of its absolutes, we lose the chance to ask what the concept offers. This essay gives the Romantic absolute another look. I focus on the later thought of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the best-known translator of German idealism into British literary life. An emphasis on Coleridge’s later work has the salutary effect of reuniting “realism” with Romantic idealism. Philoso­ phers define “realism” as the notion that a world exists, independent of the mind and its perceptions.4 Scholarship on Coleridge’s thought typically portrays it as defending the individual mind, or the “I am.” Yet his most fa­ mous prose work, the Biographia Literaria, explicitly advocates “the truest and most binding realism.”5 What sense can “realism” have for a thinker who deploys a systematic idealism to explain “the nature ofthe ultimate re­ ality in the World”?6 How would this realism change our perspective on both Coleridge’s thought and Romantic idealism more broadly? My essay uses the problem of “life” to map these shifting lines of ideal­ ism and realism in Coleridge’s thinking. Coleridge is often seen as pitting a vitalist theory of nature against the mechanical materialism of the Enlight­ enment.7 Yet Coleridge is as much repelled as fascinated by vitalism. This ambivalence arises from the attempt to make life absolute, to identify it as the fundamental constituent of the real.8 Disease and deformation, especially, threaten the purposive cosmos supposed to be grounded in an absolute life. Through close engagement with the natural-history writings of J. H. Green—surgeon, philosopher, and Coleridge’s eventual literary executor—and the thought of F. W. J. Schelling, Coleridge articulates his own idealist response to the challenge of absolute life. This response is no less realist in orientation, however. My primary aim is to trace the develop­ 3. Tilottama Rajan and Arkady Plotnitsky, eds., Idealism Without Absolutes: Philosophy and Romantic Culture (Albany: SUNY Press, 2004), 243. 4. Lee Braver, A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007). 5. S...

The Poetics of Unremembered Acts: Reading, Lyric, Pedagogy by Brian McGrath

BOOK REVIEWS 431 “sacrifice[ing of] the father to the polis,” the Hebrew Bible “sacrifices the son to the nation” (57). But whereas Oedipus’ fate is a result of Delphic prophecy, Abraham is directly commanded to sacrifice Isaac (59). In both cases, however, real fatherhood is eclipsed behind the paternal figure of politics and religion—neither Oedipus nor Abraham act like fathers. The first attempts to become his own successor by “fathering . . . children with [his] own mother” (55) while the second becomes one of the major scrip­ tural patriarchs precisely in his abdication of fatherly responsibility (70). It is the subsumption of real parenthood to the trope or myth of pater­ nity that forms the political and religious landscape of the West. In subse­ quent chapters, Weineck deals deftly with the transformations of the Laius Complex in the thought ofPlato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Lessing, Hegel, Kleist, Freud, Federn, Weinninger, and Hofmannsthal. If it is beyond the con­ fines of this review to detail the development of Weineck’s argument and readings of these texts, it is surely not beyond the confines of the reader’s engagement with her book to enjoy and learn from it. Mention should be made, however, of Weineck’s fascinating reading of Hobbes: the thinker most associated with tyranny turns out to be the thinker who most stringently interrupts the authoritarian trope of paternity by “locating the origin of [paternal] power in the appeal of an infant in need” (115)— paradoxically, it is Hobbes who defends fatherhood. And although this brief moment in Leviathan—“almost concealed within the relentless logic of power grounded in the specter of death” (115)—does not appear to ex­ ert the gravitational pull away from the aforementioned trope, it does glimpse at a question that Weineck does not answer (mainly because it has no philosophical answer): What does it mean to be a father? For this, as well as for her impeccable treatment of the paternal trope, I suggest that The Tragedy of Fatherhood is a book for the whole family. Jeffrey A. Bernstein College of the Holy Cross Brian McGrath. The Poetics of Unremembered Acts: Reading, Lyric, Pedagogy. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2013. Pp. 167. $45. Who remembers learning to read? No doubt most of us claim memories of a self that preceded literal literacy; but does anyone—can anyone—possess as a memory that fabulous instant (supposing it were to exist as an instant) when marks become letters? No pedagogical accomplishment, in the modern developed world, is more ordinary than learning to read; but a touch of necromancy still lies latent in this moment when it is imagined SiR, 54 (Fall 2015) 432 BOOK REVIEWS as a moment—a lightning-bolt of revelation that breaks the continuity of time and identity, as “the black marks become magical.” I am quoting the title of a chapter in George Eliot’s novel Romola (1863), in which Eliot set herselfthe task ofimagining what it would be like for a scholar to remem­ ber how to read. Dispossessed of his literacy by a trauma he has suffered, the scholar, Baldassare, suffers another shock that restores it. He looks at a book; “he could see the large letters at the head of the page” (and here Eliot breaks her narrative to print, in capital letters, a chapter title from Pausanius in the original Greek, a language that only a select portion ofher novel’s readership, even in 1863, would have been able to read): “yet an hour ago he had been looking at that page, and it had suggested no more meaning to him than ifthe letters had been black weather-marks on a wall; but at this moment they were once again the magic signs that conjure up a world.” The “glow ofconscious power” he experiences in the wake ofthis epiphany is temporary (he soon loses his literacy again), unredemptive (he remains monomaniacal in his desire to kill his ungrateful adoptive son), and perhaps most remarkably, rooted in an unseizable event. The power to read surges up out of the fissure between “an hour ago” and “at this moment.” It originates in a narrative interruption, an immemorial event more primary than the amnesia to...

Dark, Sweet: New and Selected Poems by Linda Hogan

Linda Hogan. Dark, Sweet: New and Selected Poems. Minneapolis. Coffee House Press. 2014. isbn 9781566893510 From the beginning of her career, Linda Hogan’s often prayer-like poems evoke liminality , speaking from blurred boundaries of animal and human, self and other, but it is the constant interpenetration of the sacred and mundane, which poet-theorist Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei calls “the ecstatic quotidian ,” that sets Linda Hogan’s work on a plane of its own. Dark,Sweetincludespoemsfromasearly as 1978 and as current as 2014. Throughout the collection, Hogan makes the everyday spiritualism of her poems available to a wide variety of readers by her use of spare, common language. Moreover, her poetry fuses the epic and the intimate in a Native American, feminist rewriting of Whitman’s “merge,” in which boundaries of all sorts are dissolved and the self/poetic speaker becomes intimate with all things, even with the birth of the planet: “In water / the world is breathing, / in the silt.” Like many other Native American poets, Hogan’s figurative language brings a decidedly political aspect to her work, as in “Going to Town,” where “The black walnut trees are gone, / stolen during the night / and transformed / into the handles of guns.” Likewise, in “The Other Voices,” Hogan identifies the damage done by oppressive social practices, leaving us unable to speak our “inner truths” and equally unable to hear when others do: “Our other voices take sanctuary / while police with their shepherds / stand guard / at the borders of breath / lest our stories escape / this holy building / of ourselves. // . . . We don’t tell our inner truth and no one believes it anyway.” An examination of human violence is a dark thread weaving through this collection . In the poem “Thanksgiving,” we are confronted by the fact that human hungers are often only temporarily sated by violence , as she describes a “Turkey, blue head on the ground, body in a gleaming white tub with lion claw feet.” In the saga of tooth and claw, none of us are blameless, “all of us have stolen something / in the night” (“Coyote”), and “even the trees with their rings have kept track of the crimes that live within and against us” (“The Light”). Yet despite human propensity toward violence and our alienation from the rest of creation, Hogan closes the collection with a section entitled “The Remedies.” Among the collection’s many remedies are transformations in which “the story became a song” (“Transformations: Winter Count”), and another in which the speaker is like a firefly, “burning with life / until at last I am light” (“Wicking”), and the hope that we move toward and return to the light, that “in the last breath / we give back all the swallowed / all the takenin , and it is light, after all, / first and last, we live for, die for” (“Light”). Linda Hogan’s Dark, Sweet reveals the arc and breadth of a master poet’s life-work. It is one of those pieces of light that we live for. Jeanetta Calhoun Mish Oklahoma City University Richard Milazzo. A Prayer in a Wolf’s Mouth: Poems 2013–2014. Turin. Lower Canal Books. 2014. isbn 9788890538544 ———. Like Branches to Wind: Poems 2008. Turin. Lower Canal Books. 2014. isbn 9788890538551 Richard Milazzo is a prominent international art curator and critic who has written over twenty art books and has published eighteen volumes of poetry. In his world travels since 1993 he has often written his poems in far-flung hotels, reflecting an antigrail quest, a reluctant yet passionate determination to see the numinous in every creature and feature of this world. A Prayer in a Wolf’s Mouth is, Uday Prakash The Walls of Delhi Jason Grunebaum, tr. Seven Stories Press This collection of three unconnected short stories by Indian writer Uday Prakash show deep insight into the lives of people across the different castes that make up Indian culture. These stories are told with a clever humor that accents rather than diminishes the fierce honesty of their portrayal of modern life in India. David Mura The Last Incantations Northwestern University Press In his experimental combination of poetic forms, Japanese American writer David Mura illuminates the obstacles of racism and orientalism in America...

A Prayer in a Wolf's Mouth: Poems 2013–2014 by Richard MilazzoLike Branches to Wind: Poems 2008 by Richard Milazzo

Linda Hogan. Dark, Sweet: New and Selected Poems. Minneapolis. Coffee House Press. 2014. isbn 9781566893510 From the beginning of her career, Linda Hogan’s often prayer-like poems evoke liminality , speaking from blurred boundaries of animal and human, self and other, but it is the constant interpenetration of the sacred and mundane, which poet-theorist Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei calls “the ecstatic quotidian ,” that sets Linda Hogan’s work on a plane of its own. Dark,Sweetincludespoemsfromasearly as 1978 and as current as 2014. Throughout the collection, Hogan makes the everyday spiritualism of her poems available to a wide variety of readers by her use of spare, common language. Moreover, her poetry fuses the epic and the intimate in a Native American, feminist rewriting of Whitman’s “merge,” in which boundaries of all sorts are dissolved and the self/poetic speaker becomes intimate with all things, even with the birth of the planet: “In water / the world is breathing, / in the silt.” Like many other Native American poets, Hogan’s figurative language brings a decidedly political aspect to her work, as in “Going to Town,” where “The black walnut trees are gone, / stolen during the night / and transformed / into the handles of guns.” Likewise, in “The Other Voices,” Hogan identifies the damage done by oppressive social practices, leaving us unable to speak our “inner truths” and equally unable to hear when others do: “Our other voices take sanctuary / while police with their shepherds / stand guard / at the borders of breath / lest our stories escape / this holy building / of ourselves. // . . . We don’t tell our inner truth and no one believes it anyway.” An examination of human violence is a dark thread weaving through this collection . In the poem “Thanksgiving,” we are confronted by the fact that human hungers are often only temporarily sated by violence , as she describes a “Turkey, blue head on the ground, body in a gleaming white tub with lion claw feet.” In the saga of tooth and claw, none of us are blameless, “all of us have stolen something / in the night” (“Coyote”), and “even the trees with their rings have kept track of the crimes that live within and against us” (“The Light”). Yet despite human propensity toward violence and our alienation from the rest of creation, Hogan closes the collection with a section entitled “The Remedies.” Among the collection’s many remedies are transformations in which “the story became a song” (“Transformations: Winter Count”), and another in which the speaker is like a firefly, “burning with life / until at last I am light” (“Wicking”), and the hope that we move toward and return to the light, that “in the last breath / we give back all the swallowed / all the takenin , and it is light, after all, / first and last, we live for, die for” (“Light”). Linda Hogan’s Dark, Sweet reveals the arc and breadth of a master poet’s life-work. It is one of those pieces of light that we live for. Jeanetta Calhoun Mish Oklahoma City University Richard Milazzo. A Prayer in a Wolf’s Mouth: Poems 2013–2014. Turin. Lower Canal Books. 2014. isbn 9788890538544 ———. Like Branches to Wind: Poems 2008. Turin. Lower Canal Books. 2014. isbn 9788890538551 Richard Milazzo is a prominent international art curator and critic who has written over twenty art books and has published eighteen volumes of poetry. In his world travels since 1993 he has often written his poems in far-flung hotels, reflecting an antigrail quest, a reluctant yet passionate determination to see the numinous in every creature and feature of this world. A Prayer in a Wolf’s Mouth is, Uday Prakash The Walls of Delhi Jason Grunebaum, tr. Seven Stories Press This collection of three unconnected short stories by Indian writer Uday Prakash show deep insight into the lives of people across the different castes that make up Indian culture. These stories are told with a clever humor that accents rather than diminishes the fierce honesty of their portrayal of modern life in India. David Mura The Last Incantations Northwestern University Press In his experimental combination of poetic forms, Japanese American writer David Mura illuminates the obstacles of racism and orientalism in America...

Connected by the Ear: The Media, Pedagogy, and Politics of the Romantic Lecture. By Sean Franzel. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2013. x + 292 pages + 13 b/w illustrations. $39.95.

Connected by the Ear: The Media, Pedagogy, and Politics of the Romantic Lecture. By Sean Franzel. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2013. x + 292 pages + 13 b/w illustrations. $39.95.

Introduction: En-gendering Islamic Authority in West Africa

Islamic Africa, vol. 5, no. 2, 2014. issn 2154-0993. Copyright © 2014 by Northwestern University Press. All rights reserved. www.islamicafricajournal.org Women and gender have very often been marginal or absent in the academic literature on Islam in West Africa. Where the literature has not itself marginalized or completely ignored women, it has often defined women as essentially marginal in relation to Islam. Contributors to this special issue of Islamic Africa seek not merely to bring more attention to Muslim women in West Africa but to examine the mutually constitutive relationships between Islamic authority and gendered discourses and practices. This introduction begins by reviewing the emergence of literature on women and gender in Muslim West Africa, pointing out some of the assumptions that have often limited this literature as well as recent attempts to remedy these assumptions. These include the assumption that women are categorically defined as marginal in relation to Islam; that men are to women as the public is to the private; and that “women” and “Islam” can be approached as monolithic objects of analysis. Then we outline several themes that we consider key to an engendered study of Islamic authority in West Africa. First, we propose performativity as an organizing concept for understanding how authority is exercised, recognized, reconfigured, and challenged in relation to gender and Islam. For instance, we ask how women present new leadership roles as “felicitous” in relation to gendered norms of piety. Second, we suggest reexamining Islamic knowledge, a key component of performances of Islamic authority, moving beyond binaries such as “scriptural” and “oral” knowledge and examining forms and practices of Islamic knowledge that Introduction: Engendering Islamic Authority in West Africa