Booker Prize-winning Research Articles

Unmitigated Blackness: Paul Beatty's Transscalar Critique

Unmitigated Blackness:Paul Beatty's Transscalar Critique Henry Ivry Maybe the reason so few people are funny these days is that nothing is identified as being absurd anymore. … The word is rarely even used, because for the dutiful American to acknowledge the absurdity of life implies responsibility.1 —Paul Beatty Towards the end of Paul Beatty's Booker Prize-winning novel The Sellout (2015), the narrator takes stock of contemporary African American art. The protagonist, known only by his last name Me, is at a comedy club when an African American comedian abruptly stops his performance as a white couple starts to laugh hysterically at his jokes. The comedian yells: "Do I look like I'm fucking joking with you? This shit ain't for you. Understand? Now get the fuck out! This is our thing!"2 Me is both awed and confused by the performance: I respected that he didn't give a fuck. But I wish I hadn't been so scared, that I had the nerve to stand in protest. Not to castigate him for what he did or to stick up for the aggrieved white people. After all, they could've stuck up for themselves, called in the authorities or their God, and smote everyone in the place, but I wish I'd stood up to this man and asked him a question: "So what exactly is our thing?" (SO, 287–88) Me picks up on the comedian's phrase "our thing" to ask what qualifies as African American aesthetic expression. How can the comedian, Me wonders, draw a line between our thing and their thing? This is, I argue, also a literary question. Through Me, Beatty's novel joins a conversation best encapsulated by Kenneth Warren in his controversial but essential What Was African American Literature? There, Warren claims that African American literature as an aesthetic category existed only in relation to Jim Crow legislation. This is not to say that "racism has disappeared from the nation's sociopolitical landscape," but rather that African American literature was constituted as a dialectical [End Page 1133] "function of Jim Crow and the fight against it."3 With the end of de jure segregation and the ascendancy of de facto racism, the possibility for crafting a distinctly African American aesthetic vernacular in the contemporary moment, Warren argues, lacks a grounding referent. Warren makes a political claim alongside his periodization of African American literature. Literature, Warren contends, provided the space "in which the black literary voice could count for so much because, in political terms, the voice of black people generally counted for so little."4 Warren argues that African American art is grounded in a reciprocal relation between the aesthetic and the political made possible by the obvious structural oppression of Jim Crow legislation. This is where Warren and Beatty diverge. While Warren laments the loss of a distinctly African American literature, Beatty, throughout The Sellout, critiques this idea of a stable African American literature having ever existed. The plot turns around Me's relationship to Hominy Jenkins, the former understudy of the Our Gang minstrel, Buckwheat, and the sole surviving "Little Rascal stunt coon" (SO, 71). Hominy sets off a series of events that eventually lead the narrator to being charged by the Supreme Court with "willfully ignoring the Fourteenth Amendment" and resegregating the fictional Los Angeles ghetto of Dickens while also possessing Hominy as a slave (SO, 23). In some senses, this regressive plotline seems to revolve around what Warren describes as a tired trope within contemporary literature wherein '"the discovery' [is] made again and again by recent scholarship, that despite news to the contrary, 'racism' still exists."5 But The Sellout doesn't merely uncover the racist bias of some minor character: by staging the segregation of Dickens and the reinstitution of slavery, Beatty goes much further than the "discovery" that '"racism' still exists." The Sellout satirically erases not only the gains of the Civil Rights movement but imagines returning to chattel slavery as offering the only way out of the current racial impasse. The novel therefore critiques the politics of intelligibility that underpin Warren's idea of African American literature, which remain circumscribed within...

Life Writing When the World is Burning: The Year in Australia

Life Writing When the World is BurningThe Year in Australia Kylie Cardell (bio) It is no surprise that in Australia this year a great deal of life writing has continued to emerge in conjunction with pressing social and political issues. The ongoing national crises of refugee and asylum seeker policy, gendered abuse, and racial discrimination continue to surface in both political and literary arenas, while unprecedented bushfires have decimated the country, bringing climate change back onto the public agenda with new fury. The right of individuals to live with dignity, in safety, and free from fear—and the ongoing challenges to these rights suffered in public and domestic domains—is a connecting thread across the year's life writing and a theme the genre is uniquely equipped to amplify. Writing Asylum In Australia, one of the most volatile issues for representation has been, for a number of years now, in relation to the experiences and lives of refugees who arrive (or attempt to arrive) in Australia by boat. In 2013, the Kurdish journalist and artist Behrouz Boochani was one of sixty asylum seekers intercepted by Australian authorities on a boat that had left from Indonesia. Between 2013 and 2017, Boochani was forcibly detained at the Australian-run Manus Island immigration detention center in Papua New Guinea (PNG), a facility that closed suddenly (and violently) in 2017 causing displacement and statelessness for hundreds of "unprocessed" detainees. In detainment and exile, Boochani has produced a remarkable body of testimony, including a documentary film and a series of diary-essays for mainstream news media. Boochani's memoir No Friend but the Mountains (2018), written from the Manus camp on a cell phone and delivered over WhatsApp to collaborators in Australia, was awarded in 2019 the Victorian Prize for Literature, Australia's richest literary prize (Wahlquist). Boochani was not permitted to attend the ceremony, a gala event held in Melbourne. When testimony turns to memoir, it takes the form of a prestigious literary product. No longer a [End Page 1] digital stream of text and images but a hardcover, prize-winning book, the account claims coveted territory in the Australian literary sphere—but the author is yet to set foot on the Australian mainland. In No Friend, Boochani testifies in lyrical, shocking detail to the lack of safety and the ongoingness of daily struggle that characterize life in the detention facility—this is "prison literature" and strategic activism, poetry and diary, memoir and novel. His story does work his body cannot; it circulates in the Australian public sphere, raising awareness, encouraging activism, and speaking on behalf of refugees. What the memoir might achieve in terms of legal rights for asylum seekers in Australia remains to be seen, but it is hopeful that No Friend has won such a significant prize this year. Writing Domestic Abuse In her memoir Fake: A Startling True Story of Love in a World of Liars, Cheats, Narcissists, Fantasists and Phonies (2019), Stephanie Wood uses life writing to work through an individual experience to achieve both emotional catharsis and visibility for widespread issues of gendered emotional abuse. Stephanie is a successful journalist writing for some of the country's top mainstream media publications when she meets a man named Joe through an online dating service. Newly forty, childless, and a long-term romantic who has nurtured a dream of "the one," Stephanie is also at an emotional nadir. The tension in Wood's story is built on disbelief: the reader can't believe Stephanie is falling for the increasingly implausible stories that Joe is crafting—he explains away a nonexistent house, denies a very much existing wife and children—and Stephanie doesn't believe in herself. Her inner monologue is relentless; she is too needy, too anxious, too untrusting, too possessive. By the time Stephanie manages to end the relationship, she has spiraled into a deep depression. Her recovery involves rediscovering her journalistic power: she teams up with a female colleague, she tracks land records and bankruptcy deeds, and she interviews the "other woman," an ex-partner who Joe was dating at the same time. She consults psychoanalysts about whether or not Joe's behavior might qualify as psychopathic...

Revisiting the Past: A Thematic Study of Man Booker Prize Winning Novel Wolf Hall Written by Hilary Mantel

Revisiting the Past: A Thematic Study of Man Booker Prize Winning Novel Wolf Hall Written by Hilary Mantel

«Принцип Златовласки» в романе С. Рашди «Кишот» (2019): соотношение прецедентных имён, лингвокультурем и экзотической лексики

The twelfth novel (“Quichotte”) by the English-speaking writer of Indian origin Salman Rushdie was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 2019. Like many other literary works by the Booker Prize winner of 1981, the analyzed novel testifies to the necessity of following the Goldilocks Principle when resorting to precedent names, culturally-loaded words and loanwords from non-European languages. In order to effectively convey his ideas to the target reader the author juggles with exotic loanwords (84 lexemes), culturally-loaded words (52 lexemes) and over 100 allusions to European and North American texts, persons and phenomena. The exotic loanwords and the culturally-loaded words contribute to the depiction of the place, time and characters; however, the intertextual elements perform an evaluation function and an aesthetic function.

The Rumors of Bergson’s Demise May Have Been Exaggerated: Novelty, Complexity, and Emergence in Biological Evolution

Early 20th century philosopher Henri Bergson posited an initial push that propelled the diversity of life forward into a varied, novel future: The elan vital, a necessary force or impulse that animated life’s progress and development. His idea had largely been abandoned by mid-century. Even so, much of the conceptual and explanatory work this impulse targeted is yet in want of an explanation. In particular, Bergson’s derelict ideas on evolution addressed three areas that have once again become relevant in the effort to unite evolutionary genetics, biological development, and ecological context (often shortened to evo/devo/eco): (1) the purposeful nature of individual organisms and their parts; (2) the integrative, holistic, non-linear emergent dynamics seen in evolutionary processes; and (3) how genuine novelty emerges into the universe (Ellegren and Galtier in Nat Rev Genet 17(7):422, 2016; Simondon et al. in On the mode of existence of technical objects. Univocal series, Univocal Publishing LLC, Minneapolis, 2017; Bang, in: Winther-Lindqvist, Bang, Valsiner (eds) Nothingness: philosophical insights into psychology, Transaction Publishers, Somerset, 2016; Moreno and Mossio in Biological autonomy: a philosophical and theoretical enquiry. History, philosophy and theory of the life sciences, Springer, Dordrecht, 2015). In this paper I argue that Bergson’s ideas may yet be relevant to these questions, and his work warrants a reexamination in light of current problems in evolutionary biology. This is not a call to ‘return’ to Bergson, nevertheless his notions about complexity suggest ways of looking at current biological problems in ways that offer a heuristic insight worth entertaining. Bergson’s Nobel Prize-winning book, Creative Evolution, provided a strikingly prescient early 20th century framework for understanding how Darwinian evolution acts as an engine for generating new forms (Bergson in Creative evolution (M. Vaughan, trans., vol. 231), University Press of America, Lanham, Bergson 1911).

Political overtones and Allusions in Arundhati Roy's The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

Published in 2017, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is the second novel of famous Indian author, and Booker Prize winner, Arundhati Roy. The novel can be seen to have two parts where the first half of the novel is a bildungsroman of Anjum (a hermaphrodite), set in the old city of Delhi while the second half is the story of Tilottama, Naga and Musa spanning Kashmir insurgency. The novel engages in many political and social incidents that have occurred in India and other parts of the world at the backdrop of its story. It is full of allusions to many political figures, political issues, events, and incidents that have occurred in the past few decades in India and around the world. The present paper attempts to examine the political overtones implicit in the novel by decoding and explaining few significant allusions used in the novel.

Reading for Land Susan Hill's The Clay We Are Made Of : Haudenosaunee Land Tenure on the Grand River

Reading for Land Susan Hill's The Clay We Are Made Of:Haudenosaunee Land Tenure on the Grand River Audra Simpson (bio) With this issue, we introduce a new occasional feature in the journal that opens up space for extended consideration of noteworthy new works. Audra Simpson contributes a close examination of how Susan Hill's prize-winning book (NAISA Best First Book, Canadian Historical Association Aboriginal History Group Book Prize, and Ontario Clio Prize, all 2018) constitutes a fieldchange intervention in Haudenosaunee and Indigenous studies. Matthew Cohen reviews Lisa Brooks's new book by way of an interview with the author about her groundbreaking methodology. Jean M. O'Brien and Robert Warrior SUSAN HILL'S PRIZE-WINNING BOOK The Clay We Are Made Of: Haudenosaunee Land Tenure on the Grand River (2017) offers a comprehensive history of land and governance that is rare in its framing, its focus, and its execution, rendering it one of the most important studies to emerge on Haudenosaunee history to date.1 In this book Hill documents the relationships that Haudenosaunee had with lands, peoples, and waters in what is now the North American "Northeast." She moves us through the vicissitudes of the Revolutionary War, documenting Haudenosaunee movement up into the northern points of their hunting territory and their relocation and negotiations with Mississaugas at what would become Six Nations of the Grand River. On the way we run into some of the usual protagonists of Six Nations history: Joseph Brant (Thayendenaga), William Johnson, and John A. MacDonald. Brant's sister and Johnson's wife, Molly Brant, appears briefly, and one of the most chronicled Indigenous women in North America, Pauline Johnson, notably does not make an appearance. These are not ellipses or oversights, as Hill's approach is far from hagiographic; thus, there are very different players in this story. The central concern or protagonist is not a person or an event but a set of [End Page 149] ethics. The ethics of land are the central protagonists in this study, and this makes for a very different kind of history than we have been taught about Six Nations.2 These ethics of land speak through the archives that Hill works with: speeches and letters, council minutes, Indian agent correspondence, and arguments and negotiations. Through Hill's readings we see the process of treaty, of deliberation and decision making regarding property and inheritance in colonial contexts laid bare for us, and it is the burning question—the question of the contradiction between ethics and practice in the teeth of settler-colonial constraint and imperative—that orients her analysis. She asks specifically of this material, "If our relationship to the earth and to land is central why would we negotiate land sharing deals, treaties and, leases and direct sales?" (4). These negotiations over land are in seeming contradiction to Haudenosaunee philosophy and belief. We see how chiefs, clan mothers, and councils tried to maintain land and territory through policy, land tenure practice, and inheritance decisions in the face of rapid and unrelenting attempts to divest them of land and (annuity) money. Gone is the emphasis on militarism, decline and defeat, and then cultural salvage that has marked much of the literature on the Iroquois. Not only is this a sort of story different from the one we have been told, but this is also a model study of how to read archives for Indigenous history, theory, and principle. Hill offers a robust account of the Haudenosaunee eighteenth-century alliance with the British, a relationship based on mutual recognition, on equality. This alliance with the British, however, extends the principles of the earlier seventeenth-century Kaswentha ("Two Row Wampum") Treaty between the Dutch and the Haudenosaunee and transposes it onto relations with the British. But eighteenth-century Haudenosaunee not only treated with British, they maintained their relationships to others in the Confederacy and those in the shadow of the Confederacy. As such, they brought with them protectorate nations like the Nanticokes and Tutelos when they moved to what is now Ontario, but they also brought with them their obligations to people and land. Hill demonstrates how these obligations and relationships with other political orders were...

The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea by Jack E. Davis

Reviewed by: The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea by Jack E. Davis Erin Stewart Mauldin The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea. By Jack E. Davis. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2017. 557 pp. $29.95. ISBN 978-0-8714-0866-2. Jack Davis's Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Gulf, is a beautifully-written, wide-ranging synthesis representing the best of what environmental history offers to both academia and the general reading public. The delightful prose and frequent use of intimate, person-centered narratives provide an entertaining package for Davis's thorough research, innovative interdisciplinary discussions, and deft handling of chronological and geographical scale. As most environmental histories do, this work blurs the line between human and non-human narratives in a way that restores the "natural struts of our existence" (9). Yet what could have been a standard, declensionist tale of nature's ruination at the hands of farmers, real estate developers, and oil men, is, in Davis's hands, a story of resilience and hope, focusing on the ways the Gulf "has long been and will continue to be a gift to humankind" (11). Of course, the coastline of the Gulf of Mexico encompasses a variety of environments and histories, and Davis is careful not to artificially conflate the history of Florida's Mangrove Coast with that of southern Texas or Louisiana. Zooming in to focus on developments in one area does not prevent the author from discussing more general developments across the Gulf states. Thus, he manages to produce a local, regional, and national history [End Page 159] all at once, for the events in and resources of the Gulf make their way into American life through trade, tourism, and technology. The book is divided into nineteen chapters over four parts, each part organized by its temporal coverage. The early chapters highlight the contributions of little-known figures during the Euro-American "conquest" of and settlement in the areas around the Gulf of Mexico, from sea captains and mapmakers to nineteenth-century engineers and soldiers. Outside of the in-depth coverage of Native American groups often passed over in textbook explanations of pre-Columbian America (which tend to focus on either the Northeast or the Southwest), the basic narrative of this first section is not particularly revelatory for readers familiar with early American history. However, Davis intersperses explanations of the non-human history of the Gulf in a way that ably introduces the lay reader to geology, riverine and estuarine hydrology, botany, and field zoology—all of which are necessary to understanding the particular character of the Gulf and its attraction for humans over time. In this way, The Gulf diverges in its structure from many environmental histories; it organically threads science throughout the entire narrative, rather than using natural history as prelude or background before moving on to the human history of the Gulf of Mexico. Exploration and discovery of the Gulf gave way to extraction, and the chapters covering the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries cycle through the various things humans wanted from the area. Tangible resources, such as oysters, tarpon, snapper, grouper, exotic birds, and oil, are juxtaposed with more abstract attractions such as isolation, health, and vacation time. Throughout, Davis emphasizes the "invention" of the Gulf as we know it today—for centuries, fears of lashing rainstorms, unpredictable waters, perilous swamps, man-eating alligators, and swarms of insects kept large-scale settlements off the coastlines. Technological and transportation advances, breakthroughs in the treatment of tropical diseases, a thriving tourist business in fishing and hunting, the works of artists and writers who found wonderment in the Gulf, and changing attitudes toward leisure [End Page 160] time during industrialization all worked together, over time, to bring throngs of sun-loving beachgoers to the coast. The most riveting sections of this work are those in which Davis describes the Gulf's ecology as it operates out of human control. Chapters Twelve and Thirteen, "Islands, Shifting Sands of Time," and "Wind and Water," respectively, are gripping disaster stories grounded in compelling portraits of individuals, such as Walter Anderson, who witnessed and were awed by the destructive natural forces at work in the Gulf...

INTERCONNECTEDNESS OF WOMAN AND NATURE WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO WOMAN CHARACTER NANDA KAUL IN ANITA DESAI’S FIRE ON THE MOUNTAIN

The paper focuses on the changing trends in Indian writing in English with special reference to Anita Desai. During the seventy years of its effective history Indian writing in English crossed many milestones and has come to be finally accepted as a major literature of the world. A new group of writers have arrived on the Indian scenario, for example - Anita Desai, Chaman Nahal, Kamala Markandaya, Arun Joshi,Dina Mehta, Salman Rushdie, Shobha De, Vandana Shiva, and the Booker Prize winner Arundhati Roy and many more in list. Here I would like to focus on the new trend in Indian literature and that is ecofeminism as well as her portyal of woman characters in that context. A close reading of Anita Desai and her novels makes us aware of her novel is related to her own experiences and the reality. Attention on this work is focused on the life of Anita Desai, her interest in ecofeminism and how she is influenced by social, economic, political and cultural problems of her age.

A.S. Byatt and the “perpetual traveller”: a reading practice for new British fiction

While most readers enjoyed, or at least admired A.S. Byatt’s Booker prize-winning novel “Possession”, many are puzzled by her work before and since. This essay argues that the problem is not the novels themselves, but rather the way that readers approach them. Conventional reading practices for experimental or postmodern fiction do not enable the reader to understand and enjoy her dense, dizzying work. By examining the intertexts in her novella “Morpho Eugenia,” in particular two imaginary texts written by the protagonist William Adamson, this essay demonstrates how the novella generates a different kind of reading practice. Using Byatt’s metaphor, the essay recommends that readers become “perpetual travelers,” a global model of readership that will enable readers to navigate not only Byatt’s oeuvre and the realm of neo-Victorian fiction, but also the field of new British fiction and the crowded media landscape in which it resides.

Ben Okri’s Aphorisms: “Music on the Wings of a Soaring Bird”

Abstract The title of this presentation is derived from Ben Okri’s latest publication, The Magic Lamp (2017), itself an intersectional text featuring a selection of Rosemary Clunie’s art and Okri’s accompanying ontopoietic/ heightened consciousness prose. This trans-disciplinary paper traces the trajectory and suggests the import of Okri’s blueprints for regaining our true state of being: his aphorisms in Birds of Heaven (1996), A Time for New Dreams (2011) and those in Johns Hopkins’s journal, Callaloo (2015, 38(5): 1042-1043). Reviving a wisdom corpus from antiquity, this Booker Prizewinning Nigerian novelist provides a guiding paremiological exemplum in A Time for New Dreams to counter postmodernity’s obsession with the pleasure principle or fast living and hyper-connectivity: “And out of the wilderness/ The songbird sings/ ‘Nothing is what it seems./ This is a time for new dreams’” (2011: 147). Based on Italian Renaissance’s Desiderius Erasmus’s ([1540] 1982) view on the luminous benefits of concise thought, the argument is that the quintessence of aphorisms or proverbs has been and is their pithy wisdom. A basic premise is that the Imaginatio Creatix communicating in poetic prose aphorisms provides fertile ground for new connections, new depths, and new transversals as well as epiphanies or what Okri terms the alchemy of ‘serendipity’. A fragment in Birds of Heaven (1996: 40) highlights the moral purpose of Okri’s aphorisms: “It is precisely in a broken age that we need mystery and a reawakened sense of wonder: need them in order to be whole again.”

Justice, subalternism, and literary justice: Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger

This article analyses Aravind Adiga’s Booker prize-winning novel The White Tiger (2008) through the lens of justice: philosophical, legal, and literary. What is justice when its agent is subaltern — disprivileged by both caste and class — and delivers justice to himself? I argue that the fictional representation of class, caste, poverty, and violence can be similar to the structuring and translations of justice. By writing his novel from the perspective of a subaltern character, Adiga joins the call by Dalit critics to reconfigure modernity from the interests of the oppressed and the marginalized. In the process, there can be a rethinking of postcolonial literary criticism from within the postcolonial nation, rather than the established perspective of the postcolonial nation understanding its own colonial oppression. My essay provokes wider insights into the implications for justice and human rights as they are informed and represented by literary fiction, subaltern theory, and deconstructive theory. How can a writer conceive of and represent justice — literary justice — by working within and against philosophical and legal conceptions of justice? The philosophers and theorists I invoke include Drucilla Cornell, Jacques Derrida, Wai Chee Dimock, Emmanuel Levinas, Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak, and Robert Young.

Intermediate text and the canonicity of world literature

The notion “intermediate text” refers to a somewhat neglected genre or type of text emerging through the mutual interaction between local literatures and world literature. “Intermediate text” as a category comprises texts from a local literature influenced by the hypercanon of world literature, yet at the same time approaching the canon from a critical and local perspective. Such intermediate texts play a role as critical mediators between the local and the global, also assuming the function of a contestatory canon from a local point of view as well as forming a “shadow canon” on the global scene. In this article, intermediate texts will be characterized by three features: historicity, mediation, and absorption. The primary texts are works by Mo Yan and Julian Barnes, both of whom, as a Nobel Prize winner and a Man Booker Prize winner, have a potential for acquiring both local and international canonicity. Inspired by William Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez, Mo Yan builds on an international canon, while also creating works with strong Chinese elements. Unlike Mo Yan's intermediate texts, Julian Barnes's novels situate themselves within the network of canonical writers such as Gustave Flaubert, yet without “writing back” on local conditions.

Susan Lepselter on Her Prize‐Winning Book

Susan Lepselter on Her Prize‐Winning Book

Science, Technology, and Medicine in the Modern Japanese Empire ed. by David G. Wittner, Philip C. Brown

Reviewed by: Science, Technology, and Medicine in the Modern Japanese Empire ed. by David G. Wittner, Philip C. Brown Daqing Yang (bio) Science, Technology, and Medicine in the Modern Japanese Empire. Edited by David G. Wittner and Philip C. Brown. Routledge, London, 2016. xxii, 290 pages. $145.00, cloth; $49.95, paper; $49.95, E-book. On March 11, 2011, an extremely powerful earthquake struck northeastern Japan. The tsunami it generated killed and injured over 20,000 people and led to meltdowns at the Fukushima Dai’ichi nuclear power plant, producing one of the worst nuclear disasters in history. The catastrophe is a stark reminder of one of the gravest challenges faced by Japan and indeed all of humanity: how to harness modern science and technology without endangering the fragile environment of which human life is but an integral part. By coincidence, several months later, a major conference on Japanese science, technology, and medicine (STM in the professional lingua) was held at Ohio State University. From the over 40 papers presented at that conference, a dozen or so appear in this edited book. They are divided into [End Page 199] four sections: “Science, Technology, and Industry in the Creation of a New Japan,” “State, Experts, and Imperial Medical Policy,” “Medical Specialists and Scientists at Work,” and “Scientific Weapons, Technology, and the Transformation of Pacific War Aims.” Both the conference and the book are dedicated to James Bartholomew, who writes an afterword. Of the 14 chapters, 10 are devoted to medicine or public health either entirely or partially. Temporally, the book covers the entire span of modern Japan, although the Meiji period claims the largest share of chapters. Many chapters are mini-biographies, either on one scientist or engineer or a group of individuals; others are concerned with knowledge production and circulation and policy formulation and implementation, among other things. Together, these chapters are intended to be “something of a marker of the current state of studies in the history of science, technology, and medicine in Japan” (p. 7). The two editors, David Wittner and Philip Brown, achieve this goal admirably in their introduction by providing a historiographical account of the development of Japanese STM studies. After a slow start and briefly under the shadow of Chinese science, they point out, Japanese STM has seen a surge of scholarly works in English since the 1990s. They attribute this phenomenon to a confluence of personal, professional, and cross-disciplinary developments. Still, they lament the fact that until recently the histories of STM in Japan have been largely neglected and marginalized, as they are often subsumed under economic or environmental history. Japan specialists rarely feel the need to consult journals devoted to STM. As this book demonstrates, this should not be the case. In addition to providing a brief summary of each chapter, the editors highlight five themes running through the book: the strong sense of national pride and image associated with Japanese STM; the degree of state involvement in STM endeavors; the influence of religious faith in research choice or policy; the multidirectional transmission of knowledge; and what may be termed “transwar” concerns. Not surprisingly, many contributors address—directly or indirectly—the question of Japan’s “research traditions” that Bartholomew pursued in his 1992 prize-winning book Formation of Science in Japan: Building a Research Tradition. These themes are reflections of historians of Japanese STM in dialogue with Japan studies on the one hand and global STM studies on the other. Situating modern Japan in the worldwide development is an inherent strength of STM studies and is evident in many chapters, whether on basic science or epidemiological research or population theory. Aleksandra Kobiljski’s chapter on Shimomura Kōtarō, a “Christian scientist” who studied in the United States, shows the intersection of religion and science, traditional ideas, and practical concerns in Meiji Japan. In his examination of several leading Japanese physicists in a broad context, Ito Kenji proposes four questions they all faced—possibility, legitimacy, strategy, and originality—and [End Page 200] points to the impact of “self-Orientalism” on these scientists. James Bartholomew draws from his ongoing work on Japanese Nobel laureates and nominees and returns to the question of the...

Dis/Graceful Liberties: Textual Libertinism/ Libertine Texts in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace

Abstract This essay addresses J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, a Booker Prize winner in 1999. The novel captures South African political and cultural turmoil attending the post-apartheid transitional period. Far from overlooking the political allegory, I propose instead to expand on a topic only cursorily developed elsewhere, namely liberty and license. The two terms foreground the textual dynamics of the novel as they compete and/or negotiate meaning and ascendency. I argue that Disgrace is energized by Coetzee’s belief in a total liberty of artistic production. Sex is philosophically problematized in the text and advocated as a serious issue that deserves artistic investigation without restriction or censorship. This essay looks into the subtle libertinism in Coetzee’s text, which displays pornographic overtones without exhibiting a flamboyant libertinage. Disgrace acquires its libertine gesture from its dialogue with several literary works steeped in libertinism. The troubled relationship between the aesthetic and the ethical yields an ambiguous text that invites a responsible act of reading.

Le Mot juste: An interview with Howard Jacobson by Anne-Marie Picard

ABSTRACTAnne-Marie Picard interviews British novelist, Booker Prize winner, and journalist Howard Jacobson about his satirical novel, Pussy (Penguin, 2016). In the shocking aftermath of Trump's election, with as much Dickens as Swift, and memories of Rabelais, the novelist writes “in a fury of disbelief,” wanting “a fast attack with no quarter given. No quarter given, not only to Fracassus,” the Trump character, “but the world in which his rise was made possible.”

“No one owns language”: The 2016 Man Booker Prize winner Paul Beatty discusses “offensive” language and teaching styles

“No one owns language”: The 2016 Man Booker Prize winner Paul Beatty discusses “offensive” language and teaching styles

An Interview with Sudeep Sen

Sudeep Sen's prize-winning books include: Postmarked India: New & Selected Poems(HarperCollins), Rain, Aria (A K Ramanujan Translation Award), The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry (ed.), Fracta...

At Home in Johannesburg?: Rethinking Cosmopolitanism through TJ/Double Negative, the Joint Project between David Goldblatt and Ivan Vladislavić

This article examines the cosmopolitan character of TJ/Double Negative (2010) and argues that the prize-winning photography book, co-produced by the South African photographer David Goldblatt and writer and editor Ivan Vladislavic, is both a symptomatic expression of uneven development and a self-conscious interrogation of that unevenness. The book comprises two ‘parts’: Goldblatt’s iconic photographic series, TJ : Johannesburg Photographs 1948-2010 , and Vladislavic’s novel Double Negative, a metafiction that refracts the story of modern Johannesburg – but also of Goldblatt’s career and the concomitant genre evolution of South African photojournalism from local ‘documentary’ to world-renowned ‘art’ – as it is reconstructed in TJ . This experiment in interdiscursivity is significant not simply for being the first of its kind – ‘a unique event in publishing’, as the publisher contrasto declares in its marketing blurb - but rather because through this collaborative but also multi-modal venture a new mode of critical cosmopolitanism in world-literature might be discerned.