Journal of Modern Literature articles from March 2011

Journal of Modern Literature archives from March 2011

Liberalism and lyricism, or Karl Shapiro's elegy for identity.(Report)
March 22, 2011... What happened to Karl Shapiro? He returned from active duty in WWII the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of V-Letter and was shortly thereafter appointed poetry consultant to the Library of Congress (a position now termed Poet Laureate). He left...

James Schuyler's beef with ordinary language.(Critical essay)
March 22, 2011... No one takes his lightness more seriously than I. --James Schuyler ORDINARY SUBJECTS, ORDINARY LANGUAGE It has become axiomatic in commentary on James Schuyler to call him a poet who celebrates everyday experiences and ordinary things....

On superficiality: Truman Capote and the ceremony of Style.(Critical essay)
March 22, 2011... "And when all these weighty matters are off my hands," said Genji at last, "I hope I shall have a little time left for things which I really enjoy--flowers, autumn leaves, the sky." -MURASAKI SHIKIBU, THE TALE OF GENJI, 11TH CENTURY How...

Love and Disgrace: reading Coetzee in the light (and love) of Barthes.(Roland Barthes on J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace)(Critical essay)
March 22, 2011... The scene is like the Sentence: structurally, there is no obligation for it to stop; no internal constraint exhausts it, because, as in the Sentence, once the core is given (the fact, the decision), the expansions are infinitely renewable. Only...

Possible worlds: trans-world travel, haecceity and grief in Jacques Roubaud's The Plurality of Worlds of Lewis.(Critical essay)
March 22, 2011... Jacques Roubaud's young wife, Alix Cleo, died tragically of a pulmonary embolism in 1983. She was 31. By Roubaud's account, he had known Alix for just over three years and, following her death, he stopped writing and fell silent for thirty...

Catalyzing Prufrock.(J. Alfred Prufrock)(Critical essay)
March 22, 2011... According to T.S. Eliot, in 1912, a year after completing the "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" as it appears today, (1) Eliot made "some additions" to the poem, but soon deleted them at the advice of his Harvard friend and fellow poet...

Ramazani's global vocabulary for poetry.( A Transnational Poetics)(Book review)
March 22, 2011... Jahan Ramazani. A Transnational Poetics. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 2009. ix, 221 pp. $29.00 cloth. As a study of poetry and poetics, Jahan Ramazani's dynamic new book, A Transnational Poetics (2009) stands out from the majority of...

On the borderlands of loneliness and community in twentieth century German-Jewish literature.(When Kafka Says We: Uncommon Communities in German-Jewish Literature)(Book review)
March 22, 2011... Vivian Liska. When Kafka Says We: Uncommon Communities in German-Jewish Literature. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2009. vi, 239 pp. $29.95 cloth. In a letter from 7 October 1916, Franz Kafka asked Felice Bauer if she could tell him what, as a...

In the vortex of modernity: writing blackness, blindness and insight.(Critical essay)
March 22, 2011... Native Son is a story about reading. Or, perhaps more accurately, about misreading. An obscure incident from Book Three might be taken to represent, by synecdoche, a narrative aesthetic founded upon what we term here the novel's rhetoric of...

Entwining tongues: postcolonial theory, post-soviet literatures and bilingualism in Chingiz Aitmatov's I dol'she veka dlitsia den'.(Report)
March 22, 2011... Published in the wake of the December 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Chingiz Aimatov's novel, I dol'she veka dlitsia den (The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years), was deeply implicated in the ambivalent and contradictory politics of...

Amitav Ghosh and the aesthetic turn in postcolonial studies.(Critical essay)
March 22, 2011... While a renewed interest in aesthetics is apparent throughout the humanities, it is particularly striking in postcolonial studies. As recently as 2003, Deepika Bahri lamented what she saw as a "remarkable lack of a sufficiently developed...

Only connecting?: E. M. Forster, empire broadcasting and the ethics of distance.(Critical essay)
March 22, 2011... In the introduction to the collection of his 1993 Reith Lectures--a series given annually to celebrate the British Broadcasting Corporation's history of public service broadcasting and to pay tribute to its first director-general, John Reith,...

Erratum.(Correction notice)
March 22, 2011... Erratum: As a result of a most regrettable editorial error in JML 34.1 (Fall 2010), Daniel Katz's "James Schuyler's Epistolary Poetry: Things, Postcards, Ekphrasis" (p. 143-161) did not represent the final state of the essay approved by the...