Pub Date : 2023-03-15DOI: 10.1215/00267929-10335688
Jennifer Spitzer
Virginia Woolf seems to have agreed with Georg Lukács about the static quality of details in turn-of-the century fiction: she too condemned the pictorialism that transformed human subjects and their environments into “still lives.” Her own details are anything but static: they are always in motion, zooming in and zooming out, demanding close observation while also enlarging the frame to the global impact of war or the marginalization of women. Woolf uses details dynamically to move between material objects and human minds, and also to move across scales, and thus produces a specifically narrative theory of the detail. This is also a political theory: the fact that she places large and small side by side, often in the same sentence, speaks to her commitment to tracing connections between the particular and the abstract, the mundane and the mystical, the internal world of thoughts and feelings and the external world of actions.
{"title":"Scaling the Detail: Woolfian Proportions","authors":"Jennifer Spitzer","doi":"10.1215/00267929-10335688","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-10335688","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Virginia Woolf seems to have agreed with Georg Lukács about the static quality of details in turn-of-the century fiction: she too condemned the pictorialism that transformed human subjects and their environments into “still lives.” Her own details are anything but static: they are always in motion, zooming in and zooming out, demanding close observation while also enlarging the frame to the global impact of war or the marginalization of women. Woolf uses details dynamically to move between material objects and human minds, and also to move across scales, and thus produces a specifically narrative theory of the detail. This is also a political theory: the fact that she places large and small side by side, often in the same sentence, speaks to her commitment to tracing connections between the particular and the abstract, the mundane and the mystical, the internal world of thoughts and feelings and the external world of actions.","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":"38 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75930997","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-15DOI: 10.1215/00267929-10335706
Dora Zhang
Departing from the premise that novelistic details particularize and locate characters in a sociocultural matrix, this essay examines what happens to the detail in texts that refuse certain norms of specification. The essay focuses on the French writer Anne F. Garréta’s novel Sphinx (1986), which avoids all linguistic markers of gender for its central pair of lovers, and Toni Morrison’s short story “Recitatif” (1983), which never reveals the racial identities of its two protagonists, one of whom is white and one Black. Drawing on Georg Lukács’s discussion of realism and typicality, the essay considers how these unmarked texts mediate between individual and type, as well as their approaches to the representation of difference.
{"title":"The Mark of the Detail: Universalism, Type, Difference","authors":"Dora Zhang","doi":"10.1215/00267929-10335706","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-10335706","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Departing from the premise that novelistic details particularize and locate characters in a sociocultural matrix, this essay examines what happens to the detail in texts that refuse certain norms of specification. The essay focuses on the French writer Anne F. Garréta’s novel Sphinx (1986), which avoids all linguistic markers of gender for its central pair of lovers, and Toni Morrison’s short story “Recitatif” (1983), which never reveals the racial identities of its two protagonists, one of whom is white and one Black. Drawing on Georg Lukács’s discussion of realism and typicality, the essay considers how these unmarked texts mediate between individual and type, as well as their approaches to the representation of difference.","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":"12 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79859840","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-15DOI: 10.1215/00267929-10335724
Jennifer Spitzer, Shirley Lau Wong
{"title":"Editorial Introduction","authors":"Jennifer Spitzer, Shirley Lau Wong","doi":"10.1215/00267929-10335724","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-10335724","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135648437","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-15DOI: 10.1215/00267929-10335733
Shirley Lau Wong
Literary settings are often celebrated for richly representing the many details of a particular place. The close association between detail and setting stems from the realist presumption that detail constitutes what Roland Barthes calls an “index of . . . atmosphere”: the accumulation of details provides an authentic sense of place. But the detail’s usual role in constructing immersive worlds seems antithetical to the project of the so-called global novel, which has often been characterized by placelessness and by cosmopolitan, jet-setting characters. This essay examines the relationship between place, detail, and narrative in Teju Cole’s Open City (2011), which has often been praised for its intimate portrayal of New York. With Open City Cole offers a metanarrative commentary on the detail’s function in previous literary periods and modes, from the nineteenth-century novel’s harnessing of detail to create plush, seemingly real worlds to modernist and postmodern fiction’s interrogation of the detail’s supposed referentiality. Engaging with the detail’s many legacies, Cole underscores the latent violence of detail in the global novel, namely, its capacity to draw something into the foreground or make it recede into the background.
文学背景常常以丰富地表现一个特定地方的许多细节而闻名。细节和背景之间的密切联系源于现实主义的假设，即细节构成了罗兰·巴特所说的“…的索引”。“氛围”:细节的积累提供了一个真实的地方感。但是，细节通常在构建沉浸式世界中的作用，似乎与所谓的全球小说的项目是对立的，后者的特点往往是无地域性和世界主义的、喷气式飞机上的角色。本文考察了泰朱·科尔(Teju Cole)的《开放之城》(Open City, 2011)中地点、细节和叙事之间的关系，这部作品因其对纽约的亲密描绘而经常受到称赞。在《开放城市》一书中，科尔对细节在以前的文学时期和文学模式中的作用进行了元叙事的评论，从19世纪小说对细节的利用来创造豪华的、看似真实的世界，到现代主义和后现代主义小说对细节所谓的参照性的质疑。通过研究细节的诸多遗产，科尔强调了全球小说中细节的潜在暴力，也就是说，它有能力把一些东西拉到前景中，或者让它退到背景中。
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Pub Date : 2023-03-15DOI: 10.1215/00267929-10335715
C. Levine
This essay makes the case that most methods in literary studies explicitly privilege the detail but covertly depend on structures. The article turns to structuralism, specifically to the debate between Vladimir Propp and Claude Lévi-Strauss about the role of the detail, for a method that keeps structures in view, even while focusing on details. Suggesting that structuralist methods could usefully reshape the teaching of literature now, the essay reads two novels that both depend on and depart from traditional fairy-tale patterns: Jane Yolen’s Briar Rose (1992) and Helen Oyeyemi’s Boy, Snow, Bird (2014).
本文认为，文学研究中的大多数方法都明确强调细节，但暗地里却依赖于结构。本文转向结构主义，特别是弗拉基米尔·普罗普(Vladimir Propp)和克劳德·l vi-施特劳斯(Claude l vi- strauss)之间关于细节作用的辩论，寻求一种即使在关注细节的同时也能保持结构的方法。这篇文章认为结构主义方法可以有效地重塑现在的文学教学，并阅读了两部既依赖于传统童话模式又背离传统童话模式的小说:简·约伦的《蔷薇》(1992)和海伦·欧耶米的《男孩、雪、鸟》(2014)。
{"title":"Structures All the Way Down: Literary Methods and the Detail","authors":"C. Levine","doi":"10.1215/00267929-10335715","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-10335715","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay makes the case that most methods in literary studies explicitly privilege the detail but covertly depend on structures. The article turns to structuralism, specifically to the debate between Vladimir Propp and Claude Lévi-Strauss about the role of the detail, for a method that keeps structures in view, even while focusing on details. Suggesting that structuralist methods could usefully reshape the teaching of literature now, the essay reads two novels that both depend on and depart from traditional fairy-tale patterns: Jane Yolen’s Briar Rose (1992) and Helen Oyeyemi’s Boy, Snow, Bird (2014).","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":"248 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76984705","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-15DOI: 10.1215/00267929-10335742
Wendy Allison Lee
This essay examines the work of detail in contemporary Asian American metafiction by reconsidering Georg Lukács’s understanding of description as a mode of fiction that transforms humans into observers and objects via an excess of detail. Lukács’s work has informed views of how “exotic” details in Asian American fiction turn Asian American characters and people into objects of entertainment and edification for predominantly white readerships. Yet works of Asian American metafiction such as Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior, Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats, and Nam Le’s “Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice” deploy description to unsettle detail’s objectifying effects. Their authors invent techniques of deploying racist and exotic details to reveal how the logic of liberal multiculturalism and diversity rather than the aesthetics of description transforms Asian American persons into things.
{"title":"Unsettling Ethnic Detail in Asian American Metafiction","authors":"Wendy Allison Lee","doi":"10.1215/00267929-10335742","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-10335742","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay examines the work of detail in contemporary Asian American metafiction by reconsidering Georg Lukács’s understanding of description as a mode of fiction that transforms humans into observers and objects via an excess of detail. Lukács’s work has informed views of how “exotic” details in Asian American fiction turn Asian American characters and people into objects of entertainment and edification for predominantly white readerships. Yet works of Asian American metafiction such as Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior, Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats, and Nam Le’s “Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice” deploy description to unsettle detail’s objectifying effects. Their authors invent techniques of deploying racist and exotic details to reveal how the logic of liberal multiculturalism and diversity rather than the aesthetics of description transforms Asian American persons into things.","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":"212 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78261003","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1215/00267929-10189279
Angela Brintlinger
{"title":"Medical Storyworlds: Health, Illness, and Bodies in Russian and European Literature at the Turn of the Twentieth Century","authors":"Angela Brintlinger","doi":"10.1215/00267929-10189279","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-10189279","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":"25 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84786692","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1215/00267929-10189270
Amit S. Yahav
This essay examines the theory of leisure that Samuel Johnson presents in his Idler series and that Jane Austen engages in her novel Mansfield Park. Just as productivity and vigilance are becoming unassailable values, Johnson and Austen publish popular works designed to insert breaks into the culture of ceaseless striving. Their theory of leisure revalues idling as a state of beneficial, albeit transient, mindlessness and develops forms of representation that, instead of cultivating an edifying point of view—of refined knowledge, judgment, or feeling—promotes an occasional letting go. Johnson uses the proliferation and Austen the suspension of points of view to defend the value of reading materials that solicit relaxation and afford cheap pleasures for the many, or at least the many more. Both the Idler and Mansfield Park advocate for the redistribution of leisure in time rather than across classes of persons, thus transforming idling from a characterological deficiency into a periodic respite that is necessary for all and that all are entitled to.
{"title":"In Praise of Idling: Johnson, Austen, and Literary Leisure","authors":"Amit S. Yahav","doi":"10.1215/00267929-10189270","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-10189270","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay examines the theory of leisure that Samuel Johnson presents in his Idler series and that Jane Austen engages in her novel Mansfield Park. Just as productivity and vigilance are becoming unassailable values, Johnson and Austen publish popular works designed to insert breaks into the culture of ceaseless striving. Their theory of leisure revalues idling as a state of beneficial, albeit transient, mindlessness and develops forms of representation that, instead of cultivating an edifying point of view—of refined knowledge, judgment, or feeling—promotes an occasional letting go. Johnson uses the proliferation and Austen the suspension of points of view to defend the value of reading materials that solicit relaxation and afford cheap pleasures for the many, or at least the many more. Both the Idler and Mansfield Park advocate for the redistribution of leisure in time rather than across classes of persons, thus transforming idling from a characterological deficiency into a periodic respite that is necessary for all and that all are entitled to.","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":"9 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78851832","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1215/00267929-10189243
Francesca T. Royster
{"title":"Read Until You Understand: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature","authors":"Francesca T. Royster","doi":"10.1215/00267929-10189243","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-10189243","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":"11 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88704233","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1215/00267929-10189288
Carolyn Betensky
{"title":"Vagrancy in the Victorian Age: Representing the Wandering Poor in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture","authors":"Carolyn Betensky","doi":"10.1215/00267929-10189288","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-10189288","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":"11949 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77522046","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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