Pub Date : 2023-10-01DOI: 10.1353/mlr.2023.a907868
Reviewed by: Idealizing Women in the Italian Renaissance ed. by Elena Brizio and Marco Piana Alex E. Tadel Idealizing Women in the Italian Renaissance. Ed. by Elena Brizio and Marco Piana. (Essays and Studies, 55) Toronto: Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies. 2022. 305 pp. $49.95. ISBN 978–0–7727–1106–9. This edited volume brings some valuable contributions to the study of Italian Renaissance women. Examining women's idealization between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries from various and sometimes complementary angles, it contains case studies in visual art, literature, philosophy, and theatre. The editors' Introduction outlines some of the issues at stake, describing the idealization of women 'both as a form of oppression and as a tool for social recognition' (p. 9) and positing a 'paradigm shift in the ideal of woman' (p. 10) in the Renaissance, while missing the opportunity to address some important questions, such as whether and how idealizations of women differ from the widespread Renaissance discourse of exemplarity. The editors state that their intention is to showcase the range of the debate on women, yet additional theoretical reflection together with more focus on idealization in some of the essays might have further clarified the specific issues involved in the study of this topic. Judith B. Steinhoff's 'Mandates for Women's Mourning in the Early Renaissance: Paintings and the Law in Trecento Florence and Siena' compares male and female [End Page 629] mourners in depictions of the Lamentation by Giottino and Ambrogio Lorenzetti to the gendered regulation of mourning in Sienese law. Sandra Cardarelli's A Depiction of Virtue and Beauty: The Patronage of the Saint Ursula Fresco in the Church of San Giorgio at Montemerano' analyses the only known example of female patronage in a church in the Maremma region in the fifteenth century and discusses Saint Ursula as a model of female piety. In 'Idealizing the Female Hero: Representations of Judith in Seventeenth-Century Italian Painting', Mathilde Legeay surveys the treatment of the problematic motif of the heroic female warrior and seducer in the work of artists such as Giovanni Baglione, Caravaggio, and Virginia Vezzi. Benedetta Lamanna's 'A Good Woman, a Good Wife: Strategies of Idealization in Sperone Speroni's Dialogo della dignità delle donne' examines the dynamics between patriarchal and proto-feminist discourses on women in Speroni's dialogue, whose ambiguities in this matter she compares to Castiglione's Il cortegiano. Francesca D'Alessandro Behr's 'Philosophy, Religion and the Praise of Women in Lucrezia Marinella' discusses the recurrent presentation of women as ethically and intellectually competent across Marinella's œuvre and focuses on her engagement with Neoplatonism. In 'Female Exemplarity, Identity and Devotion in Lucrezia Marinella's Rime Sacre (1603)', Sarah Rolfe Prodan explores female saints as models of meditation in Marinella's spiritual verse, with ref
书评:埃琳娜·布里齐奥和马尔科·皮亚纳·亚历克斯·e·塔德尔主编的《意大利文艺复兴时期的理想化女性》。埃琳娜·布里齐奥和马可·皮亚纳主编。(论文与研究，55)多伦多:文艺复兴与改革研究中心，2022。305页，49.95美元。ISBN 978-0-7727-1106-9。这个编辑卷带来了一些有价值的贡献，研究意大利文艺复兴时期的妇女。从不同的角度(有时是互补的角度)审视14至17世纪之间女性的理想化，它包含了视觉艺术、文学、哲学和戏剧的案例研究。编辑们的引言概述了一些关键问题，描述了女性的理想化“既是一种压迫形式，也是一种社会认可的工具”(第9页)，并假设文艺复兴时期“女性理想的范式转变”(第10页)，同时错过了解决一些重要问题的机会，例如女性的理想化是否以及如何与文艺复兴时期广泛的典范话语不同。编辑们表示，他们的目的是展示关于女性的辩论的范围，然而，在一些文章中，额外的理论反思以及对理想化的更多关注可能会进一步澄清涉及这一主题研究的具体问题。朱迪思·b·斯坦霍夫(Judith B. Steinhoff)的《文艺复兴早期妇女哀悼的规定:特伦托·佛罗伦萨和锡耶纳的绘画和法律》将乔蒂诺和安布罗吉奥·洛伦泽蒂(Ambrogio Lorenzetti)描绘的哀悼中的男性和女性与锡耶纳法律中哀悼的性别规定进行了比较。桑德拉·卡达雷利的《美德与美的描绘:蒙特梅拉诺圣乔治教堂圣乌苏拉壁画的赞助》分析了15世纪马雷玛地区教堂中唯一已知的女性赞助的例子，并讨论了圣乌苏拉作为女性虔诚的典范。在《理想化的女性英雄:朱迪思在17世纪意大利绘画中的表现》一书中，玛蒂尔德·莱格伊调查了乔瓦尼·巴格里奥内、卡拉瓦乔和维吉尼亚·维齐等艺术家作品中对英雄女战士和诱惑者的问题母题的处理。Benedetta Lamanna的《一个好女人，一个好妻子:Speroni's Dialogo della dignit delle donne中的理想化策略》考察了Speroni对话中关于女性的父权话语和原始女权主义话语之间的动态关系，她将其在这个问题上的模棱两可与Castiglione的Il cortegiano进行了比较。Francesca D' alessandro Behr的《Lucrezia Marinella的哲学，宗教和对女性的赞美》讨论了在Marinella的œuvre中女性作为道德和智力能力的反复呈现，并关注了她与新柏拉图主义的接触。在《卢克雷齐娅·玛丽内拉的圣歌中的女性典范、身份和奉献》(1603)中，萨拉·罗尔夫·普罗丹探讨了玛丽内拉的精神诗歌中作为冥想典范的女性圣徒，参考了她对短语的使用以及她对女性美的宗教意义的看法。罗莎琳德·克尔的《理想化的女演员:叛逆的女性声音》介绍了16世纪下半叶的第一代女演员，并研究了她们作为女演员和剧作家对性别动态的描绘。在《理想的化身:文森扎·阿玛尼，第一位女主角》一书中，塞蕾娜·莱耶娜着重于1570年阿玛尼去世时发表的诗歌，并分析了这位女演员诗歌理想化中所使用的彼得拉克派和新柏拉图派的拓扑。皮娜·帕尔马(Pina Palma)的《献给他的妻子和情人:蓬塔诺的爱情》(For his Wife and Lover: Pontano’s De amore conugali)对蓬塔诺的收藏进行了讨论，并将其与一套古典和当代的杂文进行了比较。劳拉·吉安内蒂的《意大利五十周年的女性气质和饮食文化》研究了伊莎贝拉·德·埃斯特的信件、Moderata Fonte的《Il merito delle donne》和弗吉尼亚·伽利莱的通信中对食物的讨论与当代行为文学中对女性和食物的看法不同的例子。在《理想的姐妹，理想的诗人:卡桑德拉和加斯帕拉·斯坦帕》一书中，简·泰勒斯考虑了一个罕见的案例，一个姐妹在死后精心编排了一位女诗人的作品，1554年的《麦当娜·加斯帕拉·斯坦帕》，她认为这可能与加斯帕拉死前计划的一个合集有关。正如编辑们所承诺的，这本书提供了一个……
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Pub Date : 2023-10-01DOI: 10.1353/mlr.2023.a907850
Reviewed by: #MeToo and Literary Studies: Reading, Writing, and Teaching about Sexual Violence and Rape Culture ed. by Mary K. Holland and Heather Hewett Julie Anne Taddeo #MeToo and Literary Studies: Reading, Writing, and Teaching about Sexual Violence and Rape Culture. Ed. by Mary K. Holland and Heather Hewett. London: Bloomsbury Academic. 2021. xiii+ 415 pp. £90 (pbk £24.99). ISBN 978–1–5013–7274–2 (pbk 978–1–5013–7273–5). Twice a year, students on my university campus participate in the Clothesline Project using T-shirts to reveal, perhaps for the first time, their own experiences as [End Page 601] sexual assault survivors. Thousands of students, faculty, and staff walk by, some stopping to read and photograph the shirts, and perhaps recognize themselves in these brief accounts from mostly young women, but also some men, about what happened to them as children and/or young adults. The Clothesline Project was created in 1990 by the Cape Cod Women's Defense Agenda; its website explains that 'during the same time 58,000 soldiers were killed in the Vietnam War, 51,000 U.S. women were killed by the men who claimed to love them' (<https://clotheslineproject.info/about.html> [accessed 20 January 2023]). More than three decades later, it remains an example of what Mary K. Holland and Heather Hewett propose in their Introduction to this edited collection: that we use literature in its varied forms—whether it is a medieval text, digital hashtags, or brief stories on T-shirts—to critique rape culture and act to end it. As Holland and Hewett remind us in their Introduction, #MeToo began in 2006 with Tarana Burke's revelation on MySpace of her own sexual assault, but it took the star power of actors such as Alyssa Milano and Ashley Judd to make the hashtag go viral in 2017, in the aftermath of the arrest of Harvey Weinstein. Since 2017, academic scholarship has responded with special journal issues and monographs that largely re-examine canonical works through the lens of #MeToo. Holland and Hewett's edited collection, however, stands out not only for its intersectional and international approach to texts that span two thousand years—from Ovid to Roxane Gay, from medieval England to postcolonial India—but also for the book's second half, which offers readers pedagogical approaches and practices, with examples of both successful and unsuccessful classroom instruction. In such a brief review, it is difficult to single out any particular chapter among the twenty-eight contributions, but all of them highlight the potential for literary studies to effect change in and beyond the university classroom. Holland and Hewett observe that hashtag activism 'has its roots in over two centuries of activism, advocacy work, and writing about sexual violence' (p. 3). Likewise, hashtag activism invites scholars and students to engage in new interpretations of old texts; one such example is described in Chapter 8, in which twenty-first-century Indian college students, respon
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Pub Date : 2023-10-01DOI: 10.1353/mlr.2023.a907849
Reviewed by: Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study by John Guillory Ritchie Robertson Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study. By John Guillory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2022. xvi+ 407 pp. $29. ISBN 978–0–226–82130–6. In these loosely linked essays, John Guillory uses his deep familiarity with the history of scholarship, teaching, and rhetoric to view the modern university from 'a certain orbital distance' (p. 71). He begins with a sociologically informed account of how the teaching of English in American universities became, in the nineteenth century, an organized profession which issued its own credentials (the Ph.D.). Professionalization gave academics a degree of autonomy and social standing. Departments of English and modern languages inherited two traditions: that of belles-lettres (descending from Hugh Blair's occupancy of the Chair of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres at Edinburgh in 1762–83) and philology, imported from Germany. After long contests between scholars and critics, the two reached an accommodation in the mid-twentieth century. Their subject was understood as 'literary criticism', and their approaches could be reconciled in the person of the 'scholar-critic'. Some academics, however, felt a lack of purpose, and were impelled by the new social movements of the 1960s to politicize their courses in the hope of effecting social change. While such teaching has probably strengthened liberal attitudes among the college-educated, it has not changed the world, nor has it resolved a widespread uncertainty about the point of teaching literature. Guillory diagnoses a persistent tendency in literary studies to overestimate the potential impact of one's work and then be disappointed when such impact is not visible. To make matters worse, the role of literature in people's lives has diminished as that of other media, especially film, has increased: Guillory mentions this topic several times without exploring its implications. What should literary academics do? Guillory does not put forward an agenda for literary study, but he does his best to clarify what teachers of literature can and should do. The essay 'Monuments and Documents' starts from the continual need to justify the study of literature (and the humanities generally) by contrast especially with STEM subjects. Rather than making implausible claims for the social value of the humanities or exaggerating their power to teach critical thinking, we should be clear about what humanities departments actually study. Whereas the sciences are defined by their method, the humanities are defined by their object. Borrowing his terms from an essay by Erwin Panofsky, 'The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline' (1938), Guillory argues that the humanities study monuments surviving from the past in which we are interested for whatever reason, and study them by means of documents. Panofsky's example is a fifteenth-century German altar
书评:约翰·吉洛里·里奇·罗伯逊的《职业批评:文学研究组织论文集》。约翰·吉洛里著。芝加哥:芝加哥大学出版社，2022。Xvi + 407页，29美元。ISBN 978-0-226-82130-6。在这些松散联系的文章中，约翰·吉洛里利用他对学术、教学和修辞学历史的深刻熟悉，从“一定的轨道距离”(第71页)来看待现代大学。他首先从社会学角度阐述了19世纪美国大学的英语教学如何成为一种有组织的职业，并颁发自己的证书(博士学位)。专业化赋予了学术一定程度的自主权和社会地位。英语系和现代语言系继承了两种传统:文学传统(源自休·布莱尔1762年至1783年在爱丁堡担任修辞和文学系主任)和从德国引进的文献学传统。经过学者和评论家的长期争论，双方在20世纪中期达成和解。他们的主题被理解为“文学批评”，他们的方法可以在“学者批评”的人身上得到调和。然而，一些学者感到缺乏目标，并在20世纪60年代新社会运动的推动下，将他们的课程政治化，希望能影响社会变革。虽然这样的教学可能加强了受过大学教育的人的自由主义态度，但它并没有改变世界，也没有解决人们对文学教学意义的普遍不确定性。吉洛里发现，文学研究中存在一种持续存在的倾向，即高估自己作品的潜在影响，而当这种影响并不明显时，又会感到失望。更糟糕的是，文学在人们生活中的作用已经减弱，而其他媒体，尤其是电影的作用却在增加:吉洛里多次提到这个话题，但没有探讨它的含义。文学学者应该怎么做?纪洛里没有提出文学研究的议程，但他尽力阐明了文学教师能做什么和应该做什么。《纪念碑和文献》这篇文章的出发点是不断需要证明文学(以及一般的人文学科)的研究是合理的，尤其是与STEM学科相比。我们不应该对人文学科的社会价值做出令人难以置信的断言，也不应该夸大人文学科在教授批判性思维方面的能力，而应该清楚地了解人文学科系实际上在研究什么。科学是由它们的方法定义的，而人文是由它们的对象定义的。借用欧文·帕诺夫斯基(Erwin Panofsky)的一篇文章《作为人文学科的艺术史》(The History of Art as a humanities Discipline, 1938)中的术语，吉洛里认为，人文学科研究的是那些我们出于某种原因对其感兴趣的历史遗迹，并通过文献来研究它们。帕诺夫斯基的例子是一幅15世纪的德国祭坛画，其中有一份合同留存了下来。但一份文件可能具有“纪念性”，反之亦然:古学家可能主要对合同感兴趣，并使用祭坛画来记录其重要性。虽然这种方法也适用于当代文学，但它承认过去的记录是文学研究的典范对象，当许多学生对古代文学变得陌生和没有吸引力时，这种关注是受欢迎的。在他的结束语中，吉洛里提出了将文学作为一门学科进行研究的五个基本原理:“一种合理的程序，用来确定我们对一个对象的认识”(第344页)。它们包括阅读和写作的训练，以及道德判断的改进，这需要超越直觉上的“相关性”(这个当前的陈词滥调显然激怒了他)。他肯定文学研究的目的包括审美愉悦，但补充说，这种愉悦可能不会立即获得:它需要努力和知识，是“受过教育的经验的结果”(第378页)。本章没有设定一个议程，而是对学习文学的目的和可能的回报给出了一个现实的评估。纪洛谈到了更多的话题。有些是历史性的。他回顾了修辞学的历史，强调了教育写作中方言取代拉丁语和笔试取代口头表演所代表的分水岭。
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Pub Date : 2023-10-01DOI: 10.1353/mlr.2023.a907845
Reviewed by: The Women Who Invented Twentieth-Century Children's Literature by Elizabeth West Yuanyuan Zhang and Haifeng Hui The Women Who Invented Twentieth-Century Children's Literature. By Elizabeth West. London: Routledge. 2022. vii+ 260 pp. £120 (ebk £36.99). ISBN 978–1–032308–27–2 (ebk 978–1–003306–87–0). For children's literature, the decades from the 1930s to the 1960s are traditionally dismissed as the mundane 'Brass Age' (p. 4), overshadowed by the Golden Ages preceding and succeeding this period. In this book, however, Elizabeth West conducts an insightful reinvestigation of this period and testifies to its significant impact on modern children's literature. West concentrates particularly on the 'forgotten' (p. 1) dedication of a group of female writers, illustrators, editors, and librarians, or, in her collective term, the 'bookwomen', active in Britain and the United States between the 1930s and the 1960s. Their commitment to ensuring the quality of children's books in terms of both content and material form not only aided the production of classics still warmly received today, but also laid the foundation for some of the most crucial criteria for children's publishing, and 'invented', as the title of the book suggests, children's literature in the twentieth century. West resurrects the contributions of these bookwomen in an ambitious total of nine chapters. In the Introduction she explains her research focus and presents the principal preoccupations in children's literature and inter-war socio-cultural frameworks that form the basis for her subsequent chapters. In Chapter 1 the author gives a comprehensive overview of the representative British and American bookwomen and their interconnections. Chapters 2–7 each focus on a different aspect of children's literature or on a specific genre, featuring one or several bookwomen relevant to each topic. Chapter 2 concerns children's editors, highlighting the work of Eleanor Graham, the prominent founding editor of Penguin's Puffin [End Page 593] books. Chapter 3 uses Eileen Colwell's librarianship at Hendon Public Library to discuss the evolving role of children's librarians. Chapter 4 concentrates on how female children's authors managed to shine in the inter-war period by examining the successful career of Ursula Moray Williams, who managed to combine her writing talent with sound commercial sense so as to maintain long-lasting popularity. Chapter 5 centres on materiality and how bookwomen collaborated to negotiate content, design, wartime shortages, and commercial considerations of cost and profit. Chapter 6 examines picture books, concentrating on Kathleen Hale and her enduring Orlando series. Chapter 7 explores radical children's literature and records Amabel Williams-Ellis's efforts in embedding unconventional ideas in her works for the young. In the concluding chapter, West once again lauds the undervalued endeavour of the bookwomen. West's enquiry brings to light a largely neglected
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Pub Date : 2023-10-01DOI: 10.1353/mlr.2023.a907834
Samuel Donoghue
Abstract: This article analyses the ethically suspect processes of identification and empathy mobilized by Miguel Dalmau's 2009 work of perpetrator fiction, La noche del Diablo . It draws on narratological perspectives on character identification and narrative empathy and on philosophical discussions on the necessity of attempting to comprehend the motivations of those who commit evil acts. Informed by these narratological and philosophical insights, the article argues that perpetrator fiction about the Spanish Civil War is a psychologically useful tool for expanding our understanding of how individuals commit atrocities and for enhancing our awareness of ourselves as potential agents of perpetration.
摘要:本文分析了米格尔·达尔茂(Miguel Dalmau) 2009年的犯罪小说《暗黑之夜》(La noche del Diablo)所引发的认同和共情的伦理怀疑过程。它借鉴了叙事学视角下的人物识别和叙事共情，以及试图理解恶人动机的必要性的哲学讨论。通过这些叙事学和哲学的见解，文章认为，关于西班牙内战的犯罪者小说是一种心理上有用的工具，可以扩展我们对个人如何犯下暴行的理解，并增强我们作为潜在犯罪者的意识。
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Pub Date : 2023-10-01DOI: 10.1353/mlr.2023.a907877
Reviewed by: Teaching Nabokov's 'Lolita' in the #MeToo Era ed. by Eléna Rakhimova-Sommers, and: Reimagining Nabokov: Pedagogies for the 21st Century ed. by Sara Karpukhin and José Vergara Alisa Ballard Lin Teaching Nabokov's 'Lolita' in the #MeToo Era. Ed. by Eléna Rakhimova-Sommers. London: Rowman & Littlefield. 2021. ix+ 187 pp. £73. ISBN 978–1–7936–2838–1. Reimagining Nabokov: Pedagogies for the 21st Century. Ed. by Sara Karpukhin and José Vergara. Amherst, MA: Amherst College Press. 2022. xxi+ 207 pp. $21.99. ISBN 978–1–943208–50–0 (open access 978–1–943208–51–7). Students are changing. The pandemic, Black Lives Matter, and racial justice awareness (especially in the United States), the effects of the 2017 #MeToo movement, transgender and disability activism, the politics of right-wing extremism, new media and technology—all of these factors have made university student organizations [End Page 645] far more attuned to evaluating fairness and to sniffing out privilege than those we taught even a decade ago. In the literature classroom, instructors work to diversify and decolonize our syllabuses, to practise student-centred teaching, and to judiciously consider the new technologies we might bring into the classroom. But in our efforts to balance appeal to the social moment with our sense of responsibility to our discipline, academics frequently run into dilemmas over how to handle canonical texts or authors who have, rightly or wrongly, fallen under the axe of contemporary cancel culture. One such sticky author is Vladimir Nabokov. His Lolita may often be deemed one of the greatest American novels of the twentieth century, but it also urges its reader to identify with the perspective of a paedophile and rapist, leading us through florid descriptions of illegal and non-consensual sexual acts. Further, as Galya Diment writes in her Foreword to one of the titles under review, Reimagining Nabokov: Pedagogies for the 21st Century, 'Nabokov had not only his share of strong opinions, he also had his share of strong prejudices, among them what my students perceive as obvious sexism, discernible racism, and unmistakable homophobia' (p. xiv). Today's students are also often suspicious of Nabokov's multiple domains of privilege as a white male academic raised in an aristocratic family. From childhood, Nabokov was trilingual, including fluency in English, which would enable his flourishing international career as a writer in emigration. Fortunately, despite the subject matter of Lolita, no stories have surfaced of Nabokov himself exhibiting sexually inappropriate behaviour, a point that saves the author from compulsory cancellation but which makes more complex and ambiguous the questions of whether and how to teach his work in today's classroom. Both of these edited volumes on teaching Nabokov take up these concerns in the light of the changing needs of today's students. Teaching Nabokov's 'Lolita' in the #MeToo Era, edited by Eléna Rakhimova-Sommers, has
{"title":"Teaching Nabokov's 'Lolita' in the #MeToo Era ed. by Eléna Rakhimova-Sommers, and: Reimagining Nabokov: Pedagogies for the 21st Century ed. by Sara Karpukhin and José Vergara (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/mlr.2023.a907877","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mlr.2023.a907877","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Teaching Nabokov's 'Lolita' in the #MeToo Era ed. by Eléna Rakhimova-Sommers, and: Reimagining Nabokov: Pedagogies for the 21st Century ed. by Sara Karpukhin and José Vergara Alisa Ballard Lin Teaching Nabokov's 'Lolita' in the #MeToo Era. Ed. by Eléna Rakhimova-Sommers. London: Rowman & Littlefield. 2021. ix+ 187 pp. £73. ISBN 978–1–7936–2838–1. Reimagining Nabokov: Pedagogies for the 21st Century. Ed. by Sara Karpukhin and José Vergara. Amherst, MA: Amherst College Press. 2022. xxi+ 207 pp. $21.99. ISBN 978–1–943208–50–0 (open access 978–1–943208–51–7). Students are changing. The pandemic, Black Lives Matter, and racial justice awareness (especially in the United States), the effects of the 2017 #MeToo movement, transgender and disability activism, the politics of right-wing extremism, new media and technology—all of these factors have made university student organizations [End Page 645] far more attuned to evaluating fairness and to sniffing out privilege than those we taught even a decade ago. In the literature classroom, instructors work to diversify and decolonize our syllabuses, to practise student-centred teaching, and to judiciously consider the new technologies we might bring into the classroom. But in our efforts to balance appeal to the social moment with our sense of responsibility to our discipline, academics frequently run into dilemmas over how to handle canonical texts or authors who have, rightly or wrongly, fallen under the axe of contemporary cancel culture. One such sticky author is Vladimir Nabokov. His Lolita may often be deemed one of the greatest American novels of the twentieth century, but it also urges its reader to identify with the perspective of a paedophile and rapist, leading us through florid descriptions of illegal and non-consensual sexual acts. Further, as Galya Diment writes in her Foreword to one of the titles under review, Reimagining Nabokov: Pedagogies for the 21st Century, 'Nabokov had not only his share of strong opinions, he also had his share of strong prejudices, among them what my students perceive as obvious sexism, discernible racism, and unmistakable homophobia' (p. xiv). Today's students are also often suspicious of Nabokov's multiple domains of privilege as a white male academic raised in an aristocratic family. From childhood, Nabokov was trilingual, including fluency in English, which would enable his flourishing international career as a writer in emigration. Fortunately, despite the subject matter of Lolita, no stories have surfaced of Nabokov himself exhibiting sexually inappropriate behaviour, a point that saves the author from compulsory cancellation but which makes more complex and ambiguous the questions of whether and how to teach his work in today's classroom. Both of these edited volumes on teaching Nabokov take up these concerns in the light of the changing needs of today's students. Teaching Nabokov's 'Lolita' in the #MeToo Era, edited by Eléna Rakhimova-Sommers, has ","PeriodicalId":45399,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW","volume":"100 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134935215","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-10-01DOI: 10.1353/mlr.2023.a907863
Reviewed by: Who Speaks for Wales? Nation, Culture, Identity: The Centenary Edition by Raymond Williams M. Wynn Thomas Who Speaks for Wales? Nation, Culture, Identity: The Centenary Edition. By Raymond Williams. Ed. by Daniel G. Williams. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. 2021. xviii+ 398 pp. £18.99. ISBN 978–1–78683–706–6. Reviewing The Oxford Companion to the Literature of Wales in 1986, Raymond Williams deeply regretted that British literary specialists had habitually ignored the country's rich vernacular literature stretching back to the sixth century. This could be explained, he added, only by 'the fact of several centuries of political domination, and of a consequent cultural indifference, often punctuated by aggression' (p. 279). It is tempting to reach for the same explanation when confronted with the enduring obstinate refusal of British critics to take Williams's Welshness seriously. When Williams entitled his celebrated semi-autobiographical novel 'Border Country', he correctly identified the character of his native region in the Welsh Marches, where two societies and their cultures confronted and cross-fertilized each other. 'It was a place to find intimations of complexity', he wrote (p. 65), a perfect incubator for a mind that progressed to complex meditation on the social formations subtly and decisively inflecting individual identities. And it alerted him to the bewildering variousness and hybridity of modern Welsh identity. It was in 1979 that Williams emerged from his political closet and roundly declared himself to be a 'Welsh European', confessing that he had come to sympathize less with the English Left than with a European Left that had shown far greater understanding of the claims not only of marginalized classes but of marginalized peoples, such as the Basques and the Welsh. It is Williams's readiness to align himself with such that provides the solid basis for Daniel G. Williams's claim that he had developed into an anti-colonial thinker. Any attempt to comprehend this radical realignment of allegiance needs to be set in the context of political events in Wales, as well as in England, at that particular time. The phrase 'Welsh Europeanism' seems to have been first used in the 1930s by Saunders Lewis, the Catholic leader of a Plaid Cymru that was deeply conservative in outlook. For him, it was part of a project of recreating the religious and cultural unity that Europe had enjoyed before the Protestant Reformation and its bastard offspring, the individual nation state. [End Page 622] By the 1970s, however, Plaid had been reborn as a party well to the Left of Labour that was devoted to a kind of decentred communitarian socialism, and it actively sought solidarity with similar nationally based movements of the Left across Europe. Williams accordingly sought refuge from the moribund centrism of the English Left and the rise of a xenophobic Thatcherite neo-Liberalism in the company of intellectuals of the alternative Left in
评审人:谁代表威尔士?《民族、文化、身份:百年纪念版》作者:雷蒙德·威廉姆斯民族，文化，身份:百年版。雷蒙德·威廉姆斯著。丹尼尔·g·威廉姆斯主编。卡迪夫:威尔士大学出版社，2021。Xviii + 398页，18.99英镑。ISBN 978-1-78683-706-6。1986年，在回顾《牛津威尔士文学指南》(Oxford Companion of Wales Literature)时，雷蒙德·威廉姆斯(Raymond Williams)深感遗憾的是，英国的文学专家们习惯性地忽视了该国丰富的可追溯到六世纪的本土文学。他补充说，这只能用“几个世纪的政治统治，以及随之而来的文化冷漠，经常被侵略所打断”来解释(第279页)。当面对英国评论家长期顽固地拒绝认真对待威廉姆斯的威尔士风格时，人们很容易寻求同样的解释。当威廉姆斯将他著名的半自传体小说命名为《边境之国》时，他正确地识别了威尔士行军中他的家乡的特征，在那里两个社会和他们的文化相互对抗和相互促进。“这是一个寻找复杂性暗示的地方”，他写道(第65页)，这是一个完美的孵化器，让他的思想发展到对社会形态的复杂思考，这种思考微妙而果断地影响了个人身份。这让他意识到现代威尔士身份的多样性和混杂性。1979年，威廉姆斯从自己的政治密室中走了出来，并公开宣称自己是一个“威尔士欧洲人”，他承认自己对英国左派的同情比欧洲左派要少，因为欧洲左派不仅对边缘阶级的诉求，而且对边缘民族的诉求，如巴斯克人和威尔士人，都表现出了更大的理解。正是威廉姆斯愿意与这样的人结盟，为丹尼尔·g·威廉姆斯(Daniel G. Williams)声称自己已经发展成为一名反殖民思想家提供了坚实的基础。任何试图理解这种激进的忠诚调整都需要放在威尔士和英格兰的政治事件的背景下，在那个特定的时期。“威尔士欧洲主义”这个词似乎是在20世纪30年代由桑德斯·刘易斯(Saunders Lewis)首次使用的，他是格纹骑士团(Plaid Cymru)的天主教领袖，该党的观点非常保守。对他来说，这是重建欧洲在新教改革及其私生子——单个民族国家之前所享有的宗教和文化统一的计划的一部分。然而，到了20世纪70年代，格莱德党已经重生为工党的左翼政党，致力于一种去中心化的社群社会主义，并积极寻求与欧洲各地类似的以国家为基础的左翼运动团结一致。因此，威廉姆斯在英国左翼垂死的中间主义和威尔士另类左翼知识分子中兴起的排外的撒切尔式新自由主义中寻求庇护。其中最著名的是内德·托马斯(Ned Thomas)，他是一位坚定的亲欧民族主义者，也是重要的知识分子杂志《星球》(Planet)的创刊编辑，该杂志定期刊登关于从布列塔尼和尤斯卡迪到南斯拉夫和捷克斯洛伐克等陷入困境的少数民族的文章。另一个重要的人物是达菲德·埃利斯·托马斯，他是格莱德·西姆鲁最杰出和最有魅力的年轻左倾领导人之一。和他们一样，威廉姆斯也支持保护威尔士语的运动，他认为威尔士语对说英语的人和说威尔士语的人都很重要。历史上文化在维护威尔士身份认同中所扮演的角色，强化了威廉姆斯的信念，即不应以传统马克思主义的方式将其视为经济关系的附带现象。它既是一个生产者，也是一个产品。他对这一形成过程的评论非常贴切:所有重要的形状都在移动，即使它只是向一个新的确认移动。威尔士的形状比大多数地方都在不断变化，这当然令人不安。但是，我们的经历是如此的动态和变化，如果形态没有改变，我们现在应该完全漂流:我们自己的漂流。这些观察结果适用于当代威尔士，如今更适用于它曾经强大的邻居……
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Pub Date : 2023-10-01DOI: 10.1353/mlr.2023.a907858
Reviewed by: The Turning Point: A Year that Changed Dickens and the World by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst John Batchelor The Turning Point: A Year that Changed Dickens and the World. By Robert Douglas-Fairhurst. London: Cape. 2021. 355 pp. £25. ISBN 978–1–78733–070–2. This is an extraordinarily clever book. For a reader who is completely new to Dickens, the whole story of his relationship with his age is set out in a full and comprehensible form. David Copperfield is a mirror of Charles Dickens. The 'CD' of Dickens's initials are a reversal of David's initials. His history is the history of the whole of Victorian society taking 1850 as its midpoint. 1850 was a triumphal central year in Victorian culture, the year of Dickens's 'story of my own life', of Tennyson's great autobiographical elegy 'In Memoriam', and also of the first publication of Wordsworth's masterpiece, The Prelude. The 'turning point' of this book's title also is a physical structure, the Great Exhibition in the Crystal Palace, opened 1 May 1851, which for this study embodies the material success of the British Empire at its most affluent and resplendent. By 1851, this little island, with its industries, [End Page 614] its navies, and its command of much of the underdeveloped world, was arguably the most powerful civilization that the world had ever seen. Dickens was at the heart of it. Dickens's personal life story had been one of steady social advancement, and the British class system provided the spine of many of his plots. Pip in Great Expectations lives the dream of many a young, ambitious, and socially disadvantaged man of the period. At the same time, his story shows, shockingly, that sudden and unexpected access to great wealth can be a disastrous social evil. The plotting of this novel, with its elaborate network of hidden relationships, displays another of Dickens's leading preoccupations. Hidden relationships form a network which sustains the plot of several of Dickens's masterpieces, and this is particularly true of Bleak House, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend. In his writing life, Dickens was both harnessing the energies of the previous century that drove the Bildungsroman, the novel of initiation and development as practised by Fielding, and following the bigger and broader traditions of narrative which drove Don Quixote. The novels which centre on the life of a single figure, David Copperfield and Great Expectations, are themselves phenomenal ragbags of narrative, packed with incidents all of which are part of a significant pattern. Bleak House does more than that, and this book shows that its tumult of incident disappointed and mystified some of its first readers. The fog which dominates some of the early narrative is presented in a sequence of verbal fragments which refuse to form discrete sentences. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst unpicks Dickens's prose here and in so doing demonstrates that a new kind of narrative writing has been evolved. He throws in the fasci
{"title":"The Turning Point: A Year that Changed Dickens and the World by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/mlr.2023.a907858","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mlr.2023.a907858","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: The Turning Point: A Year that Changed Dickens and the World by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst John Batchelor The Turning Point: A Year that Changed Dickens and the World. By Robert Douglas-Fairhurst. London: Cape. 2021. 355 pp. £25. ISBN 978–1–78733–070–2. This is an extraordinarily clever book. For a reader who is completely new to Dickens, the whole story of his relationship with his age is set out in a full and comprehensible form. David Copperfield is a mirror of Charles Dickens. The 'CD' of Dickens's initials are a reversal of David's initials. His history is the history of the whole of Victorian society taking 1850 as its midpoint. 1850 was a triumphal central year in Victorian culture, the year of Dickens's 'story of my own life', of Tennyson's great autobiographical elegy 'In Memoriam', and also of the first publication of Wordsworth's masterpiece, The Prelude. The 'turning point' of this book's title also is a physical structure, the Great Exhibition in the Crystal Palace, opened 1 May 1851, which for this study embodies the material success of the British Empire at its most affluent and resplendent. By 1851, this little island, with its industries, [End Page 614] its navies, and its command of much of the underdeveloped world, was arguably the most powerful civilization that the world had ever seen. Dickens was at the heart of it. Dickens's personal life story had been one of steady social advancement, and the British class system provided the spine of many of his plots. Pip in Great Expectations lives the dream of many a young, ambitious, and socially disadvantaged man of the period. At the same time, his story shows, shockingly, that sudden and unexpected access to great wealth can be a disastrous social evil. The plotting of this novel, with its elaborate network of hidden relationships, displays another of Dickens's leading preoccupations. Hidden relationships form a network which sustains the plot of several of Dickens's masterpieces, and this is particularly true of Bleak House, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend. In his writing life, Dickens was both harnessing the energies of the previous century that drove the Bildungsroman, the novel of initiation and development as practised by Fielding, and following the bigger and broader traditions of narrative which drove Don Quixote. The novels which centre on the life of a single figure, David Copperfield and Great Expectations, are themselves phenomenal ragbags of narrative, packed with incidents all of which are part of a significant pattern. Bleak House does more than that, and this book shows that its tumult of incident disappointed and mystified some of its first readers. The fog which dominates some of the early narrative is presented in a sequence of verbal fragments which refuse to form discrete sentences. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst unpicks Dickens's prose here and in so doing demonstrates that a new kind of narrative writing has been evolved. He throws in the fasci","PeriodicalId":45399,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW","volume":"47 17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134933737","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-10-01DOI: 10.1353/mlr.2023.a907872
Reviewed by: Transcultural Memory and European Identity in Contemporary German-Jewish Migrant Literature by Jessica Ortner Stuart Taberner Transcultural Memory and European Identity in Contemporary German-Jewish Migrant Literature. By Jessica Ortner. Rochester, NY: Camden House. 2022. 285 pp. £85. ISBN 978–16–401–4022–6. There is much to recommend this volume. In it, Jessica Ortner examines recent German-language writers with a Jewish background whose lived experience of the Soviet Union (or, in the case of Barbara Honigmann, the former East Germany) introduces Eastern European histories into a historical narrative that has largely been [End Page 636] shaped by Western institutions. Whether it is Stalinist crimes, Soviet antisemitism, or less familiar sites of the Nazi genocide, these writers offer an important corrective, Ortner argues, to dominant social, political, and cultural discourses that tend to construct 'Auschwitz' as the single most significant memory around which Europe could—or should—shape a unified identity. Ortner thus offers an important contribution to the scholarly literature on the 'Eastern turn' (Brigid Haines: see 'Introduction: The Eastern European Turn in Contemporary German-Language Literature', German Life and Letters, 68 (2015), 145–53 <https://doi.Zorg/10.1111/glal.12073>) in recent German-language writing and inflects this with an emphasis on the migration of Jewish memories from east to west following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. This also relates, of course, to the spectacular revival of the Jewish community in Germany following the arrival after 1990 of around 200,000 people from the former Soviet Union able to claim Jewish heritage. Ortner's book is organized into three sections. The first gives a detailed overview of and engagement with the 'mnemonic divide' between Eastern and Western Europe, with countries that once belonged to the Soviet bloc tending to their victimization under communism while Western European countries focus on the Nazi genocide. This section also attends to recent scholarship in memory studies and identifies the volume's original contribution to this literature. Section 11 examines three contemporary authors, Vladimir Vertlib, Katja Petrowskaja, and Barbara Honigmann, and specifically their endeavours to parallel Stalinism with Nazi crimes—without, however, relativizing the Holocaust. Section in then examines two writers, Olga Grjasnowa and Lena Gorelik, who more explicitly contest Germany's dominant memory culture, by de-emphasizing the uniqueness of the Holocaust and placing it within a multidirectional, transcultural framework alongside other atrocities and injustices—for example, the Armenian genocide or even Israel's military interventions in the West Bank and Gaza. The close readings are detailed, generally sound, and occasionally excellent. The chapter on Petrowskaja, then, is highly illuminating in its detailed and nuanced focus on the memory politics of
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Pub Date : 2023-10-01DOI: 10.1353/mlr.2023.a907847
Reviewed by: Comics and Graphic Novels by Julia Round, Rikke Platz Cortsen, and Maaheen Ahmed Lise Tannahill Comics and Graphic Novels. By Julia Round, Rikke Platz Cortsen, and Maaheen Ahmed. (Readers' Guides to Essential Criticism) London: Bloomsbury. 2023. xi+ 268 pp. £65 (pbk £21.99; ebk £19.79). ISBN 978–1–350336–10–0 (pbk 978–1–350336–09–4; ebk 978–1–350336–08–7). This collaborative work is an impressive effort to offer an overview of the development of the field of comics and graphic novel studies from its early beginnings to today, an interdisciplinary field that the authors note 'has only really developed in the last century (p. 1) but which is now expanding at an exponential rate. Given the breadth and continuing development of this field, production of a guide of this type may seem a daunting task, but it is one which the authors approach in a comprehensive and considered way, producing a key reference volume for those new to and familiar with comics scholarship alike. Over twelve chapters arranged in four overarching parts ('Approaching Comics', 'Histories and Cultures', 'Production and Reception', 'Themes and Genres'), the authors present a wide-ranging survey of key texts in comics scholarship. While they are clear that this survey is not exhaustive, the stated aim is one of international scope, 'beyond the anglophone' (p. 1); included is scholarship from the Francophone world, Japan, Chile, and Sweden, to give just a few examples. Chapters within these four parts are loosely grouped thematically: Approaching Comics' contains chapters on formalist concerns (early scholarship, semiotic approaches, comics as language) along with chapters on ideology (colonialism, superheroes, cultural legitimacy) and the materiality and sensory experience of comics. 'Histories and Cultures' discusses early criticism, censorship, and legitimization in American, British, Francophone, and other global contexts, and offers a snapshot of historical accounts of comics, from the global scale to the more geographically specific. 'Production and Reception' includes discussion of publishers and creators of comics in various forms, but also fan culture, reader identity, and fan studies. 'Themes and Genres' is necessarily wide-ranging, providing overviews of scholarship on documentary, memory, and children in comics, genres such as romance, superheroes, and horror, and the underground comics context in the Anglophone and Francophone spheres. This last section also includes a chapter on general reference works and textbooks for making or teaching comics. Alongside bibliographical information, the authors detail key themes and arguments of the works discussed in each chapter. Summaries are concise and informative, expressing often complex ideas in clear language, without oversimplifying. Given the inclusion of works written in languages other than English, this approach is helpful in disseminating, if only partially, scholarship which is not easily accessible to Ang
书评:漫画和图形小说由朱莉娅·朗，Rikke Platz Cortsen，和Maaheen艾哈迈德丽丝·坦纳希尔漫画和图形小说。作者:Julia Round, Rikke Platz Cortsen, Maaheen Ahmed。(《读者基本批评指南》)伦敦:布鲁姆斯伯里出版社，2023。订购£19.79)。ISBN 978-1-350336-10-0 (pbk 978-1-350336-09-4;- 978-1-350336-08-7)。这项合作工作是一个令人印象深刻的努力，提供了从早期开始到今天的漫画和图形小说研究领域的发展概述，作者指出，“只有在上个世纪才真正发展起来(第1页)，但现在正以指数速度扩展。”鉴于这一领域的广度和持续发展，制作这种类型的指南似乎是一项艰巨的任务，但这是作者以全面和深思熟虑的方式接近的一项任务，为那些新的和熟悉漫画奖学金的人提供了一个关键的参考卷。超过十二章安排在四个总体部分(“接近漫画”，“历史和文化”，“生产和接受”，“主题和流派”)，作者提出了漫画奖学金关键文本的广泛调查。虽然他们很清楚这项调查并不详尽，但所陈述的目标是国际范围的，“超越英语国家”(第1页);其中包括来自法语国家、日本、智利和瑞典的奖学金，仅举几个例子。这四个部分中的章节按主题松散地分组:《接近漫画》包含形式主义关注的章节(早期学术、符号学方法、作为语言的漫画)，以及意识形态(殖民主义、超级英雄、文化合法性)和漫画的物质性和感官体验。“历史与文化”讨论了美国、英国、法语国家和其他全球背景下的早期批评、审查和合法化，并提供了从全球范围到更具体地理范围的漫画历史记述的快照。“生产与接受”包括对各种形式漫画的出版商和创作者的讨论，也包括粉丝文化、读者身份和粉丝研究。“主题和流派”的范围很广，提供了纪录片、记忆、漫画中的儿童、浪漫、超级英雄和恐怖等流派的学术综述，以及英语和法语国家的地下漫画背景。这最后一节还包括一章一般的参考作品和教科书制作或教学漫画。除了书目信息外，作者还详细介绍了每章讨论的作品的关键主题和论点。摘要简明扼要，信息丰富，用清晰的语言表达复杂的想法，而不是过度简化。考虑到收录了用英语以外的语言写成的作品，这种方法有助于传播(如果只是部分传播)那些不懂这些语言的以英语为母语的读者很难接触到的学术成果。这本书表达的目的和结构都非常清晰，每一章都有翔实的总结和结论。这种清晰的结构特别有益，因为它有助于根据读者感兴趣的领域将单独的章节作为连贯的整体阅读。虽然这本书整体上运作良好，但一卷书所要求的范围之广，提供了如此广泛的领域的概述，必然意味着要提供大量的信息，这有可能压倒任何按顺序阅读这本书的人。章节的自成一体的性质可能使这项工作对寻找特定信息的读者或研究人员和大学环境中的教学目的都很有用，因为每一章都可以作为文献综述或作为那些考虑特定研究领域或研究问题的阅读清单。语言的清晰和可读的风格使漫画和图画小说对经验丰富的研究人员和学生都很容易理解。对于第一次接近漫画研究的读者来说，这本书作为一个整体提供了一个有用的切入点，进入这个领域，它的关键论点和理论。这种在全球范围内促进漫画学术研究的便利，以低门槛的形式提供(平装本供审查，所有三个版本在出版商的网站上都有进一步的折扣)，是……
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