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 ) 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
{"title":"Transcultural Memory and European Identity in Contemporary German-Jewish Migrant Literature by Jessica Ortner (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/mlr.2023.a907872","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mlr.2023.a907872","url":null,"abstract":"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","PeriodicalId":45399,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW","volume":"15 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":"134933774","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.a907844
Reviewed by: Adaptations: Critical and Primary Sources ed. by Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan Kate Griffiths Adaptations: Critical and Primary Sources. Ed. by Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan. 3 vols. New York: Bloomsbury. 2022. x+ 357 pp. (vol. i); xi+ 426 pp. (vol. ii); xi+ 466 pp. (vol. iii). £495. ISBN 978–1–5013–1540–4. Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan's three-volume set of critical and primary sources on adaptation is a much-needed addition to the discipline of Adaptation Studies. It traces, via a compellingly contrastive range of critical voices, the complicated relationship between source texts and their afterlives in an ever expanding range of different media. Ranging from Vachel Lindsay in 1915 to Thomas M. Leitch in 2019, Cartmell and Whelehan set themselves the daunting task of compiling the cacophonous voices commenting on and theorizing the much-disputed art of adaptation between those dates. The value of their compendium is clear. The range and diversity of their coverage maps the plethora of thinkers contributing to the discipline that is Adaptation Studies, documenting its evolution, definitions, and development. The conversations between these different thinkers take us, as readers, to the heart of the existential questions which both power and haunt Adaptation Studies: What is adaptation? What are the formative forces shaping its outputs? What is the value of those outputs? What is Adaptation Studies? How might we theorize it? Where does Adaptation Studies sit as a discipline? How do we map its borders and boundaries? Cartmell and Whelehan's collection offers no simplistic, finite answer to any of those questions. Rather, it embraces the wealth of possible responses to them, exploring the ways in which different historical moments, thinkers, creative practitioners, political contexts, and theoretical turns have answered these and other questions in intriguingly diverse ways. The compendium's focus is the history of adaptation from the early twentieth century. It deliberately takes the birth of film, the medium which would impact so powerfully on adaptation and its study, as its starting point. Subsequently, the progression is chronological. Volume i covers the period 1900–93, volume ii 1996–2007, volume iii 2007–20. The greatest space by far is allocated to the years from 1993 onwards, reflecting the acceleration and accumulation of research in this area as Adaptation Studies turned and re-turned in different theoretical directions. This collection of essays does not over-privilege the years from 1993 onwards, though. Rather, it underlines, in the telling intersections between each of its three volumes, the ways in which the present of Adaptation Studies speaks to and is shaped by its past, and itself actively shapes that past. [End Page 591] The collection offers valuable correctives to our vision of adaptation history. It has become a commonplace that Adaptation Studies began with George Bluestone's 1957 'The Lim
{"title":"Adaptations: Critical and Primary Sources ed. by Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/mlr.2023.a907844","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mlr.2023.a907844","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Adaptations: Critical and Primary Sources ed. by Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan Kate Griffiths Adaptations: Critical and Primary Sources. Ed. by Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan. 3 vols. New York: Bloomsbury. 2022. x+ 357 pp. (vol. i); xi+ 426 pp. (vol. ii); xi+ 466 pp. (vol. iii). £495. ISBN 978–1–5013–1540–4. Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan's three-volume set of critical and primary sources on adaptation is a much-needed addition to the discipline of Adaptation Studies. It traces, via a compellingly contrastive range of critical voices, the complicated relationship between source texts and their afterlives in an ever expanding range of different media. Ranging from Vachel Lindsay in 1915 to Thomas M. Leitch in 2019, Cartmell and Whelehan set themselves the daunting task of compiling the cacophonous voices commenting on and theorizing the much-disputed art of adaptation between those dates. The value of their compendium is clear. The range and diversity of their coverage maps the plethora of thinkers contributing to the discipline that is Adaptation Studies, documenting its evolution, definitions, and development. The conversations between these different thinkers take us, as readers, to the heart of the existential questions which both power and haunt Adaptation Studies: What is adaptation? What are the formative forces shaping its outputs? What is the value of those outputs? What is Adaptation Studies? How might we theorize it? Where does Adaptation Studies sit as a discipline? How do we map its borders and boundaries? Cartmell and Whelehan's collection offers no simplistic, finite answer to any of those questions. Rather, it embraces the wealth of possible responses to them, exploring the ways in which different historical moments, thinkers, creative practitioners, political contexts, and theoretical turns have answered these and other questions in intriguingly diverse ways. The compendium's focus is the history of adaptation from the early twentieth century. It deliberately takes the birth of film, the medium which would impact so powerfully on adaptation and its study, as its starting point. Subsequently, the progression is chronological. Volume i covers the period 1900–93, volume ii 1996–2007, volume iii 2007–20. The greatest space by far is allocated to the years from 1993 onwards, reflecting the acceleration and accumulation of research in this area as Adaptation Studies turned and re-turned in different theoretical directions. This collection of essays does not over-privilege the years from 1993 onwards, though. Rather, it underlines, in the telling intersections between each of its three volumes, the ways in which the present of Adaptation Studies speaks to and is shaped by its past, and itself actively shapes that past. [End Page 591] The collection offers valuable correctives to our vision of adaptation history. It has become a commonplace that Adaptation Studies began with George Bluestone's 1957 'The Lim","PeriodicalId":45399,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW","volume":"73 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":"134935005","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.a907866
Reviewed by: Selected Letters: A Bilingual Edition, 1523–1546 by Vittoria Colonna Maria Serena Sapegno Selected Letters: A Bilingual Edition, 1523–1546. By Vittoria Colonna. Ed. by Veronica Copello; trans, by Abigail Brundin. (The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series, 88) New York: Iter Press. 2022. xiv + 186 pp. $48.95. ISBN 978–1–64959–028–2. This volume completes the string of texts dedicated to Vittoria Colonna in the same series, The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe—Sonnets for Michelangelo: A Bilingual Edition, ed. and trans. by Abigail Brundin (Chicago, 2005); Poems of Widowhood: A Bilingual Edition of the 1538 'Rime', ed. and trans. by Ramie Targoff (Toronto, 2021)—in a remarkable achievement. A larger public is now in a position to evaluate the significance of a complex personality and a writer who was a unique model for European women in her time: the first to have a book of poetry printed in her name. [End Page 626] The historical-critical Introduction helps to situate Vittoria Colonna's epistolary activity within a public and private life that was complicated and intense, and not without difficult or even dramatic moments. Her life, after the untimely death of her husband in 1525, was always traversed by a tension between, on the one hand, the allure of meditative withdrawal into a regime of prayer and writing and, on the other, the need to fulfil family and social commitments related to her position as a member of the ruling class. Colonna's collected letters, which, thanks to intense research in recent years, now stand at about 270 documents and may grow further, reflect the richness and variety of her life and interlocutors, as manifested in the plurality of stylistic registers and variety of content. For these reasons, the undertaking presented the two editors with the far from straightforward task of making a selection that would preserve this richness and make sense of it in an already complex and fast-moving historical and cultural context. Incidentally, this is precisely the period when, thanks to the press, epistolary writing was on its way to becoming a literary genre in its own right, through the publication of model texts and collections by various authors, among whom Colonna herself finds a place. Pietro Aretino, her correspondent and admirer, published the first printed collection of letters in 1538. The edition comprisese forty letters covering the period from 1523 (before her husband's death) to 1546 (shortly before her own death in 1547). This selection, although limited in number, manages to give an idea of the social position of the writer, her authority, and her wide network of relationships, to provide an insight into her interests, her passions, and, last but not least, her opinions in diverse fields and subjects. Many of these letters are in fact among her most famous. Each letter has its own introduction that explains its importance and meaning, references the critical bibliography, and, ver
{"title":"Selected Letters: A Bilingual Edition, 1523–1546 by Vittoria Colonna (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/mlr.2023.a907866","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mlr.2023.a907866","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Selected Letters: A Bilingual Edition, 1523–1546 by Vittoria Colonna Maria Serena Sapegno Selected Letters: A Bilingual Edition, 1523–1546. By Vittoria Colonna. Ed. by Veronica Copello; trans, by Abigail Brundin. (The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series, 88) New York: Iter Press. 2022. xiv + 186 pp. $48.95. ISBN 978–1–64959–028–2. This volume completes the string of texts dedicated to Vittoria Colonna in the same series, The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe—Sonnets for Michelangelo: A Bilingual Edition, ed. and trans. by Abigail Brundin (Chicago, 2005); Poems of Widowhood: A Bilingual Edition of the 1538 'Rime', ed. and trans. by Ramie Targoff (Toronto, 2021)—in a remarkable achievement. A larger public is now in a position to evaluate the significance of a complex personality and a writer who was a unique model for European women in her time: the first to have a book of poetry printed in her name. [End Page 626] The historical-critical Introduction helps to situate Vittoria Colonna's epistolary activity within a public and private life that was complicated and intense, and not without difficult or even dramatic moments. Her life, after the untimely death of her husband in 1525, was always traversed by a tension between, on the one hand, the allure of meditative withdrawal into a regime of prayer and writing and, on the other, the need to fulfil family and social commitments related to her position as a member of the ruling class. Colonna's collected letters, which, thanks to intense research in recent years, now stand at about 270 documents and may grow further, reflect the richness and variety of her life and interlocutors, as manifested in the plurality of stylistic registers and variety of content. For these reasons, the undertaking presented the two editors with the far from straightforward task of making a selection that would preserve this richness and make sense of it in an already complex and fast-moving historical and cultural context. Incidentally, this is precisely the period when, thanks to the press, epistolary writing was on its way to becoming a literary genre in its own right, through the publication of model texts and collections by various authors, among whom Colonna herself finds a place. Pietro Aretino, her correspondent and admirer, published the first printed collection of letters in 1538. The edition comprisese forty letters covering the period from 1523 (before her husband's death) to 1546 (shortly before her own death in 1547). This selection, although limited in number, manages to give an idea of the social position of the writer, her authority, and her wide network of relationships, to provide an insight into her interests, her passions, and, last but not least, her opinions in diverse fields and subjects. Many of these letters are in fact among her most famous. Each letter has its own introduction that explains its importance and meaning, references the critical bibliography, and, ver","PeriodicalId":45399,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW","volume":"67 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":"134935010","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.a907848
Reviewed by: Art, Theory, Revolution: The Turn to Generality in Contemporary Literature by Mitchum Huehls Peter Sloane Art, Theory, Revolution: The Turn to Generality in Contemporary Literature. By Mitchum Huehls. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. 2022. 198 pp. $69.95. ISBN 978–0–8142–1524–1. Mitchum Huehls sets himself a difficult challenge in his deeply thoughtful and philosophically astute study of the relationship between literary form and politics in the contemporary period, more specifically the post-period following the various playful and often exaggerated nihilisms and endings attendant on the postmodern. On the one hand he makes a sophisticated series of claims about the ways in which current literary fiction continues to exploit forms' potential for various kinds of resistance (even to resistance itself) by engaging with what he describes as the 'form-politics homology' (p. 6); on the other, in a series of insightful close readings of the specifics of his chosen figures—including Chris Kraus, Percival Everett, Zadie Smith, and Rachel Kushner—he argues that some have instead 'turned to the single-general relationship' (p. 6). Either one of these might warrant a monograph, [End Page 598] but the point of Huehls's study is that these interrogations work together to give rise to a peculiarly post-postmodern set of entanglements between art, theory, and revolution. Intriguingly, as I suggest below, though this is not stated explicitly, the study is fundamentally interested in the work performed by the hyphen in these two conjunctions, the relationships, dependencies, and linkages implied by that, and by its possible erasure or refiguration. The Introduction is extensive, wide-ranging, and if at times hard to follow because it goes in at the deep end, worth reading closely because the theoretical framework is both rewarding in itself and vital if sense is to made of the following chapters. Much of the hard work takes place here, Huehls outlining the case that he will reinforce in his Conclusion, that his subjects 'develop generalized forms of value production irreducible' to the 'homological thought' of their predecessors in the modernist or pre-modernist periods (p. 153). Chapter 1 is concerned with 'Art, Life-Writing, and the Generic', focusing on Sheila Heti and Chris Kraus, arguing that they explore 'the problem of being a person in the world' and reconceive the 'nature of female selfhood' (p. 40). Chapter 2 turns to 'Theory, Metafiction, and Constructivism', asking the question that, if theory is 'supposedly dead', why is it still so 'alive and well in contemporary fiction?' (p. 75). Finally, Chapter 3 gets to grips with 'Revolution, Historical Fiction, and Gesture', to propose that Peter Carey, Viet Nguyen, Dana Spiotta, and other writers of recent historical fiction use 'their own forms of realism to think through the formal impasses that beset the various revolutionary activities that their content comprises' (p. 113). As I hint
{"title":"Art, Theory, Revolution: The Turn to Generality in Contemporary Literature by Mitchum Huehls (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/mlr.2023.a907848","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mlr.2023.a907848","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Art, Theory, Revolution: The Turn to Generality in Contemporary Literature by Mitchum Huehls Peter Sloane Art, Theory, Revolution: The Turn to Generality in Contemporary Literature. By Mitchum Huehls. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. 2022. 198 pp. $69.95. ISBN 978–0–8142–1524–1. Mitchum Huehls sets himself a difficult challenge in his deeply thoughtful and philosophically astute study of the relationship between literary form and politics in the contemporary period, more specifically the post-period following the various playful and often exaggerated nihilisms and endings attendant on the postmodern. On the one hand he makes a sophisticated series of claims about the ways in which current literary fiction continues to exploit forms' potential for various kinds of resistance (even to resistance itself) by engaging with what he describes as the 'form-politics homology' (p. 6); on the other, in a series of insightful close readings of the specifics of his chosen figures—including Chris Kraus, Percival Everett, Zadie Smith, and Rachel Kushner—he argues that some have instead 'turned to the single-general relationship' (p. 6). Either one of these might warrant a monograph, [End Page 598] but the point of Huehls's study is that these interrogations work together to give rise to a peculiarly post-postmodern set of entanglements between art, theory, and revolution. Intriguingly, as I suggest below, though this is not stated explicitly, the study is fundamentally interested in the work performed by the hyphen in these two conjunctions, the relationships, dependencies, and linkages implied by that, and by its possible erasure or refiguration. The Introduction is extensive, wide-ranging, and if at times hard to follow because it goes in at the deep end, worth reading closely because the theoretical framework is both rewarding in itself and vital if sense is to made of the following chapters. Much of the hard work takes place here, Huehls outlining the case that he will reinforce in his Conclusion, that his subjects 'develop generalized forms of value production irreducible' to the 'homological thought' of their predecessors in the modernist or pre-modernist periods (p. 153). Chapter 1 is concerned with 'Art, Life-Writing, and the Generic', focusing on Sheila Heti and Chris Kraus, arguing that they explore 'the problem of being a person in the world' and reconceive the 'nature of female selfhood' (p. 40). Chapter 2 turns to 'Theory, Metafiction, and Constructivism', asking the question that, if theory is 'supposedly dead', why is it still so 'alive and well in contemporary fiction?' (p. 75). Finally, Chapter 3 gets to grips with 'Revolution, Historical Fiction, and Gesture', to propose that Peter Carey, Viet Nguyen, Dana Spiotta, and other writers of recent historical fiction use 'their own forms of realism to think through the formal impasses that beset the various revolutionary activities that their content comprises' (p. 113). As I hint","PeriodicalId":45399,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW","volume":"63 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":"134935196","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.a907846
Reviewed by: From Puppet to Cyborg: Pinocchio's Posthuman Journey by Georgia Panteli Kelly Mckisson From Puppet to Cyborg: Pinocchio's Posthuman Journey. By Georgia Panteli. (Studies in Comparative Literature, 40) Cambridge: Legenda. 2022. xi+ 178 pp. £85. ISBN 978–1–781887–12–7. When in 2023 Guillermo Del Toro's stop-motion adaptation of Pinocchio won the Oscar for best animated feature, audiences were again captivated by the adventures of the now one-hundred-and-forty-year-old mischievous puppet. Carlo Collodi's classic, first serialized in an Italian children's magazine in 1881–82, and then expanded and published as a novel in 1883, has been so widely translated and adapted that it remains 'one of the most famous texts in the world' (p. 1). So proclaims the first line of Georgia Panteli's slim book, From Puppet to Cyborg. Panteli's comparative project tracks contemporary retellings of the Pinocchio myth and analyses how they reinterpret and revise the original's concern with a desire to be human. The pleasure of reading Panteli's book comes not from one centrally sustained argument but instead from thought-provoking insights revealed by unearthing Pinocchio elements in multiple recent reimaginings, across three media forms and multiple languages. As the title suggests, Panteli's survey makes a suitable case for the Pinocchio myth, and especially the wooden boy's desires, as an early precursor to posthuman narratives—here, readers should expect the posthumanism aligned with Nick Bostrum's Tn Defense of Posthuman Dignity' (Bioethics, 19.3 (2005), 202–14), which refers to the transhuman or superhuman extension of the human category. Panteli moves from cyborg Pinocchios in science fiction film and television to ironic Pinocchios in postmodern metafiction and then to subversive Pinocchios in contemporary graphic novels, making new use of Collodi's original myth in each instance. The structure and analysis of From Puppet to Cyborg resemble the picaresque journey of Pinocchio's adventures: with few sections longer than fifteen pages, the book's Introduction and Conclusion bookend three parts that are divided into prefatory pieces and nine short chapters. The Introduction is one of the longest sections, providing an overview of the contexts for Collodi's original and subsequent international translations, as well as twentieth-century stage and film adaptations. Here, Panteli makes a case for understanding Pinocchio's part in the fairy-tale tradition, following Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folk Tale (Russian original 1928), as well as Pinocchio's function as modern myth, fitting Joseph Campbell's formula from The Hero with a Thousand Faces (first edition 1949). Outlining the themes and archetypes of the Pinocchio myth—for example, fairy and talking animal characters; moments of confrontation and transformation; the hero's journey [End Page 595] of separation, initiation, and return—allows Panteli to engage these elements as connections for compar
回顾:从木偶到半机械人:皮诺曹的后人类之旅乔治亚·潘特利凯利·麦基森从木偶到半机械人:皮诺曹的后人类之旅。作者:Georgia Panteli。(《比较文学研究》，第40期)剑桥:Legenda, 2022。ISBN 978-1-781887-12-7。2023年，吉列尔莫·德尔·托罗(Guillermo Del Toro)改编的《木偶奇遇记》(Pinocchio)定格动画获得了奥斯卡最佳动画长片奖，观众们再次被这个140岁的淘气木偶的冒险故事所吸引。卡洛·科洛迪(Carlo Collodi)的经典作品于1881 - 1882年首次在一家意大利儿童杂志上连载，随后于1883年作为小说进行了扩充和出版，被广泛翻译和改编，至今仍是“世界上最著名的文本之一”(第1页)。这是乔治亚·潘特利(Georgia Panteli)的薄书《从木偶到电子人》(From Puppet to Cyborg)的第一句话。潘特利的比较项目追踪了当代对匹诺曹神话的重述，并分析了他们如何重新诠释和修改原著对人性的渴望。阅读Panteli的书的乐趣不是来自于一个集中持续的论点，而是来自于最近在三种媒体形式和多种语言的多种重新想象中挖掘出的匹诺曹元素所揭示的发人深省的见解。正如标题所暗示的那样，潘泰利的调查为匹诺曹神话，尤其是木男孩的欲望，作为后人类叙事的早期先驱，提供了一个合适的案例——在这里，读者应该期待与尼克·博斯特拉姆的《捍卫后人类尊严》(生物伦理学，19.3(2005)，202-14)一致的后人类主义，它指的是人类范畴的超人类或超人的延伸。从科幻电影和电视中的机器人匹诺曹，到后现代元小说中的讽刺匹诺曹，再到当代图画小说中颠覆性的匹诺曹，潘泰利在每一个例子中都使用了科洛迪的原始神话。《从木偶到生化人》的结构和分析类似于匹诺曹的冒险之旅:只有很少的几个章节超过15页，书的引言和结论结束了三个部分，分为序言部分和九个简短的章节。引言是最长的部分之一，概述了科洛迪的原著和后来的国际翻译，以及20世纪的舞台剧和电影改编。在这里，潘泰利根据弗拉基米尔·普罗普的《民间故事的形态学》(1928年俄语原版)，以及约瑟夫·坎贝尔在《千面英雄》(1949年第一版)中的公式，阐述了匹诺曹在童话传统中的角色，以及匹诺曹作为现代神话的功能。概述匹诺曹神话的主题和原型——例如，仙女和会说话的动物角色;对抗和转变的时刻;主人公的分离、成长和回归之旅——让潘泰利通过书中对当代复述的调查，将这些元素作为对比分析的联系。在第一部分中，Panteli声称匹诺曹的身份是“第一个有自己愿望成为人类的拟像”，这使他与早期的无生命转化(如Pygmalion的Galatea)区别开来，而是将他与科幻小说中的电子人联系起来(第26页)。雷德利·斯科特的《银翼杀手》(1982)中的瑞秋，史蒂芬·斯皮尔伯格的《人工智能》(2001)中的大卫，以及《太空堡垒卡拉狄加》(2004)中的莎伦都是“语义上的亲戚和主题上的同源”，他们协商自己与人类的关系(第30页)。在第二部分中，杰罗姆·查林的《匹诺曹的鼻子》(1983)和罗伯特·库弗的《威尼斯的匹诺曹》(1991)中的元虚构作家角色采用了匹诺曹神话的元素，然后反过来讽刺了人类的处境，尤其是通过关注衰老和死亡，这对所有木偶来说都是一个不太幸福的结局——变成了人。这些后现代小说的精神分析线索让潘特利重新审视了原始神话的特征，比如皮诺奇和蓝仙女之间的俄狄浦斯关系。在第三部分，Panteli读了两本图画小说，Ausonia的《匹诺曹》(2006)和Winshluss的《匹诺曹》(2008)，看看它们是如何解构——也许更确切地说，是如何分解、逆转或拒绝——神话中关于人类成长的进步叙事，尤其是对消费主义价值观的批判。潘泰利没有……
{"title":"From Puppet to Cyborg: Pinocchio's Posthuman Journey by Georgia Panteli (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/mlr.2023.a907846","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mlr.2023.a907846","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: From Puppet to Cyborg: Pinocchio's Posthuman Journey by Georgia Panteli Kelly Mckisson From Puppet to Cyborg: Pinocchio's Posthuman Journey. By Georgia Panteli. (Studies in Comparative Literature, 40) Cambridge: Legenda. 2022. xi+ 178 pp. £85. ISBN 978–1–781887–12–7. When in 2023 Guillermo Del Toro's stop-motion adaptation of Pinocchio won the Oscar for best animated feature, audiences were again captivated by the adventures of the now one-hundred-and-forty-year-old mischievous puppet. Carlo Collodi's classic, first serialized in an Italian children's magazine in 1881–82, and then expanded and published as a novel in 1883, has been so widely translated and adapted that it remains 'one of the most famous texts in the world' (p. 1). So proclaims the first line of Georgia Panteli's slim book, From Puppet to Cyborg. Panteli's comparative project tracks contemporary retellings of the Pinocchio myth and analyses how they reinterpret and revise the original's concern with a desire to be human. The pleasure of reading Panteli's book comes not from one centrally sustained argument but instead from thought-provoking insights revealed by unearthing Pinocchio elements in multiple recent reimaginings, across three media forms and multiple languages. As the title suggests, Panteli's survey makes a suitable case for the Pinocchio myth, and especially the wooden boy's desires, as an early precursor to posthuman narratives—here, readers should expect the posthumanism aligned with Nick Bostrum's Tn Defense of Posthuman Dignity' (Bioethics, 19.3 (2005), 202–14), which refers to the transhuman or superhuman extension of the human category. Panteli moves from cyborg Pinocchios in science fiction film and television to ironic Pinocchios in postmodern metafiction and then to subversive Pinocchios in contemporary graphic novels, making new use of Collodi's original myth in each instance. The structure and analysis of From Puppet to Cyborg resemble the picaresque journey of Pinocchio's adventures: with few sections longer than fifteen pages, the book's Introduction and Conclusion bookend three parts that are divided into prefatory pieces and nine short chapters. The Introduction is one of the longest sections, providing an overview of the contexts for Collodi's original and subsequent international translations, as well as twentieth-century stage and film adaptations. Here, Panteli makes a case for understanding Pinocchio's part in the fairy-tale tradition, following Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folk Tale (Russian original 1928), as well as Pinocchio's function as modern myth, fitting Joseph Campbell's formula from The Hero with a Thousand Faces (first edition 1949). Outlining the themes and archetypes of the Pinocchio myth—for example, fairy and talking animal characters; moments of confrontation and transformation; the hero's journey [End Page 595] of separation, initiation, and return—allows Panteli to engage these elements as connections for compar","PeriodicalId":45399,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW","volume":"153 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":"134935009","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.a907854
Reviewed by: Imagining the Soul in Premodern Literature by Abe Davies David Parry Imagining the Soul in Premodern Literature. By Abe Davies. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. 2021. xiv+ 244 pp. £109.99. ISBN 978–3–030–66332–2 (pbk 978–3–030–66335–3). Abe Davies's Imagining the Soul in Premodern Literature is an ambitiously wide- ranging and earnestly but often delightfully quirky study of the literary representation of the soul. The definition of 'soul' is a vexed question to which this study repeatedly returns, but Davies has a persuasive working definition: 'the soul is the privileged part of the human that transcends embodiment, and […] represents and guarantees the integrity of selfhood' (p. 5). He suggests that the persistence of this idea over time across varied human cultures is due to the fact that it 'represents] a self […] that is separable from the body and its death' (pp. 14–15). However, this core definition of the soul leaves and to some extent, Davies argues, generates numerous ambiguities. Much of Davies's study is dominated by the teasing out of these ambiguities as they manifest themselves in literary texts. Despite the title gesturing towards a broader premodernity, the texts analysed are primarily from the early modern period. Although his opening introductory chapter offers a broad survey of the history of the soul in classical, biblical, and medieval sources, the one medieval text Davies treats at length is the Old English Soul and Body from the Exeter Book, which Chapter 2 of the book pairs with Marvell's 'A Dialogue between the Soul and Body' as early and late examples of [End Page 608] the body/soul debate genre. Another provocative pairing is found in Chapter 3, which pairs Donne's Anniversary poems with Descartes's Discourse on Method as 'travelogues' of the soul, both using the subjective inner experience of the soul as a reassuring anchor to restore meaning to a cosmos threatened by the 'spatial turn', in which bodies with a fixed place in the order of things had been replaced by bodies with no fixed boundaries extending into an infinite space. Chapter 4 explores the address to the soul in didactic religious writing through the lens of a close reading of Shakespeare's Sonnet 146 ('Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth'), structuring its discussion around the sonnet's images of the soul as military rebel, painted harlot, and prodigal son. Shakespeare is also the key focus of Chapter 5, which develops an innovative argument linking the 'nothingness' of the ghost of Old Hamlet to scientific debates around atomism in which the universe is made up mostly of void space. A brief concluding chapter notes how premodern debates around the body and soul relationship persist into present-day debates surrounding the nature of human consciousness. Davies highlights the early modern period as a transitional one in which classical and Christian notions of a soul that transcends materiality and mortality coexist with emerging challenges fr
{"title":"Imagining the Soul in Premodern Literature by Abe Davies (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/mlr.2023.a907854","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mlr.2023.a907854","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Imagining the Soul in Premodern Literature by Abe Davies David Parry Imagining the Soul in Premodern Literature. By Abe Davies. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. 2021. xiv+ 244 pp. £109.99. ISBN 978–3–030–66332–2 (pbk 978–3–030–66335–3). Abe Davies's Imagining the Soul in Premodern Literature is an ambitiously wide- ranging and earnestly but often delightfully quirky study of the literary representation of the soul. The definition of 'soul' is a vexed question to which this study repeatedly returns, but Davies has a persuasive working definition: 'the soul is the privileged part of the human that transcends embodiment, and […] represents and guarantees the integrity of selfhood' (p. 5). He suggests that the persistence of this idea over time across varied human cultures is due to the fact that it 'represents] a self […] that is separable from the body and its death' (pp. 14–15). However, this core definition of the soul leaves and to some extent, Davies argues, generates numerous ambiguities. Much of Davies's study is dominated by the teasing out of these ambiguities as they manifest themselves in literary texts. Despite the title gesturing towards a broader premodernity, the texts analysed are primarily from the early modern period. Although his opening introductory chapter offers a broad survey of the history of the soul in classical, biblical, and medieval sources, the one medieval text Davies treats at length is the Old English Soul and Body from the Exeter Book, which Chapter 2 of the book pairs with Marvell's 'A Dialogue between the Soul and Body' as early and late examples of [End Page 608] the body/soul debate genre. Another provocative pairing is found in Chapter 3, which pairs Donne's Anniversary poems with Descartes's Discourse on Method as 'travelogues' of the soul, both using the subjective inner experience of the soul as a reassuring anchor to restore meaning to a cosmos threatened by the 'spatial turn', in which bodies with a fixed place in the order of things had been replaced by bodies with no fixed boundaries extending into an infinite space. Chapter 4 explores the address to the soul in didactic religious writing through the lens of a close reading of Shakespeare's Sonnet 146 ('Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth'), structuring its discussion around the sonnet's images of the soul as military rebel, painted harlot, and prodigal son. Shakespeare is also the key focus of Chapter 5, which develops an innovative argument linking the 'nothingness' of the ghost of Old Hamlet to scientific debates around atomism in which the universe is made up mostly of void space. A brief concluding chapter notes how premodern debates around the body and soul relationship persist into present-day debates surrounding the nature of human consciousness. Davies highlights the early modern period as a transitional one in which classical and Christian notions of a soul that transcends materiality and mortality coexist with emerging challenges fr","PeriodicalId":45399,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW","volume":"73 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":"134935244","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.a907864
Reviewed by: Zola's Painters by Robert Lethbridge Claire Moran Zola's Painters. By Robert Lethbridge. (Research Monographs in French Studies, 68) Cambridge: Legenda. 2022. xiii+ 230 pp. £85. ISBN 978–1–83954–079–0. 'It is difficult to dispute the oft-made claim', as Robert Lethbridge writes in his engaging and meticulously researched monograph on Émile Zola, 'that with the possible exception of Baudelaire, no other nineteenth-century writer enjoyed such a close relationship with the art of his time' (p. 24). What Lethbridge reveals, however, over the course of six chapters on Zola's art criticism, discussions on Cézanne, Courbet, Manet, landscape painters, and, interestingly, the Old Masters, is the complexity of, as well as the many paradoxes and contradictions that define, that relationship. The book could easily have borne a subtitle borrowed from one of the chapter subheadings such as 'tensions and contradictions' or 'reflections and refractions', since what Lethbridge unearths is the complicated history of nineteenth-century art and the figures which shaped it. Zola is important not only as a critic but also as a chroniqueur, although these roles were largely self-defined. In his articles for the annual Salons, he details facts and figures that remain historically significant. In 1876, for example, he notes 104,775 visitors in the opening week of the Salon, with 50,000 visitors on the final day, a Sunday, when there was no entry fee (p. 12). But it is Zola's role as critic that Lethbridge scrutinizes. Through careful reading of Zola's correspondence from the 1860s to the 1890s, Lethbridge questions Zola's artistic 'apprenticeship' and the relationships and personal and professional motives that moulded it. The writer's self-belief is never in doubt as from the outset, in 1859, shortly after moving from Aix-en-Provence to Paris, he distinguishes himself from 'des personnes qui se piquent de se connaître en peinture et [qu'il voit] au Salon prendre des ânes pour des vaches' (p. 16). Zola's immense contribution to nineteenth-century criticism is well known (between 1863 and 1869 alone he penned almost four dozen reviews on aesthetics, scholarly books by art historians, and illustrated editions), yet it is his writing on Impressionism, most particularly directly and indirectly on Manet, as well as what has been largely understood as a veiled portrait of Cézanne in L'Œuvre, that has gained most critical attention. What Lethbridge's book does in a subtle yet convincing way is to question the relationships that underscore these texts, both critical and fictional. The figure of Claude Lantier looms large, and the mutually admiring yet thorny relationship of Zola and Cézanne could, as the author notes in his Introduction, merit an entire book. In this chapter, which stands out for its sensitive portrayal of a friendship that unravels, not, as art-historical and literary legend would have it, because of Zola's damning and wounding fictional portrait o
{"title":"Zola's Painters by Robert Lethbridge (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/mlr.2023.a907864","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mlr.2023.a907864","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Zola's Painters by Robert Lethbridge Claire Moran Zola's Painters. By Robert Lethbridge. (Research Monographs in French Studies, 68) Cambridge: Legenda. 2022. xiii+ 230 pp. £85. ISBN 978–1–83954–079–0. 'It is difficult to dispute the oft-made claim', as Robert Lethbridge writes in his engaging and meticulously researched monograph on Émile Zola, 'that with the possible exception of Baudelaire, no other nineteenth-century writer enjoyed such a close relationship with the art of his time' (p. 24). What Lethbridge reveals, however, over the course of six chapters on Zola's art criticism, discussions on Cézanne, Courbet, Manet, landscape painters, and, interestingly, the Old Masters, is the complexity of, as well as the many paradoxes and contradictions that define, that relationship. The book could easily have borne a subtitle borrowed from one of the chapter subheadings such as 'tensions and contradictions' or 'reflections and refractions', since what Lethbridge unearths is the complicated history of nineteenth-century art and the figures which shaped it. Zola is important not only as a critic but also as a chroniqueur, although these roles were largely self-defined. In his articles for the annual Salons, he details facts and figures that remain historically significant. In 1876, for example, he notes 104,775 visitors in the opening week of the Salon, with 50,000 visitors on the final day, a Sunday, when there was no entry fee (p. 12). But it is Zola's role as critic that Lethbridge scrutinizes. Through careful reading of Zola's correspondence from the 1860s to the 1890s, Lethbridge questions Zola's artistic 'apprenticeship' and the relationships and personal and professional motives that moulded it. The writer's self-belief is never in doubt as from the outset, in 1859, shortly after moving from Aix-en-Provence to Paris, he distinguishes himself from 'des personnes qui se piquent de se connaître en peinture et [qu'il voit] au Salon prendre des ânes pour des vaches' (p. 16). Zola's immense contribution to nineteenth-century criticism is well known (between 1863 and 1869 alone he penned almost four dozen reviews on aesthetics, scholarly books by art historians, and illustrated editions), yet it is his writing on Impressionism, most particularly directly and indirectly on Manet, as well as what has been largely understood as a veiled portrait of Cézanne in L'Œuvre, that has gained most critical attention. What Lethbridge's book does in a subtle yet convincing way is to question the relationships that underscore these texts, both critical and fictional. The figure of Claude Lantier looms large, and the mutually admiring yet thorny relationship of Zola and Cézanne could, as the author notes in his Introduction, merit an entire book. In this chapter, which stands out for its sensitive portrayal of a friendship that unravels, not, as art-historical and literary legend would have it, because of Zola's damning and wounding fictional portrait o","PeriodicalId":45399,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW","volume":"143 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":"134935265","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.a907855
Reviewed by: Climate and the Making of Worlds: Toward a Geohistorical Poetics by Tobias Menely Sophie Fordham Climate and the Making of Worlds: Toward a Geohistorical Poetics. By Tobias Menely. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2021. vii+ 269 pp. $27.50. ISBN 978–0–226–77628–6. Energized by Fredric Jameson's coinage in The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London: Methuen, 1981), Tobias Menely's Climate and the Making of Worlds astutely locates the misty gradations of the 'climatological unconscious' in a sample of poems scattered across 140 years of fluctuating atmospheric conditions. Starting with John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667) and closing with Charlotte Smith's Beachy Head (1807), this interdisciplinary and multidimensional critical text yearns to make visible the covert ways in which climate has shaped poetics, by tracing the vicissitudes of both and evidencing why the connection between them is not incidental but generative. It traces the development of poetic mode—from the allegorical, to the descriptive, to the lyrical—across a century-and-a-half of intense energy transition, where meaningful reliance upon a system of solar energy conditioned by the flux of sunlight, wind, and water is phased out by an emerging planetary system and mode of production fuelled by fossil energy. This intertwined poetic and planetary genealogy is sketched out in great detail, through meticulous interdisciplinary research over a decade in the making—and yet the text remains relevant, rehearsing a renewed critical approach to unconsciously climatological poetry that has the potential to transform and better connect the nexus of fields it contributes to. The first chapter leans on an understanding of Paradise Lost as allegory, in order to perform a geohistorical reading of its 'mimetic strata' (p. 48). A significant portion of the chapter is devoted to justifying the allegorical nature of Milton's epic, both responding to and pre-empting further critical resistance to characterizing the poem in a way that is often understood to insufficiently capture the sensitivities to mimetic relation and representation Milton was so consciously attuned to. Menely gets around this somewhat by framing allegory as an unstable and multivalent term in itself, the 'name' for Paradise Lost's 'refusal to offer the reader an interpretive code' (p. 47). The second chapter examines James Thomson's The Seasons (1730), a text which uses description to witness the workings of a natural world circumscribed by seasonal and diurnal patterns, rather than to express a sentimental attachment or [End Page 610] psychological relation to it. The third chapter looks at four industrial georgics which evidence the crisis of description that arose in the late 1700s, as new modes of industrial production—whether in mines, factories, or plantations—were in the process of decoupling from the temporal and geographic realities of an economy controlled by solar energy. The
{"title":"Climate and the Making of Worlds: Toward a Geohistorical Poetics by Tobias Menely (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/mlr.2023.a907855","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mlr.2023.a907855","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Climate and the Making of Worlds: Toward a Geohistorical Poetics by Tobias Menely Sophie Fordham Climate and the Making of Worlds: Toward a Geohistorical Poetics. By Tobias Menely. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2021. vii+ 269 pp. $27.50. ISBN 978–0–226–77628–6. Energized by Fredric Jameson's coinage in The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London: Methuen, 1981), Tobias Menely's Climate and the Making of Worlds astutely locates the misty gradations of the 'climatological unconscious' in a sample of poems scattered across 140 years of fluctuating atmospheric conditions. Starting with John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667) and closing with Charlotte Smith's Beachy Head (1807), this interdisciplinary and multidimensional critical text yearns to make visible the covert ways in which climate has shaped poetics, by tracing the vicissitudes of both and evidencing why the connection between them is not incidental but generative. It traces the development of poetic mode—from the allegorical, to the descriptive, to the lyrical—across a century-and-a-half of intense energy transition, where meaningful reliance upon a system of solar energy conditioned by the flux of sunlight, wind, and water is phased out by an emerging planetary system and mode of production fuelled by fossil energy. This intertwined poetic and planetary genealogy is sketched out in great detail, through meticulous interdisciplinary research over a decade in the making—and yet the text remains relevant, rehearsing a renewed critical approach to unconsciously climatological poetry that has the potential to transform and better connect the nexus of fields it contributes to. The first chapter leans on an understanding of Paradise Lost as allegory, in order to perform a geohistorical reading of its 'mimetic strata' (p. 48). A significant portion of the chapter is devoted to justifying the allegorical nature of Milton's epic, both responding to and pre-empting further critical resistance to characterizing the poem in a way that is often understood to insufficiently capture the sensitivities to mimetic relation and representation Milton was so consciously attuned to. Menely gets around this somewhat by framing allegory as an unstable and multivalent term in itself, the 'name' for Paradise Lost's 'refusal to offer the reader an interpretive code' (p. 47). The second chapter examines James Thomson's The Seasons (1730), a text which uses description to witness the workings of a natural world circumscribed by seasonal and diurnal patterns, rather than to express a sentimental attachment or [End Page 610] psychological relation to it. The third chapter looks at four industrial georgics which evidence the crisis of description that arose in the late 1700s, as new modes of industrial production—whether in mines, factories, or plantations—were in the process of decoupling from the temporal and geographic realities of an economy controlled by solar energy. The ","PeriodicalId":45399,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW","volume":"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":"134933778","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.a907831
Peter Yoonsuk Paik
Abstract: What kind of role does fate play in a world that denies its existence? This article explores this question in relation to 'Alkmene', a tale by Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen), which depicts the relationship between a young nobleman and the title character, an orphan who resists the Christian faith of her adoptive parents. The article examines the mysterious events that conspire to thwart the budding romance between the two. The denial of destiny draws the nobleman into the grip of a demonic silence.
{"title":"Destiny, Discretion, and the Demonic: On Isak Dinesen's 'Alkmene'","authors":"Peter Yoonsuk Paik","doi":"10.1353/mlr.2023.a907831","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mlr.2023.a907831","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: What kind of role does fate play in a world that denies its existence? This article explores this question in relation to 'Alkmene', a tale by Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen), which depicts the relationship between a young nobleman and the title character, an orphan who resists the Christian faith of her adoptive parents. The article examines the mysterious events that conspire to thwart the budding romance between the two. The denial of destiny draws the nobleman into the grip of a demonic silence.","PeriodicalId":45399,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW","volume":"2014 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":"134933788","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}
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