Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1353/sdn.2023.a905812
Kirstin L. Squint
Decolonial Fiction and the American Third World is a fascinating study of US multi-ethnic literature of the late twentieth century, reading planetary motion as a form of resistance against oppressive colonial and capitalist forces
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Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1353/sdn.2023.a905809
Reviewed by: Against Better Judgment: Irrational Action and Literary Invention in the Long Eighteenth Century by Thomas Salem Manganaro Stephanie Insley Hershinow MANGANARO, THOMAS SALEM. Against Better Judgment: Irrational Action and Literary Invention in the Long Eighteenth Century. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2022. 250 pp. $95.00 cloth; $39.50 paperback; $29.50 e-book. I kept meaning to write this review of Thomas Salem Manganaro's Against Better Judgment: Irrational Action and Literary Invention in the Long Eighteenth Century, a [End Page 348] learned and engaging book about how literature and philosophy differently approach problems of intention and action. But then, there were always other tasks that seemed a bit more urgent—grading and emails, meetings and, well, more emails. And of course there was Twitter to scroll. So, while I wanted to tell you about Manganaro's careful close readings and playful explications of philosophical writing, I also kept putting it off. Fortunately for me, Against Better Judgment recurs to the example of procrastination as a particularly resonant form of akrasia—that phenomenon wherein one recognizes what action is right and acts otherwise anyway. So even as the review remained incomplete, Manganaro prompted me to think about my own failure, that stubborn irrationality, with new depth. This is a book that compels the reader to reflect on personal experience, on all of the ways that we have struggled with our own judgment and the other things that get in the way. But more forcefully, the book prompts renewed attention to some thorny moments in long eighteenth-century literature, and it gives us a vocabulary to understand those moments' operations in a new way. Manganaro takes as his subject the ancient Greek concept of akrasia, which later enters Christian thought as what St. Augustine calls "weakness of the will." Some of the examples in the text pick up on the inheritance of this religious context, while others take the akratic on new journeys. Among a strong recent slate of books on eighteenth-century literature and philosophy, Manganaro's stands out for its ingenious approach: he considers a concept absent in eighteenth-century philosophy rather than one at its center. A complement to Jonathan Kramnick's Actions and Objects (Stanford University Press, 2010), which is energized by the nondistinction between philosophy and literature in the eighteenth century, Manganaro instead illuminates places where philosophy and literature become distinct, developing their own methodologies and commitments. As he explains, an influential line of Enlightenment thought all but eliminated the possibility of akrasia when it moved away from teleological forms of explanation. By these accounts, it's simply not possible to act against one's judgment; one is instead just a dupe of other, stronger forces. This gap in philosophy opens up an opportunity for literature. As Manganaro makes clear, however unthinkabl
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Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1353/sdn.2023.a905807
Kyle McAuley
I will end on this note, Deleuze’s idea of a “new image of thought.” If this volume tells us anything about Proust’s proximity to philosophy, it is that, while we would not be amiss in expressing trepidation about calling him a philosopher outright, he most certainly invites us—really, urges us—to think in a new way. This volume, hopefully, will close the book on attempts to either align Proust’s work with a particular philosopher or to expound upon a supposed Proustian philosophy. What we have here is an attempt to push beyond this tendency, to read Proust on his own terms, which also means reading him beyond himself, beyond any of his “theories.” As the editors write of the Recherche: “The narrator treats the production of art as one way, perhaps the best and only way, to expose, preserve and communicate the deeper reality, and corresponding joy, which has been encountered in experiences of involuntary memory and in certain other revelatory experiences which are not straightforwardly memories of any kind” (4). To take Proust’s philosophical import seriously, it seems, is to read his novel, but not only that. We must experience the joy of what his hero, along with him, has undergone.
{"title":"The Victorian Novel and the Problems of Marine Language: All at Sea by Matthew P. M. Kerr (review)","authors":"Kyle McAuley","doi":"10.1353/sdn.2023.a905807","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sdn.2023.a905807","url":null,"abstract":"I will end on this note, Deleuze’s idea of a “new image of thought.” If this volume tells us anything about Proust’s proximity to philosophy, it is that, while we would not be amiss in expressing trepidation about calling him a philosopher outright, he most certainly invites us—really, urges us—to think in a new way. This volume, hopefully, will close the book on attempts to either align Proust’s work with a particular philosopher or to expound upon a supposed Proustian philosophy. What we have here is an attempt to push beyond this tendency, to read Proust on his own terms, which also means reading him beyond himself, beyond any of his “theories.” As the editors write of the Recherche: “The narrator treats the production of art as one way, perhaps the best and only way, to expose, preserve and communicate the deeper reality, and corresponding joy, which has been encountered in experiences of involuntary memory and in certain other revelatory experiences which are not straightforwardly memories of any kind” (4). To take Proust’s philosophical import seriously, it seems, is to read his novel, but not only that. We must experience the joy of what his hero, along with him, has undergone.","PeriodicalId":54138,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN THE NOVEL","volume":"55 1","pages":"343 - 345"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44650002","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1353/sdn.2023.a905813
Katie Lanning
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Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1353/sdn.2023.a905803
Iana W. Robitaille
Abstract:This article reads Ling Ma's Severance (2018) for its account of the racial entanglement of transnational mobility, settler capitalism, and homemaking, a dynamic referred to as alien domesticity. The novel narrativizes how the transnational circulation of capital, peoples, and labor over the past four decades has complicated the domestic character of US settler-racial form—and the settler-capitalist character of the domestic novel. I posit alien domesticity as a revision of Amy Kaplan's "manifest domesticity," engaging Asian American and settler colonial studies critiques of the racial logic of settler capitalism to read Severance as a contemporary assessment of American middle-class homemaking and its part in a racial civilizing project. Insofar as it frames Candace Chen's transnational labor with her unsettled movement among various domestic spaces, Severance thus discloses the function of alien domesticity: ultimately, I contend, Candace's competing duties of representation result in her transnational alienation from the novel's domestic narrative.
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Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1353/sdn.2023.a905811
Paul Stasi
{"title":"Ireland, Revolution, and the English Modernist Imagination by Eve Patten (review)","authors":"Paul Stasi","doi":"10.1353/sdn.2023.a905811","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sdn.2023.a905811","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":54138,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN THE NOVEL","volume":"55 1","pages":"353 - 355"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42147924","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1353/sdn.2023.a905801
Roberto del Valle Alcalá
Abstract:This article offers a substantial reinterpretation of Mary Barton in terms of Robert Owen's ideas, especially as outlined in his early tract A New View of Society. The article contends that Gaskell's novel stages a significant reassessment of the transformative possibilities of nineteenth-century paternalism. It also suggests, drawing on the work of Jacques Derrida, that the reformist aspirations of a utopian thinker such as Owen can only be articulated "spectrally" in the context of Victorian class conflict: that is, by positing the kind of presence that only an irremediable absence can enable and register.
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plan their profit models. In an October 2022 essay for Public Books, “Where is All the Book Data?”, Melanie Walsh discovered that the company BookScan collates and distributes data to major publishers but the collated data in question is explicitly banned from being used for scholarly projects. This is part of the impetus for projects like Laura McGrath and Dan Sinykin’s Post45 Data Collective, an open-access repository for literary and cultural data to gain insights from a variety of sources, including library circulation numbers and how publishing house decisions effect the distribution of work by authors based on race and ethnicity. Both corporate and open-access approaches nonetheless face daunting barriers to providing clear causality on how, for example, an academic text might escape the backwaters of research collections and enter into the awareness of a mainstream readership. In response to Lincoln Michel’s Counter Craft blog post “No, Most Books Don’t Sell Only a Dozen Copies: A little post on why publishing statistics are so confusing,” BookScan’s lead industry analyst, Kristen McLean, thoughtfully weighed in on why so many statistics appearing in the public record from events like the DOJ’s antitrust case against the $2.2 billion Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster merger can nonetheless end up offering little to no clarity on actual people reading the actual words of a book. Beyond how someone chooses their tranche of sales data, even BookScan’s numbers don’t include “direct sales from publishers...sales by authors at events, or through websites, eBook sales, or any reading through platforms like Substack, Wattpad, Webtoons, Kindle Direct, or library lending platforms like OverDrive or Hoopla” (Michel). The result is that the economics of book sales are both difficult to access or parse and even harder to link to the kind of effective conceptual impact that Leckie pursues by initiating divergent forms of writing. It appears that those of us committed to the work of cultural critique and interpretation must make decisions about what constitutes our own reading public without any clarity of how that imagined community necessarily coincides with the industry reality of publics that read. Is the primary purpose of writing scholarly monographs and articles to be read by a niche group of likewise informed scholars who then reciprocate with their own contributions to disciplinary ways of knowing? Leckie expresses a deep dissatisfaction with these cloistered networks of knowledge formation, and, in doing so, has written a book that would not easily circulate within the logic of field citation. Lists of self-help tips to avoid ending up a modern-day Casaubon are not generally cited as evidence in academic arguments, but perhaps the possibility that such a venture may act as a communal rallying cry for climate action is worth the sacrifice of losing that mode of citational immortality. Whether Leckie’s work will mobilize academic readers
{"title":"Against Better Judgment","authors":"","doi":"10.2307/jj.5501135","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.5501135","url":null,"abstract":"plan their profit models. In an October 2022 essay for Public Books, “Where is All the Book Data?”, Melanie Walsh discovered that the company BookScan collates and distributes data to major publishers but the collated data in question is explicitly banned from being used for scholarly projects. This is part of the impetus for projects like Laura McGrath and Dan Sinykin’s Post45 Data Collective, an open-access repository for literary and cultural data to gain insights from a variety of sources, including library circulation numbers and how publishing house decisions effect the distribution of work by authors based on race and ethnicity. Both corporate and open-access approaches nonetheless face daunting barriers to providing clear causality on how, for example, an academic text might escape the backwaters of research collections and enter into the awareness of a mainstream readership. In response to Lincoln Michel’s Counter Craft blog post “No, Most Books Don’t Sell Only a Dozen Copies: A little post on why publishing statistics are so confusing,” BookScan’s lead industry analyst, Kristen McLean, thoughtfully weighed in on why so many statistics appearing in the public record from events like the DOJ’s antitrust case against the $2.2 billion Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster merger can nonetheless end up offering little to no clarity on actual people reading the actual words of a book. Beyond how someone chooses their tranche of sales data, even BookScan’s numbers don’t include “direct sales from publishers...sales by authors at events, or through websites, eBook sales, or any reading through platforms like Substack, Wattpad, Webtoons, Kindle Direct, or library lending platforms like OverDrive or Hoopla” (Michel). The result is that the economics of book sales are both difficult to access or parse and even harder to link to the kind of effective conceptual impact that Leckie pursues by initiating divergent forms of writing. It appears that those of us committed to the work of cultural critique and interpretation must make decisions about what constitutes our own reading public without any clarity of how that imagined community necessarily coincides with the industry reality of publics that read. Is the primary purpose of writing scholarly monographs and articles to be read by a niche group of likewise informed scholars who then reciprocate with their own contributions to disciplinary ways of knowing? Leckie expresses a deep dissatisfaction with these cloistered networks of knowledge formation, and, in doing so, has written a book that would not easily circulate within the logic of field citation. Lists of self-help tips to avoid ending up a modern-day Casaubon are not generally cited as evidence in academic arguments, but perhaps the possibility that such a venture may act as a communal rallying cry for climate action is worth the sacrifice of losing that mode of citational immortality. Whether Leckie’s work will mobilize academic readers ","PeriodicalId":54138,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN THE NOVEL","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42790932","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1353/sdn.2023.a899462
L. Craig
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Pub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1353/sdn.2023.a899470
A. Dean
Abstract:The article considers the nature and value of comic expression in Saul Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970). It begins by taking note of the many public statements Bellow made about the stifling qualities of what he came to call “low seriousness,” the mode he saw as alive in mid-century literary reception. It then shows how Bellow’s comic strategies revise his otherwise overwhelming tendency toward public intellectualizing—and how these ultimately ground a case for literary distinctiveness. The article then focuses on how Mr. Sammler’s Planet makes a mockery of instrumentalized understandings of the legacies of the Shoah, of whatever stripe. This in turn troubles critical attempts to translate the book into some specific political or moral insight. This article demonstrates how the novel levels disturbing thoughts about the ultimate irredeemability of recent history, as we experience all forms of seriousness being stalked by the ghosts of unseriousness.
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