AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW最新文献

{"title":"The Nomad in Situ, or, the Man of the Crowd in the Time of COVID","authors":"Robert T. Tally Jr.","doi":"10.1353/abr.2024.a929669","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2024.a929669","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> The Nomad <em>in Situ</em>, or, the Man of the Crowd in the Time of COVID <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Robert T. Tally Jr. (bio) </li> </ul> <p>The emergence of the global pandemic and ongoing COVID-19 crisis has fostered a profound and personal awareness of space and place, such that one's apprehension of one's place in space is perhaps all the more <em>real</em> than it may have seemed a year or two earlier. That is, everyday life under the effects of COVID-19 has become marked with a sense of place, as thousands or millions of individual subjects found themselves facing stay-at-home orders, lockdowns, quarantines, curfews, closures, travel restrictions, and the now ubiquitous concept of social distancing, a phrase that quite literally draws our attention to one's \"place\" relative to that of others, right down to maintaining a space of six feet between ourselves and our fellow humans. What Heidegger called \"the They\" seems all the more ominous in this respect, and the <em>Angst</em> he identified with the <em>Unheimlich</em> or \"uncanny\" and with \"not being at home\" (\"<em>nichts-zu-Hause-sein</em>\") takes on new resonances as well, when people are being anxiously reminded to stay at home, a rather uncanny state to be in, or else being warned to keep our distance when in the public spaces of the <em>agora</em>. Our most homely settings are all the more <em>unheimlich</em> today, and the familiar space of one's apartment or house seems now truly uncanny for so many people.</p> <p>In my <em>Topophrenia: Place, Narrative, and the Spatial Imagination</em> and elsewhere, I have suggested that the experience of being lost is probably the condition under which we are most viscerally aware of space and place. The <em>Angst</em>-ridden disorientation, fear, and dread that comes with not knowing where we are and how to get to where we want to be: this makes us all too conscious of our <em>place</em>, or perhaps our <em>displacement</em>, in space. But for many living in the COVID era the experience of spatial limitation, of being forced to stay in one's place or to restrict one's movements to a specified number or type of relatively familiar, <em>known</em> places, carries with it a powerful sense <strong>[End Page 79]</strong> of our spatiality and our situatedness in space, with similar levels of anxiety. The places where we find ourselves located are not at all unfamiliar, especially when we are literally staying \"at home,\" but the <em>situation</em> is changed. Home is no longer quite so homely, and this is a profoundly \"unsettling\" experience.</p> <p>Here I should add, parenthetically but significantly, due recognition of all those people for whom working from home is and was not an option. I am hopeful, though not very confident, that one result of the pervasive COVID-19 crisis and its aftermath will be for more and more peopl","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-06-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141516017","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}

{"title":"Afterlives: Recovering the Lost Stories of Looted Art by Darsie Alexander and Sam Sackeroff (review)","authors":"Jessi Rae Morton","doi":"10.1353/abr.2024.a929680","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2024.a929680","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Afterlives: Recovering the Lost Stories of Looted Art</em> by Darsie Alexander and Sam Sackeroff <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Jessi Rae Morton (bio) </li> </ul> <em><small>afterlives: recovering the lost stories of looted art</small></em><br/> Darsie Alexander and Sam Sackeroff<br/> Yale University Press<br/> https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300250701/afterlives/<br/> 280 pages; Print, $50.00 <p><em>Afterlives: Recovering the Lost Stories of Looted Art</em>, by Darsie Alexander and Sam Sackeroff, began as an exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York, and its first run was interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. For those of us who were unable to view the exhibition in 2020 or during its second presentation (from August 2021 to January 2022), Alexander and Sackeroff's book provides a potential alternative by incorporating and cataloging large portions of the exhibit. The book consists of four essays, one each by the authors as well as contributions from Julia Voss and Mark Wasiuta, alongside numerous photos, reproductions of artworks, and smaller sections dealing with specific elements of the topic in more detail.</p> <p>When <em>Afterlives</em> first arrived in my mailbox, its physical presence was immediate and undeniable. With its stunning cover and its many pages of images, the book appears more like a coffee-table book than an academic text. The physical presence of the book is part of its main point, after all. Alexander and Sackeroff offer an opportunity to engage with objects and artworks that have been looted, lost, and damaged, and their book powerfully presences these objects. According to Alexander's essay, Walter Benjamin \"understood that history … is capable of inflicting blows not only on the people who get erased from its record but on things that either survive or don't.\" <em>Afterlives</em> \"is populated by the testimonies of those objects and the people who helped them survive to be seen today.\"</p> <p><em>Afterlives</em> prioritizes the idea that \"all works of art tell stories, but sometimes they are also actors in a larger and broader narrative.\" In this case, the <strong>[End Page 144]</strong> broader narratives are World War II, Nazi looting, and the Holocaust. Following the book's introduction, in an essay that focuses on visual art, Alexander points out that some works reproduced in the text \"were destroyed or remain lost, surviving only in reproductions.\" She provides a thorough overview of the process of Nazi looting, including how books and artworks were sought, documented, and transported. She also explains the recovery and preservation efforts with special attention to actions by women which have sometimes been overshadowed by the better-known Monuments Men in other works on the subject.</p> <p>In his essay \"Reconstructing Culture,\" Sackeroff prioritizes books a","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-06-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141516025","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}

{"title":"The Heartbreak of Desire","authors":"E. Ethelbert Miller","doi":"10.1353/abr.2024.a929663","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2024.a929663","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> The Heartbreak of Desire <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> E. Ethelbert Miller (bio) </li> </ul> <p>In 2001, Red Dragonfly Press published my book <em>Buddha Weeping in Winter</em>. This collection was an outgrowth of my interest in Buddhism. I am not a Buddhist, but perhaps I am a Buddhist at heart. What motivates and guides me is not a doctrine or sacred text but a way of looking at the world, a way of acknowledging life in living things, a way of knowing that everything begins with a way of questioning. Poets are not philosophers, but their troubling minds often struggle to translate beauty into words. Where does such beauty come from? How does one know that what one sees is real? And after turning away from beauty, how does one embrace the waves of ugliness in the world? How does one look beyond the horizon and the shore? How does a poet write of love after suffering the heartbreak of desire and the disappointment in social movements that fail?</p> <p>I was beginning the decade of my fifties back in 2001. For thirty years I had been reading books about Sufism, Eastern religions, and Zen Buddhism. In 1970, Reginald Hudgins, my college roommate at Howard University, returned from Philadelphia at the start of the second semester with a small flute and a book by Jiddu Krishnamurti. Where he had once burned incense to cover the smell of reefer, he now burn sandalwood, frankincense, and myrrh and took on a more contemplative demeanor. It might have been called meditation if he had closed his eyes. A shared space in a college dorm can affect your life more than a lecture or science lab. Reggie's interest in Eastern philosophy renewed my interest in religion. I never told my mother I wanted to follow in my older brother Richard's footsteps. Didn't he become a Trappist monk? Did he not leave behind his Thomas Merton books in the hallway closet? Oh, I was always opening the doors to closets and looking to see what was hidden in the dark. Oh, the wonder of it all when I closed my eyes and said my prayers. Who or what was I praying to, and did I dare?</p> <p>Around 1970, I was searching for something while deciding to become a <strong>[End Page 50]</strong> writer. I was wrestling with trying to determine the difference between loneliness and solitude. How often did I find myself in a crowded space sitting by myself? My first poems were love poems and primarily poems of desire, word sketches from across the room. I was not a social person. I avoided parties and dancing. I was bookish and wore glasses. I was skinny, or what a kind person might consider lanky. I spent time thinking about the meaning of life and the existence of God. I had read in <em>Time</em> magazine that God was dead. So I feared the possibility of another funeral in Brooklyn and a long trip from the Bronx to a neighborhood of Hasidic Jews and West Indians. Even when t","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-06-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141516012","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}

{"title":"When the World Walks toward You by Myra Shapiro (review)","authors":"Bonny Finberg","doi":"10.1353/abr.2024.a929673","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2024.a929673","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>When the World Walks toward You</em> by Myra Shapiro <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Bonny Finberg (bio) </li> </ul> <em><small>when the world walks toward you</small></em><br/> Myra Shapiro<br/> Kelsay Books<br/> https://kelsaybooks.com/products/when-the-world-walks-toward-you?_pos=1&amp;_sid=05092cd9c&amp;_ss=r<br/> 75 pages; Print, $16.50 <blockquote> <p><span>Throw a word into the room</span><span> And see where it goes.</span></p> </blockquote> <p>These words reflect Myra Shapiro's love affair with language and, more broadly, with the world.</p> <p>Her latest book of poems isn't a \"collected poems\" but rather a documentation of an arrival, a travelogue, guiding us through the stops and starts, the destinations reached, on a long, eventful life. It's her personal road map: ancestral precedents, a multitude of pivotal points, transformative events, and emotional milestones that culminate from forks in the road, those taken and not taken, decisions delayed, the triumphant realization of dreams along the way, abundant rewards and inevitable losses—in other words, life.</p> <p>Shapiro's life is woven of many lives, one thread leading to and joining another until a unified tapestry is apparent. She gifts us with sharp-eyed insights into her developing self, from youth to old age, from daughter to lover to wife to mother—to <em>widow</em>—where she finds herself at this moment in time. She is more than any one of these things, and so much more than the sum of their parts.</p> <p>In this slim yet epic-like collection, Shapiro gives us a clear-eyed, nearly telescopic look into her life through which our own lives—past, present, future—might be viewed. Often, the telescope, meant to bring what is in the distance, the inevitable future, closer, is replaced with her microscopic eye, bringing us closer to what is essential, firmly situated in the moment.</p> <p>Her trajectory from a warm Jewish childhood, through a southern suburb, the love of a husband and children, balancing all this while becoming a librarian, a teacher, a graduate student, to fully realized poet living in New York City, are revealed in exquisitely condensed language: <strong>[End Page 101]</strong></p> <blockquote> <p><span>In the avocado green of a kitchen,</span><span>a 50s marriage, children,</span><span> I wanted wings, I wanted Paris</span></p> </blockquote> <p>Grief, whose shadow she was born into, runs through this collection. Born after a sister died at eleven years of age, Shapiro must have felt grief's phantom early in life. Decades later, visiting her sister's tiny, overgrown grave, left untouched for eighty years, she brings us close to the haunting presence, the living absence, death's survival within the living.</p> <p>These poems reveal how, in memory, life defeats death. Shapiro reminds us that memory is served up by t","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-06-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141516020","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}

{"title":"Conspiracy Theories and Latin American History: Lurking in the Shadows by Luis Roniger and Leonardo Senkman (review)","authors":"Katerina Hatzikidi","doi":"10.1353/abr.2024.a929660","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2024.a929660","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Conspiracy Theories and Latin American History: Lurking in the Shadows</em> by Luis Roniger and Leonardo Senkman <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Katerina Hatzikidi (bio) </li> </ul> <em><small>conspiracy theories and latin american history: lurking in the shadows</small></em><br/> Luis Roniger and Leonardo Senkman<br/> Routledge<br/> https://www.routledge.com/Conspiracy-Theories-and-Latin-American-History-Lurking-in-the-Shadows/Roniger-Senkman/p/book/9781032052373<br/> 278 pages; Print, $48.95 <p>Countries at war, the death of a prosecutor on the eve of his testimony before Congress, and the massacre of thousands of citizens targeted as \"internal enemies\" are some of the events, quite distant in time and space, that come under scrutiny in Luis Roniger and Leonardo Senkman's book. What they all have in common are conspiracy theories that attempt to either <em>a posteriori</em> make sense of often large-scale events (such as the war between Bolivia and Paraguay, allegedly motivated by the competition between two foreign oil companies who wanted control of the Chaco region) or <em>a priori</em> convince of the imminent threat a given \"enemy\" is posing to society at large (as was largely believed to be the case for citizens of Haitian descent in 1937 Dominican Republic). <em>Conspiracy Theories and Latin American History: Lurking in the Shadows</em> meticulously explores conspiracism in Latin America, offering a rich and wide-ranging discussion of an ever-present phenomenon.</p> <p>No conspiracy theory is deemed wild enough to be unworthy of careful examination. Indeed, the authors caution against sharp distinctions, noting that the boundaries between actual conspiracies and conspiracy theories \"are often ambiguous and open to multiple interpretations.\" In their understanding, conspiracy theories usually have a \"factual basis\" but \"selectively highlight some facts and discredit others\" in order to force associations and create narratives about \"a conspiratorial master plan.\" And in a region like Latin America, with a long history of real plots and conspiracies changing the course of events, it is unsurprising that suspicion and conspiracism often find fertile ground.</p> <p>For Roniger and Senkman, conspiracy theories reveal both an underlying logic that searches for order when sociohistorical conjunctures are experienced <strong>[End Page 37]</strong> as particularly confusing and chaotic, and a theory of power with tremendous mobilizing potential. Their non-pathologizing approach to conspiracy theories borrows from ethnography when it insists on contextualizing conspiratorial narratives and analyzing the \"specific circumstances of their emergence, resonance, and implications.\" A stated aim of the book is to understand what factors contribute to making certain conspiracy theories attractive at given ","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-06-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141507565","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}

{"title":"That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore: On the Death and Rebirth of Comedy by Lou Perez (review)","authors":"Robert Kramer","doi":"10.1353/abr.2024.a929679","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2024.a929679","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore: On the Death and Rebirth of Comedy</em> by Lou Perez <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Robert Kramer (bio) </li> </ul> <em><small>that joke isn't funny anymore: on the death and rebirth of comedy</small></em><br/> Lou Perez<br/> Bombardier Books<br/> https://posthillpress.com/book/that-joke-isnt-funny-anymore-on-the-death-and-rebirth-of-comedy<br/> 252 pages; Print, $18.00 <p>Warning: There may be passages in this book (and in this review) that some readers will find offensive. However, I do not consider this problematic. I think it is healthy to confront opinions and attitudes different from ours, because it may encourage us to examine our own views more closely and perhaps even rethink them and modify them if necessary.</p> <p>But what kind of book is this? The subtitle proclaims its subject is \"the Death and Rebirth of Comedy.\" Yet this volume is much more than that.</p> <p>Among other things, it is a sort of autobiography of a minority artist, a discussion of the goals and possibilities of comedy in general, a statement of some of the author's theories on the subject, a primer on becoming a comedian, an indictment of some of the excesses of political correctness and wokism, and a compendium of wisecracks and funny stories. It shines an alternative light on the many moods of America today.</p> <p>At its core, <em>That Joke</em> is essentially serious. It deals with some major problems, issues, and tensions in American society, with varying degrees of depth and gravity. For Perez, one of the underlying causes of tension in the US today is the tendency to think in terms of group membership, whether ethnic, racial, religious, or economic, while ignoring or underestimating individual differences within each group. Such an attitude leads to demands for quotas, which can be divisive and self-defeating. <strong>[End Page 140]</strong></p> <p>Perez does not focus on the major long-term problems of racial discrimination in the United States, although, of course, he does not deny them. Rather, he calls attention to the dangers in the implementation and dissemination of certain woke theories. For example, he cites the opinions of woke leader Ibram X. Kendi, the author of multiple <em>New York Times</em> best-sellers and winner of a MacArthur \"Genius Grant.\"</p> <p>Kendi claims that the concept of intelligence is purely subjective and seems to agree with my congressman, Jamaal Bowman, that \"standardized testing is the pillar of systemic racism,\" as if it would be better not to know the facts, better not to know what needs to be fixed. Kendi's parents had told him that education and hard work would uplift him, \"just as it had uplifted them, and would, in the end, uplift all black people.\" Kendi calls such attitudes assimilationist or products of belief in white supremacy.</p> <p","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-06-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141516024","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}

{"title":"Perennial Conspiracy Theory: Reflections on the History of \"The Protocols of the Elders of Zion\" by Michael Hagemeister (review)","authors":"Claus Oberhauser","doi":"10.1353/abr.2024.a929661","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2024.a929661","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Perennial Conspiracy Theory: Reflections on the History of \"The Protocols of the Elders of Zion\"</em> by Michael Hagemeister <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Claus Oberhauser (bio) </li> </ul> <em><small>perennial conspiracy theory: reflections on the history of \"the protocols of the elders of zion\"</small></em><br/> Michael Hagemeister<br/> Routledge<br/> https://www.routledge.com/The-Perennial-Conspiracy-Theory-Reflections-on-the-History-of-The-Protocols/Hagemeister/p/book/9781032060156<br/> 148 pages; Print, $24.95 <p>Reading research reviews on conspiracy theories or following experts on television talking about them, it is noticeable that historians are in the minority. Furthermore, the phenomenon of conspiracy theories is often reduced to contemporary issues such as the impact of social media and the dangers to democracy. However, the study of historical conspiracy theories can help to understand these current concerns better.</p> <p><em>The Protocols of the Elders of Zion</em> is an essential text of Western conspiracy thinking and is considered one of the most important antisemitic publications of all time. Norman Cohn, the author of an influential book on the <em>Protocols</em>, called them a <em>Warrant for Genocide</em> (1967). To this day, researchers have yet to identify the author or the exact context of their origin. Were they passed down orally as early as the 1890s, or were they written around 1902? Were they a reaction to the publication of Theodor Herzl's <em>The Jewish State</em> (1896)? The more answers historical research provides, the more new questions arise.</p> <p>For a long time now, the reception of the <em>Protocols</em> has been detached from its historical origins, and nowadays one can read entire graphic novels dealing with them. But their content is as mysterious as their origins. The reader needs to find out where the action takes place. It is a reproduction of speeches at several meetings. In a loose way, one learns about a long-planned conspiracy to dominate the world with the help of Freemasons and other actors. In the end, the reader has to deal with a negative utopia. The goal of the conspiracy is a new society without social conflict. The state controls an ignorant populace, and people are happy and content. <strong>[End Page 41]</strong></p> <p>How could this poorly written text have such an impact? Hagemeister's essays, now available in English, are everything one would want from a historical study of conspiracy theories: they are based on sources, place the actors in the historical context, attempt to interpret the content of the <em>Protocols</em> in a historical-critical manner, and show which networks were involved in their creation and reception. Hagemeister's slim book is thus a much-needed corrective to research that has long chased a myth. Moreover,","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-06-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141507566","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}

{"title":"Scenes: MadHat Press: An Interview with Marc Vincenz","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/abr.2024.a929682","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2024.a929682","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Scenes<span>MadHat Press: An Interview with Marc Vincenz</span> <!-- /html_title --></li> </ul> <h2>Could you briefly describe your press's history?</h2> <p>The late Carol Novack and I conceived MadHat Press in 2010 as a print offshoot of the online journal <em>Mad Hatters' Review</em> (which had been going for nearly eight years prior). The first title we signed was by the poet, novelist, and anthropologist Hugh Fox, a few months before his passing. Unfortunately, neither Hugh nor Carol ever got to see any MadHat books in print. In a bizarre and tragic turn of events, Carol also died suddenly shortly after Christmas in Hendersonville, North Carolina. In the beginning, we were unsure whether we could continue.</p> <p>Some months later, the shock wave subsided. At the time I was living in Iceland, and it seemed a daunting task to work from the other side of the Atlantic with our authors and our press based in the US. As it turned out, working virtually, with fellow editors across the globe, Iceland proved to be an ideal starting point: it slipped right into the time zone between Europe and the US, but more importantly, those sprawling lunar landscapes gave us a non-gravitational view on literature, an alien eye. Without that wavering somewhere on the unknown horizon, I doubt MadHat Press would have come into being.</p> <p>Hugh's poetry collection, <em>Primate Fox</em>, and the two chapbooks from MadHat's first and only chapbook competition (selected by the ever-effervescent C. A. Conrad) were released in early 2012. Since then, Mad-Hat Press has published over 150 titles, the latest of which are Wang Ping's <em>The River Within</em>; Maxine Chernoff's selected poems, <em>Light and Clay</em>; and Peter Johnson's collected prose poems, <em>While the Untertaker Sleeps</em>.</p> <h2>How would you characterize the work you publish?</h2> <p>Carol's personal vision was wild, whacky, experimental, eclectic, and collaborative. We have done our best to continue her tradition, publishing work that stretches imaginative and structural boundaries. Although we <strong>[End Page 154]</strong> began predominantly as a poetry press, we have since expanded into fiction, and, more recently, criticism. Generally speaking, we lean toward passionate, lyrical, and explosive work, well crafted and somewhat cerebral. We lean toward the experimental: linguistically, sonically, imagistically; narratives that are not necessary linear; literary work that stands the test of time.</p> <h2>Who is your audience, and in what ways are you trying to reach them?</h2> <p>Any reader who craves fresh, original literary works.</p> <p>Insofar as getting the word out is concerned, we participate in AWP, the New Orleans Poetry Festival, the Brooklyn Book Fair, and other regional conferences and exhibitions every year, hold readings and book events as often as we can—som","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-06-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141516027","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}

{"title":"Speaking in Translation, or Speaking in Tongues","authors":"Brian O'Keeffe","doi":"10.1353/abr.2024.a929670","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2024.a929670","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Speaking in Translation, or Speaking in Tongues <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Brian O'Keeffe (bio) </li> </ul> <p>In his poem \"Belderg,\" Seamus Heaney converses with a man from Ireland's County Mayo. Plowing his fields, the Mayo farmer unearths fragments of old millstones—so old as to date from the times when the Vikings came to Ireland. \"They just kept turning up / And were thought of as foreign,\" says the man. Foreign they aren't, however: the soils of Ireland are cluttered with the relics and shards of newcomers—sometimes invaders—who began as foreigners to the island and then turned native. The talk turns to language: it too is a soil, deep with sediment, strewn with the broken stubs of putatively foreign words, but words that have nevertheless long since been added to the languages Ireland considers native and hence the languages of home itself. Heaney invokes the name of the homestead where he used to live—Mossbawn:</p> <blockquote> <p><span>So I talked of Mossbawn,</span><span>A bogland name. \"But Moss?\"</span><span>He crossed my old home's music</span><span>With older strains of Norse.</span><span>I'd told how its foundation</span><span>Was mutable as sound</span><span>And how I could derive</span><span>A forked root from that ground</span><span>And make bawn an English fort,</span><span>A planter's walled-in mound.</span><span>Or else find sanctuary</span><span>And think of it as Irish,</span><span>Persistent if outworn.</span></p> </blockquote> <p>The Mayo man's question is well taken: \"bawn\" sounds Gaelic but \"moss\" sounds English. How did the place-name for Heaney's home become a splice <strong>[End Page 85]</strong> of Gaelic and English? Indeed, couldn't it be parsed anew through the strains of Norse? But Heaney knows well enough that language is always forked—etymology tells us this. The <em>etymon</em> almost immediately divides and splits, word roots diverge and spread into the layered earths of language, grafting the names of home to the history of the foreign. So translate \"bawn\" into \"fort\" if you wish. Accent, by that translation, the history of English foreigners. Consider that a discreet theory of politics: didn't the Greeks tell us that politics began with the walled-in enclosures of the city, of the <em>polis</em>? Or translate \"bawn\" still into Irish (Heaney's poem is written in English) and consider linguistic sanctuaries beyond the pale, the <em>palum</em>, precarious refuges from the hegemony of English.</p> <p>What I retain from Heaney's poem are those forked roots emerging from words. I also retain the way Heaney speaks of the \"crossing\" of linguistic music—language, for him, is a matter of mesh, imbrication, and cross-weave. But consider, now, the denizens of the crossroads and intersections between languages: aren't they translators, in a sense? Translators are intercessors and intermediaries","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-06-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141516018","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}

{"title":"Elegy for Elegy","authors":"Daniel T. O'Hara","doi":"10.1353/abr.2024.a929683","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2024.a929683","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Elegy for Elegy <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Daniel T. O'Hara (bio) </li> </ul> <p>Jeffrey T. Nealon's new book, <em>Elegy for Literature</em>, is a scathing critique of the profession of literary study. It lays out succinctly the post–World War II anatomy of its current status as a bitter joke in academe only a bit higher on the public totem pole of magazine status than <em>Animal House</em>–style fraternities. And that is the extent of the good news.</p> <p>Basically, due to a combination of economic mismanagement, thanks to the wholesale adoption of neoliberalism by administrators and state and federal governments over the last forty years (i.e., since Reagan), along with the self-destructive criticism directed by scholar-critics themselves against all professions under the banner of Foucauldian theory of modern biopolitics, literary study has been reduced from the institutional bastion of Arnoldian humanism to the revolutionary vanguards of the inhuman phantasms of capitalism. Reading this book is like watching poor adjuncts holding up their ragged and soiled academic caps and gowns before throwing them into the monstrous spectral incinerator of all hope in some latter-day variant of Dante's <em>Inferno</em>. Here is Nealon in his own discerning critical words:</p> <blockquote> <p>So we return again to that basic issue for literary study: how does literature function, today? While on the whole within English departments there is a great deal of common ground surrounding literary studies' value and some disagreement (mostly between those who feel that literature is a discipline of historically connected books/ideas and those who think it's a biopolitical exercise in teaching sensitivity toward other points of view and ways of life), consistently elided remains the most foundational question of all: what is literature good for, today, in the United Biopolitical States of America?</p> </blockquote> <p>Nealon goes on to examine the promise of the novel, especially contemporary autofiction, demonstrating that such promise of creative identity transcending <strong>[End Page 157]</strong> the reach of biopolitics and nostalgic humanism remains phantasmal. The nature of such discourse, however, is not plumbed here.</p> <p>The reader is not left without any hope. In the reflexive ironizing of the \"Epilogue: Where I Predictably Assert the Kind of Thing I Do Is the Key,\" Nealon discloses how each example of art is an imaginative making not only of a sui generis \"poem\" (as it were) but also its own project of theory. Even a flower arranged by chance may be read in this fashion, as well as when a human hand intervenes to ruffle the petals a bit. In this latest context, \"the work of literature … has inexorably become the work of theory—learning privileged methodological modes that can resonate productively with all things great and s","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-06-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141516028","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}