{"title":"Quietism and Literary Creation","authors":"Llewellyn Brown","doi":"10.2979/jml.2023.a901938","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jml.2023.a901938","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: In Still: Samuel Beckett's Quietism , Andy Wimbush examines Quietism, considered both as a practice and a perennial standpoint in religion and philosophy, showing it to have nourished Samuel Beckett's creation. It favored detachment from set models, and the acceptance of contradiction and incoherency. Thus, rather than leading to a search for solutions or solipsism, Wimbush argues, Beckett's mode of Quietism was turned toward maintaining the problematic nature of his literary constructions, highlighting tension and the absence of any solution. Quietism also offered Beckett the means to confront his own personal problems, including his bodily symptoms, in his aim to transform them into creation.","PeriodicalId":44453,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MODERN LITERATURE","volume":"59 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135533020","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Beckett and/in Context: A Review of James McNaughton's Samuel Beckett and the Politics of Aftermath","authors":"John Greaney","doi":"10.2979/jmodelite.46.3.12","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jmodelite.46.3.12","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Samuel Beckett and the Politics of Aftermath presents a historicist and materialist analysis of Samuel Beckett's work. Building on the historicist turn in modernist studies, as well as Irish studies and postcolonial paradigms, it develops new terms through which we can understand Beckett's political aesthetic. McNaughton performs a series of close readings of the Beckett archive and corpus to reveal a politically aware and committed Beckett, one whose writing is both complicit with and reacting against the political ideologies and failures of his time.","PeriodicalId":44453,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MODERN LITERATURE","volume":"119 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135533345","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"\"That English Paper\": Cannibals, Slaves, and Bits of Fun in Ulysses","authors":"Tristan Power","doi":"10.2979/jmodelite.46.3.05","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jmodelite.46.3.05","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: The study of the \"Circe\" episode of Ulysses has been underserved with regard to one of its most significant sources, the sadomasochistic magazine Bits of Fun , which has never been fully examined. This source is followed more closely by Joyce in the novel's Bella/ Bello scene than has been realized, as well as in the \"Ithaca\" episode and Finnegans Wake . The exact issues that Joyce used have not yet been correctly identified, and the \"Circe\" notesheets have consequently been misdated. Joyce drew on Bits of Fun not only for his theme of forced feminization in this episode, but also for more extreme details of bondage and torture, including even cannibalism and slavery. Based on this source, the text of Joyce's early draft material in both his \"Circe\" notesheets and Ulysses notebooks should be emended in several places.","PeriodicalId":44453,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MODERN LITERATURE","volume":"30 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135533524","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"\"For the Sake of Harmony\": Beckett's Enactment of the Violence of Abstraction in The Lost Ones","authors":"Cristina Ionica","doi":"10.2979/jmodelite.46.3.09","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jmodelite.46.3.09","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Beckett's The Lost Ones —an angrier, more action-oriented text than is generally acknowledged—enacts socio-politically functional notions of \"social cohesion\" predicated on economic, racial, gender, and sexual considerations in ways apt to expose not just their harmful nature but also their aggregate functioning—their interconnected machinic articulation, which allows them to act concertedly, with crushing power, but also exposes them to generalized sabotage. The narrative voice feigns objectivity and detachment while proffering support for practices evocative of real-life economic instrumentalizations of the human body, racially justified forms of mistreatment, and gender-based discrimination and violence. The text's long-winded explanations, conspicuously rich in self-satisfied, pedantic-to-malicious caveats, understatements, and repetitions, ultimately emanate strictly unreliability, voyeurism, and cruelty. The Lost Ones thus provides not a meditative critique but an angry diagrammatic enactment (a term borrowed from Deleuze and Guattari) of the violence of abstraction.","PeriodicalId":44453,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MODERN LITERATURE","volume":"5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135533526","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introduction: Caring to Survive","authors":"Lynda Ng, P. Sheehan","doi":"10.2979/jmodelite.46.2.01","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jmodelite.46.2.01","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44453,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MODERN LITERATURE","volume":"46 1","pages":"1 - 9"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44544198","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Writing Race, Class, and Social Mobility in Post-Slavery America","authors":"","doi":"10.2979/jml.2023.a885856","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jml.2023.a885856","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: The White Trash Menace excavates a transnational Americas archive of twentieth-century fiction that grapples with the tense and tenuous ties between class privilege and whiteness that are endemic in post-slavery societies. Linking the writings of William Faulkner with a broad and diverse array of authors working across the American hemisphere, Soto-Crespo identifies a literary tradition that moves across the US nation's southern-most boundary and into the West Indies, the Caribbean coasts of South and Central America, and beyond in order to delineate the mutually imbricated histories of race and class that these regions share.","PeriodicalId":44453,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MODERN LITERATURE","volume":"20 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135495966","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Writing Photographs Ethically: Strategies of Ekphrasis in J.M. Coetzee's Prose","authors":"Iona Gilburt","doi":"10.2979/jml.2023.a885848","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jml.2023.a885848","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: In the novels Elizabeth Costello, Slow Man , and Life & Times of Michael K , J.M. Coetzee fashions an ethical mode of \"writing photographs\" rather than \"writing about photographs\" via the technique of ekphrasis to recreate in prose several vivid and often unsettling images. Through ekphrasis, the reader becomes what Liliane Louvel terms a \"reader/viewer\" and is drawn into a palimpsestic encounter in which the image activates collective knowledge and experiences of visual media. The use of ekphrasis comes with unique ethical imperatives. Close analysis enables an exploration into the strategies of writing, such as foregrounding what is unseen, that Coetzee employs to respond to such concerns.","PeriodicalId":44453,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MODERN LITERATURE","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135495961","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Corporeal Suffering: Performing Resistance and Resilience in Slow Man","authors":"Janet M. Wilson","doi":"10.2979/jml.2023.a885845","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jml.2023.a885845","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Slow Man (2005), a novel about migration, dislocation, and belonging, marks Coetzee's withdrawal from the socio-political landscapes of South Africa coinciding with his move to Australia, and his preoccupation in writing fiction with the conflicting demands of representation, auto/biography, and realism. The leg amputation and home nursing of the protagonist, Paul Rayment, following an accident, introduce a discourse on the various meanings of care and the ethics of caring that also acknowledges Rayment's corporeal enfeeblement, aging, and mortality. An intersecting meta-commentary generated by Rayment's dialogue with the metafictional character Elizabeth Costello complicates Coetzee's \"compromised resilient narrative\" of Rayment's hesitant trajectory of resistance, adaptation, and renewal. The focus on the migrant's place in the life of the nation, represented by Rayment's French origins and his recently arrived Slovakian carer, Marijanna Jokić and her family, represents a new departure for Coetzee.","PeriodicalId":44453,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MODERN LITERATURE","volume":"133 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135495973","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Heart of Stone: Posthumanist Politics in Life & Times of Michael K","authors":"Paul Sheehan","doi":"10.2979/jml.2023.a885844","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jml.2023.a885844","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Certain of J.M. Coetzee's novels have been considered in the light of posthumanist theory, but to date this has mainly meant applying animal studies precepts to them, as a way of exposing the limits of anthropocentric thinking. By contrast, this article considers the institutional manifestations of humanism, demonstrating how Coetzee's Life & Times of Michael K (1983) conducts a \"post-humanist\" critique of them. This is undertaken from three angles: first, by exploring the protagonist's \"immanentist\" bearing, with its echoes of Kafka's \"humanimals\"; then, by means of the storytelling dynamics that are part of the novel's discourse and determine its formal strategies; and finally, by highlighting the \"stony\" identity of Michael K, as a key aspect of his counter-humanist resistance. With these elements in play, the novel indicates how a posthumanist politics takes shape, even via a figure whose precarious existence compels him to withdraw from history and social involvement.","PeriodicalId":44453,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MODERN LITERATURE","volume":"42 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135495962","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Rerouting Wartime Paranoia in Agatha Christie's N or M?","authors":"Judy Suh","doi":"10.2979/jml.2023.a885852","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jml.2023.a885852","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: As alarms about \"internal treachery\" and a possible Fifth Column were raised in Britain near the beginning of World War II, fear of refugees and migrants became nearly ubiquitous. N or M? (1940), Agatha Christie's most accomplished spy novel, reroutes the rising paranoia and fear of foreign spies to channel it against the xenophobic and misogynist tendencies of wartime. In so doing, Christie turns derisive paranoid attention away from some of those groups who were most vulnerable to it in the nerve-wracking spring of 1940: refugees, Irish migrants, and women.","PeriodicalId":44453,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MODERN LITERATURE","volume":"40 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135495968","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}