{"title":"Reading Conrad’s Unpublished Trilogy: “Youth,” Heart of Darkness, and Lord Jim","authors":"J. Warodell","doi":"10.2979/jmodelite.46.1.07","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jmodelite.46.1.07","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Conrad wrote “Youth,” Heart of Darkness, and Lord Jim to be published as a trilogy. Two months before Conrad finished Lord Jim, his publisher informed him that it was financially unviable to publish the three works together. To date, Conrad’s intended trilogy remains unpublished as a homogenous book, and underexplored. Critics have only given the structure of the trilogy passing mention. Read as a composite novel in the order Conrad intended, all three works offer a developing perspective on how steam affected merchant sailing. The placement of “Youth” before Lord Jim contrasts the sea-life of light literature with the grimy reality of industrial seafaring. As if Conrad intended to create a self-reflective contrast in style and genre, Heart of Darkness and the first half of Lord Jim are framed by “Youth” and the Patusan romance, which respectively begin and end the trilogy.","PeriodicalId":44453,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MODERN LITERATURE","volume":"46 1","pages":"104 - 119"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44141531","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":"Ordinary Language for Extraordinary Loss","authors":"M. Boyd","doi":"10.2979/jmodelite.46.1.04","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jmodelite.46.1.04","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Scholarship has established the difficulty of expressing the seemingly inexpressible experience of traumatic loss. Nevertheless, there are texts that enable expression despite this difficulty. They endow expansive, elusive concepts of loss with worthy articulation. Putting trauma theory in conversation with ordinary language philosophy illuminates how such moments become conceivable. Examples from a literary tradition that stretches from Virginia Woolf to Samuel Beckett to Lydia Davis construct a potent and a public space for this work. Literature is therefore able to create new forms of utterance from which ordinary meaning gains a purchase on the extra-ordinary.","PeriodicalId":44453,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MODERN LITERATURE","volume":"46 1","pages":"48 - 65"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47557609","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":"\"Her songs are raised like fists\": The Caoineadh Tradition in Paul Muldoon's Lamentations","authors":"Wit Píetrzak","doi":"10.2979/jmodelite.45.4.06","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jmodelite.45.4.06","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Throughout Lamentations (2017), a volume of translation from Irish as well as original compositions, Paul Muldoon reworks the poetics of the traditional Irish caoineadh (keen, lament). Ranging from a cry of the grief-stricken woman that nevertheless celebrates life in the case of \"The Lament for Art O'Leary,\" to a self-elegiac song of protest in \"Songs from Typhoid Mary,\" all the way to a keen over the collapse of an individual caught in the throes of a crisis-ridden country, thematized in \"Ólagon,\" Muldoon shows the enduring applicability of the genre to address the oppression of an individual by systemic forces.","PeriodicalId":44453,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MODERN LITERATURE","volume":"45 1","pages":"110 - 93"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44127601","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":"The Matter of Poetry","authors":"S. Heim","doi":"10.2979/jmodelite.45.4.11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jmodelite.45.4.11","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Focusing on contemporary long poems that use documentary sources, Michael Leong's Contested Records theorizes a genre he names \"documental poetry.\" Taking a \"cultural formalist\" approach to these works, Leong brings rigorous attention to the forms, sources, and poetic activities of some of the most controversial recent poems including Amiri Baraka's \"Somebody Blew Up America\" and Kenneth Goldsmith's \"The Body of Michael Brown.\" Ultimately, Leong uses documental poetry to argue persuasively about the nature, use, and relevance of poetry to social, political, and cultural life.","PeriodicalId":44453,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MODERN LITERATURE","volume":"45 1","pages":"188 - 194"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42117685","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":"\"All Aboard for Natchez, Cairo, and St. Louis\": Minstrelsy and Conversion in T.S. Eliot's Ash-Wednesday","authors":"J. Pizza","doi":"10.2979/jmodelite.45.4.03","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jmodelite.45.4.03","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:An important inspiration for T.S. Eliot's Ash-Wednesday is the minstrel comedy of The Two Black Crows. Both puzzling and obscure, this inspiration has not yet received the critical attention it deserves. By reading Eliot's interest in minstrel comedy alongside his concurrent religious conversion and change of citizenship, a fuller understanding of the poet's attempt to transform earlier influences into a new, Christian identity can emerge. In this way, minstrelsy proves to be an essential source of inspiration for both his early, pre-conversion writing, as others have shown, as well as for his later work as a conservative polemicist and religious poet.","PeriodicalId":44453,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MODERN LITERATURE","volume":"45 1","pages":"41 - 57"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48983374","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":"Charles Reznikoff's Testimony of the Dead","authors":"Dalia Bolotnikov Mazur","doi":"10.2979/jmodelite.45.4.07","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jmodelite.45.4.07","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Charles Reznikoff assembles Testimony: The United States (1885–1915): Recitative from three decades of court witness reports. Stemming from his legal experience and his family history of loss, Reznikoff's methods of constructing Testimony, as archived in his notes, drafts, and correspondence, illuminate the work as his literary form of Kaddish, the mourner's prayer in Judaism. The poetic volumes express mourning for the lives he encounters in court documents: suppressed, recurring narratives, emblematic of the country's political and socioeconomic conditions. As the past resonates through Reznikoff's verse, the poetry's formal qualities stimulate grief in present audiences. Testimony takes readers through a process of mourning across time: listening to the lost voices of the dead, grieving the accumulated losses, and moving forward with a desire to remedy past injustices—bearing losses of the past to feel the urgency of a more just future.","PeriodicalId":44453,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MODERN LITERATURE","volume":"45 1","pages":"111 - 129"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49522686","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":"John Berryman's Blackface Jokes: The Insights of Literary Failure","authors":"Nathaniel Mills","doi":"10.2979/jmodelite.45.4.04","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jmodelite.45.4.04","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Blackface minstrelsy is a major presence in John Berryman's The Dream Songs. Critics have debated whether Berryman's use of blackface minstrel conventions undermines or reproduces the racist ideological work of this cultural form. However, in Dream Song 40 and Dream Song 68, Berryman embarks on a related yet distinct project: a purportedly authentic, and unsuccessful, representation of Black personhood rather than a rendering of minstrel tropes. These two poems' complex failures in speaking of and for Black subjectivity and experience position Blackness as a site of opacity, negation, and social death: a presence that can't be represented or made the material of literary figuration. In this manner, they stage a challenge to postwar liberal narratives of racial amelioration, revealing how American social and symbolic orders themselves are predicated on racial abjection.","PeriodicalId":44453,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MODERN LITERATURE","volume":"45 1","pages":"58 - 76"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47163752","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":"Ezra Pound and Mang Ke (芒克): Image, Affect, and Consumerism in Western and Chinese Modernism","authors":"Tiao-Hsin Wang, R. Schleifer","doi":"10.2979/jmodelite.45.4.02","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jmodelite.45.4.02","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:\"Modernist\" culture is a complex constellation of cultural phenomena—the qualities of economic goods based upon desire rather than need, aesthetics and experiential values, horizons of possible ways to understand the world, and social formations—that effect and assign value to human experience. The growing imbrication of consumerism with poetics can be seen both in the poetry of the late twentieth-century Chinese poet, Mang Ke (芒克, 1950-) and Ezra Pound (1885–1972) and their respective poetic movements: menglong (朦胧; \"misty\" or \"obscure\") poetry in China in the late twentieth century and the poetry of Imagism in the early twentieth century in the West. Juxtaposing these poets and movements shows that the spirit of modernism, once caught within material, historical and economic phenomena, does not belong to any particular culture. Its conjunction of relations among things creates the conditions of sensibilities for emerging affects imbricated with new modalities of feeling, understanding, and social organization.","PeriodicalId":44453,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MODERN LITERATURE","volume":"45 1","pages":"21 - 40"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43720005","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":"\"I for i and i for I\": Susan Howe's That This and the Relational Self","authors":"S. Heim","doi":"10.2979/jmodelite.45.4.08","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jmodelite.45.4.08","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Susan Howe's use of raw personal experience in her 2010 volume That This should be understood as part of her interdisciplinary investigation into the work of some of her central inspirations: Charles Sanders Peirce, Jonathan Edwards, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Diving deeply into their ideas—in particular Peirce's explorations of grammatical connection and Edwards's typology—Howe uses the tools specific to poetry (including typography, juxtaposition, and metaphor) to extend their thinking and make visceral to readers the relational nature of the self. In so doing, she develops an understanding of poetry as work that combines knowledge with emotional power.","PeriodicalId":44453,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MODERN LITERATURE","volume":"45 1","pages":"130 - 147"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48808704","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":"Frank Stanford's Rural Avant-Garde: Infrastructure, Mediation, and Poetic Community","authors":"Martyn Cain","doi":"10.2979/jmodelite.45.4.09","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jmodelite.45.4.09","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Frank Stanford was an Arkansas-based poet who produced a substantial corpus of poetry through the 1970s. His best-known work, The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You (1977), narrates the ways that mass media technologies and state infrastructures shaped regionalism and social structure in the post-1945 rural US South. The afterlife of Stanford's writing has been subject to its own form of mediation: from Stanford's death in 1978 up until the present, a cult following has kept his work in print through communal practices—trading photocopied manuscripts, participating in marathon readings of Battlefield, and organizing Frank Stanford festivals. While the aura surrounding Stanford has often disassociated him from the structures and communities that shaped his writing, both his work and its legacy disclose the institutional, mediatic, and infrastructural forms that enable rural avant-garde poetic practice.","PeriodicalId":44453,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MODERN LITERATURE","volume":"45 1","pages":"148 - 168"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49321342","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}