{"title":"To Make Negro Literature: Writing, Literary Practice, and African American Authorship","authors":"Marcy J. Dinius","doi":"10.1215/00267929-10574819","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-10574819","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":"123 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-06-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84909154","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}
{"title":"Aesthetic Historicism Now","authors":"Matt Sussman","doi":"10.1215/00267929-10574801","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-10574801","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay traces the concept of “aesthetic historicism” in literary studies, from its first appearance in the writing of Erich Auerbach to its influence on an array of contemporary currents loosely associated with “new formalism,” such as historical formalism, historical poetics, and historical stylistics. It argues that while Auerbachian aesthetic historicism played a key role in relativizing standards of aesthetic judgment—and thus arguing against aesthetic universals—a newly invigorated version would conceive the history of criticism as a chronicle of different formalisms, each contributing to the construction of “the aesthetic” across time and space.","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":"106 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-06-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73272061","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}
{"title":"Cut/Copy/Paste: Fragments from the History of Bookwork","authors":"Margaret Simon","doi":"10.1215/00267929-10574855","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-10574855","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":"51 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-06-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74020346","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}
{"title":"Subjects of Affection: Rights of Resistance on the Early Modern French Stage","authors":"A. Frisch","doi":"10.1215/00267929-10574828","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-10574828","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":"27 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-06-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80878164","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}
{"title":"George Gissing Goes Out in Style: The Syntax of Class after 1890","authors":"Alex Millen","doi":"10.1215/00267929-10574864","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-10574864","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Literary historians often cite George Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891) as a chronicle of a waning literary scene, but his sentences offer altogether stranger demonstrations of how a threatened form of realism attempts to grasp a radically transformed and transforming social situation. Drawing on recent work on the politics of style, this essay argues that Gissing’s narrative style is best understood in terms of two motivating forces powerfully at work in late nineteenth-century Britain: an ascendant popular culture and the massive expansion of the imperial regime. By focusing less on the rumble and verve of an incipient modernism than on the creaky cadences of a realism not long for the world, we begin to discern tectonic shifts at the level of the sentence within and beyond Gissing’s late novels (and the triple-decker). Such shifts allow us to understand how the residual realism of nineteenth-century social-problem fiction attempts to map the world-system. A discussion of Gissing’s style is thus an opportunity to specify the motivating forces at work in his writing and to speculate more broadly about how novelistic prose registers working-class massification and the internationalization of British economic and social worlds in the late nineteenth century.","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":"31 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-06-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77324429","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}
{"title":"Containing the Unnamable","authors":"Valerio Amoretti","doi":"10.1215/00267929-10574792","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-10574792","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay uses W. R. Bion’s object-relations theory to argue that the formal experiments in Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable demand a distinctive kind of psychic work from readers. It describes this work in terms of containment, an unconscious mechanism that supports the psyche’s capacity to think. The concept of containment reveals the continuities between the psychological breakdowns that occur in psychosis, trauma, and ordinary development, as well as the relationship between these breakdowns and the emergence of the ability to represent and narrate experience. Analyzing the affective configuration generated by The Unnamable through the prism of containment deepens our understanding of the challenges posed by the text and of the text’s historical situatedness.","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":"35 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-06-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81412999","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}
{"title":"Communities of Care: The Social Ethics of Victorian Fiction","authors":"Zarena Aslami","doi":"10.1215/00267929-10574891","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-10574891","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":"6 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-06-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87267207","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}
{"title":"To Detail a Dollhouse","authors":"Paul K. Saint-Amour","doi":"10.1215/00267929-10335679","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-10335679","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":"23 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73879647","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}
{"title":"The Queerness of Character-Details","authors":"Tyler Bradway","doi":"10.1215/00267929-10335697","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-10335697","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay reconsiders the skepticism toward queer characters and the default privilege given to antirepresentational aesthetics in queer theory. To grasp the queer affordances of character, the essay identifies character-detail as an iconic and embodied dimension of character as an aesthetic form. Character-details beckon for queer uptake, or the recirculation of character-details into contexts, genres, and media to unlock new narrative trajectories for queerness. Character-details thus highlight the promiscuously queer relationality of character as an aesthetic form. The essay then turns to A. K. Summers’s graphic memoir, Pregnant Butch: Nine Long Months Spent in Drag (2014), which takes up the character-details of Tintin to expand the narration of gender nonconformity. Finally, the essay traces how character-details focalize bisexual queer eroticism in Carmen Maria Machado’s short story “Inventory” from Her Body and Other Parties (2017). Taken together, these texts exemplify the centrality of queer characters to—and character as an aesthetic form in—contemporary queer literature.","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":"65 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87207294","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}