{"title":"Scaling the Detail: Woolfian Proportions","authors":"Jennifer Spitzer","doi":"10.1215/00267929-10335688","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-10335688","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Virginia Woolf seems to have agreed with Georg Lukács about the static quality of details in turn-of-the century fiction: she too condemned the pictorialism that transformed human subjects and their environments into “still lives.” Her own details are anything but static: they are always in motion, zooming in and zooming out, demanding close observation while also enlarging the frame to the global impact of war or the marginalization of women. Woolf uses details dynamically to move between material objects and human minds, and also to move across scales, and thus produces a specifically narrative theory of the detail. This is also a political theory: the fact that she places large and small side by side, often in the same sentence, speaks to her commitment to tracing connections between the particular and the abstract, the mundane and the mystical, the internal world of thoughts and feelings and the external world of actions.","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":"38 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75930997","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 Mark of the Detail: Universalism, Type, Difference","authors":"Dora Zhang","doi":"10.1215/00267929-10335706","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-10335706","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Departing from the premise that novelistic details particularize and locate characters in a sociocultural matrix, this essay examines what happens to the detail in texts that refuse certain norms of specification. The essay focuses on the French writer Anne F. Garréta’s novel Sphinx (1986), which avoids all linguistic markers of gender for its central pair of lovers, and Toni Morrison’s short story “Recitatif” (1983), which never reveals the racial identities of its two protagonists, one of whom is white and one Black. Drawing on Georg Lukács’s discussion of realism and typicality, the essay considers how these unmarked texts mediate between individual and type, as well as their approaches to the representation of difference.","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":"12 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79859840","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":"Editorial Introduction","authors":"Jennifer Spitzer, Shirley Lau Wong","doi":"10.1215/00267929-10335724","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-10335724","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135648437","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 Detail of Place and the Place of Detail","authors":"Shirley Lau Wong","doi":"10.1215/00267929-10335733","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-10335733","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Literary settings are often celebrated for richly representing the many details of a particular place. The close association between detail and setting stems from the realist presumption that detail constitutes what Roland Barthes calls an “index of . . . atmosphere”: the accumulation of details provides an authentic sense of place. But the detail’s usual role in constructing immersive worlds seems antithetical to the project of the so-called global novel, which has often been characterized by placelessness and by cosmopolitan, jet-setting characters. This essay examines the relationship between place, detail, and narrative in Teju Cole’s Open City (2011), which has often been praised for its intimate portrayal of New York. With Open City Cole offers a metanarrative commentary on the detail’s function in previous literary periods and modes, from the nineteenth-century novel’s harnessing of detail to create plush, seemingly real worlds to modernist and postmodern fiction’s interrogation of the detail’s supposed referentiality. Engaging with the detail’s many legacies, Cole underscores the latent violence of detail in the global novel, namely, its capacity to draw something into the foreground or make it recede into the background.","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":"20 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91335877","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":"Structures All the Way Down: Literary Methods and the Detail","authors":"C. Levine","doi":"10.1215/00267929-10335715","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-10335715","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay makes the case that most methods in literary studies explicitly privilege the detail but covertly depend on structures. The article turns to structuralism, specifically to the debate between Vladimir Propp and Claude Lévi-Strauss about the role of the detail, for a method that keeps structures in view, even while focusing on details. Suggesting that structuralist methods could usefully reshape the teaching of literature now, the essay reads two novels that both depend on and depart from traditional fairy-tale patterns: Jane Yolen’s Briar Rose (1992) and Helen Oyeyemi’s Boy, Snow, Bird (2014).","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":"248 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76984705","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":"Unsettling Ethnic Detail in Asian American Metafiction","authors":"Wendy Allison Lee","doi":"10.1215/00267929-10335742","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-10335742","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay examines the work of detail in contemporary Asian American metafiction by reconsidering Georg Lukács’s understanding of description as a mode of fiction that transforms humans into observers and objects via an excess of detail. Lukács’s work has informed views of how “exotic” details in Asian American fiction turn Asian American characters and people into objects of entertainment and edification for predominantly white readerships. Yet works of Asian American metafiction such as Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior, Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats, and Nam Le’s “Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice” deploy description to unsettle detail’s objectifying effects. Their authors invent techniques of deploying racist and exotic details to reveal how the logic of liberal multiculturalism and diversity rather than the aesthetics of description transforms Asian American persons into things.","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":"212 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78261003","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":"Medical Storyworlds: Health, Illness, and Bodies in Russian and European Literature at the Turn of the Twentieth Century","authors":"Angela Brintlinger","doi":"10.1215/00267929-10189279","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-10189279","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":"25 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84786692","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":"In Praise of Idling: Johnson, Austen, and Literary Leisure","authors":"Amit S. Yahav","doi":"10.1215/00267929-10189270","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-10189270","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay examines the theory of leisure that Samuel Johnson presents in his Idler series and that Jane Austen engages in her novel Mansfield Park. Just as productivity and vigilance are becoming unassailable values, Johnson and Austen publish popular works designed to insert breaks into the culture of ceaseless striving. Their theory of leisure revalues idling as a state of beneficial, albeit transient, mindlessness and develops forms of representation that, instead of cultivating an edifying point of view—of refined knowledge, judgment, or feeling—promotes an occasional letting go. Johnson uses the proliferation and Austen the suspension of points of view to defend the value of reading materials that solicit relaxation and afford cheap pleasures for the many, or at least the many more. Both the Idler and Mansfield Park advocate for the redistribution of leisure in time rather than across classes of persons, thus transforming idling from a characterological deficiency into a periodic respite that is necessary for all and that all are entitled to.","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":"9 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78851832","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":"Read Until You Understand: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature","authors":"Francesca T. Royster","doi":"10.1215/00267929-10189243","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-10189243","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":"11 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88704233","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":"Vagrancy in the Victorian Age: Representing the Wandering Poor in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture","authors":"Carolyn Betensky","doi":"10.1215/00267929-10189288","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-10189288","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44947,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE QUARTERLY","volume":"11949 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77522046","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}