{"title":"Toward Black Animality Studies","authors":"Samantha Pergadia","doi":"10.3368/cl.61.3.411","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3368/cl.61.3.411","url":null,"abstract":"ver the last ten years, animal studies scholarship has taken a critical race turn just as scholarship on race revises standard accounts of the relationship between race and animality. As a corrective to scholarship that treats speciesism as the grounds for racism (or appropriately recruits race-based dehumanization as the analogic precedent for animal rights), scholars have turned both to the material histories that connect race and species in counterintuitive ways and to the racialization of animality. Neel Ahuja has reprimanded “the conflation of race and species” in animal studies, wherein racial discourse is assimilated into species discourse, for “flattening out historical contexts that determine the differential use of animal (and other) figures in the process of racialization.”1 A suite of scholarship, including works by Kalpana Rahita Seshadri, Mel Y. Chen, Colleen Boggs, Michael Lundblad, and Claire Jean Kim, has examined the various and varied sites of entanglement between animality and race.","PeriodicalId":44998,"journal":{"name":"CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE","volume":"61 1","pages":"411 - 420"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-07-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45942577","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":"Theater of the Precariat: Staging Precarity in Alexander Zeldin's Love","authors":"Peter Simonsen, M. Aarhus","doi":"10.3368/cl.61.3.335","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3368/cl.61.3.335","url":null,"abstract":"he precariat populates the contemporary British stage, featured in prominent playhouses such as the Royal Court Theatre, the National Theatre, and the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Swan Theatre. Many new and significant works of British theater have focused on staging and debating, giving bodies, faces, words, voices, and emotional lives to this new social group, collective, or class-in-the-making. They have participated in imagining the contours of an identity for this heterogeneous entity and possibly―as political theater―opened more people’s eyes to the intolerable living conditions experienced by those forced to inhabit an insecure state of precarity. Showing vulnerable and insecure bodies and minds onstage reveals how everyday life may feel to specifically situated and embodied members of the precariat by exposing the audience to experiences drenched in stress, anxiety, fear, and anger. This essay joins work by Marissia Fragkou and Jen Harvie to offer a foray into this new tendency in","PeriodicalId":44998,"journal":{"name":"CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE","volume":"61 1","pages":"335 - 361"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-07-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47837052","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":"Contemporary Poetry and Comparative Iterature","authors":"Michael Leong","doi":"10.3368/cl.61.3.421","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3368/cl.61.3.421","url":null,"abstract":"odern poetry has a complicated relation to both the original and the repetitive. On one hand, as Marjorie Perloff argues, “we expect our poets to produce words, phrases, images, and ironic locutions that we have never heard before.”1 On the other hand, repetition, the “already heard,” is a central feature of poetic language―from the recursivity of rhyme schemes to the patterned reiterations of tropes such as chiasmus, anadiplosis, and epistrophe. Just as intratextual repetition can “set up expectations and guide interpretation” within any given poem, the repetitions of forms, genres, and topoi throughout a diachronic tradition can create a sense of discursive continuity within change.2 From a readerly standpoint, the recognition of repetition can be reassuring, even pleasurable. The danger is that too much repetition, formal or otherwise, risks a deadening predictability. As Williams Carlos Williams polemically stated in 1944, “To me all sonnets say the same thing of no importance.” It is no surprise, then, that standard narratives of modernism have tended to highlight a Poundian poetics of making it new, of breaking free","PeriodicalId":44998,"journal":{"name":"CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE","volume":"61 1","pages":"421 - 428"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-07-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48904820","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":"Prose Poetry and Purposiveness in Anne Boyer’s Garments Against Women","authors":"Christopher Oakey","doi":"10.3368/CL.61.2.194","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3368/CL.61.2.194","url":null,"abstract":"n 2015, Anne Boyer published Garments Against Women, a collection made up primarily of prose poems. While she had published individual prose poems in earlier collections, this was the first to be almost entirely in this genre. These poems represent something new for Boyer, working with a number of different voices tied to various models of prose writing. Some of the poems play with forms of memoir writing, such as the blog post or the diary entry, and a number of them engage with more formal, interrogative, essay-like, and at times “scientific” models. The voices tied to these prose models are bound together in Boyer’s collection by a self-conscious, interrogative performance of authorship as the site of critique, exposition, and subject formation. This situation results in a challenge for Boyer’s readers. Her poems reach toward the interrogative and expository capacities of prose writing, including forms like the academic and personal essay, while remaining highly suspicious of the social, economic, and biological contexts of those genres and their purposes. The challenge for readers lies in understanding the manner in which this act negotiates an exchange between gestures toward ideas of purposiveness―stylistic and C H R I S T O P H E R O A K E Y","PeriodicalId":44998,"journal":{"name":"CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE","volume":"163 3","pages":"194 - 220"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-06-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41290766","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":"Culture Shock","authors":"Peter L’ Official","doi":"10.3368/cl.61.2.277","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3368/cl.61.2.277","url":null,"abstract":"In August 1964, Harper’s Magazine published “Harlem Is Nowhere,” an essay by Ralph Ellison commissioned sixteen years earlier by a different magazine―’47, which was named after the year it was first published and did not survive beyond 1948, when Ellison’s essay was to have appeared. The essay, originally envisioned alongside a suite of photographs by Gordon Parks, discussed the work that the Lafargue Psychiatric Clinic―the first desegregated clinic in the United States―performed for residents of Harlem, a place Ellison describes in the piece as “the scene and symbol of the Negro’s perpetual alienation in the land of his birth.”1 Alienation had taken on a psychotherapeutic as well as an economic meaning: Ellison often overlaid urban space and the psyche. “Harlem Is Nowhere,” like Ellison’s masterwork, Invisible Man (1952), was greatly informed by his work for the Federal Writers’ Project, which involved conducting oral histories in Harlem in 1938 and 1939 that touched on Ellison’s own interest in questions of housing and urban policy―issues inseparable from the catastrophic effects the Great Depression had on a populace already subject to the psychic ruptures and crises of identity that Northern racism, violence, and segregation wrought daily. Beaten down, exhausted,","PeriodicalId":44998,"journal":{"name":"CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE","volume":"1 1","pages":"277 - 282"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-06-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69590505","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}