{"title":"Articulating Transgender Narratives","authors":"Ardel Haefele-Thomas","doi":"10.3368/cl.60.4.590","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3368/cl.60.4.590","url":null,"abstract":"achel Carroll’s Transgender and the Literary Imagination: Changing Gender in Twentieth-Century Writing is a critical addition to the expanding field of trans literary studies.1 Two other recent publications of note in this field are TransGothic in Literature and Culture, edited by Jolene Zigarovich, and a special issue of Victorian Review on “Trans Victorians” that I guest edited.2 Both of these works are quite specific in their respective focus on the gothic and the Victorian; by contrast, Carroll takes on a range of literary genres by British, Irish, and American authors published between 1918 and 2000 as well as contemporary films that reimagine some of these earlier narratives. As Carroll notes in the introduction, “A key concern for this study is the way in which transgender lives―whether historical or fictional―have been ‘authored by others’: named, defined and appropriated in ways which obscure, displace or erase transgender experiences, identities","PeriodicalId":44998,"journal":{"name":"CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE","volume":"60 1","pages":"590 - 595"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-11-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47455165","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":"Forecasting Catastrophes of Whiteness: Affects of Neoliberal Realism and Visions of a Terrorized Multiracial Precariat in Atticus Lish’s Preparation for the Next Life","authors":"R. Walsh","doi":"10.3368/cl.60.4.549","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3368/cl.60.4.549","url":null,"abstract":"Neoliberalism’s Real Victims: Affects of Worldly Realisms and the Depressed Wages of Whiteness n the eve of the Trump era that it so predicted, Atticus Lish’s 2014 novel Preparation for the Next Life was uniformly lauded by the Anglo-American literati as a “profoundly political book” (Flanery) that, as Cathleen Schine itemized in her New York Review of Books article, surveys “the greatest contemporary failures of this country―immigration policy, poverty, racism, prisons, war” (Schine). Indeed, Lish’s text hurtles from the first catastrophe of the twenty-first century―the post-9/11 R A C H E L A. W A L S H","PeriodicalId":44998,"journal":{"name":"CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE","volume":"60 1","pages":"549 - 581"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-11-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48873479","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":"“A Promiscuous Love of Experience”: The Poetics of Cruising in Thom Gunn’s San Francisco","authors":"M. Nott","doi":"10.3368/cl.60.3.343","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3368/cl.60.3.343","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44998,"journal":{"name":"CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE","volume":"60 1","pages":"343 - 369"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-09-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41396992","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":"The Case for the Globality of Twenty-First-Century Poetry","authors":"Louise McCune","doi":"10.3368/cl.60.2.300","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3368/cl.60.2.300","url":null,"abstract":"alt Hunter joins an ongoing movement in literary studies beyond regionalist and nationalist paradigms. Readers will find his book Forms of a World: Contemporary Poetry and the Making of Globalization a complement to Jahan Ramazani’s 2009 A Transnational Poetics, insofar as both critics read across hemispheres to make apparent the ways in which contemporary poetry filters and reimagines global circuits of exchange. The two differ in their theoretical commitments: whereas Ramazani draws on transnational studies, Hunter understands contemporary globality through a critique of capitalism. Accordingly, Forms of a World is the first to read Anglophone poetry of the late twentieth and twenty-first century alongside simultaneous developments in patterns of capitalist accumulation. While he acknowledges the large-scale and long-term effects wrought by the capitalist world-system since its inception approximately five hundred years ago, Hunter understands globalization as an era of capitalism that is only decades old. It follows, then, that when Hunter calls a poem “global,” he means to imply nothing in particular about subject matter, circulation, or authorship. Instead, a global poem is, for him, one that belongs to a period beginning in the 1970s, when a new production and financial system marked by transnational accumulation emerged to supplant earlier, national L O U I S E M C C U N E","PeriodicalId":44998,"journal":{"name":"CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE","volume":"60 1","pages":"300 - 304"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-06-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44849101","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":"When Fiction Rocks!","authors":"Jessica E. Teague","doi":"10.3368/cl.60.2.282","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3368/cl.60.2.282","url":null,"abstract":"n the heels of Bob Dylan’s 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature there was an immediate outpouring of debate in both academic and popular circles, on Twitter and in the press. The fury on both sides was, perhaps, predictable. Should the world’s most prestigious literary award be allowed to go to a popular rock-and-roll songwriter? Dylan himself seemed aware of the criticism, and in his unconventional Nobel acceptance speech―a twenty-seven minute spoken word recording accompanied by jazz piano―he tackled the question head on: “When I first received this Nobel Prize for Literature, I got to wondering exactly how my songs related to literature.”1 In the folksy audio-essay that follows, Dylan reflects on his many literary influences, from Buddy Holly and Lead Belly to Don Quixote, Moby Dick, and The Odyssey. Dylan claims that Odysseus, not unlike the heroes of blues ballads, is “a travelin’ man, but he’s making a lot of stops.” For Dylan, songwriters and writers of literature are influenced by the same themes, the same stories: love, loss, violence, suffering, and so on. Although Bob Dylan is not the only musician to reflect on the confluence between music and literature, his Nobel win has sparked renewed","PeriodicalId":44998,"journal":{"name":"CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE","volume":"60 1","pages":"282 - 288"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-06-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45856225","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":"Institutions, Genres, Readers","authors":"Robert Higney","doi":"10.3368/cl.60.2.289","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3368/cl.60.2.289","url":null,"abstract":"or years, the central debates in English were over method. The now-familiar terms around which those debates coalesced―surface reading, digital humanities, world literature, literary Darwinism―were united (if not haunted) by an underlying question about the legitimacy of English itself. What claims―to relevance, to funding―could be made by a discipline that couldn’t produce a coherent account of itself? In each case, to varying degrees and in different ways, proponents of new or revised methods looked outside the confines of English proper: to overlooked European theorists, to computational and data analysis, to the biological and neural sciences. They began to ask not only what literature professors should do and how they should do it but, more centrally, whether literary studies could survive at all. Perhaps this was inevitable, given the contexts of the crisis in academic labor and the downward pressure on enrollments within which any discussion of work in the humanities now takes place. Interdisciplinary borrowing as a prop to methodological innovation has a long history in English studies. But now questions about the legitimacy of such borrowing seem inextricable from questions about the discipline’s ability to perpetuate itself, and about its place within the R O B E R T H I G N E Y","PeriodicalId":44998,"journal":{"name":"CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE","volume":"60 1","pages":"289 - 299"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-06-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45956626","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}