{"title":"“Vast and Unreadable”: Tracy K. Smith, Astronomy, and Lyric Opacity in Contemporary Poetry","authors":"M. Greaves","doi":"10.3368/CL.61.1.1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3368/CL.61.1.1","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44998,"journal":{"name":"CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69590498","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":"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":"Auto-Ethnography as Literary Critique","authors":"Duncan M. Yoon","doi":"10.3368/cl.60.4.582","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3368/cl.60.4.582","url":null,"abstract":"n Du Bois’s Telegram: Literary Resistance and State Containment, Juliana Spahr asserts multiple times that the book should not be read as a scholarly monograph, pur et dur, but as “an autobiography about how my education told me that certain forms of literature were autonomous when they were not and how long it took me to realize this” (110). In her conclusion, she reasserts this position, writing that the text is an “auto-ethnographic project, an attempt to describe the way literature circulates in the very scenes in which I also circulate” (191). Read in this way, Spahr’s conversational tone and digressive flourishes embody an auto-ethnographic style, creating a space wherein she turns her subject matter, American literary nationalism, outward facing. The book thereby straddles the expectations of an ivory tower audience and the persistent call to render scholarship more accessible through the public humanities. Spahr is largely successful in creating an informal, stylistic atmosphere for this hybrid readership as she struggles with how literary autonomy seems to always be already infiltrated by nationalistic agendas that reach back into the global cold war and how the CIA influenced postcolonial (especially African) national literatures. Owing to this personal struggle for (and ultimate failure of) literary autonomy, Spahr’s text is pervaded by a tone of inevitability, which I suggest points to a certain US-pessimism, given the challenge to American exceptionalism in the twenty-first century. D U N C A N M. Y O O N","PeriodicalId":44998,"journal":{"name":"CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE","volume":"60 1","pages":"582 - 589"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-11-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41419708","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}