MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW最新文献

{"title":"Contemporary Fiction in French ed. by Anna-Louise Milne and Russell Williams (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/mlr.2023.a907865","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mlr.2023.a907865","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Contemporary Fiction in French ed. by Anna-Louise Milne and Russell Williams Maeve McCusker Contemporary Fiction in French. Ed. by Anna-Louise Milne and Russell Williams. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2021. xii+ 289 pp. £75. ISBN 978–1–108–47579–2. Anna-Louise Milne and Russell Williams have brought together in this superb collection some of the most commanding voices writing on contemporary fiction in French today. In their Introduction, the editors establish the inclusive parameters of their project: over twelve chapters, the diffracted, polycentric land- and cityscapes of contemporary fictions are showcased and celebrated, and the binaries of centre/periphery, metropole/ex-colony, French/Francophone undermined. Indeed, this commitment to decentring is palpable even in the volume's internal architecture. The collection opens with Edwige Tamalet Talbayev's 'Mediterranean Francophone Writing', a bracing incipit which identifies the Mediterranean as a decentring paradigm enabling us to understand 'new forms of social and cultural transactions which bypass the usual pattern of dominance between France and its ex-colonies' (p. 17). This post-postcolonial conviction complements Charles Forsdick's interrogation of the shifting borders between French, Francophone, and world literature. Forsdick traces, in the interval between three manifestos, Pour une littérature voyageuse (1992), Pour une littérature-monde (2007), and 'Nous sommes plus grands que nous' (2017), the increasing prominence of the transnational and the translingual writer. Simon Kemp's After the Experiment', on the much-vaunted return to the story/subject/world in French fiction after 1980, argues that experimentation and play remain nonetheless crucial in terms of narration and genre. Russell Williams analyses the anxious, occasionally exuberant embrace of American culture (crime fiction, cinema, music) by a wide range of novelists, while Laurence Grove's essay charts a series of revolutions catalysed by the graphic novel. Helena Duffy examines works by 'Russophile' authors Andreï Makine and Antoine Volodine, showing how uncomfortable political realities (notably of the Putin era) are sidestepped in their fiction in favour of the nostalgic tropes of the classic nineteenth-century Russian [End Page 625] novel. Taking as her springboard the 'orientation' process enshrined in French post-16 education, Anna-Louise Milne brings a welcome consideration of class and cultural capital in astute close readings of Ernaux, Kaplan, and Guène. In 'Fictions of Self' Shirley Jordan zeroes in on Jacques Roubaud and Marie Ndiaye, whose 'restless experimentation' (p. 166) exploits the elasticity of truth and fiction in life-writing. Jordan concludes that, while the truth/fiction binary so prevalent in 1990s scholarship 'has lost some of its critical purchase' (p. 165), the particular appeal of self-fictionalization in women's writing is often rooted in trauma. Max Silverman also consi","PeriodicalId":45399,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134933803","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":"Nabokov Noir: Cinematic Culture and the Art of Exile by Luke Parker (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/mlr.2023.a907876","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mlr.2023.a907876","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Nabokov Noir: Cinematic Culture and the Art of Exile by Luke Parker Roman Utkin Nabokov Noir: Cinematic Culture and the Art of Exile. By Luke Parker. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 2022. xiii+ 272 pp. $47.95. ISBN 978–1-50176652–7. Luke Parker masterfully blends literary criticism and history of film in his book on Vladimir Nabokov's wide-ranging engagement with cinema. Nabokov Noir shows how the experience of filmgoing, participating in film production, and contending with the narrative possibilities of film converge into a pivotal force in Nabokov's famously transnational career. Although Nabokov is the book's central figure, Parker situates his inter-war œuvre and his tactics of self-promotion in the broad discursive environment of 'cinematic culture' and 'the art of exile', reminding the reader that 'Nabokov's coming-of-age paralleled the linguistic and conceptual working out of cinema' (p. 65). 'Cinematic culture' here stands for a historicized [End Page 643] understanding of a cultural environment profoundly influenced by the burgeoning film industry. Parker frames film as 'the art of exile' because it 'supplied the means not only of thinking through and representing exile but of surviving it' (p. 185). A statement Parker makes about the role of film in The Luzhin Defense can be applied to Parker's own project: whereas in the novel 'Nabokov brings into focus questions of celebrity, international markets, the role of the print media, the power of spectacle, and the variety of occupations open to Russian émigrés' (p. 93), Parker methodically elucidates all those aspects in Nabokov Noir. Accordingly, Parker discusses film's impact on literary poetics not in isolation but with equal attention to the pragmatic considerations of a given novel's adaptability for the screen. Supported by impressive archival research, Parker traces Nabokov's 'strategic involvement with the promotional apparatus of the international movie industry', aiming to 'reconstruct a practical answer to the paradox of exile' (p. 119). It is Parker's focus on exile and his use of archival materials that make the book such a qualitative leap forward from the earlier generation of scholars who have written on Nabokov and film. Parker is less interested in the formal aspects of film influences and the impact of cinematic devices on fiction and essays. He tells instead the story of Nabokov's career trajectory from Berlin to New York, via Paris and London, as a journey thoroughly conditioned by film as artistic medium and a form of popular entertainment. Consisting of four chapters, an Introduction, a Coda, and an Appendix, Nabokov Noir is as much about Russian émigré culture as it is about Nabokov. The first two chapters reveal both familiar and forgotten émigrés, such as Georgy Gessen, Pavel Muratov, Andrei Levinson, Vladislav Khodasevich, and Evgeny Znosko-Borovsky, as astute film critics grappling with the significance of cinema for the émigré cultural identi","PeriodicalId":45399,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134935247","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":"Chekhov's Children: Context and Text in Late Imperial Russia by Nadya L. Peterson (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/mlr.2023.a907874","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mlr.2023.a907874","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Chekhov's Children: Context and Text in Late Imperial Russia by Nadya L. Peterson Melissa L. Miller Chekhov's Children: Context and Text in Late Imperial Russia. By Nadya L. Peterson. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press. 2021. xiii+ 402 pp. can $75. ISBN 978–0–228–00625–1. Nadya L. Peterson's book is a unique and welcome addition to Chekhov scholarship. Firmly anchored in theories of child-rearing and pedagogy which emerged during the nineteenth century, Peterson's study provides the first full-length analysis of Chekhov's child characters. In so doing, she also exposes the nuanced role human development plays in Chekhov's art as a whole. Part i, 'The Child in Chekhov's Time', richly describes the three most important critical lenses through which children were understood in the second half of the nineteenth century, while Part ii, 'The Child in Chekhov', uses these lenses to examine children and their emerging personhood within Chekhov's creative work. The three chapters that comprise Part i, 'The Child Imagined: The Literary Canon', 'The Humanization Project: Pro/Contra', and 'The Child Examined: Pedagogical Psychology', successively offer literary, pedagogical, and psychological approaches to childhood. In many ways, the background presented in Part i exceeds the boundaries of Chekhov studies: it introduces readers not only to the literary models of childhood that [End Page 640] inspired Chekhov, such as memoirs and fiction by Leo Tolstoy, Sergei Aksakov, and I. A. Goncharov, but also to the research of many Russian pedagogues, child development specialists, and psychologists unfamiliar to most Anglophone readers. Alongside the work of more familiar figures, such as Vissarion Belinsky and N. I. Pirogov, Peterson also investigates scholarly contributions from such thinkers as K. D. Ushinsky, N. Kh. Vessel', I. A. Sikorsky, P. F. Kapterev, and perhaps most notably, two ground-breaking women in the field of Russian child studies, Maria Manasseina and E. N. Vodovozova. Part ii contains five chapters charting the evolution of Chekhov's child characters from his emergence as a writer for the penny press through the development of his more mature work. A particular strength of this section is Peterson's robust framework for understanding the ways in which Chekhov's stories for the small press responded to typical genre expectations for pieces that appeared in such publications. Insightful close readings of less commonly studied stories such as 'Naden'ka N.'s Summer Holiday Schoolwork', 'The Big Event', and Chekhov's handwritten and hand-illustrated tale for the children of his friends, entitled 'Soft-Boiled Boots' ('Sapogi vsmiatky', an idiomatic phrase meaning 'nonsense') appear in dialogue with interpretations of more prominent Chekhov stories featuring young protagonists, such as 'Van'ka' and 'Sleepy'. As Chapter 7, 'Farewell to Childhood: The Steppe', eloquently argues, Chekhov's novella about the nine-year-old Ego","PeriodicalId":45399,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134933726","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":"Literary Beginnings in the European Middle Ages ed. by Mark Chinca and Christopher Young (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/mlr.2023.a907838","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mlr.2023.a907838","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Literary Beginnings in the European Middle Ages ed. by Mark Chinca and Christopher Young Wendy Scase Literary Beginnings in the European Middle Ages. Ed. by Mark Chinca and Christopher Young. (Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2022. xii+ 339 pp. £75. ISBN 978–1–108–47764–2. The contributors to Literary Beginnings in the European Middle Ages were asked to address the question 'When and how did literature begin in your vernacular?' (p. xi). The essays, covering literatures from Arabic to Welsh, address this brief in different ways. Some speculate on the social, linguistic, and material conditions that shape literary emergence. Stephen G. Nichols's Foreword sets the scene with a case study of the famously multilingual Strasbourg Oaths (ce 842), in which multilingualism, Nichols suggests, marks 'sociocultural hierarchies, a phenomenon that becomes ever more pronounced with the subsequent advent of court culture' (p. 3). Laura Ashe argues that the emergence of Old English literature was 'reliant on the highest levels of society for both audience and patronage' (p. 77), whereas Middle English appeared 'in a strange combination of ephemerality, necessity, and ambition' (p. 84). Fritz van Oostrom tells the story of early Dutch literature in terms of language contact—which he suggests 'may well be a fundamental condition for any literary beginning' (p. 137). Denis Hult reflects on the conditions that led to the establishment of a French literary tradition in England 'at least a generation' before the foundation of one on the Continent (p. 118). Roberta Frank's lively essay on Scandinavia describes beginnings as a hybrid of European models of textuality and local traditions. Other contributors focus on terms and categories. For Mark Chinca and Christopher Young the beginnings of German literature depend on what one means by 'literature'. For Sarah Kay, 'beginnings' are recognizable only in hindsight, and are different from 'openings' that have many possible futures—or none. Occitan literature begins 'only after several centuries of openings' (p. 165). Marina S. Brownlee asks what counts as 'Spain' when cultural and political boundaries are shifting and porous. Certain chapters are concerned with the history of literatures for which there is no or little contemporaneous evidence. Barry Lewis's chapter on Irish and Welsh reconstructs the earliest literary activity in Irish using later evidence and cautious inference, but 'the evidence is too fragmentary' (p. 64) for this method to work for Welsh. K. P. Clarke treats fragments of early Italian vernacular poetry as evidence for literary beginnings, contrasting these serendipitous survivals (e.g. a fragment used as a book cover) with three songbooks from c. 1300 that mark the end of the beginning. Simon Franklin outlines the problematic evidence for a tradition of East Slavonic court literature. The Tale of Igor's Campaign 'laments the passing of a gol","PeriodicalId":45399,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134933727","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":"Poetry and the Question of Modernity: From Heidegger to the Present by Ian Cooper (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/mlr.2023.a907871","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mlr.2023.a907871","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Poetry and the Question of Modernity: From Heidegger to the Present by Ian Cooper Rüdiger Cörner Poetry and the Question of Modernity: From Heidegger to the Present. By Ian Cooper. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. 2020. 235 pp. £104. ISBN 978–0–367–89427–6. In poetry of all times, and in literary modernism in particular, language and the word as such find themselves exposed in their essence. Therefore, poetry remains [End Page 633] an indispensable indicator of how language is rated both in aesthetic and in social terms. With Ian Cooper's latest monograph, Poetry and the Question of Modernity, which is nothing short of a landmark achievement in contemporary poetology, we can trace the roots of this perception of poetry, namely in what I would call Heidegger's existential verbalism. In it, and through it, the word attained a particular defining status of what Being constitutes in poetical contexts. The (modern) poet regards Being always as an act of Saying, while the philosopher considers verbal emanations of Being as surrogates of pure' existence. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why modern philosophers are, by and large, poor poets, Heidegger very much included, and why poets are often more than respectable thinkers. Cooper's investigation into the nature of poetic Being as part of Heidegger's philosophical presence in Paul Celan and, more surprisingly, Seamus Heaney, Les Murray, as well as David Jones, complements his first monograph, The Near and Distant God: Poetry, Idealism and Religious Thought from Hölderlin to Eliot (London: Routledge, 2008). This is mainly evident in the last chapter of his new study, which is devoted to 'Poetry, Religion, and the Overcoming of Enlightenment', where he can also draw on his expertise as co-editor of the Cambridge University Press series 'The Impact of Idealism: The Legacy of Post-Kantian German Thought' (2013). But Cooper is right not to employ the overused concept of 'reception' in this context, for he is primarily interested in the workings of Heideggerian thought in contemporary poetry. Arguably, Cooper might have used the word 'analogy' more often when discussing Heideggerian traces, particularly in the works of Heaney and David Jones given their usage of language, which can be regarded, in places, as analogous to Heidegger's conception of language and Being. This is particularly important given the absence of an actual engagement of these poets with Heidegger's texts. Admittedly, there were poets who even wrote on Heidegger but did not allow his approach to thought to impregnate their poetry. The most famous case in mind is Ingeborg Bachmann, who is curiously absent in Cooper's study. It would have been of genuine interest, given his supreme insight into the 'mechanisms' of Heidegger's poetology of thought, most prominently expressed in his reflections on Hölderlin, to compare, say, Celan's various takes on Heidegger with Bachmann's strikingly formalistic approach to his conception of","PeriodicalId":45399,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134933729","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":"Idealizing Women in the Italian Renaissance ed. by Elena Brizio and Marco Piana (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/mlr.2023.a907868","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mlr.2023.a907868","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Idealizing Women in the Italian Renaissance ed. by Elena Brizio and Marco Piana Alex E. Tadel Idealizing Women in the Italian Renaissance. Ed. by Elena Brizio and Marco Piana. (Essays and Studies, 55) Toronto: Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies. 2022. 305 pp. $49.95. ISBN 978–0–7727–1106–9. This edited volume brings some valuable contributions to the study of Italian Renaissance women. Examining women's idealization between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries from various and sometimes complementary angles, it contains case studies in visual art, literature, philosophy, and theatre. The editors' Introduction outlines some of the issues at stake, describing the idealization of women 'both as a form of oppression and as a tool for social recognition' (p. 9) and positing a 'paradigm shift in the ideal of woman' (p. 10) in the Renaissance, while missing the opportunity to address some important questions, such as whether and how idealizations of women differ from the widespread Renaissance discourse of exemplarity. The editors state that their intention is to showcase the range of the debate on women, yet additional theoretical reflection together with more focus on idealization in some of the essays might have further clarified the specific issues involved in the study of this topic. Judith B. Steinhoff's 'Mandates for Women's Mourning in the Early Renaissance: Paintings and the Law in Trecento Florence and Siena' compares male and female [End Page 629] mourners in depictions of the Lamentation by Giottino and Ambrogio Lorenzetti to the gendered regulation of mourning in Sienese law. Sandra Cardarelli's A Depiction of Virtue and Beauty: The Patronage of the Saint Ursula Fresco in the Church of San Giorgio at Montemerano' analyses the only known example of female patronage in a church in the Maremma region in the fifteenth century and discusses Saint Ursula as a model of female piety. In 'Idealizing the Female Hero: Representations of Judith in Seventeenth-Century Italian Painting', Mathilde Legeay surveys the treatment of the problematic motif of the heroic female warrior and seducer in the work of artists such as Giovanni Baglione, Caravaggio, and Virginia Vezzi. Benedetta Lamanna's 'A Good Woman, a Good Wife: Strategies of Idealization in Sperone Speroni's Dialogo della dignità delle donne' examines the dynamics between patriarchal and proto-feminist discourses on women in Speroni's dialogue, whose ambiguities in this matter she compares to Castiglione's Il cortegiano. Francesca D'Alessandro Behr's 'Philosophy, Religion and the Praise of Women in Lucrezia Marinella' discusses the recurrent presentation of women as ethically and intellectually competent across Marinella's œuvre and focuses on her engagement with Neoplatonism. In 'Female Exemplarity, Identity and Devotion in Lucrezia Marinella's Rime Sacre (1603)', Sarah Rolfe Prodan explores female saints as models of meditation in Marinella's spiritual verse, with ref","PeriodicalId":45399,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134934835","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":"#MeToo and Literary Studies: Reading, Writing, and Teaching about Sexual Violence and Rape Culture ed. by Mary K. Holland and Heather Hewett (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/mlr.2023.a907850","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mlr.2023.a907850","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: #MeToo and Literary Studies: Reading, Writing, and Teaching about Sexual Violence and Rape Culture ed. by Mary K. Holland and Heather Hewett Julie Anne Taddeo #MeToo and Literary Studies: Reading, Writing, and Teaching about Sexual Violence and Rape Culture. Ed. by Mary K. Holland and Heather Hewett. London: Bloomsbury Academic. 2021. xiii+ 415 pp. £90 (pbk £24.99). ISBN 978–1–5013–7274–2 (pbk 978–1–5013–7273–5). Twice a year, students on my university campus participate in the Clothesline Project using T-shirts to reveal, perhaps for the first time, their own experiences as [End Page 601] sexual assault survivors. Thousands of students, faculty, and staff walk by, some stopping to read and photograph the shirts, and perhaps recognize themselves in these brief accounts from mostly young women, but also some men, about what happened to them as children and/or young adults. The Clothesline Project was created in 1990 by the Cape Cod Women's Defense Agenda; its website explains that 'during the same time 58,000 soldiers were killed in the Vietnam War, 51,000 U.S. women were killed by the men who claimed to love them' (<https://clotheslineproject.info/about.html> [accessed 20 January 2023]). More than three decades later, it remains an example of what Mary K. Holland and Heather Hewett propose in their Introduction to this edited collection: that we use literature in its varied forms—whether it is a medieval text, digital hashtags, or brief stories on T-shirts—to critique rape culture and act to end it. As Holland and Hewett remind us in their Introduction, #MeToo began in 2006 with Tarana Burke's revelation on MySpace of her own sexual assault, but it took the star power of actors such as Alyssa Milano and Ashley Judd to make the hashtag go viral in 2017, in the aftermath of the arrest of Harvey Weinstein. Since 2017, academic scholarship has responded with special journal issues and monographs that largely re-examine canonical works through the lens of #MeToo. Holland and Hewett's edited collection, however, stands out not only for its intersectional and international approach to texts that span two thousand years—from Ovid to Roxane Gay, from medieval England to postcolonial India—but also for the book's second half, which offers readers pedagogical approaches and practices, with examples of both successful and unsuccessful classroom instruction. In such a brief review, it is difficult to single out any particular chapter among the twenty-eight contributions, but all of them highlight the potential for literary studies to effect change in and beyond the university classroom. Holland and Hewett observe that hashtag activism 'has its roots in over two centuries of activism, advocacy work, and writing about sexual violence' (p. 3). Likewise, hashtag activism invites scholars and students to engage in new interpretations of old texts; one such example is described in Chapter 8, in which twenty-first-century Indian college students, respon","PeriodicalId":45399,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134934966","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":"Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study by John Guillory (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/mlr.2023.a907849","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mlr.2023.a907849","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study by John Guillory Ritchie Robertson Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study. By John Guillory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2022. xvi+ 407 pp. $29. ISBN 978–0–226–82130–6. In these loosely linked essays, John Guillory uses his deep familiarity with the history of scholarship, teaching, and rhetoric to view the modern university from 'a certain orbital distance' (p. 71). He begins with a sociologically informed account of how the teaching of English in American universities became, in the nineteenth century, an organized profession which issued its own credentials (the Ph.D.). Professionalization gave academics a degree of autonomy and social standing. Departments of English and modern languages inherited two traditions: that of belles-lettres (descending from Hugh Blair's occupancy of the Chair of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres at Edinburgh in 1762–83) and philology, imported from Germany. After long contests between scholars and critics, the two reached an accommodation in the mid-twentieth century. Their subject was understood as 'literary criticism', and their approaches could be reconciled in the person of the 'scholar-critic'. Some academics, however, felt a lack of purpose, and were impelled by the new social movements of the 1960s to politicize their courses in the hope of effecting social change. While such teaching has probably strengthened liberal attitudes among the college-educated, it has not changed the world, nor has it resolved a widespread uncertainty about the point of teaching literature. Guillory diagnoses a persistent tendency in literary studies to overestimate the potential impact of one's work and then be disappointed when such impact is not visible. To make matters worse, the role of literature in people's lives has diminished as that of other media, especially film, has increased: Guillory mentions this topic several times without exploring its implications. What should literary academics do? Guillory does not put forward an agenda for literary study, but he does his best to clarify what teachers of literature can and should do. The essay 'Monuments and Documents' starts from the continual need to justify the study of literature (and the humanities generally) by contrast especially with STEM subjects. Rather than making implausible claims for the social value of the humanities or exaggerating their power to teach critical thinking, we should be clear about what humanities departments actually study. Whereas the sciences are defined by their method, the humanities are defined by their object. Borrowing his terms from an essay by Erwin Panofsky, 'The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline' (1938), Guillory argues that the humanities study monuments surviving from the past in which we are interested for whatever reason, and study them by means of documents. Panofsky's example is a fifteenth-century German altar","PeriodicalId":45399,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134935209","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 Women Who Invented Twentieth-Century Children's Literature by Elizabeth West (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/mlr.2023.a907845","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mlr.2023.a907845","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: The Women Who Invented Twentieth-Century Children's Literature by Elizabeth West Yuanyuan Zhang and Haifeng Hui The Women Who Invented Twentieth-Century Children's Literature. By Elizabeth West. London: Routledge. 2022. vii+ 260 pp. £120 (ebk £36.99). ISBN 978–1–032308–27–2 (ebk 978–1–003306–87–0). For children's literature, the decades from the 1930s to the 1960s are traditionally dismissed as the mundane 'Brass Age' (p. 4), overshadowed by the Golden Ages preceding and succeeding this period. In this book, however, Elizabeth West conducts an insightful reinvestigation of this period and testifies to its significant impact on modern children's literature. West concentrates particularly on the 'forgotten' (p. 1) dedication of a group of female writers, illustrators, editors, and librarians, or, in her collective term, the 'bookwomen', active in Britain and the United States between the 1930s and the 1960s. Their commitment to ensuring the quality of children's books in terms of both content and material form not only aided the production of classics still warmly received today, but also laid the foundation for some of the most crucial criteria for children's publishing, and 'invented', as the title of the book suggests, children's literature in the twentieth century. West resurrects the contributions of these bookwomen in an ambitious total of nine chapters. In the Introduction she explains her research focus and presents the principal preoccupations in children's literature and inter-war socio-cultural frameworks that form the basis for her subsequent chapters. In Chapter 1 the author gives a comprehensive overview of the representative British and American bookwomen and their interconnections. Chapters 2–7 each focus on a different aspect of children's literature or on a specific genre, featuring one or several bookwomen relevant to each topic. Chapter 2 concerns children's editors, highlighting the work of Eleanor Graham, the prominent founding editor of Penguin's Puffin [End Page 593] books. Chapter 3 uses Eileen Colwell's librarianship at Hendon Public Library to discuss the evolving role of children's librarians. Chapter 4 concentrates on how female children's authors managed to shine in the inter-war period by examining the successful career of Ursula Moray Williams, who managed to combine her writing talent with sound commercial sense so as to maintain long-lasting popularity. Chapter 5 centres on materiality and how bookwomen collaborated to negotiate content, design, wartime shortages, and commercial considerations of cost and profit. Chapter 6 examines picture books, concentrating on Kathleen Hale and her enduring Orlando series. Chapter 7 explores radical children's literature and records Amabel Williams-Ellis's efforts in embedding unconventional ideas in her works for the young. In the concluding chapter, West once again lauds the undervalued endeavour of the bookwomen. West's enquiry brings to light a largely neglected","PeriodicalId":45399,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134935210","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":"Identification and Empathy in Perpetrator Fiction on the Spanish Civil War","authors":"Samuel Donoghue","doi":"10.1353/mlr.2023.a907834","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mlr.2023.a907834","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: This article analyses the ethically suspect processes of identification and empathy mobilized by Miguel Dalmau's 2009 work of perpetrator fiction, La noche del Diablo . It draws on narratological perspectives on character identification and narrative empathy and on philosophical discussions on the necessity of attempting to comprehend the motivations of those who commit evil acts. Informed by these narratological and philosophical insights, the article argues that perpetrator fiction about the Spanish Civil War is a psychologically useful tool for expanding our understanding of how individuals commit atrocities and for enhancing our awareness of ourselves as potential agents of perpetration.","PeriodicalId":45399,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134935217","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}