PMLA-PUBLICATIONS OF THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA最新文献

{"title":"The Social Roots of the Arabic Free Verse Movement","authors":"Nazik al-Malaʾika, Qussay Al-Attabi","doi":"10.1632/S0030812923000251","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1632/S0030812923000251","url":null,"abstract":"On 27 October 1947, the Iraqi poet Nazik al-Malaʾika (1923–2007) wrote “ ا ل ك و ل ي ر ا ” (“al-Kulira”; “Cholera”), an experimental poem that defied the traditional rules of Arabic prosody. Al-Malaʾika wanted to write a poem in response to the outbreak of the cholera epidemic in Egypt and felt that the traditional forms restrained her ability to express the intensity of her feelings about the tragedy. Al-Malaʾika’s father, himself a man of letters, rejected the poem as “ ا خ ف ا ق ك ا م ل ” (“a total failure”), warning her that she could not transgress the boundaries of Arab taste with a poem defying deep-rooted and time-tested conventions (qtd. in al-Malaʾika, “al-Shiʿr” 92; my trans.). But the ambitious poet persisted, betting her father that the experimental poem “ س ت غ ي ر خ ر ي ط ة ا ل ش ع ر ا ل ع ر ب ي ” (“would change the map of Arabic poetry”; “Al-Shiʿr” 93). And she was right. The publication of “al-Kulira” represents a turning point in modern Arabic literature, as the poem is “recognized as the first example of its kind, a dramatic break with fourteen centuries of metrical orthodoxy” (Creswell 72). Al-Mala iʾka called the new form of poetry ا ل ش ع ر ا ل ح ر (al-shiʿ r al-hụrr; “free verse”), which allowed for breaking the monorhyme and varying the number of feet in each line of verse. The new formwas an immediate success, and although it was hardly the only mid-century experimentation with form, al-shiʿ r al-hụrr proved “the most successful metrical experiment in twentieth-century Arabic poetry” (DeYoung). Al-Malaʾika, one of the Arab world’s most famous poets, was born in Baghdad on 23 August 1923 to a well-educated family. After graduating from the famed Iraqi Teachers’ Training College in 1944, she received a Rockefeller Scholarship to study literary criticism at Princeton University, before earning a master’s degree in comparative literature from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Afterward, she returned to Iraq and held teaching positions at the Universities of Baghdad, Basra, and Mosul until 1970, when she moved to Kuwait to work at Kuwait University. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, al-Malaʾika moved to Cairo, where she lived until her death, on 20 June 2007.","PeriodicalId":47559,"journal":{"name":"PMLA-PUBLICATIONS OF THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89072239","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":"Euryclea's Greeting: Literary and Linguistic Palimpsests in Abdulrazak Gurnah's Oeuvre","authors":"T. Steiner","doi":"10.1632/S0030812923000238","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1632/S0030812923000238","url":null,"abstract":"TINA STEINER, the author of Translated People, Translated Texts: Language and Migration in Contemporary African Literature (St. Jerome Publishing, 2009) and Convivial Worlds: Writing Relation from Africa (Routledge India, 2021), is a professor in the English department at Stellenbosch University. She coedited the bilingual travelogue of D. D. T. Jabavu, In India and East Africa / E-Indiya nase East Africa (Wits UP, 2019), and is part of the editorial collective of the journal Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies. My encounter with Kiswahili was as a native speaker born into it in our house in Malindi. Many people in Malindi spoke a smattering of Arabic as well, and some spoke it fluently. My father was a fluent speaker. My mother could not speak a word except the words that had somehow smuggled their way into Swahili. From other houses you could hear the sound of Kutchi or Somali, or the inflection of Kingazija. (Gurnah, “Learning” 28)","PeriodicalId":47559,"journal":{"name":"PMLA-PUBLICATIONS OF THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86753537","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":"Sound, Interrogation, Torture: John le Carré and the Audible State","authors":"A. Hepburn","doi":"10.1632/S0030812923000147","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1632/S0030812923000147","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract While completing his national service from 1951 to 1952, John le Carré served as an intelligence corps officer whose duties included the interrogation of refugees; as a member of MI5 and MI6 between 1958 and 1963, he interrogated defectors from Soviet bloc countries to test their sincerity or duplicity. In Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy, Smiley's People, The Secret Pilgrim, The Mission Song, and le Carré's other novels, interrogation scenes contribute to the total soundworld of the audible state. As a way to gather information through extorted speech, interrogation occurs in extraterritorial nonplaces or undisclosed, deniable locations. Drawing on historical documents, this essay positions interrogation in terms of torture, human rights, and the capacity of the state to inflict harm or to extend protection to individuals under its authority. In le Carré's novels, characters not only listen like states—comprehensively, omnisciently—but also begin to think like states.","PeriodicalId":47559,"journal":{"name":"PMLA-PUBLICATIONS OF THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80619070","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":"Intimate Editing: The Textual Poetics of Susan Howe's Collage Poems","authors":"Anne Thompson","doi":"10.1632/S0030812923000184","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1632/S0030812923000184","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Susan Howe's recent collage poems—an intricate, sui generis form—are the flowering of her editorial theory, which I describe as “intimate editing.” I challenge scholarly assumptions that sideline Howe's engagement with the field of textual criticism from accounts of her poetry by showing how her unique approach to texts puts avant-garde poetry and textual editing into conversation, introducing reciprocal possibilities for both. Poems can model new forms of editing, and editorial debates can expand the reach and resonance of innovative poetry. Drawing on The Birth-mark, Howe's collection of creative-critical essays that probe the motivations and ethos of textual criticism, I show how intimate editing expands the typical, often rigid, values of traditional editing and contributes to growing discussions about what a feminist textual criticism might look like. Then I discuss the collage poems, particularly those in Concordance, as whimsical manifestations of Howe's textual approach.","PeriodicalId":47559,"journal":{"name":"PMLA-PUBLICATIONS OF THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78314524","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":"Gurnah's Fiction at the “End of Religion”","authors":"Emad Mirmotahari","doi":"10.1632/S0030812923000214","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1632/S0030812923000214","url":null,"abstract":"EMAD MIRMOTAHARI is associate professor of English at Duquesne University, where he teaches courses in world and postcolonial literatures. Early in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Paradise (1994), the novel that brought its author widespread international attention and plaudits, it is revealed that the main character, an adolescent boy named Yusuf who grows up on the Swahili coast in the early twentieth century, cannot read the Qur’an. While most people on the coast speak Kiswahili, Nyamwezi, andmany other local and regional languages, Arabic is the language of commerce, of communal authority, and of faith. The label “savage” is summarily affixed to anyonewho cannot read and speak it. As the narrative goes on, the adults in Yusuf’s world become increasingly suspicious of his inability to read Arabic and of his disinclination toward reading scripture. This suspicion is eventually confirmed, as the novel’s narrator shares that Yusuf’s “attention wandered during the longer prayers, and he was forced to hum meaninglessly over the noise of other readers when he was required to address the unfamiliar sections of the Book” (97). At one point, Yusuf is probingly asked to locate the all-important Ya-Sin surah in the Qur’an but is unable to do so. Yusuf does not know the Qur’an and does not make much effort to conceal that fact; for this reason, he finds himself on the outskirts of the Islamic society to which he nominally belongs. Salim, the narrator of Gurnah’s 2017 novel, Gravel Heart, relates the following about his own schooling in Zanzibar, a plot point that takes place more than half a century after the events in Paradise:","PeriodicalId":47559,"journal":{"name":"PMLA-PUBLICATIONS OF THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89881603","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":"MLA volume 138 issue 2 Cover and Back matter","authors":"","doi":"10.1632/s0030812923000305","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1632/s0030812923000305","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47559,"journal":{"name":"PMLA-PUBLICATIONS OF THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88481458","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":"Puritan Genealogies: Robert Lowell, Perry Miller, and the Postwar Jonathan Edwards","authors":"A. Cordingley","doi":"10.1632/S0030812923000135","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1632/S0030812923000135","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Robert Lowell challenged the mid-century canonization of the eighteenth-century Puritan theologian Jonathan Edwards. He objected to the way the influential historian Perry Miller instrumentalized Edwards to buttress support for US imperialism, exceptionalism, and Cold War politics. Challenging received views about the Puritan rhetoric of the most recognizable of postwar poets, this article contrasts Miller's captivating thesis of the Puritans’ “errand into the wilderness” with Lowell's implication of Edwards in acts of colonial expansion and slavery. Lowell's Edwards emerges as a contradictory figure who, in Lowell's 1962 poem “Jonathan Edwards in Western Massachusetts,” is brought into discourse with the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century philosopher-scientists Francis Bacon and Blaise Pascal. Lowell fashions a Puritan genealogy within which Edwards is a cosmopolitan interlocutor and forebear of confessionalism; however, the theologian's flawed moral self-scrutiny occasions the poet's self-reflexive satire, as well as his model for a faltering, self-correcting rectitude.","PeriodicalId":47559,"journal":{"name":"PMLA-PUBLICATIONS OF THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78415229","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":"Loss without Remedy: Moby-Dick and the Laws of Compensation","authors":"Geoffrey R. Kirsch","doi":"10.1632/S0030812922000906","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1632/S0030812922000906","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Reading Moby-Dick alongside the groundbreaking tort and accident jurisprudence of Melville's father-in-law, Massachusetts Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw, reveals that the white whale's attack on Captain Ahab involves the same questions of risk, responsibility, and redress posed by nineteenth-century industrial accidents. More specifically, Ahab embodies the recrudescence of an earlier, revenge-based conception of justice that emerges in reaction to the pro-business jurisprudence of Shaw, in which industry was increasingly shielded from liability to its victims in cases of “pure accident”—precisely the possibility Ahab is fatally unable to accept. As narrator, Ishmael in turn augurs the rise of a new legal order that disavows the focus on blame and responsibility altogether.","PeriodicalId":47559,"journal":{"name":"PMLA-PUBLICATIONS OF THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75163614","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":"Rude Railing Rhymers: Reading Close Rhyme in Skeltonic Verse and Hip-Hop","authors":"Emma Brush","doi":"10.1632/S0030812922000955","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1632/S0030812922000955","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract At the turn of the sixteenth century, John Skelton left a strange legacy to the English literary canon: a verse form characterized solely by short lines and long rhyme sequences. This formal innovation, a species of close rhyme now called “the Skeltonic,” has puzzled Skelton's interlocutors for centuries, leaving him a liminal figure within literary history. But if Skelton was an anomaly, the Skeltonic does not stand alone within the English-language literary canon. American hip-hop, one of the most formally innovative, commercially successful, and contentious poetic forms of our day, foregrounds a style and ethos that in many ways picks up where Skelton left off. Hip-hop, like the Skeltonic, requires the explanatory force of its own context, and yet its remarkable, persistent, historically dissonant commitment to rhyme suggests a striking formal parallel with Skelton's verse, one that offers transhistorical insight into the performative poetics and paradoxical politics of close rhyme.","PeriodicalId":47559,"journal":{"name":"PMLA-PUBLICATIONS OF THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76638436","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":"From Plinth to Stage: Protest Theater as Historiographic Activism in The Fall","authors":"Susanna Sacks","doi":"10.1632/S0030812922000967","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1632/S0030812922000967","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This essay examines theater's role in recording public history, positing a performance-sensitive approach to historiography against the singularity of both monuments and canons. The recent removal of monuments has drawn renewed attention to the problem of singular public histories. I argue for a polyvocal, repertory model of public history as theorized through the collectively written 2016 play The Fall, which records the events of the 2015–16 student protests in South Africa. The essay begins by contextualizing the play in the longer history of workshop theater and educational inequality in South Africa before specifically examining its approach to public history. Such performance-sensitive historiography enacts anticolonial epistemologies by replacing the singular representation of monumentalism with copresence amid contested histories.","PeriodicalId":47559,"journal":{"name":"PMLA-PUBLICATIONS OF THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87159661","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}