Reading Charles Reznikoff. The Plain Sunlight of His Verse
Edited by Xavier Kalck, Fiona McMahon, and Naomi Toth
Reading Charles Reznikoff explores Reznikoff’s unique position as a modernist writing spare verse, rich with urban detail, but also as a paragon of found text poetry who created lasting works of testimony, and as a Jewish American poet whose translations and adaptations from scripture and biblical commentary verge on the prophetic.
This collection of essays explores Reznikoff’s verse and its contemporary poetic and critical legacy in five movements. The first looks at how history and politics are woven into Reznikoff’s work, namely Reznikoff’s complex relationship with Jewish American identity in the 20th century. The second section turns to documentary poetics and to Reznikoff’s practice of composing from historical as well as legal documents, in the context of modernist concerns over realism as well as contemporary ones over memory and appropriation. The third section delves into the concept of verse—Reznikoff’s word for the lyric—showing how Reznikoff’s rhythms compose an abstract yet accurate vernacular portrait of America. It places Reznikoff among his fellow poets, known as the Objectivists, and in relation to larger issues pertaining to the rhythmic fabric of free verse and the aesthetic vocabularies of the spare and the ordinary. The fourth opens onto issues of translation, and Reznikoff’s work’s journey through Mexican, Polish and French contexts, illustrating Reznikoff’s ongoing transnational relevance. The volume concludes with a foray into some of Reznikoff’s afterlives, in the work of Paul Auster—an early champion of Reznikoff’s method—and through the history of Reznikoff’s complex engagement with the African American experience, the representation of injustice and testimony as a dialogical means of witnessing intended to foster a sense of community.
https://libraries.clemson.edu/press/books/reading-charles-reznikoff/
Thanatic Ethics. The Circulation of Bodies in Migratory Spaces
Edited By Bidisha Banerjee, Judith Misrahi-Barak, Thomas Lacroix
This book emerges from "Thanatic Ethics: The Circulation of Bodies in Migratory Spaces", an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary project uniting social scientists, postcolonial scholars, and artists worldwide to raise critical issues related to the death of migrants. It urgently calls for migration studies to confront the consequences of Western governments' restrictive and necropolitical migration policies.
The volume introduces thanatic ethics as a moral compass—a code of conduct that re-endows migrant deaths with meaning, ensuring they are remembered and mourned. Through diverse perspectives, contributors examine how social practices, political mobilizations, and artistic and literary representations can serve dual purposes: memorializing the dead while changing the gaze of the living on the unidentified dead. Enhancing awareness in the wider community could lead to the overturning of current migration policies.
Thoughtfully organized into four sections, the book first explores how oceanic waters have been constructed as bordering agents—spaces of exclusion and death. The second section focuses on the politics of death, burial, and mourning, while the third confronts the fraught questions inherent to visualizing the Thanatic. The concluding section advances essential conversations about care, repair, and restitution.
This essential text speaks to a diverse audience including scholars and students in migration studies, postcolonial studies, human rights, ethics, cultural studies, literature, and political science. It will also prove valuable for policymakers, human rights advocates, artists, and anyone concerned with the multi-layered aspects of migration.
The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies.
Utter Vulnerability. Essays on the Poetry of John Wieners
Michael Kindellan, Alex/Rose Cocker
Collection « Profils américains »
Utter Vulnerability: Essays on the Poetry of John Wieners is the first-ever book devoted exclusively to this extraordinary writer, a figure Allen Ginsberg once called “one of the greatest poets around”. Featuring work by many of Wieners’ most articulate and passionate contemporary exponents, the essays gathered here consider the life, styles, aesthetics, and artistic achievements of one of America’s most original voices. From devoted close readings to socio-historical contextualisations, together our contributors explore a fascinating schedule of ideas and actualities of style, sexuality, queerness, mental illness, resilience, and commitment to continual literary (re)invention. As such, Utter Vulnerability represents a significant moment in the unfinished history of Wieners’ critical reception. A landmark publication, this book provides a new platform for future discussion, debate, and appreciation.
Modernism and Matter. Literature in Quest of a new assembly of elements’ (1907-1941)
Xavier Le Brun, Christine Reynier
Collection « Present Perfect »
In the wake of recent reappraisals of modernism through the lens of ecocriticism and within the compass of New Modernist Studies, this volume seeks to renew our reading of modernist literature by focusing on matter. Rather than addressing the materiality of the book or of archive, it focuses on matter as organic or unorganic, as encompassing human bodies as well as cosmic elements, vegetal matter and the materiality of objects, and as vibrant and dynamic. Analysing the representation of matter in its multifarious acceptations in the novels, short stories and poetry of the early twentieth century entails touching upon aesthetic matter as well as ethical or ontological issues connected with the living world at large. This is done through a rich interdisciplinary approach that conjurs up literary theory while drawing now on the philosophy and scientific discoveries of the time, now on contemporary knowledge. In this light, the works of canonical authors such as Wyndham Lewis, D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf or Elizabeth Bowen take on new meanings while neglected ones, like those of Vita Sackville-West or Mina Loy, beg to be further acknowledged.
The Ethics of (In-)Attention in Contemporary Anglophone Narrative
Edited by Jean-Michel Ganteau, Susana Onega
This volume argues that contemporary narratives evince a great deal of resilience by promoting an ecology of attention based on poetic options that develop an ethics of the particularist type. The contributors draw on critical and theoretical literature hailing from various fields: including psychology and sociology, but more prominently phenomenology, political philosophy, analytical philosophy (essentially Ordinary Language Philosophy), alongside the Ethics of Care and Vulnerability. This volume is designed as an innovative contribution to the nascent field of the study of attention in literary criticism, an area that is full of potential. Its scope is wide, as it embraces a great deal of the Anglophone world, with Britain, Ireland, the USA, but also Australia and even Malta. Its chapters focus on well-established authors, like Kazuo Ishiguro (whose work is revisited here in a completely new light) or more confidential ones like Melissa Harrison or Sarah Moss.
https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.4324/9781003463610/ethics-at...
May Sinclair in Her Time. Reappraising May Sinclair’s Role in Early-Twentieth-Century Literature and Philosophy
By Leslie De Bont, Isabelle Brasme, Florence Marie
PULM
ISBN 978-2-36781-509-1
May Sinclair has been typically considered as a liminal author, positioned between two eras: the 19th and the 20th centuries, Victorian culture and modernism, traditional and avant-garde writing and thinking. As a result, traditional criticism has confined her to the margins of 20th-century literature and philosophy. Re-examining Sinclair’s involvement in the literary and philosophical debates of her time, this collaborative volume seeks to challenge this liminal status and to reassert Sinclair’s role as an author, critic and thinker firmly established within her time. Leading experts in philosophy and in criticism on May Sinclair thus investigate her presence on the literary scene, her dialogues with her contemporaries (e.g. Dorothy Richardson, H.D., Ford Madox Ford and James Joyce) and her engagement with topical issues such as heredity, women’s rights and mysticism, as well as with modernist paradigms such as the epiphany. In light of these new analyses, rather than being uncomfortably situated between two eras, Sinclair emerges as fully in and of her time, engaged in a constant conversation with fellow thinkers, writers, and artists. On a larger scale, this reappraisal of Sinclair’s fruitful connections with her peers invites us to go beyond the conventional divide opposing Victorian and modernist writing, and to participate in the current dynamics in criticism that aims to offer a more inclusive and accurate definition of the intellectual scene in early-20th-century Britain.
Espaces de souveraineté dans les Amériques
Lawrence Aje, Claude Chastagner, eds., Espaces de souveraineté dans les Amériques, Presses Universitaires d’Aix-Marseille, 2024.
https://presses-universitaires.univ-amu.fr/espaces-souverainete-ameriques
Les différents États indépendants qui composent l’« Amérique » ont tous été confrontés, à un moment donné de leur histoire, à la nécessité de consolider leur souveraineté en créant des institutions politiques soucieuses d’atténuer les divisions idéologiques et régionales qui auraient pu les fragiliser. La plupart ont mis en place un modèle de gouvernance décentralisé où l’autorité centrale dévolue des pouvoirs aux composantes locales. Mais la souveraineté nationale de ces États-nations a également été mise à l’épreuve par l’ingérence de puissances étrangères. Par ailleurs, la notion de souveraineté ne peut faire l’économie des dynamiques de conquêtes territoriales, de l’esclavage et de la discrimination ethnique et raciale qui en résulte.
Du Canada au Brésil, en passant par les États-Unis, Cuba, le Venezuela, la Colombie et l’Équateur, cet ouvrage propose une réflexion pluridisciplinaire sur la notion de souveraineté et sur les espaces qui en permettent l’expression. Il met, à l’épreuve des faits, les réflexions et questionnements théoriques, explore comment individus, communautés et gouvernements s’opposent sur les conséquences de la mise en œuvre de leur souveraineté respective. Face à ceux qui revendiquent et exercent de façon verticale une souveraineté supérieure, qu’elle soit politique, culturelle ou économique, d’autres s’efforcent, par le droit, la négociation ou la confrontation, de modifier les équilibres établis et de recouvrer la souveraineté dont elles s’estiment dépossédées.