By Klem James, author of “Particules Flottantes: Mutable Identity and Postmodern ‘Schizophrenia’ in the Works of Michel Houellebecq,” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 47, no. 2, Winter 2024, pp. 17-36, now available on Project Muse, FREE for a limited time. Michel Houellebecq, arguably France’s best-known and most widely translated living author is perhaps an unlikely figure to be associated with contemporary debates about identity. Houellebecq is conservative, abused as being so, and sometimes wrongly considered to be reactionary. In his novel Submission (Soumission), he depicts France’s fa ..read more

By Daniel R. Adler, author of “Making Visible the ‘Mental Wreckage’: A Historical Materialist Reading of Milkman,” Journal of Modern Literature 47.2 (Winter 2024), now on Project Muse, free for a limited time. After Milkman won the 2018 Man Booker Prize, it inspired some pretty extreme reactions. Some disliked it for its long paragraphs, digressions, and unnamed narrator. Other readers found the text’s thematic focus on sexual harassment during Northern Ireland’s Troubles era complicated by such elements. Perhaps because of Milkman’s success as a #MeToo text, certain readers had expectations o ..read more

This content is password protected. To view it please enter your password below: Password: The post Protected: The Deeply Rooted Heritage of Recycled Poetics: A Closer Look at JML 47.1 appeared first on Indiana University Press ..read more

By Cory Austin Knudson, author of “Animality and the Limits of Discourse in Djuna Barnes and Georges Bataille,” Journal of Modern Literature 46.4, available on Project Muse, FREE for a limited time. When I first encountered Nightwood in college, I thought it was the most frustrating book I’d ever read. Though it is now book I’ve reread more than any other, the frustration remains, but my attitude toward that frustration has changed. I’m in good company. In her study of the novel, “Nightwood and the ‘Terror of Uncertain Signs,’” Teresa de Lauretis laments, “I approached this text a number of ti ..read more

By Patricia Morgne Cramer, author of “‘Everyone chooses their love after their own fashion’: The Waves as a Modernist Symposium,” Journal of Modern Literature 46.4, now on Project Muse, free for a limited time. This moment of reconciliation . . . this evening moment [ ] with…youth coming up from the river in white flannels, carrying cushions, is to me black with the shadows of dungeons and the tortures and infamies practiced by man upon man. (Woolf, Waves 219) As a novice [‘barely turned seven’] I was soon taken to see the dungeons…. The sight of a boy in fetters…was not exactly fi ..read more

The trailer for Meghan O’Hara and Mike Attie’s In Country (2014) opens with archival footage of the Vietnam War accompanied by a voice-over whose source is quickly revealed to be that of a man dressed in fatigues. The contrast between the grainy look of the archival footage and the crisp audio of the interview signals a dual temporality that is central to the film’s subject matter: an annual reenactment of the Vietnam War in the Oregon woods. For D. Andy Rice, In Country’s critical potential is hampered by its observational style; by adopting, perhaps instinctively, a formal app ..read more

Arab–Latin American Business Elites and the Politics of Global Imaginaries Triumphant capitalism has in our time engendered a new global class that lives and works in a borderless world, beyond the reach of national politics or sovereign power. Or has it? In Rooted Globalism: Arab-Latin American Business Elites and the Politics of Global Imaginaries (Indiana University Press, 2022), Kevin Funk challenges the commonsensical view that today members of a global capitalist class have little or no need of national loyalty. Teasing the global apart from the transnational and de-n ..read more

From Film Quarterly, Fall 2023, Volume 77, Number 1 Bruno Guaraná The trailer for Meghan O’Hara and Mike Attie’s In Country (2014) opens with archival footage of the Vietnam War accompanied by a voice-over whose source is quickly revealed to be that of a man dressed in fatigues. The contrast between the grainy look of the archival footage and the crisp audio of the interview signals a dual temporality that is central to the film’s subject matter: an annual reenactment of the Vietnam War in the Oregon woods. For D. Andy Rice, In Country’s critical potential is hampered by ..read more

Patricia Zimmermann, Charles A. Dana Professor in the Department of Screen Studies, Media Arts, Sciences and Studies at Ithaca College and director of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival died the morning of Aug. 18 after a short illness.  The college notified the campus community of Zimmermann’s death Aug. 19 in an email from President La Jerne Cornish and Provost Melanie Stein that expressed great sadness and loss.  “We ask that you continue to take care of yourselves and one another, and to keep Patty and her loved ones close to your heart as we grieve this trem ..read more

By Sarah Coogan, author of “‘I am other I now’: Identity, Intertextuality, and Networks of Debt in Ulysses,” Journal of Modern Literature (JML) 46.3, now available on Project MUSE, FREE for a limited time. Ulysses (1922) is a novel particularly susceptible to diagrams. Those familiar with Joyce’s work will think immediately of the Gilbert and Linati schemas, the two charts of the novel that Joyce provided to scholars in the 1920s to elucidate its correspondences to The Odyssey as well as other thematic and stylistic elements of the text. Joyce apparently told Vladimir Nabokov that the schemas ..read more