Percy Gloom [amazon], by Cathy Malkasian. You can visit the book site here.  Not too much there.

... And

Hieronymus B., by Ulf K. [amazon]. Top Shelf has a generous preview. (I posted briefly about this before.)

I really liked them both while feeling that both could be better. It’s a bit hard to put my finger on it.

Let start with the visual basics. We have two somewhat hapless protagonists - characters to whom things happen, mostly, rather than characters who do things. They are both prematurely aged children/innocently child-like old men. They both have big round heads and little bodies. I’m starting to think that Charlie Brown is an archetype. The bald-headed kid who gets the football yanked, but who somehow salvages some degree of philosophic dignity. Maybe there is something Charlie Brownish inherent in the comics medium. A simple circle face on a stick body. It really doesn’t get more iconically economical than that. Chris Ware, anyone?

It’s been given one of those very American subtitles characteristic of commodity histories. (’how the smelt saved Western Civilization’. That sort of thing.) In this case; ‘how Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze & co. transformed the intellectual life of the United States.’ Rather an ironic commentary on the commodification of Theory, I suppose. (In French it was ’et les mutations de la vie intellectuale aux Etats-Unis.)

The book has been praised by Stanley Fish. (As linked here by Bill B.) And it has an effusive blurb from Derrida. (It was originally published in 2003, so he had a chance to read it before he died, I presume.)

“In such a difficult genre, full of traps and obstacles, French Theory is a success and a remarkable book in every respect: it is fair, balanced, and informed. I am sure this book will become the reference for both sides of the Atlantic.”

The book appears to be selling quite well. It’s ranked an astonishing 6,000 on Amazon at the moment. That’s really good for a book on this sort of subject.

But I too wish I knew more about acting. One of the many things I have failed to do in my life is attend much theater. Somehow I think it would help me better understand the inherent theatricality of all poetry. But if I may add another example of the kind of obvious Acting! that impresses me, I’d like to say a couple of things about Geoffrey Rush’s performance in The Life and Death of Peter Sellars.

A new union of faculty serving part-time wins raises and employment security in its first contract.

About six weeks ago, I reported on the decision by the Union of Part-Time Faculty to make job security the core demand of their first contract negotiation at Wayne State, where graduate employees and faculty serving on a full-time basis are already unionized.

In the tentative agreement reached between the administration and UPTF-AFT, the faculty forced the administration to accept job security after 6 consecutive semesters (to one-year renewable contracts with seniority protections) and, after 6 more terms, 2-year renewable contracts with seniority protections. 

In defence of Luckhurst (whom I don’t know), it has to be said that his position is extremely radical for a specialist in Modern and Contemporary Literature. I should note at this point that this is also my field and so I had absolutely no problem following him because I’m familiar with the idiom and the general outlines of the positions ... What was especially striking was that he more-or-less said that sf was THE literature of modernity and concluded that what was modern about it was the absence of Modernism. People in the field of Modern and Contemporary Literature do not usually say this kind of thing (and that’s putting it mildly). So for me, that was EXCITING. I can see that others might be underwhelmed but that is because they don’t share the same underlying assumptions as people who work in Modern and Contemporary Literature. This was succinctly defined by Luckhurst as being that Henry James won the war with Wells and so came to dominate the modern definition of literary fiction. Of course, the reason others don’t share this assumption is because it is demonstrably false - only in the minds of academics and the literary elite did James win this war; the heirs of Wells, from Orwell onwards, inherited the real world and modernism burnt itself out by 1940. Therefore, what we were seeing in Luckhurst’s paper was the beginning of a sea change (well, it’s been coming some time) by which received academic opinion is transforming itself and recanting the last 100 years or so.

This is, as the thread notes, one of the core arguments of Luckhurts’s recent (and excellent) cultural history of SF, Science Fiction (Polity 2005).  I reviewed this book when it came out, for an academic journal, and although I was very positive I also carped a little.  Looking back the carping was ungracious: I complained that for a self-proclaimed cultural history of SF it was a shame Luckhurst didn’t include discussion of film and TV SF.  But this was actually a reviewerish faux pas, criticising a book by somebody else because they didn’t choose to write it exactly as I would have done.  You see it so happens that I also published a history of SF, in which one of my main arguments was that since the 1970s SF has, by and large, jumped media from written to visual forms--but of course it’s asinine to criticise Luckhurst for thinking for himself rather than sharing my peculiar views.  The other of my main arguments is that SF begins in 1600.  Luckhurst takes the much more orthodox view that SF begins in the latter half of the 19th-century, which is to say, at the same time (more or less) and determined by the same cultural logics (more or less) as Modernism.  And as such his overall thesis was much more radical, and much more exciting, than I gave it credit for in my review.  So, sorry about that: and you should buy Luckhurst’s book.  It’s very good indeed.  Better than mine, if I’m frank.

Now, positing Modernism in terms of ‘a war between Wells and James’ is, clearly, a slightly polemical way of putting it; and asserting either the victory of James, or dedicating oneself to a Maquis-style battle on Wells’s behalf, lacks a certain nuance.  It’s a shorthand, not an all-encompassing critical description.  Keen says ‘I’m not denying the influence of James—I suppose I am trying to reflect the bifurcated culture: James only won in realm of elitist literary culture and the academic modernist industry (he didn’t win in the wider world).’ He goes on ‘admittedly, those spheres are very influential and have cast a distorting material effect over the wider culture’.  I wonder whether he’s right to assert that ‘current Modernist studies are showing signs of this position [i.e. the victory of James] breaking down; but as is so often the case, the immediate result of this will be a massive retrenchment with hordes of top scholars declaring contemporary literature to have gone wrong and demanding a return to James (this is starting to happen).’ Coincidentally I have recently been rereading James and my reaction has been a sort of ingenuous surprise at how good he is.  That looks rather stupid written down there like that, but its been my reaction, prompted in part by a long period (going back to my undergraduate experience) of not especially liking James.  I’ll say more about that in a day or two.  But for now I’ll close with this: in my history I cover the period of Modernism in two chapters, one for ‘high’ cultural Modernism and one for Pulps like E E Doc Smith, although my main thesis is (given the, I argue, deeper roots of the genre) they’re basically the same thing.  By this I mean that both popular sf and High Modernist art are responding in similar ways to a similar cultural logic: that, in a nutshell, High Modernism is sf.  Proust’s Recherche, say, whatever critics have said about it, is actually a time-travel story deeply indebted to Wells’s Time Machine.  Similar cases can be made for Kafka, Marinetti, Eliot etc.  Enough! Or too much.

Anyway, over at {LIME TREE} K. Silem Mohammad has a 100 Best-Loved Poems list going. I love lists! And the most recent poem is Thomas Wyatt’s “They Flee From Me,” only K. Silem is calling it something else, and he’s juxtaposing it with some hippety hop, Mike Jones “Back Then” (actual working YouTube here), which he says is the “inverse” of the Wyatt, which reminds me of how my friend Jennifer Clarvoe has written some of what she calls “inverse poems,” mirror images, as it were, of canonical poems. Only she doesn’t have any of them online, nor does she have a clip on YouTube.

But reading the Wyatt again sparked one thought.

The Association of Literary Scholars and Critics (ALSC) is re-issuing the calls for papers for three seminars scheduled to take place at the 2008 ALSC Conference in Philadelphia, October 24-26: “Editing Dickinson and/or Whitman”; “Literary Magazines: Meeting Places”; and “Uniform Spines: Book Series.”

The submissions deadline for these seminars has been extended to Monday, June 9.

Additional prospective members and current members alike are encouraged to apply. Please see below for details.

Submission form and deadline. Submissions must reach the convener of the session by June 9. They should be sent to both (1) the convener of the seminar and (2) the Association’s office at . On your e-mail’s “subject” line, please give your name and other information in the following form: “ALSC 2008, [Name of Session] abstract by [First Name, Last Name].” For details regarding submission length, please refer to the individual instructions for each session.

• If you do not send copies to both the convener and the ALSC, we cannot guarantee that you will receive an e-mail notice acknowledging receipt of your proposal.
• You must be a member of the ALSC in good standing to participate. ALSC members receive a discount on conference registration.
• For more details about the conference program and information about how to join the ALSC, visit our website at www.bu.edu/literary.

General Description of the Seminar Program

The 2008 Conference in Philadelphia will continue the tradition established in 2004 of offering seminars designed to increase participation of the membership in the conference and giving them another excellent reason to attend. Modeled on what has worked successfully for such organizations as the Shakespeare Association of America and the Modernist Studies Association, these three seminars will each be led by a distinguished member of the Association.

Each seminar will have fifteen (15) guaranteed places, and each person accepted for a seminar will receive an official letter of invitation to the conference and will be listed in its program. Seminar participants will write brief position papers (2-4 pages maximum, double-spaced), and will circulate their papers to the other participants and read all the papers prior to the conference. The listing of the titles in the conference program should help participants obtain travel funding for the conference from their home colleges and universities. Senior scholars are eligible to apply for these seminars, but graduate students and junior faculty especially are encouraged to do so; we hope that senior scholars and others will spread the word and encourage their graduate students and junior colleagues to apply. The three seminars will run concurrently. Those admitted as participants in each seminar will participate in the actual discussion, but anyone at the conference is welcome to attend one of the seminars as an auditor—not a participant—provided there is sufficient room.

Seminar One: Editing Dickinson and/or Whitman
Convener: TBA
Can Dickinson’s poetry be properly edited?  What is one to do with all of those manuscripts attached to flowers or bees? What are modern editors to do with successive editions of Leaves of Grass?  And why are there no modern editions of, say, Drum Taps?  In this seminar, we will discuss various historical approaches to problems associated with editing Dickinson and Whitman.  We will then try to come up with some new solutions (or perhaps we will decide that there are not any).  Please send half-page abstracts or short papers (2-4 pages) as Word attachments to .  All perspectives welcome; we hope to include participants who have lots of experience in editing these poets as well as participants who have none.

Seminar Two: Literary Magazines: Meeting Places
Convener: Andrew McNeillie (Oxford University Press, founding editor of the new literary magazine Archipelago)
The concept of the “literary” might be a relatively recent one but this is no reason to dismiss it as a johnny-come-lately. It’s been around for a century and a half, or more, in some interpretations, and before it the concept of ‘poetry’, although ever complex, is as old as time. Most of us have iconic literary magazines that played key roles in our individual development and the formation of personal preference. Beyond that too, in historical terms, magazines of other eras (some even as short-lived as the May-fly) are living tissue preserved in which we can trace meaning in the making, at the cross-roads or meeting place, before criticism (beyond editorial agenda) and scholarship have quite stepped in to condition reception.  This seminar wishes to concentrate on Anglo-American literary magazines of the last century and invites some contextualized case-histories of individual publications, the aim being to see what lessons they might teach for the possible creation of new literary periodicals today. Please send half-page extracts or short papers (2-4) pages to Andrew McNeillie, Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP. ()

Seminar Three: “Uniform Spines: Book Series”
Convener: David Yezzi (Executive Editor, The New Criterion)
Everyman Library, the Pléiade, Penguin Classics, the Library of America, the Loeb series, the Harvard Great Books—how have these influential book series, and others like them, shaped literary studies, the tastes and habits of readers, editors, scholars, and writers? What may it mean for works of literature to be included or excluded from such series? What sorts of possibilities and limitations do such series pose? This seminar invites consideration of any aspect of the relationship of book series to literature, literary culture, or the culture at large, of which literature is one part. We welcome investigations of book series in any language and from all historical periods, including speculation on the future of book series in the digital age. We are also interested in the impact of major serial editions of significant authors. Please send short papers (2-4 pages) as Word attachments to David Yezzi ().

The college doesn’t have departments, and its faculty try very consciously to branch out and explore connections between different kinds of knowledge and methodologies. There is a lot of emphasis on guiding students towards independent study and in changing the curriculum to respond to new problems and shifting student interests. They focus on what they call “human ecology”, which I think is potentially specific enough to give the curriculum a clear set of boundaries while flexible enough that it doesn’t get stuck in a particular place and time or in a specific social or political project like a fly in amber. ... The students I met, as well as the faculty, also seem to have a very clear drive towards applied and practical uses of what they teach, though not at all narrowly vocational. The emphasis on student independence pays off, from what I can see: the students I talked to were among the most confident, uninhibited and yet non-snobby undergraduates I’ve met.

In praise of Deadwood: Alan Taylor reviews a comprehensive American history aimed at the general public: Richard Kluger, Seizing Destiny: How America Grew from Sea to Shining Sea. He finds it an inadequate antidote to American triumphalism:

To achieve his goals, Kluger needed to make a cleaner break with the tropes of Turner’s day. Indeed, he missed a golden opportunity to reform Turner’s frontier thesis--which can be rescued from its distorting character types. Although Turner got almost all of the details wrong, he knew where to look for the distinctive nature of American society. The frontier thesis rightly regards expansion as central to the development of American institutions and values through the nineteenth century. That expansion created this nation’s wealth, and its distribution of property and power, and much of its historical memory. But that distribution of property and power was profoundly unequal--it was, in other words, at odds with the democratic aspirations also generated by the frontier experience. Before HBO’s series Deadwood succumbed to David Milch’s rhetorical excesses, it brilliantly explored the tension between frontier illusions and realities--and particularly between the frontier ambitions of common people and the consolidating power of capital. Had Richard Kluger similarly illuminated that tension, he would have earned the pulpit to preach history to his readers.

Alan Wolfe reviews John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand (Atlantic Books, 2007), a biography by Richard Reeves. "In contrast to both Continental and analytic philosophy, give me John Stuart Mill any day, and give me a biography as fascinating to read as the one written by Richard Reeves.”

I am no philosopher, so perhaps I can be forgiven for thinking that Mill has gotten a raw deal from those who are. For a book I have just completed on what we can learn from the tradition of liberal political philosophy, I read a good deal of Mill and came to value him, not only for his seductive writing but also for the relevance of his ideas to such contemporary issues as free speech, women’s suffrage, and the role that religion should play in a democracy. It therefore bothers me that Mill is not taken as seriously as he should be, either in philosophy or in my own discipline of political science.

Reeves calls Mill “unquestionably the greatest public intellectual in the history of Britain — and perhaps even the world.” Such praise is too excessive, even for me. But I share Reeves’s argument that, as well known as Mill may be, he nonetheless deserves a rediscovery.

Founded in 1960, the minnesota review has long served as a leading outlet for literary fiction and poetry, and, under Jeffrey Williams’ editorship since 1992, established itself as a foremost outlet for cultural-studies scholarship and reflection about the increasingly sorry state of the profession under managerial domination. It has grown into a uniquely influential voice in literary and cultural studies. Every issue features essays by and interviews with leading intellectuals in a wide variety of disciplines. 

In 2005, Jerry Graff called it “essential for keeping au courant with the best current thinking in the areas of literary and cultural theory.” In the same year, Paul Buhle called it “the standard-bearer for dissenting views on American literature and culture” that his students in the American Civilization program at Brown read with “near-religious fervor,” outlasting “nearly all of the journals of its type founded in the 1960s and 70s.” During Williams’ editorship, mr garnered more mentions in the Chronicle of Higher Ed than any other academic journal.

But now the quality trolls at Carnegie Mellon, one of the most aggressively “well-managed” institutions in the country, with every tub truly on its own bottom, threatens the survival of this venerable humanities institution with the ceaseless renewal of the doltish mantra to “do more with less.”