Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2017 -

This book's title, Forget English!, is deceptive; Mufti (UCLA) explores the paradox of how difficult it is to forget English even as the ever-more-popular construct of "world literature" invites consideration of the literatures of many of the world's nations and languages. The best South Asian texts created in Bengali, Urdu, Hindi, and other indigenous South Asian languages, which are spoken by hundreds of millions, do not circulate as "world" literature unless translated into English--or into French, as Pascale Casanova insists in The World Republic of Letters (CH, Jun'05, 42-5694). Consequently, many South Asians choose to write in English. Mufti's book is in one sense a quarrel with Salman Rushdie's overly enthusiastic celebration of English-language "postcolonial" South Asian literature, but more important, the book extends, qualifies, and enriches Edward Said's work on Orientalism, demonstrating that despite its promise, world literature does not eliminate the dominant role of the Anglophone book market in shaping South Asian literature. Nested within this persuasive argument is a rich commentary on major topics ranging from translation and unfaithful fidelity to philologist Erich Auerbach, Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali, novelist Tayeb Salih (who wrote in Arabic), and a dozen others. Mufti's book is both accessible and theoretically informed.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

Readers often assume that Thomas More's 1516 work Utopia was the first and final statement on a Western utopian concept and the cultural, political, and religious desires it embodies. Lochrie (English, Indiana Univ.) challenges this notion, and with success, by placing the Middle Ages as a space wherein forms of utopianism were outlined and expressed. Modernity is often (mis)understood as the space that can produce utopian ideals and dreams, and Lochrie is masterful in demonstrating how the medieval period formulated sophisticated philosophical and theological concepts of utopianism. The texts the author examines--Macrobius's Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, Land of Cokaygne, William Langland's Piers Plowman, Mandeville's Travels--are not temporally fixed, either by composition date or by publication date. The works look backward and forward, to utopian societies of the past and of the future. This reader was especially appreciative of the author's argument that Mandeville's Travels (a work whose relevance continues to be felt) challenges a Eurocentric concept of utopianism that is contingent on Christian civilization and Christian religious beliefs. This volume should dispel, once and forever, any notion that the medieval period was a "dark age."Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

Riffing on Heraclitus and Charles Olson, poet and critic Charles Bernstein (English and comparative literature, Univ. of Pennsylvania) admits to recasting an old aphorism: "You can never step into the same poem twice." In The Pitch of Poetry--an unruly yet incisive collection of essays, interviews, and provocations--Bernstein wades back into the expanded field of language poetry, which has preoccupied him for years and which his own work has helped define. But Bernstein, a trickster figure par excellence, has little time for retrospection or self-congratulation. These "nonexpository, exploratory" pieces treat poets ranging from Gertrude Stein to Robert Creely and survey a variety of topics: the poetics of Occupy Wall Street, the allure of the audiobook, the hard paradox of Holocaust representation, and the evolving afterlife of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry. Compulsively readable, the essays assembled here skew toward the reader, though not exactly on account of their accessibility (a word that Bernstein distrusts). Instead, they serve as models of the "close listening," translation, and antiliteral thinking that avant-garde poetry requires. This compelling "pitch" will leave readers with a sense of poetry's ever-expanding range and the danger of remaining complacent in the face of its power.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals.

Davidson (English and comparative literature, Columbia Univ.) offers an autobiographical exploration of her "life in sentences." Her intent is provide a guide for how to read literary works and appreciate various aspects of literary prose style. She chooses for consideration books that were personally important to her, and she uses them to loosely trace her own development as a reader and as a thinker. Each of the ten chapters focuses on particular literary works, exploring the writing style of the authors; she examines brief extracts from each work, looking at literary conventions such as style, word choice, emphasis, form, detail, and so on. Among the authors she considers are Anthony Burgess, Henry James, George Eliot, Franz Kafka, Gary Lutz, Jane Austen, Gustave Flaubert, Roland Barthes, Stephen King, Thomas Pynchon, and Thomas Bernhard. This is an ideal resource for those new to the study of literature at the college level.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower- and upper-division undergraduates; general readers.

What do Melville's Moby-Dick, Gaddis's The Recognitions, and Wallace's Infinite Jest have in common? Each contains "cruft," an internet slang term that Letzler adopts to describe a meganovel's "pointless" text. Pertinent questions at the heart of this bold claim center around reader engagement, readers' ability to process information, the function and value of cruft, and, most intriguing, whether comprehending a meganovel's information is worthwhile, necessary, or even possible. Analyzing often-overlooked passages of incomprehensible, uninteresting, or unconventional text, Letzler points out several varieties of cruft in meganovels ranging from Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans to Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. In the process, he coins the term "dictionary novel" to categorize books seeking to expand in a single work the possibilities of a given language, using Joyce's nearly impenetrable Finnegans Wake as the prime example. Anyone living in the digital age recognizes the reader's conundrum when encountering such a work. Indeed, how does one process the onslaught of textual information packed into a meganovel? In a masterful conclusion, Letzler parallels these issues with broader real-world concerns such as managing "the unimaginably numerous stimuli [people] encounter in every waking moment of [their] lives" and attending to the long-term effects of governmental and corporate data collection programs targeting private citizens.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

Demonstrating the efficacy of close reading in a new era, this useful book places the skill at the center of discussion of changing formats for reading by examining how the mechanics of print and the book infused the thinking and the art of Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. Placing his own persona as reader at the heart of his discussion, Lurz (Tufts Univ.) argues for the continuing currency of the book even at the time of its putative death. In the coda, the author explains that "mediation's material forms are ... always already obsolete, always already bound up with their own supersession," leading to an "imagined decline" of the physical book. Lutz sees Proust, Joyce, and Woolf as quite aware of the limitations of the book, both physically and temporally, and he uses their interplay with this knowledge to argue that the platform of reading alters the mental act of reading in ways writers have long manipulated. He sees, therefore, places for a multitude of media, only the competition among them misplaced. This book is an excellent addition to the study of the novels considered, and it places such study firmly within contemporary discussions of media.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals.

One may doubt that there can be a "theory" of any genre--there can be only a history. Mazzoni's study in fact presents a history of the European novel from its beginnings to the present. The volume comes with blurbs by distinguished scholars who proclaim the book "a classic" and "destined to be a classic"--and Mazzoni's early chapters (on the beginnings of the novel to 1800) amply deserve this praise. He has read and concisely synthesized the myriad studies on "the rise of the novel," from Ian Watt onward, and the comments by critics from the Renaissance through Hegel. He is effortlessly at home in traditions of narrative from Italy, France, Spain, and Germany as well as England. This part of his book is really the best account yet of the rise of the novel, not least in its acute grasp of the details of neoclassical poetics. But at about 1800, Mazzoni loses his way. His comments on individual authors begin to become unconvincing (is it really true that in Jane Austen there is not a system of transcendental values beyond "mere life itself"?), and the discussion of 19th-century and modernist fiction rehearses familiar generalizations. But the first half of the book is brilliant and deserves to be widely read.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.