Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association

Congratulations to PAMLA member Catherine Cucinella on the publication of her celebrated new book, Poetics of the Body: Edna St. Vincent Millay, Elizabeth Bishop, Marilyn Chin, and Marilyn Hacker (Palgrave, 2010).

Poetics of the Body examines representations of the body in the work of four important twentieth-century poets: Edna St. Vincent Millay, Elizabeth Bishop, Marilyn Chin, and Marilyn Hacker. Drawing on both past and present discussions regarding the place of the body in relation to Western philosophy, gender, sexuality, desire, creative production, and narrative, this study reveals how the poetic bodies in the poetry of these women negotiate the intersecting ideologies that attempt to regulate the body, its characteristics, and its behaviors. Ultimately, this dynamic bookconsiders what it means to possess a body.

“Cucinella’s intense book about bodily representation provides a new way of seeing the work of Millay, Bishop, Chin, and Hacker. Its synthetic theorizations, brilliant close readings, and final dialogue with Chin bring the study of the represented female body to a new plateau. An essential book.”—Steven Gould Axelrod, author of Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the Cure of Words and co-editor of The New Anthology of American Poetry, Volumes 1-3

“Poetics of the Body offers a first-rank conversation about the cultural politics of ‘the body’ in recent American women’s poetry. I predict that Cucinella’s readings of Millay, Bishop, Chin, and Hacker will place her solidly at the forefront of a new wave of feminist scholars who write about poetry. This work is essential for anyone interested in ‘the body’s’ often contentious relationship to gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and class.”—Camille Roman, author of Elizabeth Bishop’s World War II-Cold War View and co-editor of The Women & Language Debate: A Sourcebook 

“Cucinella’s Poetics of the Body is a refreshing book. By listening attentively to the distinct story of the body that each of her four poets has to tell, Cucinella offers a compelling and diverse story of American women’s poetry in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. For Cucinella, a poem is not a mask for the poet to hide behind but a place to explore and perform the problems, fears, challenges, and pleasures of the body. In elegant, theoretically sophisticated readings that ground each poets’ work in place, time, and experience, a unique poetics of the body comes into focus—Edna St. Vincent Millay’s commodified body, Elizabeth Bishop’s ambiguous body, Marilyn Chin’s investigations of the body in the context of the Chinese American immigrant experience, and Marilyn Hacker’s complex intertwining of body and language. It is finally, though, the exuberance Cucinella conveys, the delight she takes in poetic craft, and the careful attention she pays to a poet’s body of work, that marks this book as worth reading.”—Bethany Hicok, author of Degrees of Freedom: American Women Poets and the Women’s College, 1905-1955

“Cucinella's book is smart, thorough, informative, and forward-thinking. It adds a great deal to current conversations about representation of the body in literature.”—Dr. Renee R. Curry, author of White Women Writing White: H.D., Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, and Whiteness

The editors of Gender and Space in Britain, 1660-1820 seek essays that identify, delineate, and explore new cartographies— geographic and metaphoric—of gender in literature authored by British women between 1660 and 1820.
 
This collection begins with the historical and theoretical recognition of the ways in which space both constitutes and represents identity. As Henri Lefebvre has pointed out, historically the temporal and spatial have been gendered masculine and feminine. At the same time, however, scholars such as Lefebvre, Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu have demonstrated that the early modern period, specifically the eighteenth century, was a turning point in the redefinition of the geographical landscape and the social terrain of Western Europe. Transformations in foundational British structures including class, politics, economics, and print culture during the long eighteenth century reconfigured and created new concepts of both space and gender. What did these reconfigurations demand and what opportunities did they provide for men and for women? In particular, how do women (re)define, occupy, negotiate, inscribe and create new spaces, cross borders and construct both concrete and abstract new cartographies during this period in Britain?
 
Possible topics of exploration include but are not limited to:
 
*The City and/or the Countryside
*The Space(s) of the Nation or Beyond
*Space and Revolution
*Border Crossings, Exile and Migrations
*Professional Spaces
*Domestic Space(s)
*Sacred/Profane Places and Spaces
*Body Spaces
*Space and Genre (ex. satire, poetry, the novel, the Gothic, non-fictional prose)
 
Please send a 1-page abstract and a 2-page CV as a .doc or .docx attached to an email to mnarain@tcu.edu and to gevirtka@shu.edu by September 1, 2010.

Stanley Orr, professor of English at the University of Hawai'i, West O 'ahu, and longtime PAMLA member and current PAMLA Executive Committee member, has published a ground-breaking new work on American crime fiction and film:

Darkly Perfect World: Colonial Adventure, Postmodernism, and American Noir

Stanley Orr’s Darkly Perfect World offers a large-scale historical nar­rative about the way American crime fiction and film have changed throughout the twentieth century. Orr argues that films noirs and noir fictions dramatize Raymond Chandler’s pronouncement that “Even in death, a man has a right to his own identity.” Orr illumi­nates a noir ethos committed to “authenticating alienation”: sub­jectivity managed through radical polarization of Self and Other. Distinguishing a heretofore unrecognized context for American noir, Orr demonstrates that Chandler and Dashiell Hammett arrive at this subject within and against the colonial adventure genre. While the renegades of Joseph Conrad and Louis Becke project a figure vulnerable to shifts in cultural context, the noir protagonist exempli­fies alienated selfhood and often performs a “continental operation” against the slippages of the colonial adventurer. But even as Orson Welles, Billy Wilder, and other noir virtuosi persist with this revision of late Victorian adventure, Chester Himes, Dorothy Hughes, and John Okada experiment with hard-boiled alienation for a subver­sion of noir that resonates throughout literary postmodernism. In their respective avant-garde novels, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, and Paul Auster expose what K.W. Jeter terms the “darkly perfect world” of noir, thus giving rise to and enabling the con men and “connected guys” of contemporary films noirs such as Bryan Sing­er’s The Usual Suspects, David Fincher’s Seven, Christopher Nolan’s Memento, and Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs.
 
“Darkly Perfect World is an accom­plished, engaging, and stimulating book. It offers an ambitious and in some ways quite original argument about an important strain of literary and cultural history. It will make a success­ful contribution to the fields of noir studies as well as postcolonial studies.” —Sean McCann, professor of English, Wesleyan University
 
“Stanley Orr gives us a ripping yarn of the hard-boiled detective's emergence from late imperial adventure, and backs it up with sterling scholarship. This book earns its authority with a towering command of primary materi­als, which it judiciously synthesizes and sharply theorizes. It is a book such as we rarely see. Darkly Perfect World is not just another set of smart opinions about the noir canon, rehashing the usual suspects, but a new perspective gained by reading what no one else has bothered to, and making it rel­evant.” —Martin Kevorkian, associate professor of English, The University of Texas at Austin

For more information about Darkly Perfect World, go to:  http://osupress.blogspot.com/2010/03/orr-darkly-perfect-world.html

Congratulations Stan!

PAMLA Member John Hill has published a new work on Beowulf:

The Narrative Pulse of Beowulf: Arrivals and Departures. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008).

Mark C. Amodio, Professor of English at Vassar College, writes of the book:  "John M. Hill has long been acknowledged as the leading student of what we may call the sociology of Anglo-Saxon England, and his new book is certain to solidify his standing as one of today's most important and astute readers of the social context out of which Beowulf emerged. The Narrative Pulse of Beowulf is infused with Hill's deep erudition but manages throughout to be extremely accessible. It offers a fresh and compelling way of reading the most widely known and studied work of medieval English literature. This is a welcome addition to Beowulf scholarship, and one that will attract a broad readership."

John's book, On the Aesthetics of Beowulf and Other Old English Poems, is forthcoming from the University of Toronto Press later this year.  Congratulations John.

PAMLA member Susan Morgan has two exciting announcements. First, her cultural biography, Bombay Anna: The Real Story and Remarkable Adventures of the King and I Governess (University of California Press, 2008), was selected by the American Library Association (ALA) for their list of "The Best of the Best from the University Presses" for 2009.

Additionally, a second, expanded and significantly revised, edition of Bombay Anna is being published by Silkworm Books in Thailand in January 2010. Congratulations Susan!

CALL FOR PAPERS
DO YOU BOWLES?
(Paul Bowles’s Centennial -- International Conference)
October 21 - 23, 2010
 
Paul Bowles is widely acknowledged as one of the twentieth century’s most skillful storytellers and imaginative composers of modern American music. His unsettling literary themes and expatriation to Morocco made him into a cult figure whose life and work continue to fascinate contemporary audiences.
By examining the interplay between literary, musical, visual and cultural texts, the conference aims at stimulating discussion on Bowlesian musical and literary themes, as well as cultural and anthropological issues and on the relationship between the artist’s challenging work and current inner and outer geographies.
Given the international and interdisciplinary academic mould of the conference, and the author’s polymath profile, we encourage contributions from scholars and artists of different fields and welcome suggestions for papers, panels and sessions, and also multimedia proposals.
 
The Conference will be hosted by the American Studies Research Group at the University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies (ULICES /CEAUL), Portugal, from October 21 to 23, 2010.
 
SUGGESTED TOPICS:
• Bowles and Portugal (influences, writings, translations)
• Paul Bowles and Jane Bowles (interactions/interinfluences)
• American Existentialism (the Beats, American negativity, dissonance, crime, Modernism)
• The Maverick Tradition (rebels, individualism/community, Avant-garde, Anti-art)
• New American Music (trends, aesthetics, fictions)
• Literature and Other Arts (music, contemporary opera, spoken-word, film music, cinema)
• Gothic and the Grotesque (American gothic, horror, dark poiesis)
• Exile (Moroccan fiction/place/culture and travel)
• Literature and Anthropology (Anarchism, cultural clash; magic/smoking/religion)
 
 250-word abstracts, or any queries, should be sent by April 6, 2010 to: Anabela Duarte and Hermínia Sol at:
 doyoubowles@gmail.com
University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies
Faculty of Letters of the University of Lisbon
Alameda da Universidade
1600-214 Lisbon
PORTUGAL

Longtime PAMLA member and former PAMLA president Gunter H. Hertling has published Hard Times: My Youth under National Socialism (and Beyond) 1935-1947. (Haag + Herchen: Frankfurt a.M., 2008; published in English).

Professor Emeritus G. H. Hertling was born in 1930 in Pasadena, California of German parents. Their last and final visit back to Germany from California proved fatal. Young American Gunter Hertling and his German mother could not return, whereas his father succeeded in repatriating to California alone.  Caught in Hitler’s "Grand German Empire of a Thousand Years" initially in airraid-riddled Hamburg and later in bombed-out Munich, Gunter attended a private, then state administered high school in Bavaria. Torn between identifying with National Socialism on the one hand as a member of the Hitler Youth and yet as a German-American with liberal-democratic ideals on the other, Hertling here vividly recalls the turbulent hard times during World War II: he fully remembers, reminisces about and relates to large portions of those historical and personal events that affected his formative years psychologically and emotionally. His central narrative is enriched by two subtexts—a series of historical and personal images. While this fascinating and important memoir has a German publisher, it is written in English.

PAMLA member Jeremiah B.C. Axelrod is proud to announce the recent publication of his book, Inventing Autopia: Dreams  and Visions of the Modern Metropolis in Jazz Age Los Angeles (2009), by the University of California Press. Inventing Autopia explores the profound relationship between imagination and place, visuality and legibility, showing how the clash of irreconcilable utopian visions and dreams resulted in the invention of an unforeseen new form of urbanism—sprawling, illegible, fractured—that would reshape not only Southern California but much of the nation in the years to come: http://inventingautopia.com

Stanford University Emeritus Professor of Humanities, Marjorie Perloff, says that "this book belongs on your shelf next to Reyner Banham and Mike Davis, but Axelrod is more learned than either... [it] is also immensely readable!"

University of California English Professor John Ganim adds, "Flat-out one of the most interesting books I've read in years. To say that a book about California might rank with Kevin Starr's Americans and the California Dream or Mike Davis' City of Quartz is dangerously high praise, but I think Axelrod's book may someday be in that league."

PAMLA member Kevin Hutchings produced a new monograph, a new co-edited collection, and a new CD in 2009: 

Romantic Ecologies and Colonial Cultures in the British Atlantic World, 1770-1850.
Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2009.

This book highlights significant intersections between Green Romanticism and colonial politics, demonstrating how Romantic-era understandings of animality, climate, and habitat informed literary and cross-cultural debates about race, slavery, colonialism, and nature in the British Atlantic world.  Further information about this title may be found on the McGill-Queen’s University Press website at http://mqup.mcgill.ca/book.php?bookid=2420

Native Americans and Anglo-American Culture 1750-1850: The Indian Atlantic.  Ed. Tim Fulford and Kevin Hutchings.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Containing chapters written by prominent British, Canadian, American, and First Nations scholars, this book explains how complex relationships between Britons, Anglo-Americans, and Native Americans shaped the literature and history of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.  Further information about this title may be found on the Cambridge University Press website at http://www.cambridge.org/us/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521888486

On the Bridge You Were Burning.  This independently released CD features Kevin's original musical interpretations of poems by Lord Byron, Grahame Davies, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley.  For further information, and to sample some free musical tracks, please visit Kevin's website at http://www.kevinhutchings.ca/music 

PAMLA member Frances Smith Foster has three new books to announce.   First, a monograph, "'Til Death or Distance Do Us Part": Love and Marriage in African America, from Oxford University Press, 2010.

Of this book, Stephanie Coontz, author of Marriage, A History: How Love Conquered Marriage, writes, "Foster demolishes stereotypes about the history of love, sexuality, and marriage among antebellum African Americans and issues a passionate argument for why contemporary Americans need to understand the complexity, variety, and richness of the intimate relationships forged by enslaved and free African American women and men in the past."

Frances has also published two important anthologies:

Still Brave: The Evolution of Black Women's Studies, co-edited with Stanlie James and Beverly Guy-Sheftall.  Feminist Press, 2009.

Love and Marriage in Early African America, from University Press of New England, 2009.