NEW AND FORTHCOMING BOOKS from MLI
Contemporary Francophone African Writers and the Burden of Commitment
Odile Cazenave and Patricia Célérier
University of Virginia Press
Spring 2011
"Once in a decade, a critical text surfaces that upends our run-of-the-mill reading of literature. Odile Cazenave and Patricia Célérier’s book does just that for African francophone literature. By its breadth and depth, Contemporary Francophone African Writers and the Burden of Commitment not only subsumes previous critical works on the subject, but also provides new grids for exploring the ever-expanding African francophone corpus."—Emmanuel Dongala, Bard College at Simon’s Rock, author of Johnny Mad Dog and Little Boys Come from the Stars
Within roughly the past fifty to sixty years, after most francophone African countries gained independence, the concept of “engagement” has been undergoing a change in both terminology and practice. The belief in the transformative power of both literature and the intellect, and the sense of writing as a mission, have given way in the past fifteen years to a less idealistic and dogmatic stance as writers shift to a more nuanced understanding and practice of African literatures. Recognizing that previous notions of engagement that dominated the effort to combat neocolonialism now seem exhausted, if not obsolete, contemporary francophone African writers are reaching for newer modes of commitment in their work. This book offers both an overview of this transition and an analysis of this writing today.
Working across genres but focusing on the novel, Odile Cazenave and Patricia Célérier take up the evolution of the concept of engagement to show how contemporary francophone African writers are expanding their forms of commitment to include aesthetics, in addition to politics, and to broaden their context to that of world literature. Among the topics they discuss are the processes of identifying with and belonging to Africa, the modes of resistance to the old notions of writing as art, the role of memory in a re-crafting of the heroic figure, current approaches to violence and immigration, and the impact of the publishing industry and the Internet. Their selected writers range from Mongo Beti, Ousmane Sembene, and Aminata Sow Fall to Boubacar Boris Diop, Véronique Tadjo, Alain Mabanckou, Emmanuel Dongala, and Léonora Miano, among others.
Odile Cazenave is Professor of French at Boston University. Patricia Célérier is Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Vassar College.
256 pages, 6 x 9 in.
978-0-8139-3096-1, Paper, $24.50
978-0-8139-3095-4, Cloth, $55.00
978-0-8139-3115-9, eBook, $55.00
World rights
February 2011
Poetry in Pieces
César Vallejo and Lyric Modernity
Michelle Clayton
University of California Press
FlashPoints series
Spring 2011
"This excellent study abounds with insights on an intriguing author." —Choice
Set against the cultural and political backdrop of inter-war Europe and the Americas, Poetry in Pieces is the first major study of the Peruvian poet César Vallejo (1892–1938) to appear in English in more than thirty years. Vallejo lived and wrote in two distinct settings—Peru and Paris—which were continually crisscrossed by new developments in aesthetics, politics, and practices of everyday life; his poetry and prose therefore need to be read in connection with modernity in all its forms and spaces. Michelle Clayton combines close readings of Vallejo’s writings with cultural, historical, and theoretical analysis, connecting Vallejo—and Latin American poetry—to the broader panorama of international modernism and the avant-gardes, and to writers and artists such as Rainer Maria Rilke, James Joyce, Georges Bataille, and Charlie Chaplin. Poetry in Pieces sheds new light on one of the key figures in twentieth-century Latin American literature, exploring ways of rethinking the parameters of international lyric modernity.
Michelle Clayton is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California, Los Angeles.
320 pp., 6 x 9 in.
978-0-520-26229-4, Paper, $39.95tx, £27.95
World rights
January 2011
Rewriting Russia
Jacob Gordin's Yiddish Drama
Barbara J. Henry
University of Washington Press
Fall 2011
"Lucid and engaging, Rewriting Russia makes an important scholarly contribution to the fields of Yiddish culture, American Jewish history, and Russian Jewish history."—Tony Michels, author of A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York.
"This is a rare work that presents us with a mold-breaking study of literary history as well as a brilliant analysis of literary text."—Jeremy Dauber, author of In the Demon's Bedroom: Yiddish Literature and the Early Modern
Jacob Gordin was the first major playwright of the "Golden Age" of New York's Yiddish theater, which was not just entertainment but also a public forum, a force for education and acculturation, and a battleground for ideologies and artistic credos. Gordin, like his audience, was a Russian émigré. His most successful and scandalous dramas—The Jewish King Lear, The Kreutzer Sonata, and Khasye the Orphan—were based on works by Lev Tolstoy and Ivan Turgenev, and reflected a profoundly Jewish means of using literature to salvage a lost land. Gordin's life and his plays held out the tantalizing possibility that by changing the story of one's past, one could write one's own future. Through a detailed examination of Gordin's career in Russia, Barbara Henry dismantles the fictive radical background he invented for himself. In doing so, she illuminates the continuities among his Russian fiction and journalism, his work as a controversial Jewish religious reformer, and his Yiddish plays.
Barbara Henry is associate professor of Russian literature and Jewish studies at the University of Washington.
276 pp., 4 illus., 6 x 9 in.
978-0-2959-9133-7, $35.00 paper
World rights
December 2011
Accessories to Modernity
Fashion and the Feminine in Nineteenth-Century France
Susan Hiner
University of Pennsylvania Press
Spring 2010
"Susan Hiner's Accessories to Modernity: Fashion and the Feminine in Nineteenth-Century France breaks open . . . seemingly mute and trivial objects--shawls, parasols, fans, handbags, and the marriage baskets that contain them--to reveal the rich social meanings they harbor in their historical context. Drawing on a variety of sources, from the popular physiologies and fashion press to canonical novels, she makes these objects expand like Proust's Japanese paper flowers into meaningful and suggestive signs. . . . This book is a pleasure to read: extremely well-written, elegant, clear, fascinating, and witty. Hiner admirably weaves together disparate texts and illustrations into a coherent and cogent argument."—Dorothy Kelly, Boston University, reviewed in H-France
"Hiner avoids many of the pitfalls that plague literary scholars who venture into fashion history. Hers is one of those rare books that give interdisciplinarity a good name, advancing both fields without alienating non-specialist readers. By reclaiming accessories from the margins of the realist novel, Hiner has written the most ingenious kind of fashion history, documenting not the whats, whos, and whens, but the elusive hows and whys."—Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell
Accessories to Modernity explores the ways that feminine fashion accessories, such as cashmere shawls, parasols, fans, and handbags, became essential instruments in the bourgeois idealization of womanhood in nineteenth-century France. Considering how these fashionable objects were portrayed in fashion journals and illustrations, as well as fiction, the book explores the histories and cultural weight of the objects themselves and offers fresh readings of works by Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola, some of the most widely read novels of the period.
As social boundaries were becoming more and more fluid in the nineteenth century, one effort to impose order over the looming confusion came, in the case of women, through fashion, and the fashion accessory thus became an ever more crucial tool through which social distinction could be created, projected, and maintained. Looking through the lens of fashion, Susan Hiner explores the interplay of imperialist expansion and domestic rituals, assertion of privilege in the face of increasing social mobility, gendering practices and their relation to social hierarchies, and the rise of commodity culture and woman’s paradoxical status as both consumer and object within it.
Through her close focus on these luxury objects, Hiner reframes the feminine fashion accessory as a key symbol of modernity that bridges the erotic and proper, the domestic and exotic, and mass production and the work of art while making a larger claim about the “accessory” status—in terms of both complicity and subordination—of bourgeois women in nineteenth-century France. Women were not simply passive bystanders but rather were themselves accessories to the work of modernity from which they were ostensibly excluded.
Winner of the Costume Society of America's 2011 Millia Davenport Publication Award
Susan Hiner is Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Vassar College.
288 pp., 30 illus., 6 x 9 in.
978-0-8122-4259-1, Cloth, $47.50s, £31.00
World rights
June 2010
Dagur Kári's Nói the Albino
Björn Norðfjörð
University of Washington Press
Nordic Film Classics series
Spring 2010
Dagur Kári's Nói the Albino (Nói Albínói, 2003) succeeded on the international festival circuit as a film that was both distinctively Icelandic and appealingly universal. Nói the Albino taps into perennial themes of escapism and existential angst, while its setting in the Westfjords of Iceland provided an almost surreal backdrop whose particularities of place are uniquely Icelandic. Björn Norðfjörð's examination of the film integrates the broad context and history of Icelandic cinema into a close reading of Nói the Albino's themes, visual style, and key scenes. The book also includes an interview with the director, Dagur Kári.
Nói the Albino's successful negotiation of the tensions between the local and the global contribute to the film's status as a contemporary classic. Its place within the history of Icelandic cinema highlights the specific problems this small nation faces as it pursues its filmmaking ambitions, allowing us to appreciate the remarkable success of Kári's film in relation to the challenges of transnational filmmaking.
Björn Norðfjörð is Assistant Professor and Director of the Film Studies Program at the University of Iceland. His publications in both Icelandic and English focus equally on Icelandic national cinema and world cinema.
144 pp., 10 illus., 5.5 x 7.5 in.
978-0-295-99009-5, Paper, $24.95
World rights except UK and Continental Europe
May 2010
Shaken Wisdom
Irony and Meaning in Postcolonial African Fiction
Gloria Nne Onyeoziri
University of Virginia Press
Fall 2011
“Shaken Wisdom is a delight to read. Onyeoziri’s mastery of African cultural practices and oral traditions, linguistic theory, and African literature is truly impressive. Well-written, well-argued, and well-researched, the book brings a very special set of insights to African fiction, linguistic theories about irony, and gender studies.”—Laura Rice, Oregon State University, author of Of Irony and Empire: Islam, the West, and the Transcultural Invention of Africa
In her focus on irony and meaning in postcolonial African fiction, Gloria Nne Onyeoziri refers to an internal subversion of the discourse of the wise and the powerful, a practice that has played multiple roles in the circulation of knowledge, authority, and opinion within African communities; in the interpretation of colonial and postcolonial experience; and in the ongoing resistance to tyrannies in African societies. But irony is always reversible and may be used to question the oppressed as well as the oppressor, shaking all presumptions of wisdom. Although the author cites numerous African writers, she selects six works by Chinua Achebe, Ahmadou Kourouma, and Calixthe Beyala for her primary analysis.
Gloria Nne Onyeoziri, Associate Professor in the Department of French, Hispanic, and Italian Studies at the University of British Columbia, is the author of La parole poétique d’Aimé Césaire: Essai de sémantique littéraire.
192 pages
6 x 9 in.
Cloth 978-0-8139-3186-9 $49.50
Paper 978-0-8139-3187-6 $21.50
Ebook 978-0-8139-3200-2 $49.50
World rights
September 2011
Art Without an Author
Vasari's Lives and Michelangelo's Death
Marco Ruffini
Fordham University Press
Spring 2011
"A concise and highly readable volume that considers an enormously important constellation of matters within Italian culture of the late Renaissance, touching on a broad range of matters artistic, literary, and social."—Leonard Barkan, Princeton University
"Ruffini lays the groundwork for better understanding the background for confusion behind claims to authorship in our own post-Enlightenment age. He also makes it possible for us to accommodate into the humanities the sort of corporate authorship and publishing collaborations that were common in the sixteenth century, but are practiced routinely today only in the sciences. He does this through an elegant, scholarly, and even gripping discussion of the academic project of producing Vasari’s Lives, and the functions that Michelangelo’s art and persona have performed in art and literary history."—Evelyn Lear, Brown University
Perhaps no other text has exerted such a formidable influence on the discipline of art history as Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists (1550, republished 1568). Michelangelo figures centrally in the Lives and exemplifies art as an expression of the individual. Yet, as this book shows, the Lives fashions Michelangelo as the founder of a new, academic era in which art develops collectively as a discipline. Each of the five chapters of this book examines the notion of “art without an author,” whereby art is teachable and not the inimitable product of a genius, a corporate rather than an individualistic venture. By way of close study this book reaches new conclusions about the production and significance of Vasari’s Lives, Michelangelo, and the role “authorial” values play in Italian Renaissance culture.
Marco Ruffini is Assistant Professor of Italian Studies and Art History at Northwestern University.
208 pages, 46 illus., 6 x 9 in.
978-0-8232-3456-1, Paper, $26.00 (01)
978-0-8232-3455-4, Cloth, $80.00 (06)
World rights
July 2011
Apocalyptic Futures
Marked Bodies and the Violence of the Text in Kafka, Conrad, and Coetzee
Russell Samolsky
Fordham University Press
Spring 2011
"Apocalyptic Futures consists of a brilliant long theoretical introductory chapter followed by three long chapters, one each on Kafka (primarily In the Penal Colony), Conrad (primarily Heart of Darkness), and Coetzee (primarily Waiting for the Barbarians). Each of these chapters is a major contribution to the literature on its topic, strikingly original and persuasive. Samolsky writes with verve and remarkable clarity about difficult concepts and makes readings of great subtlety and penetration."—J. Hillis Miller, University of California, Irvine
"Samolsky is a close reader with an impressive erudition in deconstruction and rhetorical reading. His account of Kafka’s uncanny gift for prognostication, whether the future of technology, communications, or twentieth-century political outcomes, is the most valuable currently available in the marketplace of cultural critique and literary exegesis."—Henry Sussman, Yale University
In this book, the author argues that certain modern literary texts have apocalyptic futures. Rather than claim that great writers have clairvoyant powers, he examines the ways in which a text incorporates an apocalyptic event into its future reception. He is thus concerned with the way in which apocalyptic works solicit their future receptions.
Apocalyptic Futures also sets out to articulate a new theory and textual practice of the relation between literary reception and embodiment. Deploying the double register of “marks” to show how a text both codes and targets mutilated bodies, the author focuses on how these bodies are incorporated into texts by Kafka, Conrad, and Coetzee.
Situating “In the Penal Colony” in relation to the Holocaust, Heart of Darkness to the Rwandan genocide, and Waiting for the Barbarians to the revelations of torture in apartheid South Africa and contemporary Iraq, the author argues for the ethical and political importance of reading these literary works’ apocalyptic futures in our own urgent and perilous situation.
Russell Samolsky is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
192 pp., 10 illus., 6 x 9 in.
978-0-8232-3480-6, Paper, $24.00 (01)
978-0-8232-3479-0, Cloth, $65.00 (06)
978-0-8232-3481-3, eBook, $17.00
World rights
August 2011
Postcolonial Francophone Autobiographies
From Africa to the Antilles
Edgard Sankara
University of Virginia Press
Fall 2011
“This study is likely to incite much discussion and contribute to further studies on Francophone autobiographies nationally or in transnational comparative perspectives. Sankara’s book is exciting to read, and it renews and revitalizes interest in this important literature.”—Kandioura Dramé, University of Virginia, author of The Novel as Transformation Myth: A Study of the Novels of Mongo Beti and Ngugi wa Thiong’o
Bringing a comparative perspective to the study of autobiography, Edgard Sankara considers a cross-section of postcolonial Francophone writing from Africa and the Caribbean in order to examine and compare for the first time their transnational reception. Sankara not only compares the ways in which a wide selection of autobiographies were received locally as well as in France but also juxtaposes reception by the colonized and the colonizer to show how different meanings were assigned to the works after publication. Sankara’s geographical and cultural coverage of Africa and its diaspora is rich, with separate chapters devoted to the autobiographies of Hampâté Bâ, Valentin Mudimbé, Kesso Barry, Patrick Chamoiseau, Raphaël Confiant, and Maryse Condé.
Edgard Sankara is Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Delaware.
232 pages
6 x 9 in.
Cloth 978-0-8139-3171-5 $55.00
Paper 978-0-8139-3172-2 $24.50
Ebook 978-0-8139-3176-2 $55.00
World rights
August 2011
Standing by the Ruins
Elegiac Humanism in Wartime and Postwar Lebanon
Ken Seigneurie
Fordham University Press
Spring 2011
"Fascinating, eloquent, and tightly argued, Standing by the Ruins offers a distinctive perspective on relations between cultural productions and politics in times of extreme duress. Across a range of fascinating examples, Seigneiurie shows the ways in which novelists and filmmakers offer alternative visions in a collapsing world that can set the stage for new ways of imagining the future."—David Damrosch, Harvard University
Since the mid-1970s, Lebanon has been at the center of the worldwide rise in sectarian extremism. Its cultural output has both mediated and resisted this rise. Standing by the Ruins reviews the role of culture in supporting sectarianism, yet argues for the emergence of a distinctive aesthetic of resistance to it.
Focusing on contemporary Lebanese fiction, film, and popular culture, this book shows how artists reappropriated the twin legacies of commitment literature and the ancient topos of “standing by the ruins” to form a new “elegiac humanism” during the tumultuous period of 1975 to 2005. It redirects attention to the critical role of culture in conditioning attitudes throughout society and is therefore relevant to other societies facing sectarian extremism.
Modern Arabic novels, feature films, and popular culture, far from being simply cultural imports, are hybrid forms deployed to respond to the challenges of contemporary Arab society. As such, they are cultural products that travel and intervene in the world.
Ken Seigneurie is Associate Professor of World Literature and Director of the Program in World Literature at Simon Fraser University, Surrey, British Columbia. He spent the first thirteen years of his scholarly career in Lebanon, where he edited Crisis and Memory: The Representation of Space in Modern Levantine Narrative.
224 pages, 21 illus., 6 x 9 in.
978-0-8232-3483-7, Paper, $26.00 (01)
978-0-8232-3482-0, Cloth, $80.00 (06)
World rights
July 2011
Genealogies of Fiction
Women Warriors and the Dynastic Imagination in the 'Orlando furioso'
Eleonora Stoppino
Fordham University Press
Fall 2011
Genealogies of Fiction is a study of gender, dynastic politics, and intertextuality in medieval and renaissance chivalric epic, focused on Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando furioso. Relying on the direct study of manuscripts and incunabula, this project challenges the fixed distinction between medieval and early modern texts and reclaims medieval popular epic as a key source for the Furioso.
Tracing the formation of the character of the warrior woman, from the Amazon to Bradamante, the book analyzes the process of gender construction in early modern Italy. By reading the tension between the representations of women as fighters, lovers, and mothers, this study shows how the warrior woman is a symbolic center for the construction of legitimacy in the complex web of fears and expectations of the Northern Italian Renaissance court.
Eleonora Stoppino is Assistant Professor of Italian at the University of Illinois.
208 pages, 6 x 9 in.
978-0-8232-4037-1, Hardcover, $55.00
World rights
December 2011
Disarming Words
Empire and the Seductions of Translation in Egypt
Shaden M. Tageldin
University of California Press
FlashPoints series
Spring 2011
In a book that radically challenges conventional understandings of the dynamics of cultural imperialism, Shaden M. Tageldin unravels the complex relationship between translation and seduction in the colonial context. She examines the afterlives of two occupations of Egypt—by the French in 1798 and by the British in 1882—in a rich comparative analysis of acts, fictions, and theories that translated the European into the Egyptian, the Arab, or the Muslim. Tageldin finds that the encounter with European Orientalism often invited colonized Egyptians to imagine themselves “equal” to or even “masters” of their colonizers, and thus, paradoxically, to translate themselves toward—virtually into—the European. Moving beyond the domination/resistance binary that continues to govern understandings of colonial history, Tageldin redefines cultural imperialism as a politics of translational seduction, a politics that lures the colonized to seek power through empire rather than against it, thereby repressing its inherent inequalities. She considers, among others, the interplays of Napoleon and Ḥasan al-ʿAṭṭār; Rifāʿa al-Ṭahṭāwī, Silvestre de Sacy, and Joseph Agoub; Cromer, ʿAlī Mubārak, Muḥammad al-Sibāʿī, and Thomas Carlyle; Ibrāhīm ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Māzinī, Muḥammad Ḥusayn Haykal, and Aḥmad Ḥasan al-Zayyāt; and Salāma Mūsā, G. Elliot Smith, Naguib Mahfouz, and Lawrence Durrell. In conversation with new work on translation, comparative literature, imperialism, and nationalism, Tageldin engages postcolonial and poststructuralist theorists from Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, and Gayatri Spivak to Jean Baudrillard, Walter Benjamin, Emile Benveniste, and Jacques Derrida.
Shaden M. Tageldin is Associate Professor in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota.
368 pp.
978-0-520-26552-3, Paper, $39.95tx, £27.95
World rights
June 2011
The Doppelgänger
Literature's Philosophy
Dimitris Vardoulakis
Fordham University Press
Spring 2010
"A bold and complex treatment of a classic literary figure that will make this book standard reference for years to come, both in what it contributes to modernist criticism and in how it reconceptualizes the terrain of contemporary literary theory."—Stathis Gourgouris, Columbia University
The Doppelgänger presents literature as the double of philosophy. This relation is historically rooted in the genesis of the doppelgänger as literature’s response to the philosophical focus on subjectivity: The term doppelgänger was coined by the German author Jean Paul in 1796 as a critique of Idealism’s assertion of subjective autonomy, individuality, and human agency. This critique prefigures late-twentieth-century extrapolations of the subject as decentered. From this perspective, the doppelgänger has a family resemblance to current conceptualizations of subjectivity. It becomes the emblematic subject of modernity.
This is the first significant study of the doppelgänger’s influence on philosophical thought. Reading literature philosophically and philosophy as literature, Vardoulakis examines authors such as Franz Kafka, Maurice Blanchot, and Alexandros Papadiamantes and philosophers such as Immanuel Kant, Walter Benjamin, and Jacques Derrida to show how the doppelgänger emerges as a hidden and unexplored element both in conceptions of subjectivity and in philosophy’s relation to literature.
Dimitris Vardoulakis is Lecturer in Philosophy and Literature at the University of Western Sydney. He is the editor of Spinoza Now and the co-editor of After Blanchot.
336 pp., 6 x 9 in.
978-0-8232-3299-4, Paper, $28.00 S
978-0-8232-3298-7, Cloth, $70.00 X
978-0-8232-3300-7, eBook, $20.00 N
World rights
June 2010
Beyond the Mother Tongue
The Postmonolingual Condition
Yasemin Yildiz
Fordham University Press
Fall 2011
Monolingualism—the idea that having just one language is the norm—is only a recent invention, dating to late-eighteenth-century Europe. Yet it has become a dominant, if overlooked, structuring principle of modernity. According to this monolingual paradigm, individuals are imagined to be able to think and feel properly only in one language, while multiple languages are seen as a threat to the cohesion of individuals and communities, institutions and disciplines. As a result of this view, writing in anything but one's "mother tongue" has come to be seen as an aberration.
Beyond the Mother Tongue demonstrates the impact of this monolingual paradigm on literature and culture and charts incipient moves beyond it. Because newer multilingual forms and practices exist in tension with the paradigm, which alternately obscures, pathologizes, or exoticizes them, this book argues that they can best be understood as "postmonolingual".
Focused on canonical and minority writers working in German in the twentieth century, Beyond the Mother Tongue examines distinct forms of multilingualism, such as writing in one socially unsanctioned "mother tongue" about another language (Franz Kafka); mobilizing words of foreign derivation as part of a multilingual constellation within one language (Theodor W. Adorno); producing an oeuvre in two separate languages simultaneously (Yoko Tawada); and mixing different languages, codes, and registers within one text (Feridun Zaimoglu). Through these analyses, Beyond the Mother Tongue suggests that the dimensions of gender, kinship, and affect encoded in the "mother tongue" are crucial to the persistence of monolingualism and the challenge of multilingualism.
Yasemin Yildiz is Assistant Professor of German at the University of Illinois.
208 pages, 6 x 9 in.
978-0-8232-4130-9, Hardcover, $45.00
World rights
December 2011
