Lothe, Hawthorn, and Phelan, eds.: Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad

Voice, Sequence, History, Genre

Edited by Jakob Lothe, Jeremy Hawthorn, James Phelan

Joseph Conrad: Voice, Sequence, History, Genre brings together essays by established critics of Conrad and by leading narratologists that explore Conrad’s innovative uses of narrative throughout his career. Collectively, these explorations by Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan, Gail Fincham, Jeremy Hawthorn, Susan Jones, Jakob Lothe, J. Hillis Miller, Zdzislaw Najder, Josiane Paccaud-Huguet, James Phelan, Christophe Robin, Allan H. Simmons, and John Stape amply demonstrate (1) that narrative theory, and especially some of its more recent developments, can help critics generate greater insight into the complexities of Conrad’s work; and (2) that a rigorous engagement with Conradian narrative can lead theorists to a further honing of their analytical tools. More particularly, the volume focuses on the four narrative issues identified in the subtitle, and it analyzes examples of Conrad’s fiction and nonfiction, from early work such as An Outcast of the Islands to his late work of reminiscence, A Personal Record. The volume also provides multiple perspectives on major works such as Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim, a cluster of three essays on Nostromo and history, and an afterword by the editors that looks ahead to future work on the interrelations of Conrad and narrative theory.

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Franke: Modernist Heresies

Modernist Heresies

British Literary History, 1883–1924

Damon Franke

In Modernist Heresies, Damon Franke presents the discourse of heresy as central to the intellectual history of the origins of British modernism. The book examines heretical discourses from literature and culture of the fin de siècle and the Edwardian period in order to establish continuities between Victorian blasphemy and modernist obscenity by tracing the dialectic of heresy and orthodoxy, and the pragmatic shifting of both heterodox and authoritative discourses.

Franke documents the untold history of the Cambridge Heretics Society and places the concerns of this discussion society in dialogue with contemporaneous literature by such authors as Pater, Hardy, Shaw, Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence, and Orwell. Since several highly influential figures of the modernist literati were members of the Heretics or in dialogue with the group, heresy and its relation to synthesis now become crucial to an understanding of modernist aesthetics and ethics.

From the 1880s through the 1920s, heresy commonly appears in literature as a discursive trope, and the literary mode of heresy shifts over the course of this time from one of syncretism to one based on the construction of modernist artificial or “synthetic” wholes. In Franke’s work, the discourse of heresy comes forth as a forgotten dimension of the origins of modernism, one deeply entrenched in Victorian blasphemy and the crisis in faith, and one pointing to the censorship of modernist literature and some of the first doctrines of literary criticism.

http://www.ohiostatepress.org

AEJMC MCS division research award call

The Mass Communication and Society division of AEJMC has recently posted a call for its annual research award. Proposals are due by May 1st. The winner is obligated to give the division's journal, Mass Communication and Society, first right of refusal for publication of research stemming from the award. COPS members may recall that Teresa Myers and I won this award last year. The research stemming from that proposal is currently going through peer review. Here is the call for proposals.

COPS and OSU Welcome Ray Pingree and Kimberly Rios Morrison

I am happy to announce that, starting AU 2008, Kimberly Rios Morrison and Ray Pingree will be joining the School of Communication faculty as well as the COPS group.

Kim comes to us from Stanford, where she is completing her Ph.D. in the business school. Her research focuses on minority group influence and the conditions that prompt minority opinion expression in group settings. She also studies social identity, perceived threat from outgroups, and attitude change. Her training in organizational behavior and experimental social psychology will further enrichen an already exciting research culture. Here are a couple of her recent papers that might interest COPS members:

Morrison, K. R., & Miller, D. T. (in press). Distinguishing between silent and vocal minorities: Not all deviants feel marginal. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology [PDF]

Morrison, K. R., & Ybarra, O. (2008). The effects of realistic threat and group identification on social dominance orientation. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 44, 156-163.


Ray is completing his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin and brings an interesting background as a computer scientist to his own theorizing about political deliberation. Some of his published work has attempted to identify ways to improve political deliberation through the use of online technologies. He has two recent publications in Communication Theory that you might be interested in:

Pingree, R. J. (2007). How messages affect their senders: A more general model of message effects and implications for deliberation. Communication Theory. 17, 439-461.

Pingree, R. J. (2006). Decision structure and the problem of scale deliberation. Communication Theory, 16: 198-222.

Please join me in welcoming Ray and Kim to COPS!

Losano: The Woman Painter in Victorian Literature

The Woman Painter in Victorian Literature

Antonia Losano

The nineteenth century saw a marked rise both in the sheer numbers of women active in visual art professions and in the discursive concern for the woman artist in fiction, the periodical press, art history, and politics. The Woman Painter in Victorian Literature argues that Victorian women writers used the controversial figure of the woman painter to intervene in the discourse of aesthetics. These writers were able to assert their own status as artistic producers through the representation of female visual artists.

Women painters posed a threat to the traditional heterosexual erotic art scenarios—a male artist and a male viewer admiring a woman or feminized art object. Antonia Losano traces an actual movement in history in which women writers struggled to rewrite the relations of gender and art to make a space for female artistic production. She examines as well the disruption female artists caused in the socioeconomic sphere. Losano offers close readings of a wide array of Victorian writers, particularly those works classified as noncanonical—by Anne Thackeray Ritchie, Margaret Oliphant, Anne Brontë, and Mrs. Humphrey Ward—and a new look at better-known novels such as Jane Eyre and Daniel Deronda, focusing on the pivotal social and aesthetic meanings of female artistic production in these texts. Each of the novels considered here is viewed as a contained, coherent, and complex aesthetic treatise that coalesces around the figure of the female painter.

http://www.ohiostatepress.org

Blocker: A Little More Freedom

A Little More Freedom

African Americans Enter the Urban Midwest, 1860–1930

Jack S. Blocker

Why did African Americans move from the rural South to the metropolitan North? Scholars have shown that African Americans took part in the urbanization of American society between the Civil War and the Great Depression, but the racial dimensions of their migration have remained unclear. A Little More Freedom is the first study to trace African American locational choices during the crucial period when migrants created pathways that would shape mobility through the twentieth century and beyond.

This book identifies an “age of the village” for black Midwesterners, when Civil War and postwar migrants distributed themselves evenly across the urban hierarchies of the region. Using four case studies of Washington Court House, Ohio; Springfield, Ohio; Springfield, Illinois; and Muncie, Indiana, Blocker shows what life was like for African Americans in small towns and small cities, thus illuminating the reasons why most blacks ultimately chose to leave such places in favor of metropolitan centers such as Chicago, Indianapolis, and Cleveland. Previous scholars have emphasized the role of racist white violence as the catalyst, but A Little More Freedom takes a more nuanced approach.

Emphasis upon racist violence and Jim Crow has inadvertently tended to portray African Americans as victims and their migrations as flight from danger and oppression. While not downplaying white racism, A Little More Freedom tries to recreate the threats and opportunities in urban places of different sizes as seen through the eyes of migrants.

http://www.ohiostatepress.org