Books

This collection of essays examines the discursive topography of world literature, challenging the current West-centered monochronic vision of world literature. The book's contributors join their efforts in marking a literary space in which the polychronic literatures of 'minor' countries and peoples can be heard, uncaged from the epistemological frame of the West's 'other.' Concepts, such as 'the majority' and 'the minority,' are reviewed in the global framework of a capitalist world economic system, and the ethics of the new minority is explored. The 'minority' voices of the so-called 'major' countries of world literature - such as India's Dalit tribal writing, China's reception of William Shakespeare, and Japan's conscientious engagement voice - will be refreshing enough to rethink the Orientalism. At the same time, the rarely heard voices of Egypt's literature of diaspora, the United Arab Emirates's post-oil era imagination, and South Korea's literary activism will attract a new interest in the postcolonial conditions of 'minority' countries. The book invites the reader to take note of the digital interface system and the consequential nomadic mode of existence, rapidly spreading all over the world. Encouraging the reader to review 'the minority' not as a fixed position, but as a new transmutable space of 'becoming,' it provides a chance to meditate on the role of a new digital generation of humanists, challenging the capitalist world economy system. 

Sukyung Huh (1964-2018) is unafraid to write of what is. In her Global Blues, the extraordinary starts to become the ordinary we somehow have all in common. Though listed with a touch of irony, we find ourselves, for better or worse, in all scenes that are not familiar to our own experiences. In many cases, Global Blues disembodies self and image, nature and its groundedness, exploring terrains of defeat and despair. Through reading the poems, we can make voluntary exiles, othering ourselves as we reach out to the other, against the unilateral process of modernity rooted in the Western ‘center’ spreading out to homogenize and maintain the periphery. The intertwining of local and global void paradoxically conveys a gap in the world’s system of relationships, a system based on simulations and relentless maneuvers. Eventually, Global Blues lingers persistently in our minds, oscillating between expectation and frustration, entangling fact and fiction.

A Companion to Ten Modern Korean Poets is a practical handbook that connects poetry and culture with historical moments in which Korean poet-intellectuals mused on what poetry can do. This book offers a historical viewpoint of how they struggled to maintain Korean national identity, cultural sensibility, and spirituality in times of violence and surveillance. Surveying how each poet shaped their poetry, responding to the political events, it also guides readers to understand why Korean poetry begins with a sense of solitude but ends with a longing for the building of common ground called Minjung. Finally, it provides translations of each poet's representative poems. Through seemingly transparent poetic texts may emerge the tension between language and speechlessness, hunger for the modern and hunger for what is lost, and memory of the past and hope for justice. This tension makes all ten poets, including Han Yongun, Jeong Jiyong, Kim Sowol, Yun Dongju, Yi Sang, Baek Seok, Kim Suyoung, Seo Jeongju, Ko Un, and Shin Kyeongnim, crucial witnesses to the brutality in modern Korean history. On the other hand, there is the integrity of their poetics. Although living in a difficult environment, they continued laboring with their mother tongue to create modern Korean poetry, shaping Korean cultural identity, based on folk traditional arts, such as Minyo and Gut, and finally, sharing folk sensibilities of Heung and Jeong under strict censorship. Listening to their voices, we might begin to imagine a new unfolding of history in the age of extremes.

Contesting the idea that the study of Anglophone literature and literary studies is simply a foreign import in Asia, this collection addresses the genealogies of textual critique and institutionalized forms of teaching of English language and literature in Asia through the 19th and 20th centuries, along with an examination of how its present options and possible future directions relate to these historical contexts. It argues that the establishment of Anglophone literature in Asia did not simply “happen”: there were extra-literary and -academic forces at work, inserting and domesticating in Asian universities both the English language and Anglo-American literature, and their attendant cultural and political values. Offering new perspectives for ongoing conversations surrounding the globalization of Anglophone literature in literary and cultural studies, the book also  considers the practicalities of teaching both the language and its canon of classic texts, and that the historical formation and shape of English studies in Asia offers lessons that relate not only to the discipline but also may be applied to the humanities as a whole. 

Until recently, collaborative authorship has barely been considered by scholars; when it has, the focus has been on discovering who contributed what and who dominated whom in the relationship and in the writing. In "Women Coauthors", Holly Laird reads coauthored texts as the realization of new kinds of relationship. Through close scrutiny of literary collaborations in which women writers have played central roles, "Women Coauthors" shows how partnerships in writing - between two women or between a woman and a man - provide a paradigm of literary creativity that complicates traditional views of both author and text and makes us revise old habits of thinking about writing. Focusing on the social dynamics of literary production, including the conversations that precede and surround collaborative writing, "Women Coauthors" treats its coauthored texts as representations as well as acts of collaboration.Holly A. Laird discusses a wide array of partial and full coauthorships to reveal how these texts blur or remap often uncanny boundaries of self, status, race, reason, and culture. Among the many partnerships discussed are black-white collaborations, such as that of the Delany sisters and Amy Hill Hearth on "Having Our Say"; lesbian couples whose lives and writings were intertwined, including Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper ("Michael Field") and Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas; and the Native American wife-and-husband authors Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris. Framed in time by the feminist and abolitionist movements of the mid-nineteenth century and the ongoing social struggles surrounding gender, race, and sexuality in the late twentieth century, the partnerships and texts observed in "Women Coauthors" explore collaboration as a path toward equity, both socioliterary and erotic. For the authors here who collaborate most fully with each other, two are much better than one. 

This book addresses the shape of English studies beyond the ‘center’ by analyzing how the discipline has developed, and by considering how lessons from this analysis relate to the discipline as a whole. The book aims to open a cross-disciplinary conversation about the nature of the English major in both non-Anglophone and Anglophone countries by addressing the tensions between language and literature pedagogy, the relevance of a focus on hyper-canonical Anglophone literature in a world of global Englishes, world literature, and multilingual students, and by reflecting on the necessary contingency and cross-purposes of blended literature and language classrooms. Many of the book’s points of discussion arise from the author’s experience as an English professor in Japan, where the particularities of English language and literature pedagogy raise significant challenges to Anglo-centric critical and pedagogical assumptions. English Studies Beyond the ‘Center’: Teaching Literature and the Future of Global English therefore argues that English literature must make a case for itself by understanding its place in a newly configured discipline. 

Just as Shakespeare's theater was an economic gamble, subject to the workings of a market, so the plays themselves submit actions, persons, and motives to an audience's judgment. Such a theatrical economy, Lars Engle suggests, provides a model for the way in which truth is determined and assessed in the world at large—a model much like that offered by contemporary pragmatism. To Engle, the problems of worth, price, and value that appear so frequently in Shakespeare's works reveal a playwright dramatizing the negotiable nature of perception and belief—in short, the nature of his audience's purchase on reality. This innovative argument is the first to view Shakespeare in the context of contemporary pragmatism and to show that Shakespeare in many ways anticipated pragmatism as it has been developed in the thought of Richard Rorty, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, and others. With detailed reference to the sonnets and plays, Engle explores Shakespeare's tendency to treat knowledge, truth, and certainty as relatively stable goods within a theatrical economy of social interaction. He shows the playwright recasting kingship, aristocracy, and poetic immortality in pragmatic terms. As attentive to history as it is to contemporary theory, this book mediates between current and traditional accounts of Shakespeare. In doing so, it offers a sweeping new account of Shakespeare's enterprise that will interest philosophers, literary theorists, and Shakespeare scholars alike. 

Studying Shakespeare’s Contemporaries is an accessible guide to non-Shakespearian English drama of the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Featuring works of prestigious playwrights such as Kyd, Marlowe, Jonson, Webster, and Middleton, Lars Engle describes the conditions under which Renaissance plays were commissioned, written, licensed, staged, and published. Plays are organized by theme and explored individually, creating a text that can be read as a complete overview of English Renaissance drama or used as an indexed reference resource.