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By Julia Chen
Seven professors published books since our last newsletter, on topics ranging from seventeenth-century print culture to jazz to postmodernism.
Marianne DeKoven published Utopia
Limited: The Sixties and the Emergence of the Postmodern,
which describes how texts from the 1960s demonstrate
the conditions behind the birth of postmodernism. The
texts she studies include important philosophical writings
by Marcuse and Barthes, protest manifestos like "The
Port Huron Statement," avant-garde works like Burroughs's
Naked Lunch and The Living Theater's "Paradise
Now," and critical explorations of Las Vegas, the so-called
"capital of postmodernity." By tracing the way these
texts place limits on the ideal of utopia, Professor
DeKoven reveals the precise intellectual shifts by which
modernism shades into postmodernism.
Robert Kusch published his second book, The Field, a collection of very short poems which work together to tell a unified story. According to one critic, these poems are striking in their quiet but powerful themes, and Professor Kusch as a poet is "especially enamored with the unfolding of process, the evanescence of things and their remnants."
Brent Edwards co-edited, with Robert G. O'Meally and Farah Jasmine Griffin, Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies, a book about the evolution of jazz. This collection of essays celebrates jazz's rich history and its influence on poetry, art, and film, while demonstrating the power jazz had in creating and defining popular culture in America.
Paula McDowell edited Elinor James: Printed Writings, a compilation of work from the London printer-writer Elinor James and part of a series that reprints writings by early modern Englishwomen. James wrote, published, and distributed more than ninety pamphlets and broadsides on political, religious, and commercial issues. In editing this collection, Professor McDowell hopes to motivate scholars to do further research on this prolific author.
George L. Levine provides background information and explanatory notes to The Origin of Species, a reprint of Charles Darwin's 1859 masterpiece, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. In his introduction, Professor Levine argues that Darwin's book might have been the last major work to make science, at its most advanced levels, accessible to nonscientists.
Cheryl A. Wall co-edited the second edition of the comprehensive Norton Anthology of African American Literature, which touches on all genres, including poetry, fiction, slave narratives, essays, spirituals, and the blues. Her section includes an extensively revised "Literature Since 1975," in which she adds five new writers: Harryette Mullen, Gayl Jones, Caryl Phillips, Edwidge Danticat, and Colson Whitehead.
Michael Warner edited The Portable Walt Whitman, which offers a diverse selection of Whitman's poems, short stories, and prose. Professor Warner's introduction, chronology, and notes add context to Whitman's famous works.
Many faculty members have manuscripts scheduled to be published soon: John Belton, the second edition of American Cinema/American Culture; Matthew S. Buckley, Modern Drama and the Revolutionary Modernity; Brad Evans, Before Cultures: The Ethnographic Imagination in American Literature; Stacy Klein, Ruling Women: Queenship and Gender in Anglo-Saxon Literature; Richard Koszarski, Fort Lee, The Film Town; Michael McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge; and Jonah Siegel, Haunted Museum: Longing, Travel, and the Art Romance Tradition.
Alumni Authors?
Faculty are not the only published writers associated with Rutgers English. Many of our alumni are authors as well, and a complete bibliography of written works by Friends of Rutgers English would take hundreds of pages to print.
We’re going to try assembling an online list of books by Friends of Rutgers English, and we need your help. If you’ve published a book you’d like us to list in our “Friends Library,” please let us know. You can write us, call us at 732-932-7612, or use the Alumni News form on our Website. Make sure we have your contact information too, so we can keep you informed about the state of the project.
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