Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2015 - Humanities — Language & Literature

What is a community?  Can it persist in light of Derridas autoimmunity, the self-destructive force he claims is a concomitant of community?  In Communities in Fiction, Miller (Univ. of California, Irvine) complicates the idea of community as rendered in the virtual realities of Trollope, Hardy, Conrad, Woolf, Pynchon, and Cervantes.  Miller supplies no single definition: rather, he derives interpretations of community from differing theories of Raymond Williams, Heidegger, Nancy, and Derrida, among others.  The often contradictory tradition of thinking about community"to quote from the last sentence of chapter 1thus marks the entry point into a broader analysis of the works in question, the most compelling of which is the chapter scrutinizing so-called postmodern features in short fictions by Pynchon and Cervantes.  A disquieting coda portends the real-world consequences of self-destructive community behavior, including widespread apathy toward global climate change, the acceptance of Orwellian NSA surveillance of US citizens, and the nullification by the US Supreme Court of key protections in the Voting Rights Act.  Here one discovers the books capstone: a call to action.  Miller makes real the connection between problems facing fictitious communities and challenges encountered in the communities in which we live.  Remarkable for its depth, breadth, accessibility, and precision,Communities in Fiction is a masterwork.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

Trauma, as a facet of the modern condition, is central to the modern novel.  Yet how can readers understand the ramifications of this trauma when the very limitations of language render descriptive language inadequate?  Two decades ago, with her seminal edited collection Trauma: Explorations in Memory (CH, Jan'96, 33-3030), Cathy Caruth developed the critical lens of trauma theory that revolutionized readings of both trauma and trauma victims in literature.  Now Balaev (Wake Forest Univ.) has assembled a collection of essays that respectfully acknowledges the foundational theorists in trauma theory while detailing the most interesting recent iterations.  In the first essay, Balaev looks at the evolution of trauma theory and contextualizes the essays that follow, which consider semiotics, trauma and postcolonial theory, and societal constructs that constrain healing, along with digital technologies that may auger healing.  Essays by Greg Forter, Irene Visser, and Laurie Vickroy provide exciting re-visionings of classic trauma texts, and in the final essay, Paul Arthur proves that trauma theory effectively translates to social media.  Required reading for any student of modern literature.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.

International and thoroughgoing in scope,Genealogical Fictions threads its way through a dense, rich tradition that has recently received renewed attention: the development of the European novel, broadly considered to include North American and Latin American literature.  Throughout, Welge (Univ. of Konstanz, Germany)a preeminent scholar of comparative literaturesees familial and dynastic decline as one of the symbolic motifs connecting pre-Victorian novels, such as Sir Walter Scott's Waverly, to 20th-century works, such as Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa'sIl Gattopardo.  Readers must not erroneously associate this book with the somewhat discredited practice of tracking putative "influences."  Among other insights, Welge shows how the theme of familial deterioration reflects national, regional, cultural, and psychological preoccupations with change, assimilation, and deterioration within marginal, local, and global geographies.  As he points out, in the 20th-century novel, the historical/genealogical genre can portray either "a long arc of narrated time" or "a few, sometimes almost autonomous, tableaux that reflect the conflict between stasis and change."  Though in many respects different in emphasis from earlier works, Genealogical Fictions isone of the most significant critical works about the European/American novel since Ian Watt'sThe Rise of the Novel (1957).Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.

Wee (English language and literature, National Univ. of Singapore) offers a rhetorically based look at how organizations use language to style themselvesstyles ranging "from the deeply routinized and automated to the highly strategic and deliberate."  Those who study rhetoric and organizational culture are familiar with the idea of a deliberately constructed ethos, or character, but Wee brings these rhetorical and organizational concepts together with linguistics and semiotics.  The book uses case studies from a variety of organizationse.g., universities, booksellers, laundromats, coffee shops, drugstores, and so onto illustrate elements such as the impact of business size on styling, the use of vision and mission statements to showcase ethical foundations, and the role of endorsements and ambassadors to signal public support of a company.  One chapter deals with organizational restyling after something has gone wrong, such as recalls or public scandals.  Although highly academic in tone and structure, Wees book is a fascinating read for anyone interested in the process of how businesses promote themselves through specific language choices.  Language has power, and this book explores the power behind linguistic choices.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals.

The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction is a stunning achievement. Science fiction, as a genre and as a phrase, is notoriously hard to pin down, and Latham (Univ. of California, Riverside) was wise in deciding to explore the widest possible limits rather than set up any sort of rigid boundaries.  This is not to suggest the handbook ducks the question of definition; the first 11 essays, grouped together under the heading Science Fiction as Genre, approach the problem from a variety of angles, from historical to aesthetic.  The other three sections (33 essays) explore science fiction as medium, culture, and worldview, and thus allow critics to engage with topics that would almost certainly be left out of a more narrow approach.  There are essays on music, architecture, body modification, and pseudoscience, to name just a few of the subjects treated.  The only thing this reviewer finds missing is an overview: though each essay has a detailed bibliography, overall bibliographies of both the works and theorists mentioned, as well as a time line, would have made this work more useful.  But even without these elements this is a stellar accomplishment.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

Budick (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) presents new readings of significant well-known but under-studied Holocaust fiction.  Premising her discussion on psychoanalytic theory, the author examines the national, ethnic, and religious positions of characters in and authors and readers of this fiction.  She examines work by American novelists Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, Aryeh Lev Stollman, Michael Chabon, Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss, Art Spiegelman, Dara Horn, Shalom Auslander, and William Styron (all but Styron Jewish); Israelis Aharon Appelfeld and David Grossman; Germans Bernhard Schlink and W. G. Sebald; and South African J. M. Coetzee.  Budicks interest is in the subjectivity that frames any writers or readers view of any subject, in this case the Holocaust, and in how writers approach and readers respond to this difficult topic.  Among the fascinating themes Budick explores is the recurrent appearance of the inheritance of Anne Frank and Bruno Schulz.  Well versed in psychoanalytic theory and Holocaust literary criticism, Budick offers cogent intertextual comparisonssuch as the evocation of Bruno Schulz in texts by Jewish writers whose dominant theme is complicated or incomplete mourning.  This is an important contribution to literary studies.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.

For more than two decades, Scott McCloudsUnderstanding Comics: The Invisible Art (1993) has been the cornerstone of nearly every syllabus for courses on comic books and graphic novels.  Though nothing can usurp it, SousanissUnflattening now provides the answer to the question, What next?Unflattening will no doubt become an essential teaching tool for helping studentsespecially undergraduatesthink about comics, graphic novels, and other media in which words and images combine.  With a goal of providing an elevated perspective from which to illuminate the traps of our own making and offer a means to step out," Sousanis (comics studies, Univ. of Calgary, Canada) wishes to unflatten readers, allowing them to resee, unsee, or see differently.  The book was originally Sousaniss PhD dissertation, and as a new way of conducting academic discourseone that weaves a rich tapestry of theory and intertextuality beyond the cage of language and the limited pedantic form of the essaythe book is potentially revolutionary.  Rather than obfuscation and hoarding of knowledge, there is a generous opening outward into ever-deepening complexity.  This is a book that wants to teach, a book that will be talked about and belongs in any forward-looking library.Summing Up: Essential. All readers.