Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2023 -

Like Franco-Swiss writer Blaise Cendrars (1887-1961), Eric Robertson (Royal Holloway, Univ. of London, UK) possesses "impressive breadth." He accompanies Cendrars easily through his interests in cinema, photography, painting, poetry, journalism, and advertising, and, through his constant innovations, his "invention of life and art." Even a quick glance at the bibliography, especially its "general critical reading" section--which includes volumes on war, marginality, cinema, photography, and autobiography--illustrates this broad scope. Robertson covers Cendrars's entire intellectual itinerary, but some aspects--such as cinema--interest him more than others. Robertson argues that certain of Cendrars's works, such as Bourlinguer (1948) and Le lotissement du ciel (1949), "deserve a new readership," and he seeks to create that new public for the nomadic writer. Robertson also devotes a chapter to a less palatable Cendrars work, Moravagine (1926)--about a mass murderer and child molester--which he terms a "brilliant and deeply troubling novel." A fascinating study, carefully edited, this handsome illustrated volume should succeed in attracting new readers to Cendrars and inspiring the return of former readers.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

De Armas, an eminent scholar of Cervantes, has investigated a number of topics, all broad in scope and all concerned in one way or another with the dialectics of art and reality. Cervantes' Architectures is perhaps his most ambitious undertaking. De Armas alludes to having waited for his ideas, focal points, and theses to coalesce over time. The network of places and spaces--internal and external--that he treats is far-reaching and highly complex. The study is impacted by a consideration of the current condition of a world fraught with pandemics, hostilities, wars, and rhetorical strategies that refashion the concept of truth. Analyzing La Galatea, Don Quixote, and Persiles, De Armas demonstrates that architecture can be safe, insecure, or mutable. At the center of the project is the imagination: that of the characters, of Cervantes, and of the critic, arguably in reverse order. De Armas explores the suggestive power of architecture, both concrete (pun intended) and abstract. "The Dangers Outside" can be metaphorical and paradoxical. The book--a profound meditation on Cervantes as writer, thinker, and ingenious architect--constantly reframes its subjects and objects. The results are, not unexpectedly, multifaceted, polemical, and engaging.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

This engrossing, detailed volume of the origins of Creole dialect affirms its authenticity as the lingua franca of the Caribbean and validates Creole as the authoritative mode of communication in speech, literature, and the performing arts. Covering the period from the 18th century to the modern day, Edmondson (Rutgers) begins her examination of Caribbean language and identity through the lens of familial storytelling. In particular, she focuses on her native Jamaica and Creole's oral and written traditions, offering a judicious examination of the use of Creole among Blacks as self-affirming and a distancing from the trauma of colonialism. She also details how whites appropriated and mimicked the quotidian language for commercial gain and entertainment and how Creole has been sustained historically in newsprint and literature by both Black and white practitioners. Edmondson's studied chronological review of historical personages and events delineates Creole's ascendancy in the performing arts and literature that shaped intellectual thought and political movements. She looks at how the Morant Bay Rebellion influenced the development of dialect literature in Jamaica. Equally, she examines the export of Creole to the US in defining Marcus Garvey's Pan-African movement and how it influenced the literature of the Harlem Renaissance. The thorough bibliography will be an invaluable tool for exploring further.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals; general readers.

In Dante, Artist of Gesture, Webb (Univ. of Cambridge, UK) offers a visual methodology for reading the Commedia. Building on ideas about the role of gestures she introduced in her previous study, Dante's Persons: An Ethics of the Transhuman (CH, Jan'17, 54-2139), Webb argues for approaching Dante's poetry both textually and visually. In six concise chapters, she effectively demonstrates that Dante invites the reader to make visual links between different elements in the text as one might engage with groups of frescoes or mosaics in a religious space such as the Baptistry of San Giovanni in Florence. The study includes 22 carefully selected illustrations reinforcing Webb's reading of Dante's extremely visual text and demonstrating artists' perceptions of Dante's verbal cues. Throughout Webb focuses on signature gestures of key characters (Virgil, Dante, Beatrice, and the Virgin Mary) in each of the three realms as case studies. Writing primarily for specialists, Webb offers a useful interdisciplinary methodology for readers to interpret Dante's poetry as visual art.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Graduates students, researchers, faculty.

In this study [first published in hardcover in 2019 but not reviewed in these pages], Schneider (history, Indiana Univ., Bloomington) provides a detailed examination of the culture and society of French writers, essayists, and other gens de lettres in the first half of the 17th century, a period strongly marked by the memory of France's wars of religion in the latter half of the 16th century and the rise of the absolute monarchy under Louis XIII and his prime minister, Cardinal Richelieu. Schneider details the debates about language and culture that took place in salons and various publications and, eventually, in the Academie Francaise. He also provides an insightful look into how these writers and intellectuals negotiated the social, political, and religious issues of their day and reveals the active role they played in influencing the evolution of the French language and culture. This study is supported by numerous primary sources from a range of writers and by the works of others who study the period. It will be of great interest to both historians and literature scholars specializing in 17th-century France.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty.

The cover of this addition to Yale's "Jewish Lives" series features the tortured face of Elie Wiesel (1928-2016) surrounded by black. This leads one to anticipate a difficult reading experience about this most famous of Holocaust survivors. Wiesel was haunted throughout his life by the death of his younger sister, Tzipora, his mother, and his father. Berger, the son of Holocaust survivors and a New York Times columnist and editor for 30 years, frames his treatment of Wiesel in his introduction: "So how did this frail, soft-spoken writer from a village in the Carpathian Mountains become such an influential presence on the world stage? This is the question at the core of this biography." In 28 brief, focused chapters, Berger answers by depicting a man who, after the Holocaust, struggled with his faith, found his way into writing, and then witnessed what he had lived through in Auschwitz. Rather than rely on the dozens of scholarly books about Wiesel, Berger interviewed key people in Wiesel's life, using his skills as a reporter. The result is a readable appreciation/biography that has immediacy and emotional valence. It would serve well as a classroom text at the high school level or above, since it raises post-Holocaust moral, ethical, and political issues and depicts the survivors' private sorrows and agonies.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

Plagues never really end. As with wildfires, a spark can send pathogens burning through communities until they run out of fuel and retreat into dormancy, awaiting the right conditions for another conflagration. Over time, each recurring plague resurrects a familiar slate of human experiences: separation, anxiety, resignation, community, hope ... a collective trauma and communal resilience Albert Camus masterfully captured in his allegorical novel The Plague (1947). Three years into the COVID-19 pandemic, Camus scholars Alice Kaplan (Yale) and Laura Marris (a translator) reflect on what that novel might signify in the current moment. Across 13 insightful, deeply personal chapters, Kaplan and Marris explore the human side of communal trauma. Many chapters provide the sociohistorical context for understanding Camus, covering topics ranging from colonial cemeteries to toxic Oranian politics, the messy denouement of world war, and beyond. Other chapters trace the author's experiences and choices in writing the novel--his writer's block, narrative identity, and literary restraint--and how he was received by the literary establishment. Importantly, the authors avoid scholarly detachment and instead share their insightful, often vulnerable, reflections in evocative prose that serves to reinforce the deeply humanistic importance of Camus's thought.

Published to coincide with the bicentenary of his birth, this remarkable book provides a new and detailed reading of the entire corpus of Baudelaire (1821-67): Les Fleurs du Mal, Le Spleen de Paris, and his critical essays on literature and the creative arts. It is an invitation to return to the text, to discover or rediscover a writer too often categorized as an apolitical dandy burdened by melancholia and dedicated to the pursuit of art for art's sake. Focusing on the notion of the poet as alternative lawgiver, Pearson (emer., Univ. of Oxford) contends that beauty for Baudelaire was an alternative principle by which he and his readers could free themselves from the tyranny of the status quo. Proclaiming what he called the government of the imagination, Baudelaire offered a dangerous new way of engaging with the world. His pursuit of beauty through the imagination became a new form of truth, an instrument of ongoing emancipation grounded in the elusive and the provisional. Pearson's analysis is clear and persuasive, his argument groundbreaking. For further reading on the power of the writer in society, see Pearson's award-winning book Unacknowledged Legislators: The Poet as Lawgiver in Post-Revolutionary France (2016).Summing Up: Essential. Advanced undergraduates through faculty.