Ghost-Watching American Modernity: Haunting, Landscape, and the Hemispheric Imagination by Maria del Pilar Blanco

This monograph argues that we should be more attentive to the ways in which modernity haunts American literature; not with outright ghosts, but with two landscapes that uncannily exist simultaneously. Blanco makes a point of noting that her argument is not a generic one: often these hauntings transcend the genres of the gothic (in US literature) and the magically real (in Latin American literature). Blanco starts with a chapter on the hemispheric imaginary of haunting, before moving into three chapters that read specific scenarios: desert hauntings, urban hauntings, and transnational hauntings. She stakes a position as a close reader of texts (and thus, less interested in placing them in their historical contexts). The readings were not bad, but I found the theory of haunting more useful.

Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History by Ian Baucom

This monograph creates an archive out of absence, specifically the absence of a response to Granville Sharp's letter to the Lords Commissioners protesting the court decision to treat the events on the Zong (that is, the captain's decision to throw 133 slaves overboard in order to conserve water supplies) as an insurance case rather than murder. Baucom looks at the way the Zong case has echoed through history (in politics, art, literature, and philosophy), how it reflects the growth of a system of finance capital that not only treats people as objects, but as objects whose loss can always already be theoretically present insofar as they can be insured, and how it shows us the intersections between a trans-Atlantic slave economy and modern systems of capital. The book is theoretical and dense. It draws connections between Benjamin's Arcades project and Arrighi's models of cycles in addition to drawing on theorists as diverse as Adam Smith and Slavoj Zizek. The contents of Granville Sharp's letter (and indeed, a straightforward account of the Zong case) are delayed and secondary to meditations on the ethical implications of how we understand history and of the connections between the trans-Atlantic slave trade and finance capitalism. While there are parts of the book that seemed opaque to me, its overall argument was eloquent and persuasive.

The Novel and the Sea by Margaret Cohen

This monograph contends that fictions of the sea constitute a traveling, adventure genre that begins in the modern era with Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. This genre challenges our dominant accounts of the formation of the novel: Cohen insists that we account for the sea adventure narratives of writers such as Defoe and Smollett, even though the adventure genre has been critically neglected. After Smollett, the number of sea fictions wane until the subject is adopted by James Fenimore Cooper. In part this decline may be the result of the incredible, but true, tales that were happening on the world's oceans. Like the previously mentioned authors, though, Cooper is not famous for his sea fictions (The Pilot and Red Rover) but his Leatherstocking Tales. These American sea stories became popular just at the moment that the craft of seafaring became obsolete, replaced by mechanical inventions (such as accurate clocks to measure longitude). Thus Herman Melville, Victor Hugo, and Joseph Conrad had the opportunity to use their sea stories to focus on other kinds of craft at the margins. Jules Verne, on the other hand, took the exploration of frontiers beyond what people were actually experiencing to what they could only imagine. Thus, Cohen contends, sea fictions are the root of today's science fiction. I found this book to be ambitious, but thoroughly researched, and I was ultimately persuaded by Cohen's readings and her contextualizations, that we ought to pay more attention to sea fictions as a genre. I thought her description of the mariner's craft in the first chapter was particularly useful.

Der Vorleser by Bernhard Schlink

I read this book in German. It starts as a conventional bildungsroman--a teenager falls in love with an older woman, but the affair ends and the boy moves on. Later, the young man, now a law student, comes across his former lover again--as one of the defendants in a trial which is trying to determine the guilt of former concentration camp guards. The novel explores the question of secrets--what secrets are most important, what actions should we be ashamed of--and the question of fitting in--what skills are necessary to live in our world, what might those who lack these skills be forced to do to make up for that lack. There's no moral high ground here, and no absolution in the end. But if we cannot forgive, we can still understand, and mourn the losses and broken lives all around.

La Vita Nuova (Poems of Youth) by Dante Alighieri and translated by Barbara Reynolds

This collection of poetry and commentary serves two purposes: it documents Dante's love for Beatrice, from their first meeting to beyond her death, and it allows Dante to offer his theory of poetic composition. Dante justifies writing poetry in the vernacular, rhyming lines of verse, and using figurative language by its subject: if the poet aspires to convey a deeper meaning, these techniques are legitimate. He forces readers to look beyond the mechanics of the sonnet form--often his notes about the division of the poem appear in different places than the traditional octet/sestet split; thus, he demonstrates the tension inherent in sonnets between prescribed form and inspired content. The poetry after Beatrice's death is particularly moving: news of her death forces him to break off a canzone, and then he offers less guidance on how to read the sonnets (one of which even starts in two different ways). He demonstrates a transition in his love: while at the start of the work, he loves Beatrice as a woman on earth, by the end of the sequence he realizes that she can become a heavenly guide to divine love (in fact, she becomes the Beatrice of the Divine Comedy). A lovely and thought-provoking collection of poetry.

The Bone People by Keri Hulme

This book begins when a troubled young boy, Simon, breaks into Kerewin Holmes's tower. Kerewin, a loner, gradually becomes closer to Simon and his adoptive father Joe. But as Kerewin learns more about the family, including Simon's traumatic past, she begins to realize that there are still real troubles plaguing this family. There are no simple or easy answers here. Simon's past is something of a mystery--and it always remains mysterious. All of the characters are damaged, and engage in morally questionable behaviors. While the majority of the book is written in English, it's littered with Maori phrases (translated in the back) and it eschews conventions--inner monologues are set off almost as if they are block quotations, for example. These stylistic differences required attention, but were easy to get used to. In the end this book is lyrical and haunting. Winner of the 1985 Booker Prize.

The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie

This book was an engaging fantasy that brought in a variety of historical references in intriguing and new ways. There's conflict all over the Union: the northerners are trying to take back Angland (and the Shanka are pressing in as well), and there's pressure from the Empire in the south as well. The book follows four unlikely protagonists: Logen Ninefingers, who's only just lucky enough to stay alive, who has come from the North in search of a great Magus, Captain Jezal dan Luther, a fop with a lot of luck who realizes that there may be some things worth fighting for, Inquisitor Glotka, who lost everything as a prisoner of war, and now suffers through every day--and makes everyone else around him suffer as well, and Bayaz, a wizard who may just be the first among many and who may have returned from myth (he last appeared as himself during the reign of Herod the Great) just in the nick of time. I'm looking forward to reading the rest of this trilogy.