The Fall of Arthur by J.R.R. Tolkien and edited by Christopher Tolkien

This book contains J.R.R. Tolkien's unfinished attempt to write part of the Matter of Britain in an alliterative verse form used for Old English poetry (such as Beowulf) and used again in Middle English (for example, in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight). The story starts with Arthur away from England, going east to fight barbarians when he hears of his nephew/son Mordred's treachery back home. The poem is enjoyable--Tolkien had a good ear for this verse form (as he also demonstrated in some of the poetry in his Middle Earth stories and in his translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight). Perhaps more interesting, though, is the supplementary material. The first essay is on The Fall of Arthur's place among other tellings of the story of King Arthur, especially The History of the Kings of Britain, the alliterative Morte Arthur, the stanzaic Morte Arthur, and Le Morte Darthur. The second essay argues (I think more convincingly thematically than on hard evidence) that not only was Middle Earth Tolkien's attempt to provide mythology for the English people, but that it was directly connected to the King Arthur legends--indeed, that the Isle of Avalon (where in some versions of the story King Arthur still awaits the moment to return and lead Britain to glory) is Tol Eressëa, or the lonely island, which was where the elves could dwell and look on Valinor after their exile. I really enjoyed this volume; however I would not recommend it to anyone just looking for a good story (there are better--and more complete--retellings of the Arthur myth) or who is a casual fan of The Lord of the Rings. If you like Tolkien's poetry, or are interested in the intricacies of the Arthur story, however, this book is well worth a look.

Fictions of the Sea: Critical Perspectives on the Ocean in British Literature and Culture edited by Bernhard Klein

This collection of essays examines the role of the sea in British literature. It starts with more general topics (like a history of the claimants to the sea and reflections on the sea and modernity) and then moves on to specific readings of maritime fiction as a genre and of specific works (like several of Conrad's sea stories). Some of the essays are stronger than others, but overall the collection is best for background knowledge rather than its specific insights or theoretical developments.

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.

Steal This University: The Rise of the Corporate University and the Academic Labor Movement edited by Benjamin Johnson, Patrick Kavanagh, and Kevin Mattson

This collection of essays proposes that American universities are changing in ways that harm them because of the rise of corporate interests, which focus on lowering labor costs as much as possible without worrying about the effects these changes will have on the laborers themselves or the quality of education they are able to provide. The book shows how the casualization of academic labor harms faculty and provides accounts of attempts (both successful and not) of various employees (including graduate students) to unionize and negotiate for better working conditions. Even though this book was written about a decade ago, it still feels very relevant and its arguments still managed to persuade me.

Blood Read: The Vampire as Metaphor in Contemporary Culture edited by Joan Gordon and Veronica Hollinger

This collection of essays examines the role of the vampire in contemporary literature. Its essays are grouped into four categories: the development of the vampire metaphor in an historical continuum, on writing vampire fictions, the role of disease and disease metaphors in writing contemporary vampire fictions (especially AIDS), and the vampire as an other (especially related to sexuality). I found some of the essays in the collection stronger than others ("Consuming Youth: The Lost Boys Cruise Mallworld" by Rob Latham on the ways in which the film The Lost Boys enacts the capitalist/vampire metaphor in our contemporary economy was particularly good), but all of the essays do better with reading a given text or set of texts than theorizing in new and exciting ways.

Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa

This monograph argues that American college students are not learning very much in college. Given the rising costs of higher education, and the increasing sense that a college education will open up possibilities to students, it's important to address this lack--although the authors hesitate to call it a crisis, because the US higher education system is not in danger of collapsing. The authors' conclusions are mostly based on a test called the College Learning Assessment, which was administered to students at twenty-four universities at the beginning of their freshman year (2005) and the end of their sophomore year of study (2007). The authors then used the data to assess how much the students learned. The book accounts for a wide variety of variables. It seems that the variable over which individuals have control (as opposed to, say, whether their parents went to college) is the types of courses they select: students tended to learn more in courses that required at least 40 pages of reading a week and at least 20 pages of writing over the course of the semester. I think this book brings up a lot of problems in higher education, and it motivated me to look more closely at course structure. I think a larger sample size (more universities) and studying a larger range of classes (not just the one cohort) would help reinforce the study's claims. I am also not entirely convinced that this test alone is a good measure of how much students have learned (though I admit that it is a step towards a solution of a tough problem).

On Writing Well by William Zinsser

This book owes a lot of its advice to the little book, Elements of Style by William Strunk and E.B. White. Zinsser advocates a clear style that keeps the reader--and human interest--in mind. While at times Zinsser's tone came across as over-bearing, and I'm not sure that I'd want to have dinner with him, I think much of his advice is solid. If you're looking for concrete rules, you might prefer Elements of Style, but if you want more general advice, this book should be helpful.

New American Gothic by Irving Malin

This book takes a psychoanalytic or Freudian approach to six American writers of the mid-twentieth century who produced gothic fictions: Flannery O'Connor, J.D. Salinger, Carson McCullers, Truman Capote, James Purdy, and John Hawkes. Malin argues that these gothic fictions start with a narcissistic protagonist, disruptive to community. There are often family problems: self-absorbed parents and isolated children. Three typical gothic figures (the haunted castle, the voyage into the forest, and the reflection), which were "mere props" in British gothic, become more psychologically important--and show how these American gothic fictions reflect a community disrupted. This book could have been much more persuasive; it was organized thematically (chapters on the narcissistic self, the family, and the three images), rather than by author, and the argument felt rushed (although part of it may have been my lack of familiarity with many of the authors and titles discussed). I also felt the psychological approach was limiting--many times the analysis seemed forced or overdone.

The Law is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons by Colin Dayan

This book examines the ways that the law has been used to manipulate the boundaries of the human--especially in the case of enslaved persons and prisoners. Dayan posits that forms such as zombies, ghosts, and dogs appear in literature and culture in response to the ways that the law can be deployed to take away someone's humanity. The book covers a broad time period (dealing with cases in US law from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first) and it combines sources and techniques from a variety of fields, including the law, history, and literature, to end in a stunning indictment of legal systems that take away people's humanity and an exposé of how the cruelest forms of punishment may be written off as administrative conveniences. All in all, a persuasive and useful monograph, and a model for a radical, engaged form of criticism.

Victorian Literature and the Victorian State: Character and Governance in a Liberal Society by Lauren Goodlad

This book argues that many of the contradictions on topics such as social welfare, poverty, and the government's ideal role in society inherent in Victorian viewpoints come from the fact that "Victorian Britain was a liberal society"--and that this liberalism cut in two ways to both promote freedom and to insist on state aid as a means of achieving social health (vii). While Goodlad sees a Foucauldian perspective as useful in untangling the different strains of thought in Victorian Society, she finds later Foucault more useful than the genealogical approach of Discipline and Punish. Many of Goodlad's readings focus on pastorship--that is, someone (usually middle class) guiding the poor to better character and better living. She reads Dickens (Oliver Twist, Bleak House, and Our Mutual Friend), Frances Trollope, Anthony Trollope, George Gissing, and H.G. Wells among others. These readings arrive in conjunction with a careful social history: Goodlad does a nice job of showing the relationship between the literature, its authors' opinions, and the culture in which it was produced. I found her reading of the educational system in Our Mutual Friend particularly helpful. While this book is out of my field (and out of my usual mode of theoretical approach), I found its argument to be cogent and reasonably well supported.

Edgar Allan Poe and the Masses: The Political Economy of Literature in Antebellum America by Terence Whalen

This book investigates Poe's understanding of and relation to the interaction between capitalist market forces, political economy, and conditions of literary production in the antebellum United States. Whalen is not afraid of making a controversial argument or taking on years of scholarship: in two of his most remarkable assertions, he claims that the accounts of Poe's success at the Southern Literary Messenger are greatly exaggerated (and possibly by Poe himself) and that the controversial Paulding-Dreyton review published in the Southern Literary Messenger was actually the work of William and Mary professor Beverley Tucker, so Poe's racism was not virulent, but rather the "average racism" of the age. Indeed, Whalen contends that Poe was so interested in the potential of a national market for his work, that he worked very hard to create political neutral texts. I agreed with many of the arguments in this book, but I thought Whalen's tone was a touch aggressive and arrogant: he is the only scholar in a hundred and fifty years to make arguments like these and to look at the sources he does! There's also a very strong reading of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.

New York Intellect: A History of Intellectual Life in New York City from 1750 to the Beginnings of Our Own Time by Thomas Bender

This book gives a comprehensive intellectual history of New York City. Bender contends that intellectual life in New York has always been different from Europe--so if we look for European structures, we'll be disappointed. Instead, he traces three types of intellectual involvement: civil, literary, and academic. He contends none of these structures has been completely successful in developing intellectual life, and that a city that could embrace all three would be ideal. In this book, Bender thinks a lot about the relations between intellectual life and democratic society, ultimately contending that intellectual life has to be open to all and a vibrant part of city culture for the optimal situation. I found this book very diligent in providing convincing evidence to support its arguments. The three trends are very clearly defined, but the book could trace their relationships to each other a little more clearly.

Intertextuality and the Literary Response to Terrorism in Ian McEwan's Saturday by Paul Pugliese

This thesis reads Ian McEwan's Saturday not just as a response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, but also a response to Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. It investigates how we respond to terror in the modern world--and how the interpersonal and intrapersonal responses of Woolf and McEwan modulate that response.

"A fair match, by Jupiter!": Language, Performance, and Struggle in Richardson's Clarissa by Allison Marie Murphy

This thesis insists we read Richardson's Clarissa not just for its words, but for the unwritten languages--such as gestures and clothing--in which the characters also communicate. By paying attention to these details, Murphy argues, the struggle between Lovelace and Clarissa is not so one-sided. I liked this approach: it accounts for Clarissa's agency (and the reader's interest in her) far better than other accounts that see her as a passive tool of her foes (both her family and Lovelace).

Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays by Northrop Frye

This volume contends that literary criticism lacks both the structure and the vocabulary to adequately deal with its topic, and although Frye claims he doesn't have the ability to create a definitive structure, in a series of four essays on modes, symbols, myths, and genres, he lays out his model for criticism. A few introductory caveats are in order: the critic is neither the parasite of the creator nor the servant of a different discipline (Frye finds critics who work exclusively from a Marxist, feminist, or other perspective too constraining). Frye's argument is wide-ranging, dense, and extremely general--he speaks of types rather than quoting specific examples (except in his work on genre). I agreed with a lot of the arguments, but I would find it difficult to do this type of criticism myself.

The Real South: Southern Narrative in the Age of Cultural Reproduction by Scott Romine

In this book Scott Romine investigates the question of what constitutes the "real" South in the context of so many competing stories and narratives. He concludes that both "real" and "South" are terms that have little meaning without quotation marks--that is, spending a lot of time on figuring out what is "authentic" or "traditional" is less valuable than assessing how these cultural productions function. There are good readings of a variety of texts, ranging from Gone with the Wind to Roots to Daughters of the Dust to Dip's (a restaurant in Chapel Hill) to Confederates in the Attic to A Turn in the South. Finally Romine concludes that "my South" is always tenuous and dependent on who's talking, but that these overlapping Souths are more realistic and accurate than any single solid South could be.

Culture and Imperialism by Edward W. Said

This book in some ways picks up where Orientalism left off, but in other ways it is far more universal in its reach. Said contends that empires generally--and especially the British, French, and American empires of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries--do not exist as merely political and economic formations, but must also be supported and reinforced by the culture of the metropole. Similarly, though, resistance to imperialism, as it arises, also bears a cultural mark. This book combines a great idea with compelling close readings ranging from Austen to Conrad to C.L.R. James and beyond. As I read, I realized that lots of my ideas about both empire and how we can use literature and other cultural productions to understand, reinforce, and contest empire, come from this monumental study. This study gives critics a standard to which to aspire both in its content and its style.

A Theory of Narrative by F. K. Stanzel translated by Charlotte Goedsche

This monograph lays out Stanzel's theory of narrative. He contends that narrative fiction is unique because of its Mittelbarkeit or mediacy. That is, what makes narrative fiction narrative is that it reflects the presence of an intermediary or narrator. He characterizes this kind of fiction according to three properties: mode, perspective, and person, each of which has a binary set of attributes. These propensities lead to a typological continuum or circle which can be used to class narratives. According to Stanzel, historically narratives have tended to be one of three types: first-person narrative, authorial narrative, or, more recently, figural narrative, although he has found these types from a preponderance of historical examples and sees no reason why other types could not develop in the future. I though Stanzel was very good on the consequences of narrative choices, and that his classification scheme is flexible enough to be useful (especially since he doesn't insist that a given narrative strictly adhere to a certain type throughout). Altogether a useful way of looking at narrative, if you like that sort of thing.