The Literatures and Languages Library boasts several new additions in our collection on the works on T.S. Elliott: Gabrielle McIntire (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to ‘The Waste Land’ (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Robert Crawford, Young Eliot: from St. Louis to The Waste Land (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), and Allyson Booth, Reading The Waste Land from the Bottom Up (Palgrave: 2015). However, the broad public and scholars alike seem to give special attention to a new edited collection of Eliot’s poetry in two volumes  of remarkable scale and erudition:  T. S. Eliot, The Poems (2015) by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue (Faber & Faber, 1344 pp.)

 We read in The Guardian an overwhelmingly positive review, considering the volume as the most fully scrutinized text of his poems, and calling it a monumental achievement rightly so. Because what struck the reader immediately is the fact that, as expected, the notes, textual history, and commentaries outweigh the pages devoted to the poems themselves. Check the review at http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/nov/13/the-poems-of-ts-eliot-annotated-text-christopher-ricks-jim-mccue-review.

T.S. Elliott’s works were annotated anyway despite his express wish that critics not do so. At least Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue published T.S. Eliot’s poems from youth as they were selected by the poet himself. In contrast to the previous scholarship of Eliot’s work focusing on his unorthodox views, Ricks and McCue argue that his poetic art, despite its parsimony, continues to speak across decades into the reader’s present with eminence and collective feel. Not that Eliot’s reputation could ever be maligned given the complex modernity of his poems. As Helen Vendler  mentioned, the mysterious montage, the fragmentation, the incidental symbolism, all mirrored a Western European society broken by the war and reconstruction from 1915 to 1921 when The Waste Land was published (The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar, Essays on Poets and Poetry, Harvard, 2015).

Scholars now concern themselves with a new perspective on Eliot’s work, considering the concept of depersonalization inadequate for understanding his poetry and emphasizing instead passion and feelings that abound in most of his work. Ricks and McCue also describe Eliot’s juvenilia poems as containing buried feelings that will resurface in his later poetry.  Thus, shifting the impersonal in his creative acts to the sentimental side in his poems induced a sense of familiarity, strange, enigmatic and full of feelings.

Neil Patrick Harris flits across the screen, and a series of long-familiar film scenes dances beside him. Being, as it is, one of the de rigueur elements of the proceedings, we all know what to expect from the “Hollywood ode to itself” medley with which the Oscars ceremonies often open. Time-worn tropes and images lifted from the studios’ back catalogues will assert the apparently undying ‘magic of the movies.’ But where do these images really come from, you ask? And has Hollywood always been so reverentially cognizant of the immortal value of its past output? Enter Eric Hoyt’s recent work Hollywood Vault: Film Libraries Before Home Video. Hoyt traces the emergence and evolution of the business of film libraries from the 1910s to the 1950s, challenging the assumption that the industry only came to realize the economic value of its vaults with the advent of television. With many parties now scrambling to ascertain the worth, whether commercial or cultural, of digital film libraries, Hoyt’s examination of the first half of the American film industry’s 20^th century sheds a curious light on the shifting perception of film libraries’ “value.”

Holiday reading list season is nigh upon us. Which means that even as finals grind our undergraduates’ souls to a fine powder, and our collective christmas-cookie high slides helplessly into a twitchy, exhausted plateau — relief is on the horizon. A pristine span of weeks lies ahead, in which pleasure reading long-delayed can resume with a vengeance. If you’ve started planning your winter literary escape, you may already have taken a gander at some of the ‘Best of’ lists circulating in the press. There is the ever-reliable New York Times Book Review list of notable books for the year; Slate’s staff recommendations; NPR’s best of; or the Washington Post’s picks. Of course, there’s no law of god or man that says you must accompany your nog with a new release. The Lit & Lang Library will be open through December 23rd, with staff at the ready with their own personal recommendations. Whether you need an antidote to holiday treacle (some Robert Aickman might do the trick), or the season makes you crave something a bit Victorian, LLX is here to assist.

For many in the Anglophone literary community, the debut of a new novel by Jonathan Franzen is a major event. This week, publisher Farrar, Straus & Giroux announced that Franzen’s next work, a novel centered on the multi-continental misadventures of a young woman in search of her father, would be released in a year’s time. While fans of Franzen have yet twelve months to savor the anticipation of what publishers say will be a “stylistic departure” for the author, there are already indications of some of the literary history to which Franzen’s work will pay homage. Purity’s eponymous main character goes by the nickname ‘Pip,’ recalling the heroine of Dickens’s Great Expectations –as will come as little surprise to many who have previously spotted Dickens’s influence in Franzen’s work (among whom Harold Bloom might be the most notable, if not the most laudatory, commentator). While Franzen is not infrequently likened to Dickens and to Tolstoy in terms of the world-encompassing reach of his novels’ ambitions, references to his Dickensian streak of “social realism” are something of a refrain in criticism of his work. Whether fan, foe, or indifferent bystander to the Franzen phenom, an opportunity to reacquaint oneself with Dickens should not go unattended. Check out The Interpolated Tales from the Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices, or Martin Chuzzlewit for some lesser-known gems.

You likely know him best as the author of such classics as Animal Farm and 1984. George Orwell, whose name is synonymous with those of some of his best known works, was both a novelist and political thinker, and one of the great talents of 20th-century British satire. In an odd move recently, the Orwellian aegis was invoked by the Amazon corporation as part of their response to the publishing group Hachette, with whom they’ve had contractual disputes over e-book pricing since the spring of 2014. Acccused by Hachette of imposing sanctions on the sales of the publisher’s books as a negotiating tactic, Amazon has attempted to portray itself as a benefactor to readers, providing financially-crunched consumers with low e-book prices by cutting the profits of an “elite” European publishing house. Some authors, both Hachette’s own and others, have supported the publisher as defending their livelihood by maintaining non-cut-rate pricing, with nearly a thousand signing an open letter to Amazon’s board of directors calling the ethics of the company’s actions into question. In a perhaps ill-conceived attempt to invoke literary authority while critiquing that of publishers, Amazon’s official response to this letter compares Hachette’s resistance to e-book prices to the reactionary conservatism of Victorian publishing houses faced with the rise of cheap paperbacks–and uses an Orwell quote to do so, writing:

The famous author George Orwell came out publicly and said about the new paperback format, if ‘publishers had any sense, they would combine against them and suppress them.’ Yes, George Orwell was suggesting collusion. Well… history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme…When a thing has been done a certain way for a long time, resisting change can be a reflexive instinct, and the powerful interests of the status quo are hard to move. It was never in George Orwell’s interest to suppress paperback books — he was wrong about that.

Representatives of the Orwell Estate, literary critics, and others, however, have been quick to point out that the incompleteness of this quote robs it of its intended import. Orwell’s full comment reads as follows: “The Penguin Books are splendid value for sixpence, so splendid that if other publishers had any sense they would combine against them and suppress them.” Far from suggesting that paperbacks should actually be suppressed, Orwell’s commentary is clearly meant to be read as ironic.

The words of the great enemy of propaganda seem to have been somewhat distorted in Amazon’s public-relations efforts–which might serve to instruct us all that, regardless of our opinion on this dispute, it’s always a good idea to exercise caution when quoting a master ironist–and moreover, that should one attempt such quotation regardless, it helps to hire a well-compensated writer with competence in literary interpretation.

To discover more about the history of the uses and abuses of Orwell’s writings, see John Rodden’s George Orwell: The Politics of Literary Reputation and Frances Stonor Saunders’s The Cultural Cold War: the CIA and the World of Arts and Letters. For more info on proper citation and best practices for integrating sources into your writing, see the Citing Sources LibGuide.

The second annual Pygmalion Literary Festival kicks off this evening. Part of the Pygmalion Festival, the festival features readings and literary events with local and visiting writers and publishers.

UIUC Creative Writing professor Audrey Petty and author Peter Orner will read tonight at Krannert Art Museum at 5:00 PM. The festival, which takes place September 25-28, also includes readings from authors Richard Siken, Jennifer Percy, Jamaal May, Tarfia Faizullah, Alissa Nutting, and more.

All Pygmalion Literary Festival events are free to the public. For a full listing of events, visit the Pygmalion website.

“The semester is coming to a close, and I have a lot of work to do. Why can’t I put this book down?” I ask myself, having spent this last week completely engrossed in G. Willow Wilson’s latest novel, Alif the Unseen, which came out in June 2012. On Sunday, I fell asleep with the book on my pillow.

From the book jacket:

In an unnamed Middle Eastern security state, a young Arab-Indian hacker shields his clients—dissidents, outlaws, Islamists, and other watched groups—from surveillance and tries to stay out of trouble. He goes by Alif—the first letter of the Arabic alphabet, and a convenient handle to hide behind. The aristocratic woman Alif loves has jilted him for a prince chosen by her parents, and his computer has just been breached by the State’s electronic security force, putting his clients and his own neck on the line. Then it turns out his lover’s new fiancé is the head of State security, and his henchmen come after Alif, driving him underground. When Alif discovers The Thousand and One Days, the secret book of the jinn, which both he and the Hand suspect may unleash a new level of information technology, the stakes are raised and Alif must struggle for life or death, aided by forces seen and unseen.

This book is an adventure, a veritable tour de mystical force. I cannot help but compare the book to Neil Gaiman’s novel, American Gods; both require the protagonist and the reader to believe, and belief opens the doors to worlds unseen. Although many may see it as such, this belief is not an exotic dressing for the novel, but a part of the world. To call fire-eyed jinn, the power of words and code, desert car chases, and revolution “mundane” would certainly be wrong, but Wilson treats them as part of the world, and this world’s got them all. Wait, how do you believe in a car chase? That there is hope of escape. In a world of increasing digital state surveillance, this is a powerful hope. It is not an exotic impulse to hope, and believe, and to act on hope and belief.

This is perhaps one of the most powerful aspects of Wilson’s writing, and is impressive for a debut novel. This is without even mentioning her wonderfully crafted characters. It takes a while to warm up to Alif, another unsurprisingly male protagonist, but his struggle with identity is real and worth note. He has personality, convictions, and a capacity to learn. Nearly all of the characters, in fact, show these traits. From the indomitable Dina, Alif’s childhood friend, who invites us to share a space both personal and spiritual, to the jinn Vikram in which Alif sees “a predatory, unnerving humor, like the musing of a leopard in a pen of goats,” G. Willow Wilson urges perspectives into the world.

Alif the Unseen won the 2013 World Fantasy Award. You can find this book in our collection at the Literatures and Languages Library. Click here to view Alif the Unseen in the catalog. Other works by G. Willow Wilson include her graphic novel Cairo (2006), comic series Air (2008-2010), and an autobiographical account in The Butterfly Mosque (2010). Currently Wilson is writing a Ms. Marvel comic series starring an American Muslim teenage shapeshifter.

On Tuesday, April 22nd, Professor Wole Soyinka, Nobel Prize Winner and Patron of the Caine, announced the five shortlisted writers for the 2014 Caine Prize for African Writing. The prize is an annual literary award for the best original short story written by an African writer and published in the English language. The prize was founded in the United Kingdom in 2000 and is named after Sir Michael Harris Caine, the former chairman of Booker Group. Due to the Caine Prize’s connection to the Booker, the contest is sometimes called the “African Booker.”

To commemorate the fifteenth anniversary of the Caine Prize, each shortlisted writer will be awarded £500. The chair of judges this year, Jackie Kay, remarked: “What a golden age for the African short story, and how exciting to see real originality – with so many writers bringing something different to the form.” The winner of the 2014 Caine Prize will be announced on Monday, July 14th. The winner will be awarded £10,000.

The official Caine Prize website includes a wealth of related content, including the full press release, biographical information about the writers, and – best of all! – the nominated short stories themselves in free downloadable PDF files. The Caine Prize website also maintains a blog rich with information about the prizewinners, workshops, and more.

For a critical perspective on the Caine Prize, try reading African writer Ikhide R. Ikheloa’s commentary regarding the 2011 prize, called “How Not to Write About Africa.” He remains concerned that prize winners lazily play on stereotypes to meet Western expectations, rather than enlarge readers’ conceptions about Africa.

The Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities (IPRH) is hosting its annual symposium this week, starting May 1, continuing through May 2. The theme this year is “ecological bodies.” The event will be held in the Chancellor Ballroom, I of the Hotel Conference Center, 1900 South First Street, Champaign.

According to the IPRH website:

This symposium turns scholarly attention toward the mutual construction of “natural” bodies and “natural” environments. Responding to contemporary concerns surrounding the shaping of “human” ecological awareness, the symposium focuses needed attention on what ecological sensibilities mean for rethinking ontology of the “human” as extended into space, dependent and shaped through encounters with nonhuman others. “Ecological Bodies”  provides a conceptual tool for scholars to explore how we can productively join feminist, queer, and postcolonial insights into body politics with what environmental studies scholars have taught us about the construction of “nature.”  “Ecological Bodies” also cuts across multiple turns in the humanities in what has been called the “affective” turn, the “ontological” turn, and the “spatial” turn. Divided into four thematic sessions– which investigate imperialism, built environmental encounters, risk, and biological/reproductive processes— the symposium explores arenas of ecological relations that interrogate boundaries of the natural/cultural, human/nonhuman, and body/environment.  Its focus on “ecological bodies” encourages building connections among scholars across natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities, as well as between sites of political activism across bodies and environments.

Featured Speakers:

Thursday, May 1

7:30 p.m. Keynote: Gregg Mitman
Vilas Research and William Coleman Professor of History of Science, Medical History, and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
“Ecological Imperialism Revisited: Entanglements of Bodies, Knowledge, and Commerce in a Global World”

Friday, May 2

9:00 a.m. Keynote: Catriona Sandilands
Professor and Canada Research Chair in Sustainability and Culture, York University
“Encountering Plants: Entanglements and Embodiments.”

1:00 p.m. Keynote: Linda Nash
Associate Professor, History, University of Washington
“From Purity to Risk:  Constructing Bodies and Health through Regulation in the Twentieth-Century US”

5:00 p.m. Keynote: Jim Endersby
Reader in the History of Science in the School of History, Art History and Philosophy, University of Sussex
“Models and Metaphors, Orchids and Primroses:  When, Why and How Is a Person Like a Plant?”

University of Illinois Participants:

Aaron Carico | English / IPRH Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow 2013–15
Samantha Frost | Political Science / Gender and Women’s Studies
Carla Hustak | History / IPRH Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow 2012–14
Bob Morrissey | History
Zachary Poppel | History
Leslie Reagan | History / Gender and Women’s Studies
William Sullivan | Landscape Architecture
Jenn Thomas | Landscape Architecture / IPRH Graduate Fellow 2013–14
Paula Treichler | Professor Emerita, Institute of Communications Research / Media and Cinema Studies
Roderick Wilson | History / East Asian Languages and Cultures / IPRH Mellon Faculty Fellow 2013–14

Click here to view speaker bios/abstracts.

And follow this link to view the full symposium schedule.

We hope to see you there!