Mendele Personal Notices & Announcements September 13, 2011
To save wear and tear on the untershames, please comply with these four requests: 1. Send time-sensitive notices well in advance. 2. Send material as plain text: no HTML, other coding, or attachments. 3. Write MENDELE PERSONALS in the subject line. 4. To respond, contact the person who or organization which has posted the notice, *not* your ever-beleaguered untershames. ______________________________________________________________________________ Date: Mon, 5 Sep 2011 00:20:54 -0400 From: Andrew M Caplan <[email protected]> Subject: New book publication, September 2011 Marc Caplan: How Strange the Change: Language, Temporality, and Narrative Form in Peripheral Modernisms In this book, Marc Caplan argues that the literatures of ostensibly marginal modern cultures are key to understanding modernism. Caplan undertakes an unprecedented comparison of nineteenth-century Yiddish literature and twentieth-century Anglophone and Francophone African literature and reveals unexpected similarities between them. These literatures were created under imperial regimes that brought with them processes of modernization that were already well advanced elsewhere. Yiddish and African writers reacted to the liberating potential of modernity and the burdens of imperial authority by choosing similar narrative genres, typically reminiscent of early-modern European literatures: the picaresque, the pseudo-autobiography, satire, and the Bildungsroman. Both display analogous anxieties toward language, caught as they were between imperial, "global" languages and stigmatized native vernaculars, and between traditions of writing and orality. Through comparative readings of narratives by Reb Nakhman of Breslov, Amos Tutuola, Yisroel Aksenfeld, Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Isaac Meyer Dik, Camara Laye, Mendele Moykher-Sforim, Wole Soyinka, Y. Y. Linetski, and Ahmadou Karouma, Caplan demonstrates that these literatures' "belated" relationship to modernization suggests their potential to anticipate subsequent crises in the modernity and post-modernity of metropolitan cultures. This, in turn, leads him to propose a new theoretical model, peripheral modernism, which incorporates both a new understanding of "periphery" and "center" in modernity and a new methodology for comparative literary criticism and theory.literary criticism and theory. Marc Caplan is the Zelda and Myer Tandetnik Professor of Yiddish Literature, Language, and Culture in the Department of German and Romance Languages of the Johns Hopkins University. For further information and ordering details please consult the Stanford University Press website or Google.Books __________________________________________________________________________ Please do not use the "reply" key when writing to Mendele. Instead, direct your mail as follows: Material for Mendele Personal Notices & Announcements, i.e. anouncements of events, commercial publications, requests to which responses should be sent exclusively to the request's author, etc., always in plain text (no HTML or the like) to: victor.bers at yale.edu (in the subject line write Mendele Personal) Material for postings to Mendele Yiddish literature and language,i.e.inquiries and comments of a non-commercial or publicity nature: mendele at mailman.yale.edu IMPORTANT: Please include your full name as you would like it to appear in your posting. No posting will appear without its author's name. Submissions to regular Mendele should not include personal email addresses, as responses will be posted for all to read. They must also include the author's name as you would like it to appear. In order to spare the shamosim time and effort, we request that contributors adhere, when applicable, as closely as possible to standard English punctuation, grammar, etc. and to the YIVO rules of transliteration into Latin letters. A guide to Romanization can be found at this site: http://www.yivoinstitute.org/about/index.php?tid=57&aid=275 All other messages should be sent to the shamosim at this address: mendele at mailman.yale.edu Mendele on the web: http://mendele.commons.yale.edu/ To join or leave the list: http://mailman.yale.edu/mailman/listinfo/mendele _______________________________________________ Mendele mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.yale.edu/mailman/listinfo/mendele
