By Kristen LaRue-Sandler — March 7, 2023

It’s a busy spring for publishing, and five faculty members in the ASU Department of English announce new books recently launched or imminently forthcoming. Works include an essay collection, two monographs, and two books of poetry, with topics spanning Old English poetry, mobile technology, WWII France, the history and science of disgust, and animality.

'Old English Poetry and Its Legacy' (MDPI, 2023)

Robert Bjork edited this special issue of Humanities journal. From an introduction to the open access version:

• "This collection of essays was originally assembled in honor of John D. Niles, who has long been a major voice in Old English studies. Each of the eight essays refers to at least one of Professor Niles’s works and each one of which significantly advances the field to which Niles has chiefly dedicated his remarkable career. The collection focuses on the legacy of Old English poetry broadly conceived and includes studies: of particular poems, themes, and verse passages; of the translation or reception history of particular texts; of linguistic features of the poetry and their subsequent influence; of current historical and archaeological studies and how they illuminate the poetry or vice versa; of Old English poetry’s influence on various fields such as music or art; and of how an understanding of Old English prose or medieval Latin literature enriches appreciation of the poetry."

Bjork is Foundation Professor of English in literature at ASU.

 

'Composing Place: Digital Rhetorics for a Mobile World' (Utah State University Press, 2023)

Jacob Greene’s monograph is to appear in April 2023, along with a companion website. From the publisher:

• "'Composing Place' takes an innovative approach to engaging with the compositional affordances of mobile technologies. Mobile, wearable, and spatial computing technologies are more than the latest marketing gimmick from a perpetually proximate future; they are rather an emerging composing platform through which digital writers will increasingly create and distribute place-based multimodal texts. Jacob Greene utilizes and develops a rhetorical framework through which writers can leverage the affordances of these technologies by drawing on theoretical approaches within rhetorical studies, multimodal composition, and spatial theory, as well as emerging 'maker' practices within digital humanities and critical media studies, to show how emerging mobile technologies are poised to transform theories, practices, and pedagogies of digital writing.
  
  Greene identifies three emerging “modalities” through which mobile technologies are being used by digital writers. First, to counter dominant discourses in contested spaces; second, to historicize entrenched narratives in iconic spaces; and third, to amplify marginalized voices in mundane spaces. Through these modalities, Greene employs Indigenous philosophies and theories that upend the ways that the discipline has centered placed-based rhetorics, offering digital writers better strategies for using mobile media as a platform for civic deliberation, social advocacy, and political action.
  
  'Composing Place' offers close analyses of mobile media experiences created by various artists and digital media practitioners, as well as detailed overviews of Greene’s own projects. These projects include a digital 'countertour' of SeaWorld that demonstrates the ways in which the attraction is driven by capitalism; an augmented reality tour of Detroit’s Woodward Avenue; and a mobile advocacy project in Jacksonville, Florida, that demonstrates the inequitable effects of car-centric public infrastructure. Ultimately, by engaging with these theoretical frameworks, rhetorical design principles, and pedagogical practices of mobile writing, readers can utilize the unique affordances of mobile media in various teaching and research contexts.

Greene is an assistant professor in the writing, rhetorics and literacies program of the Department of English at ASU.

 

'Instead, It Is Dark' (Red Hen Press, 2023)

Cynthia Hogue’s twentieth book, a new collection of poetry, is set to appear in April 2023. From the publisher:

• "Following her husband’s massive heart attack, Cynthia Hogue began writing poems based on dreams and memories that he, born during WWII in occupied France, had as a child growing up in a time of vast postwar food shortages. Hogue embarked on a quest to discover if there were more such memories in her extended family in France. When asked, family members told her never-before-shared tales of parents who were POWs, collaborators, Resistance fighters, and one most vulnerable—of a hidden child. Hogue spent years researching the lives of civilians during war, work crystallized in her tenth collection of poetry, instead, it is dark. The personal is alchemized as Hogue weaves history and present day in poems that explore how there, here, an individual voice in the stark language of lyric poetry, speaks a complex truth and casts a laser light on violence, resilience, survival, and—the heart of this collection—love."

Hogue is a professor emeritus of the Department of English’s creative writing program, where she formerly held the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry.

 

'Shakespeare and Disgust: The History and Science of Early Modern Revulsion' (Bloomsbury / The Arden Shakespeare, 2023)

Bradley Irish’s newest monograph piqued media interest even before it was released in March. From the publisher:

• "Drawing on both historical analysis and theories from the modern affective sciences, 'Shakespeare and Disgust' argues that the experience of revulsion is one of Shakespeare's central dramatic concerns. Known as the 'gatekeeper emotion,' disgust is the affective process through which humans protect the boundaries of their physical bodies from material contaminants and their social bodies from moral contaminants. Accordingly, the emotion provided Shakespeare with a master category of compositional tools – poetic images, thematic considerations and narrative possibilities – to interrogate the violation and preservation of such boundaries, whether in the form of compromised bodies, compromised moral actors or compromised social orders.
  
  Designed to offer both focused readings and birds-eye coverage, this volume alternates between chapters devoted to the sustained analysis of revulsion in specific plays ('Titus Andronicus,' 'Timon of Athens,' 'Coriolanus,' 'Othello' and 'Hamlet') and chapters presenting a general overview of Shakespeare's engagement with certain kinds of prototypical disgust elicitors, including food, disease, bodily violation, race and sex disgust. Disgust, the book argues, is one of the central engines of human behaviour – and, somewhat surprisingly, it must be seen as a centrepiece of Shakespeare's affective universe."

B. Irish is an associate professor in the literature program of the Department of English at ASU.

 

'Lupine' (Black Lawrence Press, 2023)

Jenny Irish’s book of prose poems releases this March. From the publisher:

• "At the heart of all violence is fear: 'Lupine' is a gathering of feminist prose poetry engaging themes of ecology, animality, and the human unknown. A series of interconnected dramatic monologues, the poems inhabit the personae of figures traditionally deemed Monstrous, giving them voice to confront and reclaim the violent mythologies that have so often been imposed upon them. As these unmuzzled monsters speak, the collection collapses the boundaries between the self and the subjugated other, ultimately upending the discourse of monstrosity itself. By exposing how women are villainized and sacrificed in response to cultural fear, 'Lupine' offers a corrective to social narratives in which notions of the bestial and notions of the feminine are intimately entwined."

J. Irish is an assistant professor of English in creative writing at ASU, where she also received her MFA in 2016.