Irony fuels critical debate
What is it about irony–as both an object of philosophical reflection and a literary technique—that fuels critical debate? Boston College Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures Kevin Newmark examines this question in Irony on Occasion: From Schlegel and Kierkegaard to Derrida and de Man (Fordham University Press, 2012). Critically hailed as “timely, provocative, carefully reasoned and argued, and unique in its scope,” it focuses on key moments in German Romanticism and its afterlife in 20th-century French thought and writing. Chapters focus on Friedrich Schlegel, Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Thomas Mann, Jean Paulhan, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man. Neither a historical nor a thematic study of irony, the book examines occasions of ironic disruption and offers an alternative model for conceiving of historical occurrences and their potential for acquiring meaning.
Catholic Shanghai
Father Jeremy Clarke, SJ, a historian whose expertise is the history of Catholicism in China, has authored Catholic Shanghai: A Historical, Practical and Reflective Guide. It is a pilgrim’s guide to the history and significance of Catholic sites in Shanghai. Fr. Clarke was interviewed about his lifelong interest in China and the new book by Qantas inflight radio. Fr. Clarke is an assistant professor in the University’s History Department and has quickly become a popular faculty member among the students at Boston College.
Finding meaning in diaspora
Oxford University Press’ Very Short Introductions offer concise, balanced and readable introductions to a wide range of subjects. History Professor Kevin Kenny, whose expertise is the history of migration and popular protest in the Atlantic world, has written a volume for the series titled Diaspora: A Very Short Introduction. Focusing on three key elements–movement, connectivity, and return, Kenny explains where the concept of diaspora came from, how its meaning changed over time, why its usage has expanded so dramatically in recent years, and how it can both clarify and distort the nature of migration. Read more in the OUP blog.
Posted in Boston College Authors
Tagged diaspora, History Department, immigration, migration
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The Boston Strangler case, 50 years later
The Boston Strangler case is back in the headlines with the news that DNA from the 1964 murder case of Mary Sullivan has been definitively linked to Albert DeSalvo, who had confessed to the crimes but was never convicted. Boston College History Professor Alan Rogers is the author of The Boston Strangler (Commonwealth Editions, 2006), part of the New England Remembers book series, which gives an overview of the serial killings that terrorized Boston in the early 1960s, and the evidence that pointed to DeSalvo as the killer. Rogers says this new DNA testing provides the obvious answer to the age-old question: Was Albert DeSalvo the Boston Strangler? “There’s not a shred of evidence pointing to anyone else. The preponderance of evidence in the case was so overwhelming. DeSalvo recalled details in each and every slaying that no one else could have known. These details weren’t in the newspapers but he knew them.”
Posted in Boston College Authors
Tagged Boston, History Department, murder case, serial killer
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Creative undoing of form
Longtime Arts & Sciences Honors Program Assistant Director Mary Joe Hughes, a beloved teacher who recently retired from Boston College, has published The Move Beyond Form: Creative Undoing in Literature and the Arts since 1960 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). The book focuses on works of art, music, literature, and film since 1960 that convey meaning through a creative undoing of form. Hughes suggests that cultural production of this time period conceived the world not so much as a series of separate entities, including art objects, but as an endless maze of relations and interconnections. By focusing attention on the in-between spaces, these works were able to provide nuance and meaning to a way of thinking that is difficult to demonstrate through language alone.
The globalization of English
Author and historian David Northrup, who taught in the History Department at Boston College for some 40 years, has published a new book that looks at the rise and global spread of the English language. Publisher Palgrave Macmillan calls How English Became the Global Language (2013) “the first [book] written about the globalization of the English language by a professional historian.” In a Q&A with Muscat Daily, Northrup discusses how the collapse of the Soviet Union and the spread of higher education were factors in the globalization of the English language.
Stories of conversion
Boston College alumna and Boston College parent Patricia Sodano Ireland, who returned to the Catholic Church after serving as a Lutheran minister for 10 years, presents stories of women’s conversion to Catholicism in the book Women in Search of Truth: Converts to Catholicism Tell Their Stories, co-authored with Jennifer Ferrara. Ireland is a director of theology programs at St. Joseph’s College of Maine.
Looking at a generation of Asian-American writers
In his new book, The Children of 1965: On Writing, and Not Writing, as an Asian American (Duke University Press Books, 2013), Boston College Associate Professor of English Min Hyoung Song focuses on the works by emerging Asian American authors such as graphic novelists Adrian Tomine and Gene Luen Yang, short story writer Nam Le and poet Cathy Park Hong, among others. Based on an analysis of more than 100 works and his interviews with several of these writers, Song argues that collectively, these works push against existing ways of thinking about race, even as they demonstrate how race can facilitate creativity. While some of the writers eschew their identification as ethnic writers, others embrace it, and in their literature, a number of them address pressing contemporary matters: demographic change, environmental catastrophe, and the widespread sense that the United States is in national decline. The title of Song’s book is a reference to the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 which lifted long-standing restrictions on immigration and ushered in the arrival of Asians to the US. Many of the authors in Song’s cohort of Asian American writers are children of these immigrants.
Posted in Boston College Authors
Tagged Asian American writers, English Department, immigration
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