The Little Reviews

In literary texts, speech is often taken for granted as simply dialogue delivered by characters. But this assumption belies what occurs in speech between people in everyday life — we interpret speech, we try to see what the speaker really means, beyond what they are saying in a strict sense. Michael Lucey’s intervention with What Proust Heard is to turn a closer eye (and ear) to speech in texts (“language-in-use,” as he calls it) in order to investigate not only what particular speakers might...

Nadia Nurhussein’s 2019 book, Black Land: Imperial Ethiopianism and African America, analyzes the literature and texts being produced in response to broader Western interest in Ethiopia and its leadership during an 80-year stretch of Black history from the 1860s to the 1940s. Drawing on a wide range of materials such as poetry, novels, newspaper articles, and theatrical or cinematic performances, Nurhussein demonstrates not only how entrenched these conversations were in African Americans’ lives but also the ways that this interest created a paradox: How does one advocate for Black freedom when the focal point of the Ethiopians’ fight is a monarchy that is bent on expanding its territory, little different from the Europeans that threaten it?

“The ghost of Roger Casement / Is beating on the door.” So runs the refrain of William Butler Yeats’ “The Ghost of Roger Casement.” An imperialist who wrote scathing reports of colonial human rights abuses in the Congo and Brazil, Roger Casement sought German military aid for the 1916 Easter Rising: the British government arrested, sentenced, and hanged Casement for high treason. In her new study, The Literary Afterlives of Roger Casement, 1899-2016, Alison Garden frames her inquiry within the language of haunting and intervenes in Casement’s very indeterminacy: “towards the repetition of an unfinished history; the particularly ghostly fashioning of Casement’s literary afterlives” (14).

When fiction narrates speech, who is talking? Even for those who typically understand modernist fiction as skeptical of straightforward representational uses of language, scholars tend to assume that fictional characters mean the words they speak: that Bartleby would prefer not to and that Molly Bloom says yes. Elizabeth Alsop’s Making Conversation in Modernist Fiction offers a subtle, significant provocation, challenging mimetic interpretations of dialogue in modernist fiction.