Make Me takes everyday objects as vehicles of consciousness and emotion, importing the conceit of eighteenth-century “it” narratives into contemporary idioms. But the title also alludes to the crafting of subjects through brute power. Donald Revell says, "Jean Kane has truly surprised our common world, this world, in a moment of most candid, most innocent grammars. In these poems, language becomes new to itself and speaks the the rapture of beginnings, "
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“Conspicuous Bodies is an exciting and highly intelligent work, which will make a strong impact in a series of very lively debates. It has just the right amount of iconoclasm and incisiveness to be thoroughly appealing to Joyce and Rushdie scholars, to postcolonial theorists, to people thinking about how religion works in literature, and to people thinking how we might get beyond western models of selfhood and value. In recent years, I have seldom been as enthusiastic about a book as I am about this one. I recommend this book strongly.” —Enda Duffy, professor of English, University of California, Santa Barbara
In Conspicuous Bodies: Provincial Belief and the Making of Joyce and Rushdie, Jean Kane reexamines the literature of James Joyce and Salman Rushdie from a postsecularist perspective, arguing that their respective religions hold critical importance in their works. Though Joyce and Rushdie were initially received as cosmopolitans, both authors subsequently reframed their public images and aligned themselves instead with a provincial religious identity, which emphasized the interconnections between religious devotion and embodiment. At the same time, both Joyce and Rushdie managed to resist the doctrinal content of their religions.
Conspicuous Bodies presents Joyce as a founder and Rushdie as an inheritor of a distinctive discourse of belief about the importance of physical bodies and knowledge in religious practice. In doing so, it moves the reception of Joyce and Rushdie away from what previous critics have emphasized—away from questions of aesthetics and from a narrow understanding of belief—and instead questions the assumption that belief should be segregated from matters of physicality and knowledge. Kane reintroduces the concept of spiritual embodiment in order to expand our understanding of what counts as spiritual agency in non-Western and minority literatures.
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Jean Kane lives in New York City and Poughkeepsie, New York. She teaches literature, writing, and women's studies at Vassar College.
Contact her at jekane15@gmail.com
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