Reviewer: Eric Aronoff, Associate Professor of English, Michigan State University Manuscript Review:Untimely Emergence: Ethnic Modernism and the Making of U.S. Literary Multiculturalism,By Leif SorensenFor the purpose of clarity, let me begin my review by stating emphatically that Sorensen''s manuscript is a brilliant project, addressing a complex and fascinating set of questions of literary criticism, literary history and canon formation; the project is carefully conceived, argued with nuance and complexity, and written with clarity and flair. It deserves to be published in its current form, with only the light copyediting that would be a matter of course for any manuscript as it moves through the final stages of production. I strongly recommend that Palgrave publish it.Sorensen''s project uses the lens of critical multiculturalism to reexamine key texts of the modernist period that have, within the past 30 years, been ''recovered'' to become canonical both within ethnic studies and ''new modernist'' studies - or, as importantly, were ''recovered'' as canonical but now are losing their canonical status, or have not been ''recovered'' at all - to derive both new understandings of the texts themselves, and to examine the ideological terms and institutional processes that have governed their various ''recoveries.'' That is, he is interested in creating both alternative readings of the texts themselves, and alternative understandings of the literary historical processes of canon formation . Within current models of liberal multiculturalism, Sorensen argues, ethnic studies tends to celebrate ''recovery'' of lost texts/authors as restoring to health and wholeness a canon in which these authors always properly belonged, or as a making-visible of a coherent tradition of ancestors leading linearly from the past to the present; individual authors, or characters within their texts, in turn tend to be celebrated as ''overcoming'' limitations in their own historical periods to find their ''voices.

'' Similarly, new modernism constructs these recovered texts as part of an expanding, but nonetheless bounded, historical period called ''modernism.'' Both of these tendencies, Sorensen argues, ''unify'' these authors and texts in ways that ''nullify the untimely energies of recovery and in so doing, reduces the recovered texts'' potential to shock and disturb contemporary common sense'' (199). Drawing on theorists from Nietzsche to Raymond Williams to Johannes Fabian , Sorensen argues for a literary history and mode of reading that keeps front-and-center the ''untimely'' nature of these authors and texts - the way they represent alternative critiques of modernity that are both out of step with mainstream ideologies in their own periods, and also alternatives out of step with the models we would make of them as we seek to fit them into our own critical desires. Instead, Sorensen argues that we must always be aware of recovery as an ''untimely dialectic'' (37) in which each positive move in turn contains the uncanny shadow of the alternate possibilities these moves bracket: with each reading of a recovered novel as a bildungsroman triumphantly establishing a previously marginalized self, he argues, alternative, partial, fragmented possibilities within the text are ignored; with each author elevated to canonical status, come other authors whose statuses correspondingly decline or who are never recovered at all.To make this argument, and to articulate his alternative model of literary history, Sorensen engages the novels of four key authors - Zora Neale Hurston, D''Arcy McNickle, Americo Pardes, and Younghill Kang - as well as these authors'' shifting status within the canons of ethnic literature and modernism. In keeping with the bi-focal nature of the project - examining the ways both individual texts are read and the processes of canon formation that allow them to be read in the first place - Sorensen takes the reader on ''two different journeys through the same text. This structure calls attention to the untimeliness of recovered texts and demonstrates how these texts provide a critical perspective on the contemporary identity industry that has remade them as viable commodities'' (16). In the first section of the text, he analyzes key novels of each author to highlight the moments of ''failed, partial and incomplete attempts to grapple with modernity,'' the moments of ''impass'' (8) and ''isolation,'' in which ''the project of imagining an alternative mode of modernity seems to have come to an abrupt dead end'' (15).

These ''scenes of failure,'' Sorensen argues, ''have something profound to offer to critical multiculturalism because they provide negative counterparts to the moments of celebratory overcoming more frequently trumpeted in liberal multiculturalism'' ( 15). In turn, in the second section of the book Sorensen turns to each author to trace in-depth the processes by which they have been ''recovered'' - or, as he elaborates, ''unrecover[ed] (in which a text that has been recovered loses its status)'' or ''nonrecover[ed] (in which a text fails to be recovered)'' (181). As in the first section, the point is to recognize canon formation (like readings of individual texts) as an ''untimely dialectic,'' a ''fraught and contradictory space'' (353) in which ''the present, past and future are bound up in complex affective feedback loops'' (182): as he puts it, this dynamic model of literary history recognizes that recovery ''can cut both ways: it opens up new spaces for neglected text, but it also means that texts that currently are recognizes as objects of value can, indeed must, lost their standing in turn. Theorizing recovery dialectically requires that we balance the positive connotation of recovery as a return to wholeness and health with gestures toward the necessary incompleteness of the histories we craft, teach and learn. The result is a clearer sense that literary history, like Hurston''s folklore, is always in the making'' (352).If I have had to write at some length to summarize Sorensen''s argument, it is not because of its lack of clarity - on the contrary, it is instead because of the depth and complexity of his argument. Sorensen builds his argument through a thorough engagement with the relevant literature on modernism, literary criticism and canon formation. The two-fold structure of the manuscript serves Sorensen bi-focal approach wonderfully.

His writing is clear, even in its complexity, and he has a knack for startling images or turns-of-phrase that keep the reading lively and engaging. (For example, what literary critic wouldn''t be startled, in bracingly productive ways, by Sorensen''s suggestion that the ways in which we critics look for elements in past texts that speak to our current concerns, and then speak for those authors, potentially make those authors into versions of Hurston''s voiceless zombies, or her ''mules'' forced to speak in the voice of another?) The result is an exciting, bracing intellectual adventure: at each stage, Sorensen''s attempt to keep visible both the positive act (the decisive reading, the canonical choice) and the uncanny shadow of the possibilities bracketed by those choices -as he puts it, the ''holes'' as well as the ''ties'' in the ''net'' of literary history - reveal new ways of thinking about seemingly familiar texts. As a result, I learned to see in new ways texts I thought I knew well, learned more about texts I knew something about, and learned a great deal about texts about which I knew nothing - as well as why I might not know about those texts, and what that in turn means about the texts I do know. I am teaching, for example, Hurston''s Their Eyes are Watching God in an undergraduate literature course this semester, and am already planning to incorporate some of Sorensen''s insights; his analysis of McNickle has galvanized me to return The Surrounded to my syllabus next year.The book will be of great interest to scholars in a variety of fields: American literary studies, modernist studies; ethnic literary studies; literary history; canon formation. The book would be useful for scholars, graduate students and upper level undergraduates. There is no work out there quite like it, in the ways he both performs illuminating close readings of a range of authors, and theoretically profound analyses of literary history and canon formation; therefore the shelf life of the book will likely be long. The manuscript shows all the hallmarks of a text that has been wrought carefully and worked over thoroughly: I have no revisions to suggest beyond the normal polishing/copyediting of the rare typographic error.

I believe it will be clear that I strongly support the publication of this manuscript. I thank you for the opportunity to read, enjoy and review this important work.