The Genealogies of Modernity End of Year Book List
2020, this momentous and often dark year, is coming to an end. Who knows what the genealogists and historians of the future will make of 2020. What new beginnings will they find in this year marked by pandemic and unrest? We have asked some of our writers from this past year to select some of their favorite books from 2020. Perhaps some of these books will end up as source texts for future genealogists. So, if you are looking for a last-minute gift for your favorite genealogists or making reading resolutions for 2021, we have you covered!
Recommendations from our Project Director, Ryan McDermott: Remembrance of Earth’s Past by Cixin Liu and A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr.
As a blast from the past (or future!), I recommend pairing Remembrance of Earth’s Past and A Canticle of Leibowitz. The universe contains millions, maybe even billions, of civilizations, according to Cixin Liu, in this trilogy that begins with The Three-Body Problem. By comparison, humanity is an infant race. Our 5000-year history is a but a blip on the scale of universal time. And in the Cold-War masterpiece A Canticle for Leibowitz, that history is a dim memory obscured by the veil of nuclear holocaust. The novel begins in a new Middle Ages, and we follow humanity’s development for another 10,000 years up to a future not unlike our own present. These novels explode the scale on which scholars of the historical humanities typically think about human time. And both consider Christianity an infant religion with a long, unpredictable future yet ahead of it.
Recommendation from our Editor-at-Large, Terence Sweeney: Periphyseon: On the Divisions of Nature by Johannes Eriugena
This might be a strange pick since Periphyseon was first published in the 820s, but Dumbarton Oaks Publications has reprinted the John O’Meara translation. This is the only full translation of the text, which is now available to scholars not quite able to slog through 500 pages of Latin. Why the pick? A big part of the Genealogies of Modernity Project is exploring alternative modernities. What if Eriugena’s text had become the dominant one in Catholic thought rather than Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica? What would it mean for the future of Christian philosophy if Eriugena supplants the Angelic Doctor? I have my Augustinian disputes with Eriugena, but I hope this reprint helps spur new and fruitful ways of thinking about the relation of creation with Creator, temporality with Eternity.
Recommendation from our Managing Editor, Kirsten Hall: Godless Fictions in the Eighteenth Century by James Bryan Reeves
Normally when we think of the Enlightenment, we think about it as the "Age of Reason," in which developments in the natural sciences and philosophy lead to a decline of orthodox religious belief and the rise of deism, atheism, and materialism. But, according to James Reeves’s new book, Godless Fictions in the Eighteenth Century, this way we have of imagining the Enlightenment is just that—imaginary. As he writes in the introduction, "One of the supreme paradoxes of the eighteenth century was atheism's near omnipresence in British cultural productions, even though there were no open, self-avowed British atheists until at least the 1780s." But the further paradox is that writers, in their attempt to argue against unbelief, "imagined its fruition." Reeves's new book makes an important contribution to the study of secularity and modernity. It also serves as a reminder both to literary historians and historians alike of the power of storytelling, how the narratives we tell both about the present and past may start off as fiction and end as reality.
Recommendation from our design editor, Jessica Sweeney: Survival is a Style: Poems by Christian Wiman by Christian Wiman and The Strange Birds of Flannery O'Connor: A Life by Amy Alznauer and Ping Zhu
A few months ago, I discovered that Christian Wiman had a new book of poems out, the first in six years. Wiman's poetry speaks to the complexity of the modern soul and spirit. His writing is at once lyrical and hopeful, yet bare and filled with doubts. They are enmeshed in a tradition of mystical writing but also very much of the here and now. I have yet to experience this new collection but look forward to the encounter. I wrote about The Strange Birds of Flannery O'Connor: A Life in a Dappled Things review: "When I opened this picture book with my six-month-old daughter, the first thing I felt was that I was swimming in color, in an ocean of potential possibilities. Materially the book is large, even for a picture book, my daughter wanted to grab it, take it into her little hands, but it was too much. This is good and as it should be." In this picture book you get it all, the highs and lows, the transcendent and the mundane. Somehow these 32 pages seem to contain but also expand the woman we know as Flannery O'Connor.
Kathryn Mogk Wagner’s recommendation: Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader's Guide to a More Tranquil Mind by Alan Jacobs
For a book published in 2020, I recommend Alan Jacobs's Breaking Bread with the Dead. Jacobs argues for the importance of reading old books, a practice that not only expands our mental horizons but gives us the personal density to resist being blown about by every wind of opinion, fad, or current event. Much of the book focuses on the specific challenge of engaging with works that we regard as guilty of or complicit in past evils, a problem we may associate with recent controversies about Confederate statues and decolonized syllabi, but which Jacobs's careful, thoughtful treatment redeems from facile terms of debate. Weaving together argument with readings from an eclectic array of works, from Horace's Epistles to A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, this book models the humanistic engagement that it advocates—reading a chapter or two is sure to calm and steady the mind, and (hopefully) inspire further reading of the works Jacobs recommends.
Jason Blakely’s recommendation: Let Us Dream: The Path to a Better Future by Pope Francis
Reading Pope Francis's Let Us Dream in a time of crisis is not an abstract exercise but an immediate, concrete help with how to live. Francis says the general rule of a crisis is that you do not exit unchanged. The crisis will change you—especially if you attempt to remain the same. So, we must set ourselves the task of coming out better or we'll find that, without consciously willing it, we are much worse. This is why the Pope has long kept Hölderlin's verse near his heart: "But where the danger is, also grows the saving power."
Andrew Latham’s Recommendation: Dreamworld's of Race: Empire and the Utopian Destiny of Anglo-America by Duncan Bell
This is a book about late-nineteenth to early twentieth-century fantasies of a consolidated "Angloworld"— an imagined future world shaped and redeemed by a politically unified "Anglo-Saxon race." It focuses on four extraordinary figures—Andrew Carnegie, W. T. Stead, Cecil J. Rhodes, and H. G. Wells—revealing how they reimagined nation, empire, race, war, and peace in the context of a white, Anglo-American-dominated utopia. These fin-de-siècle visions are then juxtaposed with late-twentieth century narratives of Anglo-American empire. Bell offers fascinating insights into a current of utopianism running through the late-modern "Anglosphere."
Krystal Marsh’s recommendation: 100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write by Sarah Ruhl
I thoroughly recommend playwright Sarah Ruhl's 100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write. For those of us who spend most of our time working on large-scale projects full of big ideas, Ruhl's episodic essays feel just as full and rich, each one its own mini-dissertation on art, theater, and what it means to be thoughtfully creative. In many ways, I think it's the "Short Organum for the Theater" of the 21st century.
Jacob Martin’s recommendation: Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music
No one connects the dots between classical music and other disciplines better than Alex Ross, and in Wagnerism, he demonstrates how Wagner and his mighty operas influenced a whole generation of succeeding figures, not only in music, art and literature, but also in politics, feminism, and even LGBTQ history. There is enough scholarship here to appeal to the musicologist, but enough general history to be understood by the classical music novice. As such, it is a must-read for everyone.
And a last one for all you sports fans, tennis fans, and David Foster Wallace fans!
Donato Loia’s recommendation: String Theory: David Foster Wallace on Tennis by David Foster Wallace
Tennis is, perhaps, one of the most isolating of games. Reading this collection of essays by David Foster Wallace seems to me a perfect way to deal with our socially-distanced time. Moreover, "String Theory" is a philosophy of sport and life at its best. (Thank you to Kirsten Hall, editor at GenMod and my fellow tennis partner, for this wonderful gift, and for beating me every time 6-3).