A letter from one of our editors

Good news: Just in time for our participation in the Modern Language Association conference, we’re making Lives of Literature free through January and February to all! You can browse, read, and download articles from all 69 journals currently available in the collection.

We’re looking forward to the conference — we’ve been loving this interview by Simon Gakandi, president of the Modern Language Association, about this year’s  theme, Being Human. It’s true when he writes that literature has “been called upon to bear witness to both the possibility and limits of the human in the modern world.”

With that, I give you some inspiring–and some limit-testing–works on the theme from the most recently added titles in JSTOR’s Lives of Literature, accessible to everyone for the next two months:

  • With a title no one could argue with, “Let Us Now Praise Famous Orcs” asserts that Tolkien couldn’t help putting a human face on his deadly Lord of the Rings creatures.
  • Prompted by a 2009 attack on a settlement in South Africa, Nigel C. Gibson, a noted scholar on theorist Frantz Fanon, makes a fierce case for a “radical ethical move towards constant dialogue.”
  • Scholar Larry May gives us his thoughtful and arresting remembrance of Hannah Arendt, including escorting her across town the night after a man showed up at her apartment door with a death threat.

We invite you to stop by booth 402 in the MLA exhibit hall to discover what’s new in Lives of Literature and how you can access the content. While you’re there, you can also grab JSTOR swag and enter a book raffle.

Anne Ray
Senior Licensing Editor

P.S. Do you have 15 minutes to give us your input on several new areas of expansion for JSTOR? If you’re interested, drop us a line and we’ll be in touch. We’re also looking to make some brief videos in which we talk to people about their research projects–this could be you! Stop by the booth and tell us what you’re working on.