Showing papers in "Journal of Modern Literature in 2012"

Mystery and Possibility in Cormac McCarthy

Abstract: This review examines Understanding Cormac McCarthy by Steven Frye and Reading the World: Cormac McCarthy’s Tennessee Period by Dianne C. Luce. Covering McCarthy’s entire career, Frye’s book deals generally with themes, aesthetics and historical context; Frye also argues that many of McCarthy’s works are best understood within the American romance tradition. Luce’s book discusses McCarthy’s first five published works, including his screenplay, The Gardener’s Son , investigating the role of local history and philosophy¾most significantly ancient Gnosticism¾in shaping the author’s unique vision.

Still Life: Modernism's Turn to Greece

Abstract: Hellenism is a way of seeing ghosts and contemplating inanimate objects. Normally associated with the Gothic, these shadowy visions persist in modernist writings in a variety of forms, representative of distinctive and often conflicting positions on art and life. The concern with cultural legacy and the presumed license of the modern artist and intellectual to energize the present by reanimating the past amounts to more than a mere exercise in classical allusion for a learned audience. Through meditations on mythical motifs, magical objects and staged encounters between ancient rituals and contemporary crises, writers and thinkers such as Pound, Eliot, Harrison, Woolf, Freud, H.D. and Heidegger turn to Greece as the site of haunting continuities.

J. M. Coetzee's Foe and the embodiment of meaning

Abstract: The last chapter of J.M. Coetzee’s Foe is well known for its impenetrability. Drawing upon cognitive linguistics and cognitive psychology, this essay argues that the chapter can be interpreted as a metafictional allegory of the reader’s making sense of the novel. The embodiment of the character-narrator (a fictional counterpart for the reader) is central to the allegory. Coetzee’s novel lays bare the embodied nature of meaning-making, showing that interpretation is grounded in patterns of bodily interaction with an environment similar to the patterns traced by the narrator of Foe’s final pages.

Putting the Impossible to Work: Beckettian Afterlife and the Posthuman Future of Humanity

Abstract: This paper analyzes the rhetoric of futurity at work in a number of texts dealing with the "posthuman future of humanity." It follows these texts in an attempt to historicize such a future in relation to human history. But it also identifies an overwhelming temporal contradiction at the heart of their discourse: that the posthuman is already with us even as it remains to come. If so, is posthuman identity to be interpreted as a mere phase in the history of human subjectivity? Does posthumanity come about in response to ethical and epistemological challenges inherited from the experience of human subjects? Or is it rather an altogether new paradigm that renders the very use of words like "subjectivity," "history," and "experience" anachronistic? Drawing on Hegel, Derrida, and especially Beckett, I argue that an experience of the impossible informs the moment of posthuman self-reflection; and consequently, that the challenge of theorizing a point of contact between human and posthuman being (or human and posthuman history) calls for a new, ad hoc interpretation of the concept of "impossibility."

Realism, Irony and Morality in Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence

Abstract: By making Newland Archer’s age at the end of The Age of Innocence (1920) the same as hers at the time of writing, Edith Wharton clearly urges a comparison between herself and her protagonist. Pursuing this comparison, I argue that what Wharton shares significantly with Archer is neither character nor biography, but rather a particular situation: that of outliving the world that had formed her. Wharton, in this novel, explores the shape and consequences of this distinctly modern experience of historical dislocation and seeks to come to terms with her own belatedness as a novelist of manners. The Age of Innocence, I further claim, represents Wharton’s solution to the central impasse facing the realist tradition in the post-Nietzschean, post-WWI intellectual climate. Her last major artistic achievement, the novel also stands as her most self-conscious and ironic work.

Yeats, On the Boiler, the Aesthetics of Cultural Disintegration and the Program for Renewal "of our own rich experience"

Abstract: In On the Boiler , W.B. Yeats depicts the collapse of his paradigm for Ireland's renewal through culture and discerns the seeds for a new cultural movement rooted in education and eugenics. Through education and eugenics, Yeats foresees the rebirth of a new paradigm of cultural nationalism engendered in the "rich experience" of the Irish people and achieving an end very much akin to his earlier paradigm, with a significant addition: Yeats thought to extend his program for cultural renewal beyond the grave. He hoped to foster, through education and eugenics, a like-minded community of believers who would be able to enter into communion with the spirits of men of genius, including himself.

Narrativizing Characters in Mrs. Dalloway

Abstract: According to critical consensus, Virginia Woolf is the most “inward” of all modern British writers. Even critics who emphasize the socio-political vision of Woolf’s writing, such as Alex Zwerdling, read the character of Mrs. Dalloway in terms of her “private,” in contradistinction to her “public,” self. This essay seeks to question this “private” / “public” split, and argues that Woolf’s text evinces a privileging of intersubjectivity — the consciousness of other consciousnesses — over subjectivity — an individual’s “private” world as defined apart from any other subjects. First tracing how Woolf rewrites Mrs. Dalloway from short story to novel in order to foreground the deeply intersubjective nature of her central character, I will proceed by analyzing how Mrs. Dalloway narrativizes the other minds she encounters — by imposing the form of a story onto her recounting of events — in order to illustrate why she is indeed the model for ethico-affective response in the novel.

A Simultaneous Gesture of Proximity and Distance: W.G. Sebald's Empathic Narrative Persona

Abstract: W.G. Sebald’s prose narratives exist at the borderline of the novel form. Their self-conscious hybridity, combining memoir, historical account, travelogue, and fiction, may be seen as pushing the boundaries of genre. But Sebald’s use of a narrator-figure with some biographical correspondence to the author, who takes part in the action, enables an even greater crossing of borders: those between past and present, memory and history, and current and previous generations. This insertion of what I call an “empathic narrative persona” between author and subject helps enable an approach to the past in which proximity and distance occur simultaneously in a complex gesture of empathy. By situating these narratives in the context of the Sebaldian persona, I show how the author self-reflexively foregrounds the process of LaCaprian “empathic unsettlement” by establishing close personal connection with the victims of history while simultaneously inserting several layers of structural and epistemological distance.

"Humor Saves Steps": Laughter and Humanity in Marianne Moore

Abstract: Marianne Moore treats humor as a means of both recognizing commonality and creating mutual understanding between individuals. In two comparatively minor poems, "A Prize Bird" (1915) and "The Wood-Weasel" (1942), Moore uses humor as a test of friendship, and suggests that sympathetic laughter constitutes a distinctively American approach to collaborative artistic creation. Humor in "The Pangolin" (1936), like the artists' tools Moore discusses in the poem, is both an end in itself and a means to ever-greater things: it becomes the marker of shared humanity and a medium for uniting the human with the divine. Throughout Moore's work, her humor can be read as a kind of ars poetica, modeling the synthesis of diverse components that she performs in her poetry.

Your Reputation Precedes You: A Reception Study of Naked Lunch

Abstract: William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch has left an indelible imprint on American literary culture. As the last novel legally suppressed for obscenity in the U.S., its 1966 triumph in the courts cleared the way for free literary discourse. Professed by Burroughs himself as too profane to print in America, Naked Lunch did not accidentally stumble upon the role of champion for free speech. Enshrouded in its reputation as filthy, immoral and depraved, Naked Lunch was repudiated by prudish society and thus desired as forbidden fruit by readers of the 1950s and 1960s. Because of its highly publicized subversive status, the book would always be overshadowed by its notoriety. By examining both the production and reception of this incendiary book—necessarily interrelated aspects—this article argues that it was purposefully packaged as (lucratively) controversial and that the sensational marketing of the text dictated the interpretation of the language printed between its well-planned front and back covers.

Trying It On: Narration and Masking in The Age of Innocence

Abstract: The innocent, fair May Welland and the experienced, dark Ellen Olenska appear to be direct opposites of each other, representing the familiar virgin/whore binary. This essay examines Wharton’s text as it consistently questions this binary through formal and thematic interrogations of various distinctions. In addition to the opposition between May and Ellen, there is the problematic distinction between narrator and character, which the novel’s use of free indirect discourse brings to the fore. Further, the text uses multiple figures of masking or “trying on” of disguises, questioning the distinction between masks and the people who wear those masks and between the actual and the mimetic. The thematic oscillation between woman as traditionally conforming, innocent virgin on the one hand and threatening, corrupting temptress on the other takes place on the formal level as the narration calls into question the reality of any meaningful distinction between apparently oppositional binaries.

"Living in two tenses": The Intimate Archives of Sylvia Townsend Warner

Abstract: Although Sylvia Townsend Warner is most well known for her novels and short stories, her late career is marked by a commitment to biographical writing. This essay argues that Warner’s struggle to complete a biography of T.H. White led her to develop what Ann Cvetkovich has called an “archival mode of witness,” and her subsequent preservation, compilation, and annotation of an epistolary archive documenting the nearly 40 years of her relationship with Valentine Ackland demonstrates a queer politics of trans-temporal affiliation and (re)production.

Between Sensation and Sign: The Secret Language of The Waves

Abstract: The structure of Virginia Woolf’s late novel The Waves , which alternates between interludes of an uninhabited seascape and a series of non-mimetic soliloquies, has long puzzled and intrigued her critics This essay argues that the images that circulate not only between separate soliloquies, but also between soliloquy and interlude, traverse the boundary between objectivity and subjectivity and frame sensations, perceptions, and thoughts as physical presences in the real world In the recurrent treatment of words as sensuous entities, moreover, the novel suggests that all practices of language and aspects of consciousness are essentially physical phenomena in the world of people, words, and waves The Waves thus accomplishes something new and largely unrecognized in modern narrative: the language, imagery, structure, and themes collectively establish the continuity of word, narrative, and world through a non-subjective, physicalized consciousness

Keeping the Reader in the House: American Minimalism, Literary Impressionism, and Raymond Carver's "Cathedral"

Abstract: American Literary Minimalism is an important yet largely misunderstood movement. Even though a number of scholars have attempted to describe the mode, it remains poorly defined. Part of the problem is that the roots of the tradition have not been thoroughly explored. The aim of this essay is to examine how Literary Impressionism, a style practiced by authors such as Anton Chekhov and Stephen Crane near the turn of the century, shaped the aesthetic of one of the most prominent practitioners of American Minimalism, Raymond Carver. “Cathedral,” perhaps Carver’s most important short story, illustrates the nexus between the modes. The unnamed narrator objectively reports past sensory experiences, an action common in Impressionistic works, but like many Minimalist protagonists is ultimately unable to articulate the significance of the events he describes.

"Still Leafing": Celebrity, Confession, Marianne Moore's "The Camperdown Elm" and the Scandal of Age

Abstract: The essay argues that Marianne Moore's "The Camperdown Elm" (1967) employs a form of confession, to the scandal of being an elderly woman, as part of her ongoing exploration and deployment of the evolving dynamics of celebrity culture, to benefit Moore's activist causes, her own poetic longevity, and her relationship with her fans. This exploration occurs in dialogue with her contemporaries the confessionals, her modernist peers (Eliot and Loy) and her environmentalist precursors — specifically the Hudson River School painters Thomas Cole and Asher Durand and the meditative, environmental poet William Cullen Bryant, all named in the poem — to construct its own meditation on influence, authority and mortality. The poem explores the scandal of age with reference to the tradition of ekphrastic meditations on the poet's own death, but concludes by turning away from meditation toward direct action (saving a real tree) and collaborative relationship with Moore's fans.

Chaos as a Mode of Living in Samuel Beckett's The Unnamable

Abstract: In this article, I examine the deployment of chaos as a textual practice in Samuel Beckett's The Unnamable . My contention is that, in its endeavor to wrest chaos from the appropriative gestures of order and make room for newness, the text breaks with grammatical frames and conceptual systems that organize subjectivity. The Unnamable "squirms" involuntarily and willfully at the same time, in-between paradoxical turns, multiplying "I"-s, and stream-of-consciousness eruptions. Its squirming undermines stability, identity, and order, inviting into them the unborn, the unthought, chaos. Every proposition that the speaking voice utters subverts the premises upon which subjectivity is constructed and, thus, endeavors to turn the self into a site of chaos. Through its syntactic and semantic movements, The Unnamable inhabits the impossibility of "pure silence" as pure chaos and locates in it an impetus for self-transformation.

"In this valley of dying stars": Eliot's Cosmology

Abstract: In this essay I will suggest intersections between scientific and religious apocalypse as depicted in T.S. Eliot's poetic cosmology and astronomy. The primary focus of my paper will be a close-reading of The Hollow Men (1925), as I argue that the poem is awkwardly placed between the "whimper" of astronomical entropy and the "bang" of a longed-for divine apocalypse. Beyond this, I will suggest that the cosmic agony of The Hollow Men extends beyond Eliot's conversion, setting up a dilemma that it takes him until Four Quartets , with its ultimate melding of art, faith and science, to fully resolve. Ultimately, I will suggest that the greater openness toward religion displayed by contemporary science, particularly the more comforting, Christian visions of the end of the universe depicted by the Quaker scientist Arthur Eddington were as much a part of this eventual poetic resolution as Eliot's conversion.

Alice Notley's Descent: Modernist Genealogies and Gendered Literary Inheritance

Abstract: This article examines modernist genealogy in Alice Notley's 1992 poem The Descent of Alette . Notley's central speaker finds herself riding on a nightmarish subway ruled by a male tyrant who controls all artistic form. This article argues that the subway can be understood as an ongoing public to which poets since Pound have returned to experiment with impersonal poetic form. In Notley's poem, the subway signals vexed poetic lineage as well as the passageway to a new collective formal space. However, this article suggests, we must ask whether the poem's emphasis on private poetic speech qualifies the poem's feminist poetic imagination, or whether Notley's formal experimentation, particularly her use of citational quotation marks, leads to a workable notion of collective voice as the object of quest. Reading Alette against "Doctor Williams' Heiresses," Notley's early experimental historiography, the article situates the question of private speech within the larger question of modernism's "after-affects" in postwar women's poetry.

Lyric Image as Sensuous Thought

Abstract: Recent scholarship has given considerable attention to lyric poetry as a form of sensuous knowledge. This approach emphasizes the corporeal origins of poetry, its genesis in the body or in language viewed as material. The question of sensuous knowledge is central to the larger theoretical issue of modernity itself, in which lyric holds a central yet ambiguous status. The question of sensuous knowledge is ultimately a question of meaning. However, modern thought — thought pertaining to "modernity" — is fundamentally circular. This would seem to establish an epistemological impasse for aesthetics. But I argue that this circularity offers an important, and necessary, way to limit knowledge and thereby ground an ethical subjectivity. My essay places formalism at the heart of sensuous knowledge. In this essay I develop an account of the importance of abstraction in sensuous knowledge by way of Kant's concept of Darstellung , "presentation [of sensory experience]." The "presentation" is the object as it has undergone a structural process of internalization and been made available for psychic use as meaning; that requires a recognition of loss. Where this is important for literature is that twentieth-century American poetry frequently uses very personal images of family life as a way of conveying sincerity about corporeal experience. I use this discussion of circularity in modern aesthetic thought to argue that there is a risk to taking shortcuts to meaning through images of the material bodies of children. In these contemporary poems by Gary Snyder, Sharon Olds and Rita Dove, the poets reject loss in favor of a very modern "affirmation" of the material. But affirmation and the visual image as a sign of affirmation cannot alone bind meaning to us. That meaning must be internalized through the work of poetic presentation.

Mary Colum, Modernism, and Mass Media: An Irish-Inflected Transatlantic Print Culture

Abstract: Although Mary Colum and her work have been all but forgotten by scholars, this article will argue that her major work of criticism, From These Roots: The Ideas that Have Made Modern Literature (1937), represents an important attempt to define literary modernism. Her thesis in this work is that criticism is an art form and plays a central role in the creation of a nation's cultural identity and the development of a transnational modern literature. This article explores Colum's foray into journalism at The Irish Review during her youth in Dublin and argues that the review's focus on literature from 1911 until 1913 and Colum's emigration to the United States in 1914 shaped her ideas about criticism.

From "The Book of the Dead" to "Gauley Bridge": Muriel Rukeyser's Documentary Poetics and Film at the Crossroads of the Popular Front

Abstract: This essay treats Rukeyser’s attempt to adapt “The Book of the Dead” for documentary film. Between 1938 and 1940, Rukeyser worked on a film titled “Gauley Bridge,” which incorporated the documentary materials used in “The Book of the Dead.” Although Rukeyser never completed a full script for the film, her published and unpublished film sketches show how her treatment of the industrial tragedy responded to developments both within American documentary aesthetics and the changing national and international political climate during the Popular Front period. This essay argues that the unexplored formal and political differences between “The Book of the Dead” and “Gauley Bridge” not only demonstrate an important shift in Rukeyser’s aesthetics and politics, but also inform her subsequent graphics work for the Office of War Information in the early 1940s.

The “Pound Case” in historical perspective: an archival overview

Abstract: Arrested in early May 1945 on charges of treason due to his propagandistic radio broadcasts for wartime Fascist Italy, Ezra Pound’s escape from the hangman in 1945 has been ascribed to a number of factors: his international fame, his mental state at the end of the Second World War and even the vagaries of the treason laws in the USA. However, a clutch of recently released documents—ranging from a 1,513-page FBI dossier to several previously neglected archival holdings—sheds new light on this critical period in the poet’s life. In fact, the whole of 1945 may be described as a “near-death experience” for the infamous rabble-rouser. Yet May 1945 was only the midpoint in Pound’s lengthy allegiance to fascist ideology, an allegiance that may be said to have been at its most intense between his meeting Mussolini in 1933 and his release from St Elizabeths sanatorium in 1958. By taking all three critical periods into account via new archival materials—from 1933 to 1944, over 1945, and from 1946 to 1958—this article will recommend an empirically-grounded approach for heuristically approaching Pound’s “crazy” embrace of fascism.

Thomas MacGreevy's Poetics of Loss: War, Sexuality, and Archive

Abstract: Poems (1934) by Irish modernist Thomas MacGreevy provocatively presents the unspeakable—his WWI experience and his ambiguous sexuality—in order to challenge the Irish Republicanism and Catholicism that he is known to support. His challenge to contemporary political, ethical, and aesthetic norms overlaps with Samuel Beckett's work at this time, particularly as both writers turn to forbidden sexuality, politically motivated executions, and the aftermath of historical trauma to criticize the Irish Free State. MacGreevy's unpublished letters and poems, and a draft of a memoir, reveal what he strategically omits from his poems. But unpublished work, no less than his published work, importantly refuses settled determination of the religious, political, and personal meanings of his poetry.

High Modernism, Lowly Desires: A Review of Sara Crangle's Prosaic Desires: Modernist Knowledge, Boredom, Laughter, and Anticipation.

Abstract: Sara Crangle’s Prosaic Desires draws attention to the banal, ephemeral, but nevertheless fundamental desires that propel modernist fiction. Using Levinas to write back to the Foucauldian tradition that links desire with the hegemonic structures of power, Crangle argues that modernism was more concerned with the minutiae of longing felt between self and other. Focusing on knowledge, boredom, laughter, and anticipation, Crangle draws a map of the theories of intersubjectivity available in the prose of modernist fiction. The book takes Joyce, Woolf, Stein, and Beckett as its key texts, and puts them into conversation with the philosophy of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Heidegger, and Levinas.

The Early Life of Septimus Smith

Abstract: While recent criticism has made an effort to highlight Virginia Woolf’s political engagements, we are still trying to account for the oddly insubstantial presence of the Great War in Mrs. Dalloway . This essay responds to the critical tradition of reading Mrs. Dalloway as a postwar elegy by arguing that the First World War enters the text primarily as a trope for traumas inherent to its characters’ encounters with language and otherness. I examine the manuscript drafts of “The Hours,” particularly Woolf’s earliest sketches of Septimus’s youth, to show that the war functions as a metaphor for complex metaphysical and linguistic alienations that have defined him since long before the war, particularly his disillusionment with Romantic and fin-de-siecle forms of expression.

The Lacanian Phallus and the Lesbian One in Wharton's "Xingu"

Abstract: Edith Wharton’s 1911 short story “Xingu,” in which no male appears, illustrates Lacan’s theory of the phallus as a linguistic function that can be possessed by either gender. Lacan argues that the phallus is the power to signify and is a reaction to a lack that represents the inability of language to reach the object it aims at. In “Xingu,” wives in a reading club confronted by a noted author struggle to show their comprehension of an incomprehensible book. A woman who hasn’t read the book saves the group and wins the competition by producing a term that no one understands, Xingu. This signifier without a signified operates as a phallus to take control because no one can admit that she does not know what it means. Wharton’s satire implies that critical authority is a mask over a gap impelled by desire and caught in a web of power relations.

John Buchan’s amicable anti-modernism

Abstract: This article considers the novelist John Buchan’s changing responses to literary modernism in the inter-war period. It argues that although Buchan has generally been taken as a straightforward opponent of modernist writing, careful study of his oeuvre discloses a more complex scenario in which an antagonism to certain modernist 'excesses' is mixed with a qualified attraction to particular modernist innovations. The article’s central assumption is that a key part of Buchan’s worth to the New Modernist Studies lies in his querying — in novelistic as well as in essayistic forms — of the vocabularies now used to elaborate such literary-historical oppositions as high vs. low, for instance, or old vs. new. The article breaks new ground by moving beyond familiar Buchan texts — e.g. 'The Thirty-Nine Steps' (1915) — into the less appreciated territory of his novel 'Huntingtower' (1922), his literary criticism and his cultural commentaries.