Showing papers in "Modern Fiction Studies in 1992"
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127 citations
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TL;DR: Approche dialogique du feminisme woolfien dans To the Lighthouse as discussed by the authors, qui denonce, tout en les reaffirmant, les structures du patriarcat colonialiste de l'Angleterre
Abstract: Approche dialogique du feminisme woolfien dans To the Lighthouse qui denonce, tout en les reaffirmant, les structures du patriarcat colonialiste de l'Angleterre
39 citations
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TL;DR: For instance, the authors describes the scene of a teacher reading Woolf to her students in To the Lighthouse: confusion, bewilderment in their eyes, the sense of reading on quicksand, the fear of speaking uncertainty, the resistance to uncovering bafflement.
Abstract: You know the scene, the scene of your students reading Woolf. If you are not (yet) teachers, you can imagine it; you can recreate the scene of your own first reading of Woolf. At least for those of us far from the scenes of elite education, there is (at first) the confusion, bewilderment in their (our) eyes, the sense of reading on quicksand, the fear of speaking uncertainty, the resistance to uncovering bafflement—the resistance, period. Think back on To the Lighthouse, you, your students, virginal
35 citations
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TL;DR: In this paper, the contradiction politique/esthetique et les limites du feminisme woolfien are discussed, and the preface of Life as We Have Known It is given.
Abstract: Sur la contradiction politique/esthetique et les limites du feminisme woolfien. Lecture de Three Guineas et la preface de Life as We Have Known It
27 citations
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TL;DR: The authors argued that an explicit critique of imperialism constitutes the center and organizing principle of the novel and articulated a new space for reading The Waves, a space that should become the enabling ground for future readings of The Waves.
Abstract: After the recent publication of Jane Marcus' essay, "Brittania Rules The Waves," interpretations of Virginia Woolf s novel cannot legitimately ignore its political content. As for myself, before I had the opportunity to read the essay, I had already written briefly on the implicit critique of imperialism in The Waves (McGee 116-120) in such a way as to suggest my agreement with Marcus that the novel is about "the submerged mind of empire" (the words of J. M. Coetzee, cited by Marcus 136). Still, Marcus goes beyond my understanding of an implicit and partial critique to argue that an explicit critique of imperialism constitutes the center and organizing principle of the novel. Marcus has articulated a new space for reading The Waves—a space that should become the enabling ground for future readings of the novel. By articulating this space in the form of a political interpretation, she also makes visible the internal boundary or blank space that any interpretation hollows out of itself. This blank space allows me to pose the question of literary form that Marcus fails to address adequately with her emphasis on the transparency of social content and literary references. She does not claim, of course, that the meaning of the novel is obvious but that it becomes obvious once the text has been plugged into the specific dimensions of the historical context from which it derives. Marcus wants to reverse the critical history of The Waves which has tended to identify the novel as a static representation of upper-class culture and forms of identity. On the contrary, Marcus insists, "the project of cultural studies . . . now allows one to read The Waves as a narrative about culture making" (139). I agree with this state-
27 citations
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TL;DR: The authors suggest that Jacob is "recruited" by ideology, from that first shout by his brother, "JaÂ-cob! JaÂcob!" (JR 5), which recruits him for the family, to the point where he answers off-stage the pointing finger and "I Want You!" of Lord Kitchener's famous recruiting poster and is enlisted in the war that kills him.
Abstract: Hey, you there!" comes the call in Althusser's famous anecdote of interpellation, and the individual thus hailed turns around and becomes a subject, becomes a subject because he recognizes that the call is for him, because "individuals are always-already subjects" (Althusser, "Ideology" 176). Ideology "recruits" subjects, and what I want to suggest here is that Jacob is "recruited" by ideology, from that first shout by his brother, "Ja—cob! Ja—cob!" (JR 5), which recruits him for the family, to the point where he answers off-stage the pointing finger and "I Want You!" of Lord Kitchener's famous recruiting poster and is enlisted in the war that kills him.
22 citations
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TL;DR: Reecriture parodique du scenario oedipien de la bisexualite et de l'orientalisation du desir feminin dans Orlando de Woolf.
Abstract: Reecriture parodique du scenario oedipien de la bisexualite et de l'orientalisation du desir feminin dans Orlando de Woolf
20 citations
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TL;DR: The most incisive word here comes not from Baudrillard but from WJ.T. Mitchell, whose "iconology and ideology: Panofsky, Althusser, and the Scene of Recognition" concludes this collection as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: rillard and a selection from his De La Séduction. But the most incisive word here comes not from Baudrillard but from WJ.T. Mitchell, whose \"Iconology and Ideology: Panofsky, Althusser, and the Scene of Recognition\" concludes this collection. As Mitchell reminds us, iconology must be redirected toward a critical recognition of its own naturalizing processes, its ideological investments in the practice of representations; ideology, at the same time, must confront its own iconologies, or the very images through which it makes its claim to the status of a science of ideas.
20 citations
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TL;DR: The Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writing by Black Women as mentioned in this paper is a collection of essays that examine dialectical relationships between issues of race, gender, and class.
Abstract: Answering Hazel Carby's call in the first chapter of Reconstructing Womanhood for black feminism to be constructed as, \"a sign to be interrogated, a locus of contradictions,\" Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writing by Black Women presents essays that examine dialectical relationships between issues of race, gender, and class. Cheryl A. Wall's edition of essays brings together theoretical and critical writings by some of the most reputable scholars of contemporary black women's literature, including essays by Mae Henderson, Valerie Smith, Barbara Christian, Deborah McDowell, Claudia Tate, Hortense Spillers, Gloria Hull, Susan Willis, and Abena Busia, most of whom make use of contemporary theory in their analyses of black women's writing. The collection grew out of the October, 1987, symposium, \"Changing Our Own Words: A Symposium on Criticism, Theory, and Literature by Black Women,\" sponsored by Rutgers University and The Institute for Research on Women. Let me begin this review by stating that all nine of the essays, (ten, including Wall's Introduction), are excellent. Building on Amy Crittenden's verbal \"(ex)change\" with her husband Ned (\"Ah change jes ez many words ez Ah durn please!) in Zora Neale Hurston's first novel Jonah's Gourd Vine, Wall extends the vernacular use of changing words to include dialectical levels of interpretation embodied in the word (ex)change. Or as Wall puts it, \"the figure 'changing words,' derived, as it is from a form of the word exchange in which the weakly stressed syllable has been dropped, retains the idea of dialogue;\" \"[cjhanging words means transforming words.\" The purpose of the 1987 symposium and the subsequent edition of essays in 1989; however, was to situate black feminist criticism, described as a critical, theoretical \"response to the richness and complexity\" of black women's literature. As follows, Wall, in her Introduction, \"Taking Positions and Changing Words,\" advocates the use of critical theory in black feminist criticism. According to Wall, \"perspectives informed by literary theory may help us move beyond identifying blues metaphors and celebrating blues singers as artistic models to understanding how blues aesthetics and ethics are inscribed.\" Here Wall invokes Teresa
20 citations
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TL;DR: The authors argue that the politics of the literary text is a joke and that the jokes of a literary text are its politics, and that it is possible to read the political of a text as a series of jokes.
Abstract: I want το approach the question of \"The Politics of Modernism\" by way of a more general question about politics and literature: is it possible that the politics of the literary text is a joke? Or, to put it differently, that the jokes of the literary text are its politics? The question arises if we accept, at least in their general contours, two well-known arguments: Fredric Jameson's argument that \"the unmasking of cultural artifacts as socially symbolic acts\" requires the assertion and analysis of a \"political unconscious\" at work in those artifacts (Political 21); and Freud's argument not so much for a particular psychoanalytic theory of Witz as for the centrality of Witz to psychoanalytic theory in general—his insistence on the \"wit of all unconscious processes\" (Weber 84).' Together these formulations seem to suggest that, read on the level of the political, that is, as a \"socially symbolic act,\" the literary text is encountered as a series of jokes. Just as important, they imply that the politics of the text has to be understood in terms of the \"joke-work\" it performs or enables—the redistribution of energies it effects through processes of \"condensation, displacement, indirect representation, and so on\" (Freud 95)— and not in terms of a stable and altogether \"serious\" partisanship.
18 citations
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TL;DR: In this paper, Massé's In the Name of Love: Women, Masochism, and the Gothic is a response to two questions posed explicitly: "Are Gothic novels masochistic?" and "Why do feminists still use Freud?" as well as to two implicit questions: what is the etiology of masochism? and What is the prognosis?
Abstract: Michelle A. Massé's In the Name of Love: Women, Masochism, and the Gothic is a response to two questions posed explicitly—Are Gothic novels masochistic? and "Why do feminists still use Freud?"—as well as to two implicit questions— What is the etiology of masochism? and What is the prognosis? To Massé, certain Gothic texts "internalize and replicate the dynamics of oppression": Pauline Réage's The Story of 0 and Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca present "object relations that reproduce the beating triangle" in Freud's "A Child Is Being Beaten." (Even their readers become complicit.) Other Gothic texts such as Jane Eyre, Atwood's Lady Oracle, and Naylor's Linden Hills resist masochism by playing out the trauma caused by the prohibition of female autonomy (and therefore of identity in the real world), through repetition whose function it is to recognize that trauma. The Gothic can be self-sabotaging: it points to its own eventual cure. The answer, then, to Massé's first question is yes, only if we grant that works that repudiate "masochistic fantasy" are masochistic.
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TL;DR: In this paper, Crick departs from the grand and objective narrative of the French Revolution to narrate the small and subjective narratives of his own life, and the significance of all this, needless to say, is that it brings into question the very idea of the end of history.
Abstract: of history ends more than once, or rather is always already ended. It first ends with the French Revolution which, as Tom Crick informs his pupils, in rejecting the past and tradition thereby rejected history itself. Tom, then, is already relating the end of history when, in a chapter entitled "About the End of History," he suddenly departs from the grand and objective narrative of the Revolution to narrate the small and subjective narratives of his own life. In short, the 1789 end of history does itself come to an end. Indeed, no sooner has Tom's own posthistorical narrative begun than it in turn is interrupted by the pupil Price who declares that '"the only important thing about history ... is that it's . . . probably about to end"'(6). As Tom himself remarks, Price has contrived to "disrupt disruption" (51), to end the end of the end of history. The significance of all this, needless to say, is that it brings into question the very idea of the end of history. And it is, of course, a confessedly ironic formulation; Baudrillard, for instance, even when using
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TL;DR: The key to the treasure of myth and writing consists, as the John Barth of Bellerophoniad and personal interviews suggests, in recognizing that the literary convention of realism is as far as myth can get from itself.
Abstract: they may not be part of that activity. Thus, the key to the treasure of myth and writing consists, as the John Barth of Bellerophoniad and personal interviews suggests, in recognizing that the literary convention of realism is as far as myth can get from itself. It is, Barth says, \"better to address the archetypes directly\" and to trust, albeit in a rather ad hoc and unconcerned fashion, to 'comedy' and self-explanatory context\" (199). In this way it becomes truly possible to create \"a kind of myths called novels\" (248).
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TL;DR: The most comfortable ground within literary criticism for such studies has been the actual production and consumption of the novel in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as mentioned in this paper, and Modernism's rejection of realism and its celebration of the artist as an alienated personage producing an arcane product, superior to and outside the common marketplace would seem to have set it in opposi-
Abstract: Oscar Wilde, Henry James, and James Joyce have all recently been observed through the \"lens of consumption\" (Wicke 122). This is a new development in consumer/commodity1 critique because the most comfortable ground within literary criticism for such studies has been the actual production and consumption of the novel in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.2 Modernism's rejection of realism and its celebration of the artist as an alienated personage producing an arcane product—superior to and outside the common marketplace—would seem to have set it in opposi-
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TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present a supplement to the one by Barbara Weiser which appeared in the Modern Fiction Studies in 1972, which in turn supplemented that by Maurice Beebe in the Spring issue in 1956.
Abstract: NOTE: This checklist is a supplement to the one by Barbara Weiser which appeared in the Virginia Woolf issue of Modern Fiction Studies in 1972, which in turn supplemented that by Maurice Beebe in the Spring issue in 1956. Because preliminary searches produced 1,171 citations referring to Virginia Woolf (not including dissertations), it was evident that inclusion in this checklist would have to be severely restricted. Consequently, in addition to omitting dissertations and book reviews, this list excludes articles less than five pages in length. The list is divided into sections, beginning with "Bibliographies" and "Biography," followed by a large "General" category that is subdivided into "Books" and "Articles." The general sections include criticism that does not focus on a particular work by Woolf or that involves more than one work of hers. The other sections are arranged alphabetically according to Woolfs works.
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TL;DR: Hemingway's most popular book of nonfiction and arguably the one that most intrigues scholar-detectives as mentioned in this paper, A Moveable Feast is not quite the book Hemingway claimed it to be (like the discovery of Boswell's journals).
Abstract: Hemingway's most popular book of nonfiction and arguably the one that most intrigues scholar-detectives. Indeed, everything about A Moveable Feast—from the tale of its origins in the Ritz Hotel papers to Mary Hemingway's claim that the published manuscript was entirely in her husband's words—raises as many scholarly questions as it does readers' eyebrows. For A Moveable Feast is not quite the book Hemingway claimed it to be (like the discovery of Boswell's journals, the story of how, in 1956, he retrieved two trunks of old papers from the basement of Paris's Ritz Hotel is longer on charm than truth), nor is the posthumously published book quite the manuscript Hemingway in fact wrote. Granted, critics have long suspected that A Moveable Feast teeters somewhere between a self-serving nostalgia (only the fairly well off—as Hemingway surely was during the Twenties—fabricate romantic sagas of bohemian deprivation) and a mean-spirited effort to settle old scores with ghosts of the past like F. Scott Fitzgerald or Ford Maddox Ford. But that said, only a careful study of the manuscript variants can confirm these hunches, and that is precisely what Tavernier-Courbin's book rigorously accomplishes. Taken together, the two studies of Hemingway's nonfiction do much to demystify his efforts at self-mythologizing. At the same time, however, they make it clear that Hemingway was a more conscious and certainly a more complicated writer than many who took his \"truth books\" as the truth.
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TL;DR: In this paper, the reecriture parodique du sublime romantique (Kant, Wordsworth) and le depassement des dualismes traditionnels dans l'esthetique feministe d'Orlando de Woolf are discussed.
Abstract: La reecriture parodique du sublime romantique (Kant, Wordsworth) et le depassement des dualismes traditionnels dans l'esthetique feministe d'Orlando de Woolf
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TL;DR: Representation croisee des differentes hierarchies sociales et sexuelles dans les oeuvres de V. Woolf (Melymbrosia, The Voyage out, Night and Day) and de son mari (The Village in the Jungle, The Wise Virgins) as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Representation croisee des differentes hierarchies sociales et sexuelles dans les oeuvres de V. Woolf (Melymbrosia, The Voyage out, Night and Day) et de son mari (The Village in the Jungle, The Wise Virgins)
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TL;DR: Ordre symbolique et ideologie dans Mrs Dalloway, a partir des rapports entre pouvoir, subjectivite et schizophrenie qui sous-tendent la crise d'identite des personnages woolfiens as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Ordre symbolique et ideologie dans Mrs Dalloway, a partir des rapports entre pouvoir, subjectivite et schizophrenie qui sous-tendent la crise d'identite des personnages woolfiens
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TL;DR: In this article, the proliferation des representations populaires de Woolf favorisa la constitution d'une icone sur le lieu d'un contestation culturelle dominee par la figure de la peur.
Abstract: Comment la proliferation des representations populaires de Woolf favorisa la constitution d'une icone sur le lieu d'une contestation culturelle dominee par la figure de la peur
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TL;DR: Derrida refers to this intellectual no man's land as DiffA©mnce, and compares its strange eruption to a monstrous birth as discussed by the authors, and suggests that the only way to explore both the common ground which joins these alternatives and the "irreducible difference" which separates them is to explore common ground.
Abstract: Toward the end of "Structure, Sign and Play," Derrida acknowledges that he has arrived at an impasse: he can no longer work within the Western philosophical tradition, yet he is unable to move beyond it. What remains, he tells us, is to explore both the "common ground" which joins these alternatives and the "irreducible difference" which separates them. Derrida refers to this intellectual no man's land as diffA©mnce, and he compares its strange eruption to a monstrous birth:
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TL;DR: The New Age played a vital role in the dissemination of literary modernism and post-Impressionist art in Britain before the First World War as discussed by the authors, but despite its lively interest in such pre-war movements as Imagism, Vorticism, Futurism, Cubism, and Expressionism, the New Age was a paper primarily concerned not with contemporary developments in art and literature, but with politics.
Abstract: It is well known that the New Age played a vital role in the dissemination of literary modernism and post-Impressionist art in Britain before the First World War. Of the three main polemicists of early modernism— T. E. Hulme, Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis—Hulme wrote almost exclusively for the magazine, Pound wrote a large proportion of his criticism for its pages and Lewis, who described the New Age in 1914 as "one of the only good papers in the country" ("Letter" 319), published some of his early stories in the paper and used its correspondence columns to lash out at his opponents, real or imagined. But despite its lively interest in such pre-war movements as Imagism, Vorticism, Futurism, Cubism, and Expressionism, the New Age was a paper primarily concerned not with contemporary developments in art and literature, but with politics. Although historians of Edwardian Britain are well acquainted with the fact that the New Age played an important role in pre-war British politics, very little has actually been written about the paper. John Finlay, an historian of the Social Credit movement, maintains that historians have "neglected" the journal because its politics are "so hard to categorize" (83). Rather than attempting any categorization himself, Finlay concludes that "the paper was sui generis, a judgment which would have appealed to its editor," Alfred Orage (83). Similarly, Wallace Martin, the main literary historian of the New Age, attributes the paper's mercurial politics to its writers' independence from existing political parties and factions. Martin argues that the readership of "the first Socialist weekly in London" (The New Age 5) was comprised mainly of an "in-
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TL;DR: Marinetti and his entourage announced the creed of speed and steel throughout Europe as early as 1910, and their triumphant celebration of airplanes and automobiles had a crucial impact on the artistic reception of technology, the way it was recuperated as an objet d'art as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: of the turn-of-the-century European Zeitgeist and is generally encapsulated in the activities of Filippo Tomasso Marinetti, the galvanic maestro of the Italian Futurists. His manifestoes and his entourage announced the creed of speed and steel throughout Europe as early as 1910, and their triumphant celebration of airplanes and automobiles had a crucial impact on the artistic reception of technology, the way it was recuperated as an objet d'art. To attribute this love of machines to the sole influence of Italian
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TL;DR: In the Introduction to The Role of the Reader Umberto Eco argues that a model reader is inscribed in the open work by its author as discussed by the authors, and that the author should die after his work is complete, in order not to block the path of the text.
Abstract: In the Introduction to The Role of the Reader Umberto Eco argues that a model reader is inscribed in the open work by its author. "An author can foresee an 'ideal reader affected by an ideal insomnia' (as happens with Finnegans Wake) able to master different codes and eager to deal with the text as with a maze of many issues" (9). Umberto Eco would seem to be not only the ideal "model reader" but the only empirical reader whose competence is sufficiently encyclopedic to do justice to The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum. Each of Eco's novels is in fact a vast maze, a tangled web of arcane references, coded messages, metaphysical speculation, and historical trivia which only the author can successfully unravel. On the other hand, Eco's assertion that the author should die after his work is complete, in order not to block the path of the text,2 acts as a kind of challenge to the reader to fix upon an "unauthorized" interpretation of the text.3 Whether we pose as model readers, following the paths of a "faithful" reading predetermined by the author, or whether we decide to break new, uncharted ground, the interpretive paths we may follow seem endless. It has become something of a convention to open an essay on The Name of the Rose by inventorying the numerous if not infinite ways in which the text might be read.4 No matter what approach the critic chooses, she makes it clear that the reading in question is in no way privileged, that it "forecloses no others" (Artigiani 64). The critic who may seem to "go too far" with Eco's
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TL;DR: In the first sentence of the first chapter of the novel, Bloom's ''preparatory action of brushing off the shavings from Stephen's shoulder and ''buckfing] him up generally in orthodox Samaritan fashion'' (16.2-3) as discussed by the authors represents the one a.m. wanderings of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom after they escape from night-time and seek refuge in the cabman's shelter.
Abstract: tion of Joyce's novel. It represents the one a.m. wanderings of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom after they escape from nighttown and seek refuge in the cabman's shelter. In the logic of the plot, there is a kind of recuperation here, represented in the first sentence by Bloom's \"preparatory\" action of brushing off the shavings from Stephen's shoulder and \"buckfing] him up generally in orthodox Samaritan fashion\" (16.2-3).' It is as if the intense psycho-sexual drama of \"Circe\" were traded, with relief, for a more comfortable outing in the male world of cabman's shelters and almost deserted Dublin streets, the psychic depths charted earlier replaced by strictly surface transportation. (The art of the chapter, according to Joyce's schema, is navigation.) The \"Bloom\" of \"Circe,\" in all his pantomimic glory and shame, is now dignified with his original title in the narrative, \"Mr. Bloom.\" One could say that the narrative is engaged in regaining a sense of bourgeois respectability. The narrative, then, offers linguistic respite as well as geographic refuge. For the place of refuge is also a commonplace; the narrative contains a host of well-worn clichés. Nostos means homecoming; hence, the
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TL;DR: The Swarthmore College Peace Collection as discussed by the authors contains two and a half file boxes of miscellaneous "peace poetry" sorted alphabetically by author, most of which date from before 1940.
Abstract: In the Swarthmore College Peace Collection, there are two and a half file boxes of miscellaneous "peace poetry" sorted alphabetically by author—the productions of hundreds of obscure and forgotten poets. Most of these poems survive in one-of-a-kind pamphlets, newspaper clippings, and rare journals. Judging from the items identified by date of publication and from historical references scattered through the poems, virtually all were written in this century, and most date from before 1940.1 More than the introduction of individual writers into the canon, this mass of poems, all in some way entering into dialogue with pacifist politics, undermines our confidence that the literary history of modernism is something we already know. Furthermore, much of the poetry in the Swarthmore Collection challenges our usual literary critical methodologies, which even when they concern themselves with questions of politics and history often conceive of individual authors or literary coteries as in relief against a historical-political backdrop, less participants than critics of society. The poems in the Swarthmore collection particularly work against this view because so many of them have transparent ties to a specific political organization, the Woman's Peace Party (WPP), which was one of the groups most active in opposing American intervention in World War I.
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TL;DR: The postmodernism of post-modernism has been criticised by as discussed by the authors, who argue that it is difficult to sustain what for decades was the dominant mode of apology for modernism itself, and the underlying ideology of its "canonicity": the idea that modern and modern;^ were consubstantial categories, that modernum was somehow already precontained in the raw and immediate experience of contemporary life.
Abstract: current preoccupation with postmodernism in the humanities is that it has now become much more difficult to sustain what for decades was the dominant mode of apology for modernism itself, and the underlying ideology of its "canonicity": the idea that modernwm and modern;^ were consubstantial categories, that modernum was somehow already precontained in the raw and immediate experience of contemporary life. To defend, say, the Joycean interior monologue or the surrealist principles of montage, it was once necessary only to declare the fidelity of the aesthetic device to "modern" life itself. Modernism had succeeded, for a time at least, in laying ideological claim to being the realism of our (or its) time. Given this fundamental premise, one might or might not concede the existence of a modernist "politics." But even supposing one did, such a "politics" tended to be viewed as likewise consubstantial with "modernity" rather than, say, as the expression of some particular group or even class interest. Above all, one thinks here of the Adornian and generally left-formalist theory of aesthetic negation as constituting a new sphere for emancipatory activity after the decline of "politics" in its traditional modes.
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TL;DR: Coetzee and some variations on the Writer's Responsibility as mentioned in this paper, and a Mythical Interpretation of J. M. Coetzee's Life & Times of Michael K. Wright, Derek.
Abstract: Coetzee and Some Variations on the Writer's Responsibility.\" Ariel 19.4 (1988): 55-72. Post, Robert M. \"Oppression in the Fiction of J. M. Coetzee,\" Critique 27.2 (1986): 67-77. Van Lierop, Karin. \"A Mythical Interpretation of J. M. Coetzee's Life & Times of Michael K.\" Commonwealth: Essays & Studies 9.1 (1986): 44-49. Wright, Derek. \"Chthonic Man: Landscape, History and Myth in Coetzee's Life & Times of Michael K.\" New Literatures Review 21 (1991): 1-15.
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TL;DR: The "Eumaeus" episode of Joyce's Ulysses marks the beginning of the Nostos, or return to origins as discussed by the authors, where the reader, after the dizzying transformations of "Circe," begins the sixteenth episode with some relief: we seem to have returned to recognizable novelistic prose and to a homely world of sandstrewers, brooms and cups of coffee.
Abstract: The "Eumaeus" episode of Joyce's Ulysses marks the beginning of the Nostos, or return to origins. Likewise the reader, after the dizzying transformations of "Circe," begins the sixteenth episode with some relief: we seem to have returned to recognizable novelistic prose and to a homely world of sandstrewers, brooms and cups of coffee. Along with this apparent realism the narrative is also imbued with the economic ideology of realism—a bourgeois economism in which all objects carry price tags (Vernon 67). Indeed, the narrator foregrounds economics as both form and intent, finding "the money question ... at the back of everything" (.1114) in a dual sense: habitually employing economic terms to explain behavior, the teller also relies (perhaps unwittingly) upon homologies between money and narration in hopes of discovering a stable economy of meaning.1 The reassurances these homologies promise soon dissolve for, beneath the appearance of realism, beneath the narrator's bourgeois ideology and entrepreneurial plans, a counternarrative emerges that challenges conventional economies of meaning, subverts stable identity and undermines the belief that money explains and stabilizes value. As part of the Nostos, "Eumaeus" is also much concerned with origins and originality. In this regard, too, the very homologies that seem to reassure actually problematize the relationships among origins, value and authenticity: here money and narratives are counterfeit; identities are