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Showing papers in "Modern Fiction Studies in 2005"


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This article revisited the Yiddish-language intellectual, laboring at the birth of alternative modernisms, in a history of mutual borrowings that has never been fully translated or recorded.
Abstract: Rereading literary histories from the vantage point of the Lower East Side foregrounds the unacknowledged power of immigrant culture-makers and of Yiddishkeit institutions as a shaping force in the creation of an American cultural response to the challenges of modernity. Abraham Cahan's short fiction in English limns the paradox for the immigrant intellectual whose engagements with \"native\" culture are both socially transformative and invisible. In these texts, we can read an allegory of the Yiddish-language intellectual, laboring at the birth of alternative modernisms, in a history of mutual borrowings that has never been fully translated or recorded.

41 citations





Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Brierre as discussed by the authors met a young woman from Senegal or the Antilles in Paris, and the seas traversed surfed on her teeth, Permeated her smile, Sung in her voice like waves in the hollows.
Abstract: I met you in the elevators of PARIS. You were from Senegal or the Antilles And the seas traversed surfed on your teeth, Permeated your smile, Sung in your voice like waves in the hollows. Midday on the Champs Elysées I suddenly encountered your tragic faces: Your expressions attested secular grief. And yet at the Boule Blanche And under Montmartrian colors, Your voice, your breath, your whole being exuded joy. You were music, you were dance. Jean Brierre, \"New Black Soul\

19 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This article incorporated a literary reading of Nella Larsen's Quicksand with a cultural history of Baker's cinematic celebrity in order to reconsider celebratory narratives of the St Louis native's success in Paris.
Abstract: This interdisciplinary study incorporates a literary reading of Nella Larsen's Quicksand (1928) with a cultural history of Baker's cinematic celebrity in order to reconsider celebratory narratives of the St Louis native's success in Paris Did she transcend stereotypes of black womanhood or was she enmeshed in their discursive net? Analyzing Baker's dancing and film roles through Larsen's conception of exoticism, migration, bodily representation and cultural hybridity reveals the complications assembled in this dancer's seemingly transparent stardom and recasts her as an informed Black modernist

18 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors analyze images of blackness in Anzia Yezierska's novels and short stories and argue that these images, including references to jazz, mark her protagonists' ambivalence about assimilation.
Abstract: This essay analyzes images of blackness in Anzia Yezierska's novels and short stories. Instead of viewing Yezierska within the confines of immigrant writing, it situates her within the context of concurrent movements in black American literature. By placing Yezierska within the historical milieu of the Jazz Age and Harlem Renaissance, it argues that these images of blackness, including references to jazz, mark her protagonists' ambivalence about assimilation. It thus explores how Yezierska's writing expresses a model of cultural hybridity by symbolically addressing the dialectic of black and white—a strategy reflected in her protagonists' attempts to model hybrid selves.

17 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors examines the racialized and gendered construction of Jewishness in Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth through an analysis of the depiction of Simon Rosedale, the Jewish parvenu who unsuccessfully woos Lily Bart.
Abstract: This essay examines the racialized and gendered construction of Jewishness in Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth Through an analysis of the depiction of Simon Rosedale, the Jewish parvenu who unsuccessfully woos Lily Bart, I contend that Wharton's perception of Jewish difference is more complex than it initially appears, making reductive conclusions regarding her antisemitism impossible However, uncovering Wharton's ambivalence makes her repudiation of Jewish difference all the more striking; although Wharton grudgingly acknowledged that upwardly mobile immigrant Jews like Rosedale had become part of her world, she would never fully accept that they were there to stay

17 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, a picture of a Britannia figure polishing a globe, as though shining an apple for the approval of a great imperial teacher, was used as a metaphor for what these writers do in spite of themselves.
Abstract: the book is of a Britannia figure polishing a globe, as though shining an apple for the approval of a great imperial teacher: this is an excellent visual epitome of what Garrity's study suggests about what these writers do in spite of themselves. The image is from an advertisement for polish, and the caption, faintly visible, reads, \"Saves a world of trouble.\" I initially misread it as one equally apt to Garrity's reading of these writers' complex attachments to England: \"Loves a world of trouble.\

17 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Slocombe, William, 'This is not for you' as discussed by the authors, "Nihilism and the House that Jacques Built", Modern Fiction Studies (2005) 51 (1) pp.88-109 RAE2008
Abstract: Slocombe, William, '“This is not for you”: Nihilism and the House that Jacques Built', Modern Fiction Studies (2005) 51 (1) pp.88-109 RAE2008

15 citations




Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors argued that France's role as a polemical lever for civil rights struggle in the U.S. is an important legacy for the New Negro Renaissance, and argued that learning French could challenge the racialized body politic of the USA.
Abstract: France became configured as a space and a cultural apparatus of democracy and 'color-blindness' by African American writers around World War I. W.E.B. Du Bois, Addie Hunton, and Gwendolyn Bennett identified French as replete with a democratic consciousness, and suggested learning French thereby challenges the racialized body politic of the U.SA. Despite the limited and strategic value of this position, as recognised by Rudolph Fisher and evident when juxtaposed to French colonial policy, the essay argues that France's role as a polemical lever for civil rights struggle in the U.S.A. is an important legacy for the New Negro Renaissance.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Park, Park, and McKenzie as mentioned in this paper pointed out that those long genealogies of the Jukes and the tribes of Ishmael would not show such a persistent and distressing uniformity of vice, crime, and poverty unless they were peculiarly fit for the environment in which they are condemned to exist.
Abstract: In the great city the poor, the vicious, and the delinquent, crushed together in an unhealthful and contagious intimacy, breed in and in soul and body, so that it has often occurred to me that those long genealogies of the Jukes and the tribes of Ishmael would not show such a persistent and distressing uniformity of vice, crime, and poverty unless they were peculiarly fit for the environment in which they are condemned to exist. —Robert Park, Ernest Burgess, and Roderick McKenzie, The City

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The Outsider as mentioned in this paper is a political theory that reflected Wright's engagements with both negritude and existentialism, while effectively challenging their ideological limitations, leading directly to a corresponding critique of Heideggerian existentialism.
Abstract: Richard Wright articulated a political theory that reflected his engagements with both negritude and existentialism, while effectively challenging their ideological limitations. In his novel The Outsider, Wright critiques the Communist Party's racialized deployment of the strategy/tactic paradigm. The rigor of Wright's critique uncovers the structures of universalism and particularism as fundamental to Western political ontology, leading directly to a corresponding critique of Heideggerian existentialism. Opposed to any politics of authenticity, Wright proposes a politics of the outside which calls for a reconfiguration of the political structures of representation.




Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Clarissa's approach to life was central to Bloomsbury's faithfulness and their commitment to the aesthetic, the private, the intiSexuality and Self-Authorship in Mrs. Dalloway 50 mate.
Abstract: ion, but the energy, or principle, which it is the novelist's duty to capture; the failure of modern fiction lies, as much as anything, in its insufficient interest in this subject. Clarissa seeks directly what Woolf seeks—as a matter of high aesthetic-moral principle—to represent. Moreover, Clarissa seeks it in a manner deserving of rich approbation, by Bloomsburian lights. She seeks life, first of all, on atheistic grounds. As she bows her head \"beneath the influence [of life],\" she refuses false ontology: \"not for a moment did she believe in God; but all the more, she thought . . . must one repay in daily life\" (29). Atheism was central to Bloomsbury; not only as a dogma but as a sensibility, it separated them from their pious but—in their view—less spiritually receptive parents. Numerous studies have noted Bloomsburians' paradoxical unworldly worldliness—with their atheism and hard work as striving, ultimately successful artists constituting their worldliness, but their mysticism, their commitment to the aesthetic, the private, the intiSexuality and Self-Authorship in Mrs. Dalloway 50 mate, marking them as unworldly. Bloomsbury's parents, by contrast, were marked by worldly unworldliness, with their protestations of religiosity (glum and largely hypocritical, in their children's eyes) constituting their would-be unworldliness, and their keen interest in politics and social position—combined with their obliviousness to aesthetic values—revealing their deep-set, imaginatively impoverished worldliness. In her capacity for religious sentiment— in its most genuinely rapturous sense, before the physical splendors of London and daily life—without the comfort of false dogma, Clarissa demonstrates a worldly unworldliness that would make any Bloomsburian proud. \"What she loved,\" says the narrator, \"was this, here, now, in front of her\" (9), the sequence of deictics demonstrating Clarissa's power to immerse herself in the absolute present. That she resolves to make offerings for the sake of offerings, or in Peter's words, to do good for the sake of goodness (see my first epigraph), puts her in the company of the Group's patron philosopher G. E. Moore. Principia Ethica struggles, in the absence of religious foundations, to justify philosophically the value it places on friendship and aesthetics and does a less articulate job than Clarissa of accepting the inevitably nonfoundational nature of its reasoning. Even without the help of a strict foundation or dogma, theological or personal, Clarissa feels impelled to \"repay\" (29), indicating—at least at the level of impulse—how generous her approach to life can be. Clarissa also seeks life, to her further credit, in the otherness of others. \"There she was,\" concludes the novel, in a celebration of Clarissa's radiance to the eyes of Sally and especially Peter. She radiates otherness to her admiring onlookers: she is wholly herself, extant beyond category. \"It is Clarissa,\" Peter says, and there is nothing more for the omniscient narrator to say, other than to concur with Peter's appreciation of Clarissa's irreducibility (194). How fitting, given her power to inspire such a reaction in Peter and Sally, that Clarissa should recognize the value of apprehending other people with such a generous awareness of their uniqueness. She feels \"quite continuously a sense of [the] existence\" of people in Bayswater and elsewhere (122). At her party, she sees her guests and thinks \"there was Professor Brierly\" or \"there was old Aunt Helena\" (176, 178), foreshadowing the language with which Peter will note her appearance later. The Dalloway marriage enables both partners to flourish in their separateness, as a Walsh marriage likely would not; Clarissa's approach to life grants the same boon to many. For her, such an approach stems not only from instinct, but from principle. \"Why creeds and prayers,\" she wonders, watching her neighbor move away from the window, \"when . . . that's the miracle, that's the mystery; that old lady, she meant, whom she


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The "Gibson Affair" marked the height of Cold War paranoia that came to consume the group of black expatriates centered in Paris in the 1950s.
Abstract: The "Gibson Affair" marked the height of Cold War paranoia that came to consume the group of black expatriates centered in Paris in the 1950s. In writing of the forgeries and surrounding events that bear his name, Richard Gibson argues that the economy of the scandal was determined as much by the question of political commitment to Algerian independence as it was to the question of affiliations to the United States and its government. The essay combines Gibson's informative memoir with a meditation upon Richard Wright's unpublished roman-a-clef (and only novel set in Paris), Island of Hallucination.


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Goy Israels as mentioned in this paper is an autobiographical portrait of a young half-Jewish half-English artist and writer who draws on sources as diverse as its protagonist, from contemporary racialist scientism to John Bunyan.
Abstract: This essay introduces readers to Mina Loy's unpublished novel Goy Israels, written in the 1930s, an autobiographical portrait of a young half-Jewish half-English artist and writer. The novel draws on sources as diverse as its protagonist, from contemporary racialist scientism to John Bunyan. Loy considered her self-portraits to be part of the modernist impulse to make it new and this one melds science and art, autobiography and experimentation, allegory and ethnography. Feinstein argues that Loy pioneers complex narrative forms in Goy Israels to reflect and better understand the complexities of human nature—especially the enigmatic aspects of modern Jewish identity.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This article explored how Jean Toomer and Aime Cesaire used modernist forms to recreate and reclaim "home" in Cane (1923) and Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to My Native Land; 1939), respectively.
Abstract: Following a brief discussion of the critical genealogy of "modernity" and "modernism" vis-a-vis African American and Caribbean literature, this essay explores how Jean Toomer and Aime Cesaire use modernist forms to recreate and reclaim "home" in Cane (1923) and Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to My Native Land; 1939), respectively. Although the two authors did not meet in interwar Paris, the resonance between their work demonstrates that the fruits of transatlantic artistic exchange between African diasporic writers stem not only from actual moments of encounter, but also from the circulation of ideas.


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In contrast with other Jewish modernists, Gertrude Stein's relationship to Jewish concerns has been, until recently, little explored. as mentioned in this paper examined Stein's curious relationship to the Zionist movement or the text she wrote in response to Zionism's political agenda after World War I.
Abstract: In contrast with other Jewish modernists, Gertrude Stein's relationship to Jewish concerns has been, until recently, little explored. No one has yet examined Stein's curious relationship to the Zionist movement or the text she wrote in response to Zionism's political agenda after World War I. Through a close reading of "The Reverie of the Zionist" (1920), this essay examines Stein's political and aesthetic response to Zionism. It places this response in a historical context, looking at Stein's personal ties to Zionism. It also considers the ways in which "Reverie" anticipates Stein's later ideas about nationalism and "the Jews" during the 1930s.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the author examines Djuna Barnes's transformation of the figure of the Jew in Nightwood from a racial and religious category into a narratological category and argues that this transformation loosens Jewishness from actual Jewish characters, establishing a paradoxical equivalence between the statements "Jewishness is everywhere" and "Jews are nowhere," a paradox that is crucial to the structure of Nightwood itself.
Abstract: This essay examines Djuna Barnes's transformation of the figure of the Jew in Nightwood from a racial and religious category into a narratological category I argue that this transformation loosens Jewishness from Nightwood's actual Jewish characters, establishing a paradoxical equivalence between the statements "Jewishness is everywhere" and "Jews are nowhere," a paradox that is crucial to the structure of Nightwood itself Drawing on letters that Barnes wrote to her friend and fellow writer, Emily Coleman, I show how this alteration reflects a complex convergence between essentialist and anti-essentialist conceptions of Jews in Barnes's work, and in modernism more generally

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors consider the Jewish and/or Yiddish presence within debates around art and politics that underlie the development of modernism, particularly in the United States.
Abstract: This essay considers the Jewish and/or Yiddish presence within the debates around art and politics that underlie the development of modernism, particularly in the United States To do so, it focuses on the figure of Emma Goldman, whose work and life played out the debate, often in the Yiddish language Particular attention is given to parallel texts in Yiddish and English that address the topic of art and politics Goldman is brought into view both for what she can offer to a more expansive understanding of the modernist movement and, as the essay suggests, for the resonance with the current discussions of ethics and aesthetics that she and her anarchist cohort provide

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, Boyarin's Unheroic Conduct is used to explore the implications of this eroticization of a social process, while Roth tends to blame the destruction of Jewish tradition on Jewish women, his notion of an assimilation drive also allows for a productive reengagement with the concept of assimilation.
Abstract: The article examines Joseph Roth's ambivalent attitude toward Jewish assimilation in Hiob and related works. In Hiob, the motor behind Jewish assimilation is figured as both an inexplicable Jewish Wandertrieb and an excessive attraction of Jewish women to Gentile men. Drawing on post-Freudian psychoanalytic theories and sociocultural studies, including Daniel Boyarin's Unheroic Conduct, I explore the implications of this eroticization of a social process. While Roth tends to blame the destruction of Jewish tradition on Jewish women, his notion of an "assimilatory drive" also allows for a productive reengagement with the concept of assimilation.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors examines the philosophical paradoxes of African negritude, as they determine and are scrutinized in the novel L'aventure ambigue (1961) by Kane, where Islam is portrayed as a cultural presence in Francophone Africa that is as significant as "blackness" and "whiteness", but which identifies with neither.
Abstract: This article examines the philosophical paradoxes of African negritude, as they determine and are scrutinized in the novel L'aventure ambigue (1961). The primary means by which this narrative interrogates the logic of negritude is through the re-inscription of racial dialectics as an opposition between two "logi": the word of French modernity against the word of African Islam. To interrupt the irresolvable contest between Africa and Europe that initiates negritude, Kane portrays Islam as a cultural presence in Francophone Africa that is as significant as "blackness" and "whiteness," but which identifies with neither. With its tragic ending and persistent tone of elegy, L'aventure ambigue can be seen as negritude's swansong, even as it offers the most sophisticated exposition of negritude values anywhere in the African novel.