Showing papers in "Modern Fiction Studies in 2013"
TL;DR: Persephone Books as mentioned in this paper is an independent feminist publisher in London that recuperates lost modern writing by restoring neglected authors to their places in modernist literary genealogy, and furthering our understanding of modernist cultural production in the fields of literature, visual arts, textile and fashion design, and war propaganda.
Abstract: This article articulates the significance of Persephone Books, an independent feminist publisher in London that recuperates lost modern writing. Persephone’s 100 titles restore long-obscured continuities and connections in modern literature and arts; the unexpected success of this publishing venture illustrates modernism’s continuing appeal to readers. The recuperative work of Persephone Books enables us to recast the modernist literary field so that we (1) understand canonical authors anew, (2) restore neglected authors to their places in modernist literary genealogy, and (3) further our understanding of modernist cultural production in the fields of literature, visual arts, textile and fashion design, and war propaganda.
30 citations
TL;DR: The authors argues for the centrality of women's writing and feminist theory to modernist studies and presents work by little-known women writers in the context of major theoretical conversations within modernism studies and women's theory, especially affect theory, globalism and the archive.
Abstract: Rejecting recent demotions of gender, this introduction argues for the centrality of women’s writing and feminist theory to modernist studies. This special issue presents work by little-known women writers in the context of major theoretical conversations within modernist studies and feminist theory today, especially affect theory, globalism, and the archive. While affect theory grounds itself in issues of gender and sexuality, globalism and the archive have often stood in danger of neglecting women. This introduction lauds the power of affect theory while showing the deep feminist potential in globalism and the archive.
25 citations
TL;DR: This paper argued that the humanism professed by many Popular Front writers was part of a tactical attempt to make Marxist propaganda both more effective and more responsive to the unique challenges of American racial and cultural politics.
Abstract: This essay argues that the humanism professed by many Popular Front writers was part of a tactical attempt to make Marxist propaganda both more effective and more responsive to the unique challenges of American racial and cultural politics. Thus, if John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939) seems calculated to resonate with a white, middle-class audience, this is not because Steinbeck’s humanism was covertly racist and bourgeois, but because he deliberately used humanism to correct readers’ previously-held sympathies with racist and bourgeois ideologies.
16 citations
TL;DR: The authors argue that Woolf's fantastic novel, Orlando (1928) is more true to the experience of transsexualism than is the allegedly authentic account provided in Man into Woman: An Authentic Record of a Change of Sex (1933), the biography-memoir of Danish artist Einar Wegener, who, as Lili Elbe, can lay claim to the title of the first transsexual.
Abstract: In this essay, I argue that Woolf’s fantastic novel, Orlando (1928), is more true to the experience of transsexualism than is the allegedly authentic account provided in Man into Woman: An Authentic Record of a Change of Sex (1933), the biography-memoir of Danish artist Einar Wegener, who, as Lili Elbe, can lay claim to the title of the first transsexual. Orlando reconfigures notions not just of gender but of time, history, and the very nature of life-writing itself, producing a new model of life writing that I call a transgenre .
16 citations
TL;DR: Flush is what might be described as a metabiographical text, probing the consequences for life writing, revealing it to be an inextricable entanglement not just of male, female, upper-, and lower-class life histories, but also of human and nonhuman ways of encountering the world.
Abstract: Virginia Woolf’s Flush: A Biography (1933) takes its place alongside Orlando as a key modernist experiment with the norms and conventions of life writing. Flush is what might be described as a metabiographical text, probing the consequences for life writing, revealing it to be an inextricable entanglement not just of male, female, upper-, and lower-class life histories, but also of human and nonhuman ways of encountering the world. Furthermore, in modeling nonhuman phenomenology, Flush suggests how coming to terms with stories about nonhuman lives calls for a new, “transdisciplinary” paradigm for narrative inquiry.
12 citations
TL;DR: The authors argue that even with respect to the notion at the heart of the race quarrel (frenzy), striking mimetic continuities exist between colonial narratives and post-colonial counternarrative.
Abstract: This article completes a trilogy of essays that reexamine the quarrel between Chinua Achebe and Joseph Conrad from the angle of mimetic theory. Moving beyond the colonial/postcolonial binary, this essay focuses on Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and argues that even with respect to the notion at the heart of the race quarrel (“frenzy”) striking mimetic continuities exist between colonial narratives and postcolonial counternarratives. Rather than adding new fire to what is already an incendiary debate, this essay articulates the narrative, anthropological, and discursive forces that have the power to generate counternarratives that are almost the opposite, but not quite.
10 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the Modernist life narrative in the context of interwar citizenship policies that exposed women to an increased risk of statelessness on both sides of the Atlantic is explored.
Abstract: This article explores the Modernist life narrative in the context of interwar citizenship policies that exposed women to an increased risk of statelessness on both sides of the Atlantic. Read together, Agnes Smedley’s Daughter of Earth (1929) and Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas (1938) bring this transnational context into view. While access to rights may indicate the ideal endpoint of subject-formation in the traditional Bildungsroman , Woolf and Smedley demonstrate how women’s access to rights comes at the cost of nonnormative desire. Their works use a rhetoric of incivility to mark emergent agencies within and alongside formal structures of citizenship.
8 citations
TL;DR: The authors argue that failure as a productive form of critique is linked to a feminist and anticolonialist project Focusing on Jean Rhys's Voyage in the Dark and After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, and argue that Rhys protagonists' failure to successfully enact prescribed gender roles is a feminist response, one articulated through a negative feminism rather than a conventional liberal feminism.
Abstract: This essay locates failure as a productive form of critique, linked to a feminist and anticolonialist project Focusing on Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark and After Leaving Mr Mackenzie , I argue that Rhys’s protagonists’ failure to successfully enact prescribed gender roles is a feminist response, one articulated through a negative feminism rather than a conventional liberal feminism Using Jack Halberstam’s notion of shadow feminism and Sianne Ngai’s noncathartic emotions, I show how Rhys exposes the need for an alternate model of white female respectability through her narratives of failure
8 citations
TL;DR: The authors examines Virginia Woolf's negotiation of political and aesthetic commitments in the 1930s, reassessing her revisions of The Years away from explicit political critique in the context of the Woolfs' trip to Germany, the release of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, and the bombing of Madrid during the Spanish Civil War.
Abstract: This essay examines Virginia Woolf’s negotiation of political and aesthetic commitments in the 1930s, reassessing her revisions of The Years away from explicit political critique in the context of the Woolfs’ trip to Germany, the release of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will , and the bombing of Madrid during the Spanish Civil War. Tracing a homology between a literal aerial perspective, a totalizing narrative voice, political propaganda, and despotism, this essay argues that Woolf embedded her critique of tyranny within the novel’s form. With two narrative perspectives, the novel undercuts the allure of totalizing knowledge without itself propagandizing.
8 citations
TL;DR: Garrity as discussed by the authors argues that Olive Moore's neglected masterpiece, Spleen, uses the idea of reproduction both formally and thematically as a metaphor and foundation for a completely new model of creative practice.
Abstract: Jane Garrity’s essay argues that Olive Moore’s neglected masterpiece, Spleen , uses the idea of reproduction—both formally and thematically—as a metaphor and foundation for a completely new model of creative practice. Drawing from recent feminist theory on experimental literary form and from conceptual frameworks within disability studies, Garrity situates Spleen ’s preoccupation with pregnancy within the larger context of modernist cultural representations of disability, nonnormative sexuality, and racial science. The essay tracks the various ways that the novel is in effect an anatomy of the entrenched obstacles to women’s creative agency in early-twentieth-century England.
8 citations
TL;DR: The authors traces how discourses of Jewishness circulating in the imperial metropole during the early twentieth century are translated into colonial settings in Leonard Woolf's Village in the Jungle, a translation visible in Woolf representations of colonial sexual alterity and in his critique of colonial power.
Abstract: This essay traces how discourses of Jewishness circulating in the imperial metropole during the early twentieth century are translated into colonial settings in Leonard Woolf’s Village in the Jungle, a translation visible in Woolf’s representations of colonial sexual alterity and in his critique of colonial power. The intersections of semitic and colonial discourses in Woolf’s novel bring together structures of domestic discrimination and foreign domination; the text thus offers us a transnational framework of interpretation that highlights the necessity of reading histories of oppression in tandem rather than in isolation.
TL;DR: The Plot Against America as mentioned in this paper is the most multicultural of Roth's novels, but it does not address the animating model of the conservative Christian resurgence of the 20th century in American race relations.
Abstract: Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America recapitulates the history of mid-twentieth-century American race relations, and the novel’s repudiation of these assimilationist events makes it the most multicultural of his novels. But in raising the specter of one model of Jewish difference (racial) only to replace it with another (cultural), Roth is blind to the animating model (religious) of the contemporary period’s conservative Christian resurgence. Widely read as being a critical response to that resurgence, the novel’s evacuation of religious meaning suggests how poorly prepared Roth was to tackle the religious energy that overtook the nation during his long career.
TL;DR: This article explored a recent reimagination of Japanese internment in order to suggest a way of understanding Asian American subjects as something more than immigrants: they are enemies, defined as enemies.
Abstract: This essay explores a recent reimagination of Japanese internment in order to suggest a way of understanding Asian American subjects as something more than immigrants: they are enemies Julie Otsuka’s 2002 novel When the Emperor Was Divine subjects an unnamed, typical American family to military detention, evacuation, and forced incarceration Compelled to identify with Enemy Japan, the members of the family transform into alien, treacherous beings My reading focuses on small expressions of allegiance to Emperor Hirohito, who becomes a dangerous and tantalizing figure of desire in the novel
TL;DR: In contrast to the aesthetic autonomy espoused by Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, the narratives in BCR depict autonomy as a ghastly punishment rather than a goal to be achieved as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: This essay examines the fiction and nonfiction in the Birth Control Review ( BCR ), a magazine Margaret Sanger edited between 1917 and 1929, to reveal a critique of aesthetic autonomy at the intersection of modernism and feminist politics. In contrast to the aesthetic autonomy espoused by Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, the narratives in BCR depict autonomy as a ghastly punishment rather than a goal to be achieved. Such a reading offers a framework for understanding why the dominant rhetoric of the American birth control movement shifted—within only a decade—from feminist revolution to patriarchal eugenics.
TL;DR: The authors analyzes fashion as a discursive force in Rosamond Lehmann's novel Invitation to the Waltz and demonstrates that 1920s fashion, in spite of its carefully stylized public image as harbinger of modernity, was complicit in propagating patriarchal norms.
Abstract: This article analyzes fashion as a discursive force in Rosamond Lehmann’s novel Invitation to the Waltz . Through a reading of Lehmann’s novel alongside fashion magazines, it demonstrates that 1920s fashion, in spite of its carefully stylized public image as harbinger of modernity, was complicit in propagating patriarchal norms. However, if Invitation opposes the cultural machinery that regulates gender roles in post-war Britain, its formal appearance is nonetheless dependent on the very same tenets it criticizes since the novel reveals resemblances to Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse . If the tension between imitation and originality determines choices in sartorial fashions, female authorship in the inter-war period, this essay argues, was subjected to the same market forces that controlled and sustained the organization of the fashion industry.
TL;DR: McEwan's negotiation of the "two-culture" debate between literature and science in The Child in Time (1987) and Enduring Love (1997) is explored in this paper.
Abstract: This article explores Ian McEwan’s negotiation of the “two-culture” debate between literature and science in The Child in Time (1987) and Enduring Love (1997). My claim is that these novels update this debate by introducing ideas put forward in the field of contemporary popular science, while also placing popular science in conversation with literary postmodernism. In particular, I consider the degree of cultural authority his novels grant to science within the contemporary, recognizing both the priority given to scientific values as a basis for social knowledge and also their constructedness and therefore susceptibility to political appropriation.
TL;DR: Assia Djebar's Algerian Quartet explores alternative means of achieving cultural and aesthetic wholeness through new modes of auto/biographical writing as mentioned in this paper. But they find instead alternatives to conventional Bildung that are more adaptable to non-Western modes of social belonging.
Abstract: In recent years, Bildung and the Bildungsroman genre have attracted considerable attention, especially in modernist and postcolonial studies, which have re-evaluated the former’s conceptual relevance and the latter’s formal efficacy. In postcolonial fiction, the fissure, or contradiction, in classical Bildung and modernity itself becomes the source of new forms of identity and community. Assia Djebar’s Algerian Quartet explores alternative means of achieving cultural and aesthetic wholeness through new modes of auto/biographical writing. In her nonlinear, polyvocal, and syncopated narratives, we find instead alternatives to conventional Bildung that are more adaptable to non-Western modes of social belonging.
TL;DR: Lurie as discussed by the authors reviewed A Familiar Strangeness: American Fiction and the Language of Photography, 1939-1945 by Stuart Burrows (review). Modern Fiction Studies 59, no. 4 (2013): 866-68.
Abstract: This Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by the English at UR Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in English Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of UR Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact scholarshiprepository@richmond.edu. Recommended Citation Lurie, Peter. \"A Familiar Strangeness: American Fiction and the Language of Photography, 1939–1945 by Stuart Burrows (review).\" Modern Fiction Studies 59, no. 4 (2013): 866-68. doi:10.1353/mfs.2013.0058. brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk
TL;DR: The Enigma of Arrival represents a significant shift in V S Naipaul's corpus as mentioned in this paper, where the author focuses on himself as a narrating subject who is the product of a disturbance that he cannot overthrow, only channel.
Abstract: The Enigma of Arrival represents a significant shift in V S Naipaul’s corpus In earlier work Naipaul used realist techniques to depict the periphery as the product of a historical derangement In Enigma , Naipaul focuses on himself as a narrating subject who is the product of a disturbance that he cannot overthrow, only channel The originality of The Enigma of Arrival lies in its attempt to engage, at the level of form, the disorienting effects of the periphery’s induction into modernity
TL;DR: Arzner as mentioned in this paper explores the possibility of an embodied modernist voice that is at once reflexive about technologies of mass culture and attentive to women's social and aesthetic concerns in her films.
Abstract: ln Close Up , Dorothy Richardson and H. D. pose sound film as male because they constrain women’s aesthetic engagement as film spectators, a position that anticipates later feminist film criticism on embodied voice in classical cinema. This essay uncovers how Dorothy Arzner, the only woman director of Hollywood sound film from 1928 to 1943, embeds responses to these critiques through what she calls “unusual moments” in her films. In such moments, Arzner explores the possibility of an embodied modernist voice that is at once reflexive about technologies of mass culture and attentive to women’s social and aesthetic concerns.
TL;DR: For instance, Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy as discussed by the authors is a movie version of the classic literary genre, or Bildungsroman, in which a young man full of illusions travels from the provinces to the big city.
Abstract: In making Midnight Cowboy John Schlesinger took a minor American novel of existentialist angst and transformed it into a cinematic version of the classic literary genre, or Bildungsroman, in which a young man full of illusions travels from the provinces to the big city. The film possesses formal features that give it a modernist inflection, such as the montage of images in the modern city, but from a structural, moral, and psychological point of view, Midnight Cowboy is a Bildungsfilm–a perfect marriage of nineteenth-century themes and twentieth-century techniques.
TL;DR: The authors provided an overview of the essays in the special issue Modernist Life Narrative: Biography, Autobiography, Bildungsroman, arguing that considering the forms together, along with film and graphic narratives, brings out significant common features.
Abstract: The essay provides an overview of the essays in the special issue, Modernist Life Narrative: Biography, Autobiography, Bildungsroman, arguing that considering the forms together, along with film and graphic narratives, brings out significant common features. It explores with reference to the essays and to several works not treated in them various features modernist life narratives share, including failure (especially of social integration) as success, development as deformation, nonlinear temporality, and identity as fluid (rather than singular) and as opaque, or masked. Modernist life narrative’s persistence after World War II is addressed with regard to film, American fiction, and postcolonial writing.
TL;DR: In The Nets of Modernism as mentioned in this paper, Ellmann links Freud's analysis of the Wolf Man's experience of the primal scene to Woolf's elegiac exorcism in To the Lighthouse, suggesting the convergence of trauma and scene-making.
Abstract: their biographical and textual resonances. Moving from werewolves to Woolfian dogs, Ellmann links Freud's analysis of the Wolf Man's experience of the primal scene to Woolf's elegiac exorcism in To the Lighthouse, suggesting the convergence of trauma and scene-making. Ellmann offers a very Freudian conclusion when she refers to Woolf's infamous declaration that she \"'meant nothing by the Lighthouse,'\" suggesting to her reader that the Wolf Man might have echoed, \"I meant nothing by the wolf-tree\" (92). In this chapter as in others, Ellmann, like Woolf, the Wolf Man, and Freud, makes her own scene, staging \"the unoccurred and unoccurable\" (92). In The Nets of Modernism, Ellmann, like the authors she studies, is \"caught in the nets of intersubjectivity and intertextuality\" (1). However, unlike Joyce's Stephen Dedalus who is \"torn between the dream of flight and the recognition of entanglement,\" Ellmann revels in the tangles (1). Although The Nets of Modernism does not impact the field in the manner of some of Ellmann's earlier work, it does present a productive and playful model of academic constellating, providing context in the upper-level classroom and inspiration for the academic seeking to get all tangled up.
TL;DR: Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas as discussed by the authors depicts the story of the cubist movement to reveal how financial and creative speculation motivates modern art movements.
Abstract: Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) amalgamates narrative and market-making aims. Adapting important formal features of the novel, the text depicts the story of the cubist movement to reveal how financial and creative speculation motivates modern art movements. Ventriloquizing Toklas enables Stein to distinguish the social world’s version of speculation (embodied by Toklas) from Stein’s aesthetic version. Simultaneously, the women’s committed partnership renders monetary and aesthetic speculation indivisible and interdependent. Stein’s feminine “wife” represents the degraded public sphere, while the text allegorizes different forms of speculation, knowledge, and value, binding them together.
TL;DR: The authors argue that Zohra works on two fronts, combining the private/personal and public/political: it critiques the systems of purdah and arranged marriage that shackle women in a secular nation desirous of modernity and insists on the rightful claims of Indian Muslims to belonging and citizenship in modern India (after Partition) on the basis of their anticolonial, anticommunalist struggles for social reform and national independence.
Abstract: Drawing on postcolonial, feminist, historicist, and formalist methodologies, this article reexamines an almost unknown novel Zohra (1951), among the first to be written and published in English by an Indian Muslim woman writer (Zeenuth Futehally). This article argues that Zohra works on two fronts, combining the private/personal and public/political: it critiques the systems of purdah and arranged marriage that shackle women in a secular nation desirous of modernity and insists on the rightful claims of Indian Muslims to belonging and citizenship in modern India (after Partition) on the basis of their anticolonial, anticommunalist struggles for social reform and national independence.
TL;DR: The Savage Coast as discussed by the authors is a lost, unpublished novel by the American poet Muriel Rukeyser, who traveled to Spain to report on the People's Olympiad, an alternative to Hitler's Berlin games.
Abstract: In 1936, the American poet Muriel Rukeyser traveled to Spain to report on the People’s Olympiad, an alternative to Hitler’s Berlin games. Instead, she witnessed the outbreak of civil war. Rukeyser’s writings on her experience span more than forty years, including a lost, unpublished novel, Savage Coast . Recently recovered from her archive, the novel is significant because it hybridizes the forms of aesthetic and political modernism and provides a more complex understanding of how women modernists write about politics and history through modes that both interrogate and transform the boundaries of genre.
TL;DR: In this article, the main character Paul Berlin fantasizes a young Vietnamese refugee named Sarkin Aung Wan and draws attention to Wan as a product of Berlin's imagination, which produces a metafictional construction of authorship and an imaginative construction of cross-gender identification that distance the novel from gender ideologies traditionally associated with war fiction.
Abstract: In Tim O’Brien’s Going after Cacciato , the main character Paul Berlin fantasizes a young Vietnamese refugee named Sarkin Aung Wan. Berlin conjures Wan from generic conventions from the western, the romance, the war story, and most originally in O’Brien scholarship, contemporary depictions of the National Liberation Front’s female peace negotiator Nguyen Thi Binh. This essay suggests that by drawing attention to Wan as a product of Berlin’s imagination, the novel produces a metafictional construction of authorship and an imaginative construction of cross-gender identification that distance the novel from gender ideologies traditionally associated with war fiction.
TL;DR: The authors argue that women in love, despite its air of apocalyptic defeatism, offers D. H. Lawrence's most intense engagement with the problem of how to imagine the future, through the figure of the couple, and ultimately hinges upon an unresolved tension between heterosexual and same-sex coupling.
Abstract: I argue that Women in Love , despite its air of apocalyptic defeatism, offers D. H. Lawrence’s most intense engagement with the problem of how to imagine the future. Lawrence’s tenuous hope for a world that does not repeat the oppressive patterns of normativity is communicated, surprisingly, through the figure of the couple—often a site of stinging critique for Lawrence—and ultimately hinges upon an unresolved tension between heterosexual and same-sex coupling. Far from being extinguished in the novel’s pages, the project of creating a new future for the couple is passed along to the reader to pursue.