Showing papers in "Modern Language Review in 2014"
TL;DR: In this article, a genealogy of Max Weber's claim that modernity is defined by the disenchantment of the world is discussed. But the relationship between Weber's diagnosis and the gods-in-exile theme as variously rendered by Friedrich Schiller, Heinrich Heine, and Walter Pater is not discussed.
Abstract: This article charts part of the literary genealogy of Max Weber's claim that modernity is defined by the ‘disenchantment of the world’. It clarifies the relationship between Weber's disenchantment diagnosis and the gods-in-exile theme as variously rendered by Friedrich Schiller, Heinrich Heine, and Walter Pater. It also sheds light on current debates about secularization, particularly on the extent to which the concepts of the ‘pagan’ and the ‘aesthetic’ tend by turns to enable and to destabilize secularization narratives.
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TL;DR: The authors examines postscripts both as a feature of eighteenth-century letters and as a literary device, arguing that the temporal lag between a letter and its postscript allowed novelists such as Richardson to explore new ways of manipulating narrative time.
Abstract: This article examines postscripts both as a feature of eighteenth-century letters and as a literary device. Although postscripts could be used for entirely banal purposes such as sending regards or expressing thanks for a gift, their fictional usage was governed by a more specialized set of conventions.. e main contention of this article is that the temporal lag between a letter and its postscript allowed novelists such as Richardson to explore new ways of manipulating narrative time. Henry Fielding's spoof novella Shamela, with its numerous postscripts, can be seen as an ironic reflection on that aspect of Richardson's novelistic practice.
TL;DR: The authors analyzed Genazino's poetics of temporality and identified five tactics of resistance through which the protagonists achieve temporary anchorage in a run-away world: retreat into melancholy, the performance of private rituals, fabrication of stories, the technique of the prolonged gaze and slowness.
Abstract: Drawing on current debates on the effects of a new ‘culture of immediacy’ in the digital era, this articles analyses Wilhelm Genazino’s poetics of temporality. While the modern flâneur was still a sovereign subject capable of transforming fleeting impressions into moments of quasi-metaphysical vision, his contemporary successor is a stray self roaming an illegible urban jungle in search of intimacy.
Genazino’s figures discover their non-contemporaneity with the contemporary as a creative resource that allows them to exercise temporal sovereignty in an era that is otherwise ruled by the hectic just-in-time ideology. Retreat into melancholy, the performance of private rituals, the fabrication of stories, the technique of the prolonged gaze and slowness emerge as five tactics of resistance through which Genazino’s protagonists achieve temporary anchorage in a run-away world. For Genazino literature necessarily rehabilitates the self’s Eigenzeit, thereby restoring interiority and intimacy as essential conditions of cultural connectivity.
TL;DR: The authors argue that the courtesan and her bed are central to Middleton's consideration of theatricality in A Mad World My Masters, where both body and stage are metonymised through the physical stage property of the bed.
Abstract: This paper argues that the courtesan and her bed are central to Middleton’s consideration of theatricality in A Mad World My Masters. The play achieves a radical representation of female sexuality through a combination of theatrical and generic innovations: in MIddleton’s attention to space and stage properties (exemplified through the bed as stage property) and through meta-theatrical playing with anti-theatrical discourses. This article thus participates in the material and spatial “turn” of recent criticism of early modern drama. Middleton’s courtesan celebrates theatrical and sexual autonomy, where both body and stage are metonymised through the physical stage property of the bed.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present a model-agnostic approach to model-aggregated research in the Modern Humanities Research Association (MHRA), which is based on the modelangrevi model.
Abstract: Author's manuscript version. The final published version is available from the publisher via doi: 10.5699/modelangrevi.109.3.0674
© Modern Humanities Research Association
TL;DR: For instance, in this article, a close reading of some key passages from Gower and Chaucer in comparison to their sources is presented, where the authors argue that Gower's more thoroughly informed Ovidian usage in the "Visio Anglie" represents the superiority of his learning, by contrast with the boy Chaucer.
Abstract: At heart, Carlson's essay is a close reading of some key passages from Gower and Chaucer in comparison to their sources: CA 4.3063-64, the brief description of the storm in the tale of "Ceix and Alceone," in contrast to the much longer passage in Ovid's "Metamorphoses" 11.474-572; VC 1.1593-2012, another description of a storm, in comparison to the same passage in Ovid; VC 1.1623-38, which incorporates five lines from a different passage in Met., 1.264-82; Gower's "Ceix and Alceone" in comparison to Chaucer's account in "The Book of the Duchess," which omits the final transformation that Gower retains; and VC 1.1231-32, in which Gower atypically turns to Vergil (Aeneid 4.173), in comparison to "House of Fame" 713-20, in which Chaucer atypically turns to Ovid instead (Met. 12.43-46). Carlson's discussion is informed by his own deep immersion in the Latin texts, so that he is able to describe, for instance, how Gower's borrowings from Ovid in VC are selected not just for their imagery but as evocations of the broader context in which they occur, and his comments are illuminating. He frames his analysis within an argument on Gower's efforts to outdo both Ovid and Chaucer, whom he viewed as rivals, as well as an effort to outdo his own earlier youthful work. Thus the briefer account of the storm represents Gower's correction of Ovid's excess, and the comparison to Chaucer betrays an underlying jealousy: "Though Gower was senior, perhaps by as much as a generation, Chaucer arrived earlier as an English poet," Carlson concludes. "Greater, prior success for Chaucer's English writings--evidently widely copied, by contrast with Gower's earliest efforts--may also have engendered a degree of disapprobation in Gower for the younger, less serious, but better-received English writer. Gower's more thoroughly informed Ovidian usage in the "Visio Anglie" represents the superiority of his learning, by contrast with the boy Chaucer. The still more thorough command of Ovidianism, still more subtly expressed, in the final "Confessio amantis" reuse of the Ceyx and Alcione matter--where the Chaucerian ineptitude seems to have offended Gower ('Ther mai no worldes joie laste' topping 'To lytel while oure blysse lasteth')--represents Gower's greater seriousness and knowledge, by comparison with the own, younger self that had engaged thoroughly with the same Ovid, and in the learned language itself, for the "Visio Anglie" section of 1381" (952). [PN. Copyright John Gower Society eJGN 34.1]
TL;DR: The authors examines the recent writing of Evgenii Popov (b. 1946), especially the 2012 novel @rbeit, and attempts to place the writer in the satirical tradition of Russian prose.
Abstract: This article examines the recent writing of Evgenii Popov (b. 1946), especially the 2012 novel @rbeit, and attempts to place the writer in the satirical tradition of Russian prose. The comparison with the nineteenth-century writer Nikolai Gogol? seems apt as both writers depict Russian society as a grotesque and absurd reality where the relationship between individuals and the collective breaks down and life itself borders on the phantasmagorical. Disparities, nevertheless, exist: Gogol? expresses anguish for the future of Russia, whereas Popov's work attacks injustice and corruption in both Soviet Russia and the Russia of President Putin.
TL;DR: The authors explored the intertextual link between Galdos's novel Tormento and Shakespeare's Othello, and argued that Galdo had Otollo much in mind when characterizing the protagonists of his novel as well as shaping key scenes.
Abstract: This article explores the hitherto ignored intertextual link between Galdos's novel Tormento and Shakespeare's Othello. Drawing on Galdos's critical observations concerning Shakespeare and the galley-proofs of Tormento, the article argues that Galdos had Othello much in mind when characterizing the protagonists of his novel as well as shaping key scenes. The cultural, ethnic, and social tensions underpinning Shakespeare's Venice offer parallels with Galdos's pre-revolutionary Madrid. The article shows how Galdos uses Othello as a counterpoint to prurient responses to female sexual transgression that typified his contemporaries and argues against critics who have seen Tormento as a novel about female duplicity.