Showing papers in "Modernism/modernity in 2005"

The Neobaroque in Djuna Barnes

Abstract: Djuna Barnes’s notoriously difficult work has received numerous critical explications, all of which have dealt, in one way or another, with the problem of style. The most salient characteristic of Barnes’s work is an ornate, circular, obscure, rambling, hyperbolic style, a style which is non-communicative and transgressive, and which is the major source of the anti-realism of Barnes’s work. Barnes’s writing flaunts its artificiality, the figural character of its discourse, opening up a space of unreality in a way that suggests that perhaps pure language is the real subject of her work. Any recognition of reference or content is embedded in a play of deception and truth that questions the very principle of representation. The case I wish to make here is that Barnes’s transgressive and ornate style was shaped by the neobaroque, a mode recuperated from the “obsolete” styles, forms, and themes of the historical baroque by twentieth-century writers in Europe and in the Americas. As is well known, Barnes criticism has seen two broad phases or orientations: first, Barnes’s early and high modernist critics, following her publisher and long-time friend T. S. Eliot’s lead, developed the importance of style and, in keeping with New Critical readings of modernism as experimental formalism, stressed the technical design of Barnes’s work. Because of its organization into static symbol patterns reminiscent of poetry, Nightwood, for example, was declared the paradigm of the modernist novel’s “spatial form” by critic Joseph Frank. 1 A new wave of feminist and new historicist critics, beginning in the 1970s, has emphasized the political and subversive aspects of her work— her gendered modernism, critique of the patriarchal family, portrayal of lesbian culture, and parody of contemporary sexologi

The Bauhaus of Nature

Abstract: In 1937 the biologist and ecologist Julian Huxley hosted a sumptuous farewell dinner party for Walter Gropius upon the occasion of his departure from London to become Chair of the Harvard School of Design. This major event took place at the fashionable Trocadero, Oxford Street, with a guest list that reads as a Who’s Who in the English scene of modernist design. 1 Strangely, among the guests one also finds—besides Huxley—prominent ecological scientists and environmentalists, which raises the question of why they were invited to the festivity. After all, ecologists seem to be odd guests at a party in honor of a Bauhaus architect. Social gatherings are often telling indications of an intellectual climate, as Gropius’ farewell dinner will illustrate. What brought Bauhaus designers and ecologists together, this article argues, was a shared belief that the human household should be modeled on the household of nature. The importance of science to Bauhaus design hardly dominates the historical studies of the school. 2 What significance had the sciences in general and ecology in particular to modernist architecture? Rightly labeled by one of their contemporaries as “scientific architects,” the following pages argue that Bauhaus designers saw science as a key vehicle for design development. 3 Though some Bauhaus designers were inspired by biology while the school was active in Germany, this article holds that the fusion of biological reasoning in Bauhaus design took place during the process of trying to reestablish the school in London after its expulsion from Nazi Germany. This London interlude is often ignored by historians. 4 The period was important for the school’s development in terms of ecological reasoning. This article will first lay out where and how Bauhaus designers and scientists in

The Woman in White: Whistler, Hiffernan, Courbet, Du Maurier

Abstract: This article examines the links among Whistler's epochal White Girl (1862), Courbet's infamous L'Origine du Monde (1866), and George Du Maurier's best-seller, Trilby (1894). The most obvious connection is Whistler's one-time model and mistress, Johanna Hiffernan, the original of the White Girl, but also the probable model for Courbet's painting, and, I suggest, for Du Maurier's heroine, Trilby O' Ferrall. I argue that (a) Whistler's 1862 painting is a "sensation" painting, a visual assault that rejects narrative content for painterly abstraction, shocking the viewer out of a contemplative attitude to the art work, and thus part of a more general 1860s sensation culture that attempts to process modernity; and that (b) Du Maurier's novel is a piece of art theory in narrative form that demonizes his one-time room-mate, Whistler, as Svengali (his "abstraction" of Hiffernan into a "symphony in white" appears as Svengali's turning Trilby into an unconscious singing machine), but also that the recurring fetishism of Trilby in the novel (her much-worshipped feet, for example) suggests that Du Maurier knew of Courbet's "secret" painting of Hiffernan, and that he theorizes Whistler's modern abstraction as disingenuous—as another kind of fetishism that depends on harnessing Hiffernan's sexuality just as much as L'Origine does.

The Colors of Zion: Black, Jewish, and Irish Nationalisms At the Turn of the Century

Abstract: George Bornstein is C. A. Patrides Professor of Literature at the University of Michigan. His numerous books on and editions of modernist literature include most recently Material Modernism: The Politics of the Page (Cambridge University Press, 2001) and the forthcoming Early Essays volume of the Collected Works of W. B. Yeats (Scribner and Palgrave, 2006). The Colors of Zion: Black, Jewish, and Irish Nationalisms At the Turn of the Century

The Motor in the Soul: Isadora Duncan and Modernist Performance

Abstract: In the first decades of the twentieth century, F.T. Marinetti’s futurist cheer, “Hurrah for motors,” collided against Victorian invocations of spirituality—or so the period divide is often oversimplified.1 Performers and artists during the period, however, did not adhere to assumed antagonisms between spirituality and materiality, human culture and the machine age, or the soul and the motor. “I must place a motor in my soul,” declares the American-born dancer, Isadora Duncan (1877–1927) in her 1927 autobiography, and she consistently positions her choreography at the juncture of motorized movement and soulful expression. Her efforts to reimagine spirit through machine processes are shared by many key figures of modernism, including the Russian director Constantin Stanislavski and even Marinetti. Although Duncan is credited with the invention of the performance form now called “modern dance,” her influence on modernist performance has not been recognized. Her theories are dismissed as “romantic grandiloquence,”2 primarily due to her use of terms associated with Victorianism (“soul,” “inner self,” and “human spirit”).3 Even the best critical studies argue that Duncan “never completed the leap” from “late-nineteenth-century-romanticism”

Conflict and Commemoration: Two Berlin Memorials

Abstract: Through a juxtaposition of two recent memorials in Berlin—the Neue Wache in central Berlin and the "Places of Remembering" memorial in the Bavarian Quarter neighborhood—I explore ongoing controversies in the aesthetics and politics of remembrance in Germany. After situating the study within the larger debate surrounding "collective identity" and "social memory," I draw on Walter Benjamin's notion of "dialectical image" in order to trace the fault-lines that fissure the Neue Wache memorial throughout its history, even as it is used repeatedly to forge national unity that conflates civil and military traditions in remembering the war dead. Following a brief excursus in which I argue for the futility of Holocaust memorials oriented around the (im)possibility of representing historical catastrophe, I turn to the Bavarian Quarter memorial as itself constituting dialectical images which induce the lived or pragmatic perception of what Benjamin called "non-sensuous similarity" as a genuine historical experience.

Passing as Modernism

Abstract: In 1990 Barbara Johnson gave a series of lectures at the University of Chicago on psychoanalysis and African American literature. In those days many feminists were exploring the question of whether or how post-structuralist theories could be applied to multicultural literatures. At the time I was an untenured assistant professor heavily influenced by Johnson’s style of deconstruction, so you can imagine my discomfort when I learned that the second lecture in that series, entitled “No Passing,” was to be a reading of Nella Larsen’s Passing, the very novel I was then writing about in an essay that would turn out to be the inception of Passing and Pedagogy: The Dynamics of Responsibility (1999). So at the reception following the first lecture, I cornered Johnson and anxiously spewed out all the ideas I was exploring in that essay, seeking to convince her (and possibly myself) that I hadn’t taken my ideas from the lecture that I hadn’t yet heard. I talked about the nature of our authority, as white feminist critics trained in a Eurocentric theoretical and literary tradition, in the African American literature classroom where, as Patricia Hill Collins and Diana Fuss remind us, knowledge derived from experience is given more credibility than knowledge acquired through training. How does racial difference inflect the process of transference that you have helped us to see as central to the pedagogical relation, I asked her? What does it mean to learn from the one presumed not to know, from (so to speak) an unreliable narrator? In response to these questions that I found so urgent and complicated, Johnson replied with her characteristic composure: All I know is, she said, I don’t want to be another Carl Van Vechten.1 Johnson’s response came back to me several years later when I was researching and teaching at the Newberry Library in

The Woman's Historical Novel: British Women Writers, 1900-2000 (review)

Abstract: As a generic term, “Historical Fiction” is somewhat of a chameleon. It has a tendency to assume various guises, heralding a whole spectrum of associations. And though often subject to baffling levels of critical neglect, women writers across the twentieth century have, as Diana Wallace’s vital study reveals, sought to displace assumptions of historical fiction as middlebrow diversion confined to the frivolous conventions of domestic romance by pushing back the stylistic boundaries to enhance it as a medium for political critique. So multifarious has this intervention by women writers been, in fact, that the task today of retrospectively mapping the historical novel’s journey from one end of the last century to the other demands a formidable range of interpretative strategies. This is the challenge Wallace invites and relishes in her highly self-reflexive new book, leading us from Georgette Heyer’s swashbuckling fantasies to Jeanette Winterson’s parodistic metafiction, all the while addressing us in a manner that is at once generous and convivial, but without simply being uncritically affirmative toward the marginalized authors she redeems. Aware that many readers are likely to encounter several faces for the first time, Wallace adopts a style that remains conceptually dexterous yet approachable in its capacious exposition of material between periods—an exposition in which countless women writers hitherto marginalized by neglect are retrieved as we shift nimbly between survey and textual analysis. Throughout, indeed, one detects an undertone of genuine personal investment in the revisionary impulse of the project in its entirety, with Wallace tracing twin “uses of history” between her selected practitioners: principally, how the thematization of “escape” is articulated through immediate forms of polemical engagement (2). This in turn is a catalyst for an assessment of how the women’s historical novel has both complicated and enhanced our “understanding,” to borrow her estimation of Daphne du Maurier, “of the ways in which the past is constructed as a space to which the reader can escape” (88). Wallace is suitably dissatisfied with the parochialism of Lukács’s paradigm for historical realism, and turns instead to Umberto Eco’s typology which divides historical fiction into “the male adventure story . . . and the female-centered romance” (22), though querying here the complacency with which these two key generic formats have traditionally been bifurcated along gendered lines. Later in the book, it is this same rhetorical doubleness which becomes a subversive resource: as Wallace shows, by inheriting Heyer’s satirical reformulation of perspective and persona through the vocabulary of masquerade, many women novelists have capitalized upon the ambiguities of narrative voice to scrutinize the cultural mediation of embodiment. “Given the need to be ‘circumspect’ when writing about men,” asserts Wallace, “the historical novel offers women the opportunity of carrying out a double ventriloquism—a male voice from the past—with impunity” (23). And while tracing such affinities across successive decades, neither does Wallace prevaricate over the always problematic question of selection and omission. A corpus for a study of this scope will necessarily be representative, and the crucial task it faces is in tracing formal trends across an epoch of such momentous sociopolitical change without compromising the particularity of each writer’s aesthetic concerns. Wallace succeeds in retaining this imperative, proceeding chronologically by decade after discovering in Sophia Lee’s The Recess (1783) a striking antecedent to many of the preoccupations to which women writers returned in the interwar years.1 Lee’s multiperspectival work emblematizes this study’s insight into the “handling of narrative point of view.” For in The Recess the “use of a view from below or the side of conventional histories is one of Lee’s most important

T. S. Eliot: The Performativity of Gender in The Waste Land

Abstract: Cyrena Pondrom is Professor of English and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research specializations are Anglo-American modernist poetry and the avant-garde. She has written on Eliot, Stein, H.D., Pound, Moore, Barnes, cummings, and the literary history of modernist poetry. She is currently completing a book entitled T.S. Eliot and the Performativity of Gender, which will incorporate the current essay. T. S. Eliot: The Performativity of Gender in The Waste Land

Sense, Science, and the Interpretations of Gertrude Stein

Abstract: Of the many hostile reviews Gertrude Stein received in her lifetime, the award for Most Vitriolic would probably go to one written by Michael Gold. In 1936 Gold labeled Stein “a literary idiot,” claiming that her work represents “an example of the most extreme subjectivism of the contemporary artist,” and that it is on a par with “the monotonous gibberings of paranoiacs in the private wards of asylums.” Stein possesses a “strong, clear, shrewd mind,” and “was an excellent medical student, a brilliant psychologist,” but her work looks, said Gold—fine-tuning the theme of mental derangement—“like the literature of padded cells in Matteawan.” Only good Marxists, his review concludes, will properly be able to see through the “mystic irrationalities” that Stein’s work represents: “They see in the work of Gertrude Stein extreme symptoms of the decay of capitalist culture” and “the same kind of orgy and spiritual abandon that marks the life of the whole leisure class.”2 Whether or not we agree with Gold about capitalist decadence, he is surely not the only reader to wonder whether Stein’s work is an exercise in self-isolation. An association between “extreme subjectivism” and the experiments of early twentieth-century literature has been made by readers of all stripes, Robert Chodat is Assistant Professor of English at Boston University, where he specializes in contemporary American literature and literary theory. He is currently completing a study of modern literature and philosophy of mind entitled The Patterns of Persons: Ideas of Agency in Twentieth-Century Literature and Philosophy.

Eliot among the Typists: Writing The Waste Land

Abstract: To students of twentieth-century modernism, 1971 was the year when Valerie Eliot published a facsimile edition of The Waste Land’s pre-publication manuscripts. The event invited new accounts of the poem’s genetics and fresh assessments of how those might bear on our understanding of the poem.1 One year later Hugh Kenner and Grover Smith published two essays which, while differing sharply in premises and procedures, reached a consensus that Part III, “The Fire Sermon,” was the earliest portion of the poem to have been written, probably around midsummer 1921, followed first by Parts I and II, then by IV and V, the latter completed in December 1921.2 Their efforts were followed in 1977 by Lyndall Gordon’s attempt at “Dating The Waste Land Fragments,” a wide-ranging survey which addressed both the principal parts of The Waste Land and the various drafts and ancillary poems.3 In the end, however, Gordon remained divided over the claims of two sharply incompatible hypotheses for dating the principal parts of The Waste Land, and concluded that the question was, at least for the present, “unresolved” (“DTWLF,” 146). In 1979 there was still another consideration of the dating by Peter Barry.4 Barry urged a complicated chronology which assigned priority to the first leaf in the typescript for Part I, a passage recounting a rowdy night on the town in Boston (assigned to April–May 1921), followed by all of Part III (September–October), then the rest of Part I and all of Part II (early November), and finally Parts IV Lawrence Rainey, founding editor of Modernism/Modernity, has written Ezra Pound and the Monument of Culture (1991) and Institutions of Modernism (1999). His monograph Revisiting The Waste Land and his edition of The Annotated Waste Land, with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose will both appear in April 2005 (Yale University Press).

The Economic Structure of Intellectual Property Law (review)

Abstract: Anyone who studies modernism must wrestle with its persistence—its refusal to concede cleanly to postmodernism, its afterlives in market and archive and seminar, its cultural undeath. Recent extensions in national and international copyright law regimes have increased modernism’s legal longevity, too, and with immediately tangible consequences for scholars. Many of us who knew nothing about copyright law ten years ago are now comfortable with legal doctrine and lingo: the idea/expression dichotomy, fair dealing and fair use, derivative works, moral rights, works-for-hire. If, for example, you are a scholar of modernism who seeks to publish in the U.S., you have had to become conversant with the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, which brings unpublished works (letters, diaries, literary manuscripts, lectures, photographs, etc.) under statutory protection for the first time. As if to make things especially difficult for modernist studies, the Bono Act also protects works published between 1923 and 1978 for 95 years from their first publication date. In the lengthening shadow of copyright, at least, the answer to the question “What is modernism?” is “That which is still propertized.” Fittingly, then, Landes and Posner’s book is studded with references to modernism. The Waste Land turns up repeatedly as the cardinal example of those “noble plagiarisms of the cultural tradition” (63). Ulysses is described, not a little bizarrely, as a work that copies “only one old work” (216). Shaw’s borrowings from Ovid, Yeats’s from Shelley, and Kafka’s from Kleist and Dickens have a place here, as does “The Sweeniad,” a 1957 parody of Eliot by Victor Purcell writing as “Myra Buttle” (“Thirst overtook us, conjured up by Budweisserbrau / On a neon sign: we counted our dollar bills”). These works are brought to testify that “the echoing of the literature of the past has been a common device of modernist literature; one is not just talking about a vanished era of literary conventions” (59). In a chapter entitled “The Legal Protection of Postmodern Art,” the authors show how more recent variations on

The Modernist Response to Chinese Art: Pound, Moore, Stevens (review)

Abstract: With the publication of Zhaoming Qian’s acclaimed Orientalism and Modernism: The Legacy of China in Pound and Williams (Duke University Press, 1995), few critics and literary historians would now doubt the crucial role Chinese poetry played in shaping Pound’s and Williams’s transition toward modernism in particular, and in shaping Anglo-European high modernism in general. By moving China to center stage in modernist studies with that pioneering study, Qian contributed significantly to our understanding of modernism as a multicultural phenomenon. The same author has now published another acclaimed book The Modernist Response to Chinese Art: Pound, Moore, and Stevens, which explores the three modernist poets’ creative response to and appropriation of Chinese visual art in their poetry. Given the book’s intended readership of “scholars and students devoted to poetic modernism” (xix), who are likely unfamiliar with Chinese art, one immediately notes three formidable challenges for Qian that are presented by the book’s subject: 1) providing expertise in modern American poetry and Chinese art and culture, 2) describing the exchange between the verbal and the visual, 3) making visible the exchange between American poetry and Chinese art. To Qian’s credit, he meets these challenges superbly by making the book accessible even to readers without much knowledge of modern American poetry and Chinese art. Appropriately, he begins by addressing the question: how did the three American poets come to engage with Chinese art and culture? He details, with precision and erudition, their visits to such places as the British Museum (Pound and Moore), the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (Stevens), and their reading of such cultural transmitters as Lawrence Binyon, Ernest Fenollosa, H. A. Giles (Pound), Arthur Waley and Witter Bynner (Moore). Qian provides a clear chronology of the three poets’ early encounters with Chinese art and culture, and these encounters are set against the larger context of a Western zeal for Chinese art and culture. But why were the three American poets so attracted to exotic Chinese paintings? What was it in the pictures they saw that captivated their eyes? This is the second question Qian addresses in the first two parts of the book. Qian shows that the three poets were fascinated by the Confucian and Daoist ideals in the pictures they viewed. He explains, vividly and lucidly, how the pictures Lady Feng and the Bear (48) and Lady Ban Refuses to Ride (50) illustrate the Confucian ideas of loyalty to the lord and

Realism, Late Modernist Abstraction, and Sylvia Townsend Warner's Fictions of Impersonality

Abstract: "As the photographer does," asserted Storm Jameson in 1937, "so the writer must keep himself out of the picture while working ceaselessly to present the fact." It was this same subversion of authorial subjectivity which assumed a radically new guise for late modernist women writers of the 1930s and 1940s such as Sylvia Townsend Warner, when they redressed novelistic experiment to find pragmatic and uncompromising ways of effecting an urgently needed historicizing critique of developing Fascism in Europe. Expanding the creative and critical efficacy of "realist" fiction itself as another world war loomed, it was Warner who actively engaged with the stylization of documentary and externalism by re-envisioning narrative impersonality.

On French and British Freedoms: Early Bloomsbury and the Brothels of Modernism

Abstract: When that Byronic gay blade of Bloomsbury Clive Bell proposed in his 1923 pamphlet On British Freedom that “Great Britain is one of the least free countries in the world,” he had in mind not Britain’s great political freedom, admired by all Europe, but the everyday personal, social, and public freedoms that ordinary Frenchmen take for granted.1 In France, Bell observed, art, literature, and theater flourish without a censor’s interference; bars and restaurants may be open at all hours yet do sometimes close without a curfew; people pursue their amatory affairs without state supervision; and a working man can raise a point of Biblical textual criticism without fear of prosecution by the state. An “ordinary Englishman” enjoys none of these freedoms, Bell pointed out, and indeed “is, on the whole, less free than a Roman slave in the time of Hadrian” (OBF, 4). From the Puritan revolution to the 1737 Licensing Act that put the playwrights of Shakespeare’s land into shackles through the nineteenth-century “reign of the Puritan middle-classes,” the ordinary Englishman’s everyday freedoms have been so far curtailed that such writers as Shaw and Wells, “when they sit down to work for humanity,” must “wonder whether what they want to say will be sanctioned by some shop-keeping alderman, or illiterate fox-hunter, or by a committee of dyspeptic and time-worn virgins” (OBF, 13, 10). Although Bloomsbury’s significance as a modern movement is often dismissed on grounds of class privilege, Bell writes here on behalf of “ordinary” Englishmen. The English aristocracy after all suffered few practical restrictions on their personal and social freedoms, and Bell’s Bloomsbury compeers had long Christine Froula, Professor of English, Comparative Literary Studies, and Gender Studies at Northwestern University, has published widely on modern thought and literature, including Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde: War, Civilization, Modernity (2005), Modernism’s Body: Sex, Culture, and Joyce (1996), and To Write Paradise: Style and Error in Ezra Pound’s Cantos (1984).

Alternative Functions: Oscar Niemeyer and the Poetics of Modernity

Abstract: In August 2003, a group of protesters stormed the Praça dos Três Poderes (“Plaza of the Three Powers”) in the center of Brasília.1 All three branches of Brazil’s federal government have their main palaces around this great plaza at the southern tip of the capital’s “Monumental Axis;” the particular target on this day being the Congresso Nacional. At one point a small group among the hundreds of protesters around the Congress armed themselves with office chairs and whatever else they could find, and began to smash the large plate glass windows that form a wall along the northern flank of the structure. This violence was, of course, primarily political in nature, although it is doubtful that many of the protesters realized just how profoundly political it was. The immediate cause of their outrage was a severe diminution of state pension benefits proposed by the government of President Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva of the leftist Partido dos Trabalhadores (“Worker’s Party”). The protesters were current and retired state bureaucrats, a class of workers who have traditionally been promised rather exorbitant retirement benefits by every political regime (democratic and autocratic alike) since Getúlio Vargas’s modernizing Estado Novo (1937–46). Although Lula had been elected to the presidency as the representative of this bureaucratic class, immediately upon assuming his post he was faced with an impossible fiscal choice brought on by a pension system the nation could no longer afford: either betray his own constituency, or plunge Brazil into bankruptcy, destabilizing international finance markets in the process.2 The protesters in Brasília that day were making as much of a poetic statement as they were making a political one. My

Crossing the Great Divides: Selfridges, Modernity, and the Commodified Authentic

Abstract: Mr. Selfridge, however, in his gracefully worded advertisements, lays but little stress on the commercial side of his gigantic undertaking. We are to look upon Selfridges rather as a pleasant place for a quiet look round than as a mere store. We are to go there as connoisseurs contemplating a choice collection, not as seekers after bargains. Everything is to be done to make our visit pleasant for us, and should anybody desire to acquire any new possessions on a basis of payment, it is rumoured that even that will not be impossible in this remarkable establishment. Bystander, “A Week of Shopping,” 19092

Planets on Tables: Still Life and War in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens

Abstract: Bonnie Costello is Professor of English and American literature at Boston University. She is the author of many articles on modern and contemporary poetry and several books, including Marianne Moore: Imaginary Possessions, Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery, and Shifting Ground: Reinventing Landscape in American Poetry. She was General Editor of The Selected Letters of Marianne Moore. Planets on Tables: Still Life and War in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens

Incomplete Modernities: Historicizing Yugoslavian Avant-Gardes

Abstract: Out of the traces left behind by the dissolution of a country once known as Yugoslavia, a new history is taking shape, a history that indeed occurred in the past, yet which could only really happen now when the events that make up this history’s content are already irreparably over. The paradoxical, “impossible” history of Yugoslavian modernism and the Yugoslavian avant-garde is becoming newly present in the vacant place marked by a still contested, but largely empty sign that was once a proper name, Yugoslavia. Moreover, as these two rich and provocative books suggest, the curiously equivocal time of this history-under-construction echoes the original, problematic temporal structure of the modernist arts in the historical Yugoslavia. Through their focus on the brilliant but dispersive production of modernist visual artists, writers, musicians, architects, and performers in the South Slav lands, both books help to illuminate the fantastic national-utopian fulfillment of modern time under the sign of “Yugoslavia” as the ultimate message of its dissonant collage of cultural, linguistic, and territorial elements—a time that has now definitively passed beyond its end. The editors of the compendious essay and document collection Impossible Histories, Dubravka Djurić and Miško Šuvaković, present readers with a kind of avant-garde remapping of Yugoslavia’s impossible

Reading Modernism, After Hugh Kenner (1923-2003): Hugh Kenner And The Invention of Modernism

Abstract: “Art,” quips Hugh Kenner in A Homemade World (1975) “lifts the saying out of the zone of things said” (HW, 60). The reference is to William Carlos Williams’s poems, such as “The Red Wheelbarrow,” that do not seem to “say” anything profound and yet are brilliantly articulated. It is a notion close to Wittgenstein’s adage “that a poem, although it is composed in the language of information, is not used in the language-game of giving information.”1 Kenner’s emphasis on the how rather than the what has sometimes led critics to confuse him with the New Critics. But Kenner, who studied at Yale under Cleanth Brooks, had little truck with New Critical doctrine, which was, for his taste, excessively thematic and figural. The New Critic tracked a given poem’s unifying metaphor or paradox—for example, the comparison of lovers to saints in Donne’s “Canonization.” Kenner, by contrast, never focused on what Reuben Brower called the “key design” or “the aura around a bright clear centre”;2 he looked, not for centeredness but for difference. What makes Beckett’s syntax unique and different from Joyce’s? How did Pound’s annotation of Eliot’s Waste Land transform that particular poem? How did the language of the turn of the century popular magazine Tit-Bits differ from the representation of Gerty McDowell’s seemingly similar maudlin kitsch language in Ulysses? The ethos that animates such questions is hard to characterize. You will not find Kenner’s name in the endless handbooks of literary theory and criticism that have sections on formalism,

Kitsching The Cantos

Abstract: Daniel Tiffany, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California, is the author of Radio Corpse: Imagism and the Cryptaesthetic of Ezra Pound (Harvard University Press, 1995) and Toy Medium: Materialism and Modern Lyric (University of California Press, 2000), named by the Los Angeles Times as one of the “Best Books of 2000.” His poetry and translations (from French, Italian, and Greek) have been widely published. He is currently writing a book entitled “Lyric Monadologies,” a study of the problem of lyric obscurity, vernacular poetry, and infidel culture. Kitsching The Cantos

The Invention of the Western Film: A Cultural History of the Genre's First Half-Century (review)

Abstract: Identifying origins, cultural moments of birth or invention, is a fraught exercise; it inevitably tells us as much about ourselves and our obsessions as it does about the past. And so, although Scott Simmon mentions George W. Bush only once and only at the end of his nuanced and ideologically sophisticated study of the western’s invention on film, the specter of the Texas rancher with his cowboy ethics, frontier justice, and wild west rhetoric (especially but by no means exclusively post-9/11 when most of this book was written) haunts its every page. The western, as a meaningful vehicle for contemporary cinema, may indeed be dead (although its demise has been predicted ever since film’s first decade), yet its mythologies remain a vital, even primal, force in American culture. And this is why Simmon’s work on the origin of the genre and the development of its “classic” imperatives is so compelling. What The Invention of the Western Film demonstrates so persuasively, from start to finish, is the extent to which the genre cannot, despite the popular currency of its familiar clichés, be reduced to the kind of easy certainties—the good, the bad and the ugly—that Bush, his allies, and critics readily exploit. The ideologies that shape the western and that it in turn promulgates are, from the evidence of its first half-century, as divergent as Teddy Roosevelt and FDR, both of whom famously drew on the authority of its competing representations of the frontier and (white) America’s manifest destiny. The invention of the western film can be dated with, for this kind of exercise, surprising precision to 1894. In that year, Thomas Edison, better known as the inventor of the light bulb, opened his first kinetoscope parlor and shortly thereafter released one of his first films: a twenty-second piece called Sioux Ghost Dance. Edison’s brief images of bare-chested and beaded Sioux, played in his New Jersey studio by real Native American actors on a morning break from Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show, recall the 1890 battle at Wounded Knee, where the Sioux, following the killing of their chief Sitting Bull at a spiritual revival named for its “Ghost Dance” ceremony, were massacred in what became the last major confrontation of the Plains War. The finality of that battle was not lost on the American public; at the 1893 meeting of the American Historical Association, which coincided with Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exposition, a celebration of the four hundred years since America’s “discovery,” Frederick Jackson Turner famously declared the frontier closed. The era of America’s westward expansion is over; the Indian is dead (or on tour); and so film steps in to fill, and reinvent, the gap. The absurdities that subtend this very short and very first western, nowhere more evident than in its complex rendering of recent history, provide a kind of leitmotif for Simmon’s read-

Problem Space: Mary Butts, Modernism, and the Etiquette of Placement

Abstract: The second novel in Mary Butts’s 1928 Taverner Novels series, The Death of Felicity Taverner, repeatedly returns to the topic of how to correctly possess things, lauding a style of ownership that blends “passion and detachment” (169). For Butts, one’s affective relation to what one possesses defines an ethics and politics, a lifestyle. The Taverners, Butts writes, did “not tire of real things once they . . . got them home to play with” (301). In praising the family, Butts does not simply define their “real things” as authentic objects, instead of spurious imitations or copies. Rather, here Butts understands a “real thing” as an empirical surface, perceptible to touch, sight and smell:

Oskar Kokoschka's Sex Toy: The Women and the Doll Who Conceived the Artist

Abstract: Bonnie Roos is an Assistant Professor at Austin College. Her current research includes European Modernist stories of “art into life,” and is titled “Reviving Pygmalion: Art, Life and the Figure of the Statue in the Modernist Period.” Her articles have appeared in Comparative Literature, Comparative Literature Studies, Yale Journal of Criticism, and Aurora: The Journal of the History of Art. Oskar Kokoschka’s Sex Toy: The Women and the Doll Who Conceived the Artist

Anais Nin, Fictionality and Femininity: Playing a Thousand Roles

Abstract: As Helen Tookey reminds us (quoting Deirdre Bair’s 1995 biography of Anaïs Nin), “in many cases, the mere mention of [Nin’s] name,” to certain people who had been involved with her, “provoked vehemence and outrage” (188). By contrast, the feminism which emerged after the 1960s constituted “a vastly more receptive climate,” albeit for Nin’s diaries rather than her fiction (190). Both responses, Tookey suggests, whether an extreme receptivity or a visceral repugnance, can be traced to “Nin’s function as a mobiliser of fantasies” (189). Her study attempts to clarify what those fantasies were and are, and how Nin mobilized them. Tookey illustrates how Nin narrativized female subjectivity through a number of media and tropes, while remaining committed to none of them. Her expressivity in life and letters was felt by some to have been culpably amoral, while for others it remains liberating. The processes of diary-keeping and selective self-fictionalizing are traced, as are the uses Nin found for psychoanalysis, and for the work of Otto Rank. The controlling metaphor of Tookey’s study, however, is that of the actress, which dominates this book’s central chapter, returning later in another form, under the trope of masquerade. Nin remarked of her own diary: “I feel as if all the adventures which succeed one another were unfolding themselves like a play in a theatre—and I, miles and miles away, watching” (31). The diary’s very form could indeed reflect this feeling. As Tookey notes: “In the entry for 7 March 1931, for instance, she sets out a dialogue under the title ‘Part I of Play, “Warmth,”’ with the characters ‘Eduardo and Me’” (34). The diary’s “emphasis on the ‘present moment’” (46) likewise suggests an attempt to appropriate the immediacy of drama; and so, “all I had done during the week was like a perfect play” (48). Nin’s spectation came of her sense of the self’s constructedness, its status as an agglomeration of “a thousand roles” (52). Since this was always true, there was nothing to regret, and she embraced the possibilities in that situation. Agency was not a source of responsibility, but another kind of persona to be adopted or set aside. Of her psychoanalytic sessions with Rank, Nin said to Henry Miller in 1932 that the talking cure might be “the most subtle, the most insidious, the most magnificent way of making dramas more terrible, more maddening” (66). But despite that mention of the “terrible [and] maddening,” this is high praise, revealing a commitment to dramatic values as such, irrespective of their bearing upon life as an ethical arena. It is this that convinces many of Nin’s culpability as a morals-free zone; and Nin’s sometimes voraciously indiscriminate sexual promiscuity can seem to provide fuel enough for that particular fire. This behavior also informs the character of Sabina in A Spy in the House of Love, Nin’s novel of 1954 in which the heroine, an “actress in life,” “fakes a career as a professional stage actress in order to pursue her multiple desires” (85). Sexuality thus becomes a “staged spectacle” (88). In Nin’s actual mode of life and in her erotica, Tookey sees “a clear link with Nin’s fascination throughout her writing with the figure of the actress, with staging, illusion, and role-play” (89). Nin herself admitted in 1941: “Nothing fascinates me more than the actress” (91). Tookey sources this in a “paradoxical notion of women as essentially inessential, as mere surface, illusion, acting” (91), owing to their patriarchally constructed social roles. Patriarchy’s own interest in female role-playing becomes “particularly visible . . . in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as male anxieties about the place of women within the new urban contexts of modern cultures crystallized in the fin-de-siècle obsession with figures of actresses and prostitutes, ‘problematically public’ women who seemed to pose a threat . . . to the hegemonic order” (92).

Unlike Many Others: Exceptional White Characters in Harlem Renaissance Fiction

Abstract: Emily Bernard is Assistant Professor of English and Alana U. S. Ethnic Studies at the University of Vermont. Her first book, Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, was a New York Times Notable Book of 2001. Her second book, Some of My Best Friends: Writers on Interracial Friendship, will be published in paperback in July 2005. This essay is part of her current project, a monograph on interracial dynamics during the Harlem Renaissance. Unlike Many Others: Exceptional White Characters in Harlem Renaissance Fiction

Mestizo Modernism: Race, Nation and Identity in Latin American Culture, 1900-1940 (review)

Abstract: The fact that the term modernism (or “modernismo”) was actually coined in the 1880s by the Nicaraguan Rubén Darío has not proved enough to earn turn of the century Latin American poetry a significant place in scholarship on international modernism. In part this is due to divergent understandings of the term in different geographical and institutional locations. Modernismo, spanning the period from the 1880s to the 1910s, has tended to be read as a continuation of French symbolism (despite its debt to Whitman and Poe), and more recently, as a declaration of cultural independence on the part of decolonizing and modernizing poets, turning to France in an effort to stave off both a Spanish colonial heritage and a more recent threat from the north. Its more vernacular late stage of postmodernismo is displaced by an avant-garde which loudly declares its radical break with the past, leaving comparative or hemispheric scholars with a picture of two modernisms that don’t quite meet up, and an avant-garde that apparently rejects all traditions, comparisons, and connections. Tace Hedrick’s dense and impressive Mestizo Modernism makes the surprising yet compelling move of obliquely addressing this terminological disparity, recasting Latin American avant-garde production as, in fact, modernist. This gesture, as she convincingly argues, does not amount to imposing yet another Anglophone interpretative framework on to material produced elsewhere, but will rather allow scholars to reconnect the artwork of the period to the modernizing discourses with which it is entangled. In broad and bold terms, Hedrick is concerned not with contrasting modernisms but with examining changing ways of reading them, following a recent critical tradition north and south of the border which embeds modernist production in its sociopolitical context. In the scrupulousness, range, and depth of its endeavor, Mestizo Modernism takes its place alongside scholarship on “new modernist studies” in the United States—particularly the work of Susan Hegeman, Marc Manganaro, Houston Baker, and Amy Kaplan—which aims to unsettle the notions of both modernity and culture and unearth their racial, class, and gender underpinnings, not to mention their debts to hard and social sciences and their attendant ideologies. Hedrick’s study also naturally connects with recent rereadings of Latin American poetry, prose, and artwork in the first part of the twentieth century; it goes beyond the foundational scholarship of such critics as Cathy Jrade, Beatriz Sarlo, Vicky Unruh, and Néstor García Canclini, in its deft interweaving of artistic production and self-presentation, high and mass culture, debates on modernization, and public policy. Mestizo Modernism is particularly attentive to the role played by debates on race and national integration in the modernist period. Hedrick’s discussion of mestizaje zooms in on concrete programs and procedures at the often overlapping state and artistic levels; what is more, it brilliantly traces the convergence at both levels of discourses on race and modernity, but also of gender—and, implicitly, class. The foundational figure of the new continental imaginary of

Hart Crane's Smile

Abstract: This essay, excerpted from a larger study of queer optimism, extends a delineation, if not exegesis, of the myriad smiles found in the poetry of Hart Crane. The sheer multitude of Crane’s poetic smiles is only slightly less extraordinary than the fact that these smiles have hitherto been so cursorily (if not dismissively) broached by an otherwise sophisticated and burgeoning tradition of Crane scholarship. Extant critical engagements of Crane’s smiles have seemed cursory to the extent that they have seldom taken Crane’s smiles as such, but have instead swiftly co-opted them into either neutralizing temporal registers (the nostalgically preterite or untenably futural), or apposite (but by no means equivalent) affective categories. Exemplary of such co-optation is Eric Sundquist’s conflation of smiles and smirks, although the smirk appears in only one of Crane’s poems: “Lodged throughout Crane’s poetry in enigmatic postures of martyred comedy, the ‘smirk’ or ‘smile’ . . . has always the questionable status which Freud assigns to the joke. . . . ”2 Although smiles are indeed “lodged,” enigmatically, “throughout Crane’s poetry,” Sundquist’s analysis is misleading, if not apprehensive, in its dependence on an equivalence between smiling and smirking—an equivalence that Crane’s poetry, taken on its own terms, cannot support. Exemplary also is Sundquist’s presumption that a Cranian smile, when not smirking, is the screen for a more interesting or authentic emotional state: “What is concealed by these smiling façades is a prophetic suffering. . . . ”3 Michael Snediker is Visiting Assistant Professor of American Poetry and Queer Theory at Mount Holyoke College. He has articles forthcoming in Arizona Quarterly and The Henry James Review, and poetry forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal and Pleaides.

Reading Modernism, After Hugh Kenner (1923-2003): Hugh Kenner's Modernism and Ours

Abstract: Christine Froula, Professor of English, Comparative Literary Studies, and Gender Studies at Northwestern, has published Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde: War, Civilization, Modernity (Columbia, 2005), Modernism’s Body: Sex, Culture, and Joyce (Columbia, 1996), To Write Paradise: Style and Error in Ezra Pound’s Cantos (Yale, 1984), A Guide to Ezra Pound’s Selected Poems (New Directions, 1983), and numerous articles and essays. Reading Modernism, After Hugh Kenner (1923–2003)