Showing papers in "Modernism/modernity in 2006"
TL;DR: Friedman as discussed by the authors is the Virginia Woolf Professor of English and Women's Studies at the University of Wisconsin-madison and has written extensively on modernism including such writers as H.D., Woolf, and Joyce.
Abstract: Susan Stanford Friedman is Virginia Woolf Professor of english and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-madison. She writes extensively on modernism, including such writers as H.d., Woolf, and Joyce. Her recent books include Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter and Analyzing Freud: Letters of H.D., Bryher, and Their Circle. Currently, she is writing on globalization, migration, and diaspora as well as her book in progress, Planetary Modernism and the Modernities of Empire, Nation, and Diaspora. modernism / modernity volume thirteen, number three, pp 425–443. © 2006 the johns hopkins
161 citations
TL;DR: The authors argue that in order to understand the English novel's postcolonial turn in the middle of the twentieth century, we should revisit Voyage in the Dark and its interventions into British literary modernism.
Abstract: “It was as if a curtain had fallen, hiding everything I had ever known. It was almost like being born again,” muses Anna Morgan, the emigre narrator of Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark. 1 This 1934 novel about a Creole demimonde illuminates a complex but overlooked genealogical moment in twentieth-century literature: the point when the exhausted limits of modernist form revealed the lineaments of postcolonial fiction. Rhys’s semicanonical tale of a chorus-girl-turned-prostitute has generally been read as a key to pre-War London, a novel of female flânerie, or one among the author’s several fictions of feminine self-destruction. 2 In this essay, I argue that in order to understand the English novel’s “postcolonial turn” in the middle of the twentieth century, we should revisit Voyage in the Dark and its interventions into British literary modernism. The novel’s complex transnationality—the contrapuntal geography that oscillates between England and the West Indies—gives rise to its transitional literary quality: Rhys produces a new geopolitics that challenges the continued relevance of modernist formal accomplishments, and, simultaneously, inaugurates what would soon become the central goals of postcolonial literature in English. And although Voyage in the Dark has been overshadowed by Rhys’s 1966 masterpiece, Wide Sargasso Sea, it is the earlier novel that shows us a crucial transformation in the aesthetic priorities and political thrust of twentieth-century English fiction. As this fleeting, slight work gradually renders obsolescent the longstanding modernist worship of form, it announces the visionary and revisionary work of a nascent postcolonial literature.
42 citations
TL;DR: Gikandi as discussed by the authors is a professor of English at Princeton University and is the author of many books including Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature, Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism, and Ngugi wa Thiong'o, which was a Choice Outstanding academic Publication for 2004.
Abstract: Simon Gikandi is Professor of English at Princeton University. His major fields of research and teaching are the anglophone Literatures and Cultures of africa, india, the Caribbean, and Postcolonial Britain, the “Black” atlantic, and the african diaspora. He is the author of many books including Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature, Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o, which was a Choice Outstanding academic Publication for 2004. modernism / modernity volume thirteen, number three, pp 419–424. © 2006 the johns hopkins
40 citations
TL;DR: Doyle as mentioned in this paper co-edited Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity (2005), which offers a history of race and the novel, and, perhaps, George Bush.
Abstract: Laura Doyle is Professor of english at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. She has published widely on race and modernism in a transatlantic context, including in Bordering on the Body, and has recently co-edited Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity (2005). Her forthcoming book, Liberty’s Empire, offers a history of race and the novel—and, perhaps, George Bush (duke 2007). modernism / modernity volume thirteen, number three, pp 531–559. © 2006 the johns hopkins
33 citations
TL;DR: Ramazani as mentioned in this paper is the Shannon Professor of English and Department Chair at the University of Virginia, and his books include Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (1994), The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English (2001), and the most recent editions of The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry (2003) and The Twentieth Century and After in The NN Anthology OF English Literature (2006).
Abstract: Jahan Ramazani is Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English and Department Chair at the University of Virginia. His books include Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (1994), The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English (2001), and the most recent editions of The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry (2003) and The Twentieth Century and After in The Norton Anthology of English Literature (2006). modernism / modernity volume thirteen, number three, pp 445–463. © 2006 the johns hopkins
32 citations
Journal Article•
26 citations
TL;DR: Suzanne Raitt as mentioned in this paper is a professor of English and director of women's studies at the College of William and Mary, who has published Vita and Virginia: The Work and Friendship of V.Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf (Oxford University Press, 1993).
Abstract: Suzanne Raitt is Professor of English and Director of Women’s Studies at the College of William and Mary. Her publications include Vita and Virginia: The Work and Friendship of V.Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf (Oxford University Press, 1993), May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian (Oxford University Press, 2000), and a number of articles on British modernist women and psychoanalytic theory. She is currently working on a book called The Idea of Waste in British Culture, 1864–1922. The Rhetoric of Efficiency in Early Modernism
23 citations
TL;DR: Trotter as mentioned in this paper is the King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge and co-founder of the Cambridge Screen Media Group (www. screenmedia.group.cam.ac.uk).
Abstract: David Trotter is King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge. He was co-founder of the Cambridge Screen Media Group (www. screenmedia.group. cam.ac.uk), and is currently director of the University’s M.Phil. program in Screen Media and Cultures. His most recent book is Paranoid Modernism (2001). He has just completed a book on modernism and cinema. T. S. Eliot and Cinema
22 citations
TL;DR: Berman as mentioned in this paper discusses the connection between ethics and political engagement in modernist fiction, focusing on the work of Virginia Woolf, who was the coeditor of Out of Bounds (Pace 2001).
Abstract: Jessica Berman is associate Professor and Chair of english at the University of maryland, balitmore County. She is the author of Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism and the Politics of Community (Cambridge 2001) and was the coeditor of Virginia Woolf Out of Bounds (Pace 2001), papers from the tenth annual conference on Virginia Woolf, which she organized. This essay forms part of her current book project on the connection between ethics and political engagement in modernist fiction. modernism / modernity volume thirteen, number three, pp 465–485. © 2006 the johns hopkins
21 citations
TL;DR: Spector et al. as mentioned in this paper studied sexual and violence in German-speaking metropolitan central europe from 1860 to 1914, from the perspective of modernism and modernity, focusing on the Czech Republic.
Abstract: Scott Spector is Associate professor of History and German studies at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Prague Territories: National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka’s Fin de Siècle (University of california press, 2000). He is currently working on a book on sexuality and violence in German-speaking metropolitan central europe from 1860 to 1914. modernism / modernity volume thirteen, number four, pp 615–633. © 2006 the johns hopkins
TL;DR: There is no living library that does not harbor a number of booklike creations from fringe areas as mentioned in this paper, such as stick-in albums or family albums, autograph books or portfolios containing pamphlets or religious tracts; some people become attached to leaflets and prospectuses, others to handwriting facsimiles or typewritten copies of unobtainable books.
Abstract: There is no living library that does not harbor a number of booklike creations from fringe areas. They need not be stick-in albums or family albums, autograph books or portfolios containing pamphlets or religious tracts; some people become attached to leaflets and prospectuses, others to handwriting facsimiles or typewritten copies of unobtainable books; and certainly periodicals can form the prismatic fringes of a library.1
TL;DR: The present article stems from theoretical concerns raised in that book as mentioned in this paper, and it is based on the same theoretical concerns as the present article, but with a slightly different title: Reimagining the Flâneur: The Hero of the Novel in Lukács, Bakhtin, and Girard.
Abstract: Mary Gluck is professor of history at Brown University, where she teaches modern European cultural and intellectual history. She has published on the young Lukács, modernism, the Jewish Question, and, most recently, a book entitled Popular Bohemia: Modernism and Urban Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris. The present article stems from theoretical concerns raised in that book. Reimagining the Flâneur: The Hero of the Novel in Lukács, Bakhtin, and Girard
TL;DR: Presner as mentioned in this paper discusses Muscular Judaism: The Jewish Body and the Politics of Regeneration (routledge, 2007) and Mobile Modernity: Germans, Jews, Trains (Columbia University press, 2007).
Abstract: Todd Presner is Assistant professor of Germanic Languages and Jewish studies at the University of California Los Angeles. This article comes from his forthcoming book, Muscular Judaism: The Jewish Body and the Politics of Regeneration (routledge, 2007). He is also the author of Mobile Modernity: Germans, Jews, Trains (Columbia University press, 2007). modernism / modernity volume thirteen, number four, pp 701–728. © 2006 the johns hopkins
TL;DR: In this article, the authors present a catalogue of errors, misleading statements, misinterpretations, and failures of logic and contextual understanding, and conclude that it is only "conservatives" who object to gay cruising in public parks, an issue that has an interesting history of its own.
Abstract: 760 and a very shaky grasp of both the Renaissance and Enlightenment. They seem to believe that the Battle of Covadonga took place in the twelfth century (78) and that citizens of Venice were “wiling their time away” in the Piazza San Marco in 1000 (41), while Canterbury Cathedral was apparently built as a Gothic edifice in 1175 (19). Category errors involving social structure and status labels are frequent, and we encounter that stock inhabitant of the weak undergraduate essay, “the average medieval peasant” (17). Not that the authors are reliable for more recent centuries, as in the banning of “soccer” by Halifax’s People’s Park in 1857 (53). The examples cited here are taken from a five-page list of errors, misleading statements, misinterpretations, and failures of logic and contextual understanding—the book seems to have been produced without the benefit of an editor. This is only part of the story. The bibliography is full of holes, with (as the tip of the iceberg) important books such as Hazel Conway on the British public park, John Barrell on landscape and art, and Harvey Taylor on the “outdoor movement” passing unnoticed, nothing on the extensive historiography of the Grand Tour, and nothing on British seaside resorts and amusement parks except Bennett’s commissioned history of Blackpool Pleasure Beach. No fake contemporary parallel is allowed to pass unmolested: park keepers in the nineteenth century (or possibly the seventeenth—let us not be pedantic about a century or two) are like today’s nightclub bouncers. It would be unfair, but not wildly so, to encapsulate the book with the statement that Varro’s description of a Roman park “could have been taken straight out of a Disney movie” (16), or that, “arguably, Versailles amounted to a prototype Disney World” (24). The attempt to identify Tolkien’s Middle Earth with a site in Gloucestershire (2) is a representative example of the superficial exploitation of isolated fragments of information, taken out of context, to make extravagant claims, in a style that is all too common in cultural studies. But the tone of the whole work is Whiggish, looking back complacently on the democratic deficits of past societies. Within this framework, we should not be surprised to find that it is apparently only “conservatives” who object to gay cruising in public parks, an issue that has an interesting history of its own, as the authors would have learned from Matt Houlbrook’s work. This review has turned into a catalogue of errors, because the authors have been unable to sustain a project which has collapsed under the weight of its own pretensions. As a whole, this book is a disaster. This compound of glib generalization, ungrounded anecdote, and wild assertion should be kept well away from the students who are presumably its intended audience (at any rate, readers need to be told who Charles Darwin was) unless accompanied by an academic health warning. It needs to be used carefully and selectively, if at all, by academics, and nothing it says can be taken on trust without further investigation. I conclude with two quotations from the text: “Like Disney’s Mickey Mouse, [rare species] lived and died to entertain ... ancient attitudes towards wildlife varied from the barbaric to the enlightened ... the practice of animal collecting [in medieval Europe] proved piecemeal, unscientific...” (129); “Ivan the Terrible ... betrayed few stewardship principles in his Moscow bear pit ... bears became unconscious foot soldiers in class wars ...” (131). The first of these is taken from (probably) the worst page in the whole book, but it provides a flavor of the wider enterprise. Caveat emptor.
TL;DR: Freedman as discussed by the authors studied the home front writing during the First World War and the representation of Zeppelins in Ulysses and did it flow: Bridging aesthetics and history in Joyce's 'Ulysses'.
Abstract: Ariela Freedman is Associate Professor of Literature at the Liberal Arts College, Concordia University, Montreal. She is author of Death, Men, and Modernism and has also published on H.D., Mary Borden, postcolonial studies, and the representation of Zeppelins. Her current project is on home front writing during the First World War. Did it Flow?: Bridging Aesthetics and History in Joyce’s Ulysses
TL;DR: For instance, after the 1934 publication of Discrete Series, the poet George Oppen stopped writing poems, decisively abandoned the class of his origin (upper class of ’29,” as he liked to say) to join the Communist Party, and, starting in 1950, lived as a “known subversive” in Mexico to escape F.B.I. harassment for his work as a labor organizer in the Workers Alliance.
Abstract: Most studies of poetry begin with a poem. This one begins with a silence. Like a poem, a silence has both occasion and duration. The duration of this silence is a well-known quantity; after the 1934 publication of his slim volume Discrete Series, the poet George Oppen stopped writing poems, decisively abandoned the class of his origin (“upper class of ’29,” as he liked to say) to join the Communist Party, and, starting in 1950, lived as a “known subversive” in Mexico to escape F.B.I. harassment for his work as a labor organizer in the Workers Alliance. He would not write another poem for almost 25 years.1 The occasion of Oppen’s silence is less well understood. Considered as an episode in the history of American literary communism, Oppen’s story appears at first unexceptional. In 1930, Michael Gold in the New Masses had condemned the “verbal acrobatics” of modernism as “only another form of bourgeois idleness.”2 The aesthetics of the “Objectivist” poets with whom Oppen is associated would come under special censure for expressing what Herman Specter would call:
TL;DR: A broad range of themes and approaches can be found in Holocaust and Third Reich writing; they range from traditional literature analysis (albeit with new perspectives and/or examining hitherto neglected authors) to historical discussions about Jewish life in postwar Germany and, intriguingly, tourism during the Nazi era as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: 2005 was a year of commemoration and remembrance. Sixty years since the end of the Second World War. Sixty years since the liberation of Auschwitz. Sixty years of trying to comprehend and deal with the extent of organized mass-murder committed during the twelve years of Nazi dictatorship. On the publishing front, 2005 saw a renewed upsurge in scholarly titles dedicated to the Holocaust and the Third Reich in what seems a general reorientation for new perspectives. The ranks of actual witnesses to and survivors of the Holocaust are inexorably thinning, and instead of new memoirs by survivors one now increasingly finds second- or third-generation, postmemory, or fictional accounts of the Holocaust alongside scholarly treatises on varying aspects of the Third Reich and its reign of terror. The books discussed here are indicative of this broad range of themes and approaches that can presently be found in Holocaust and Third Reich writing; they range from traditional literature analysis (albeit with new perspectives and/or examining hitherto neglected authors) to historical discussions about Jewish life in postwar Germany and, intriguingly, tourism during the Nazi era.
TL;DR: The Modernism and Nationalism: Literature and Society in Scotland 1918-1939 as discussed by the authors survey of modern Scottish poetry provides an essential foundation for a more theoretically sophisticated conception of British modernism.
Abstract: Reviewing Hugh MacDiarmid’s first collection of Scots lyrics in 1925,1 Edwin Muir noted the separateness of this distinctive modernist experimentation: “It is known only to a few people in England, it is probably not suspected in America at all, that for about three years there has existed what has been termed a Scottish Renaissance” (McCulloch, 65). If, in 2004, Christopher Whyte may be able to assume a somewhat wider—if still limited—awareness of MacDiarmid, he must acknowledge, nonetheless, that “the surface” of Iain Crichton Smith’s poetry “has barely been scratched by critics” (203), and the same can be said of most twentieth-century Scottish poetry. Yet the changing landscape of British politics, and recent reconsiderations of British literature as not synonymous with the literature of England, are reframing our understanding of British modernism as more complex, varied, and culturally diverse than standard accounts have recognized. Though almost entirely excluded from studies of modern British poetry, the Scottish Renaissance defined a set of interrelated questions and issues debated in Scotland throughout the twentieth century, questions focusing on nationality, identity, language, and poetic experimentalism that, as Cairns Craig has argued, reveal Scottish history and culture as exemplary of the multiplicity and pluralism explored in much current theory.2 In this context the appearance of Margery Palmer McCulloch’s edited source documents for the Scottish Renaissance along with Christopher Whyte’s survey of modern Scottish poetry provides an essential foundation for a more theoretically sophisticated conception of British modernism. Modernism and Nationalism: Literature and Society in Scotland 1918–1939 brings together a wide array of literary and cultural texts: essays, reviews, journal and newspaper articles, letters, interviews, book chapters. Drawing on a very wide range of authors, sources, and perspectives, it provides a kind of continuous debate running through the years between the wars. Inevitably, with so broad a focus, it consists of excerpts or very short texts, yet it avoids the typical problems of such collections by careful structuring: rather than a series of unsatisfying snippets, the texts comprise nine thematic sections arranged in dialogue with each other so that they serve as reactions, responses, or reconsiderations of those that precede and succeed them. If reading random selections gives the flavor of the period, reading straight through the book creates a sense of engagement in a sustained discussion. For example, “A Theory of Scots Letters”—in which MacDiarmid calls the Scots Vernacular a “vast storehouse of just the very peculiar and subtle effects which modern European literature in general is assiduously seeking”—is placed in the context of a lecture on the vernacular in music, Edwin Muir on Scottish ballads, and John Buchan’s counterclaim that Scots can survive only as a “book tongue.” Conflicting positions on the nature and use of Scots as a modern language frame much of Scottish modernist discourse. A familiar debate in relation to the poetry of MacDiarmid and Muir, it takes on new resonance as part of a larger dialogue addressing theater, cinema, lesser known novels, and such cultural issues as religion, economics, Irish immigration, or, in the 1930s, views on Hitler, race, and war. For the language debate and the debates about Scotland as a nation are inseparable. Though these debates focus chiefly on poetry, Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s trilogy, A Scots Quair—especially in the first novel, Sunset Song—reveals in rich and intense Vernacular the possibilities of a modern Scots prose, possibilities cut short by Gibbon’s early death. The
TL;DR: Lindqvist as mentioned in this paper studied the paradoxical poetry of Edith Södergran in Sweden, France, and the United States in the 1930s and compared critical readings of two kinds of "texts" (world exhibitions and lyrical poetry) in Sweden and France.
Abstract: Ursula Lindqvist is Instructor of Scandinavian at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She completed her Ph.D. in comparative literature, with a certificate in women’s and gender studies, from the University of Oregon in 2005. Her research areas are twentieth-century Scandinavian poetry and film; Modernism; performance culture; and race, class and gender in social welfare states. Her dissertation juxtaposes critical readings of two kinds of “texts,” world exhibitions and lyrical poetry, in Sweden, France, and the United States in the 1930s. The Paradoxical Poetics of Edith Södergran
TL;DR: Rosenfeld as discussed by the authors is an associate professor of English at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, who is the author of Outsiders Together: Virginia and Leonard Woolf, and Haunting Modernism: The English Novel Before and After World War II.
Abstract: Natania Rosenfeld is Associate Professor of English at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. The author of Outsiders Together: Virginia and Leonard Woolf, she is currently working on “Haunting Modernism: The English Novel Before and After World War II.” Her poetry and essays have appeared widely in journals. Her anti-war poem “The Ply,” set to music by composer Mark Grey, will be sung by the Los Angeles Master Chorale during their 2007-8 season Less Light: The End(s) of Aestheticism in Pater, Ondaatje, and Sebald
TL;DR: Gabriella Safran as discussed by the authors is associate professor of slavic languages and literatures at stanford University and co-producer with Michael alpert of a compact disk, Dos Oyfkumen/The Upward Flight: The Musical Worlds of S. An-sky.
Abstract: Gabriella Safran is associate Professor of slavic Languages and Literatures at stanford University. she is the author of Rewriting the Jew: Assimilation Narratives in the Russian Empire (2000), the co-editor with steven Zipperstein of The Worlds of S. An-sky: A Russian Jewish Intellectual at the Turn of the Century (2006), and the co-producer with Michael alpert of a compact disk, Dos Oyfkumen/The Upward Flight: The Musical Worlds of S. An-sky. she is currently writing a critical biography of an-sky. modernism / modernity volume thirteen, number four, pp 635–655. © 2006 the johns hopkins
TL;DR: Ulysses as mentioned in this paper is a book about two things, Dublin life on June 16, 1904, and life, and it is the story of a day in which a man (perverse enough to be everyman) wanders through a city.
Abstract: Ulysses is a book about two things, Dublin life on June 16, 1904, and life. It is the story of a day (arbitrary enough to be everyday) in which a man (perverse enough to be everyman) wanders through a city (indistinct enough to be every place.) On the one hand, there are streets, pubs, postcards, newspapers, and Bloom’s wayward thoughts. And on the other hand, there is myth, death, nationalism, and the cosmos. If Ulysses deals with colonialism, it does so because Bloom has stepped into Barney Kiernan’s pub; if capitalism, because he is trying to sell an ad or buy some soap. At every turn, there is a welter of particulars set beside an intimation of the universal. The early reviewers were quick to recognize this duality in Ulysses:
TL;DR: Pamela Smart is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Art History at Binghamton University as discussed by the authors, who is currently completing a book manuscript titled Sacred Modern: The Aesthetic Project of The Menil Collection and is beginning work on a new project on the efforts of the Guggenheim Museum to define contemporary art transnationally.
Abstract: Pamela Smart is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Art History at Binghamton University. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology at Rice University and subsequently established and directed a program in Visual Culture at the University of Otago, New Zealand. She is currently completing a book manuscript titled Sacred Modern: The Aesthetic Project of The Menil Collection and is beginning work on a new project on the efforts of the Guggenheim Museum to define contemporary art transnationally. Possession: Intimate Artifice at The Menil Collection
TL;DR: Schilling as discussed by the authors is the author of Mémoires du quotidien: les lieux de Perec (Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 2006) and of a series of articles on representations of the Paris suburbs between the wars.
Abstract: Derek Schilling is Associate Professor of French at Rutgers University. He is the author of Mémoires du quotidien: les lieux de Perec (Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 2006) and of a series of articles on representations of the Paris suburbs between the wars. His monograph on filmmaker Eric Rohmer is forthcoming with Manchester University Press. modernism / modernity volume thirteen, number four, pp 729–745. © 2006 the johns hopkins
TL;DR: Golston as discussed by the authors has published articles on Ezra Pound, Charles Bernstein, Clark Coolidge, p. inman, and William Carlos Williams, as well as on the subject of modernist rhythm and prosody.
Abstract: Michael Golston is an assistant professor in the English Department at Columbia University. He has published articles on Ezra Pound, Charles Bernstein, Clark Coolidge, p. inman, and William Carlos Williams, as well as on the subject of modernist rhythm and prosody. He is currently fi nishing a manuscript on modernist poetics and the science of rhythm. Petalbent Devils: Louis Zukofsky, Lorine Niedecker, and the Surrealist Praying Mantis