Showing papers in "Modernism/modernity in 2008"

Found and Lost: The Politics of Modernist Recovery

Abstract: When Bonnie Kime Scott’s ground-breaking anthology, The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology, was first published in 1990, I was a graduate student at Berkeley writing a dissertation on primarily noncanonical British women modernists. At the time, those of us who were working in Anglo-American modernist and feminist studies were delighted to encounter this wide-ranging anthology, which sought to illustrate not only how modernism was unconsciously gendered masculine, but how previously marginalized and neglected women writers were actually central proponents and practitioners of modernism. None of my seminars in graduate school exposed me to writers such as Mina Loy, Dorothy Richardson, or Katherine Mansfield, but Scott’s anthology legitimized my interest in noncanonical writing and invited me to pursue the kind of recovery work that had been spearheaded by critics such as Elaine Showalter (A Literature of Their Own, 1977), Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar (The Madwoman in the Attic, 1979), and Shari Benstock (Women of the Left Bank, 1986). Today, the project of recovering lost women writers is no longer in vogue as it once was, but Scott’s new anthology sees itself as part of this earlier tradition at the same time as it seeks to break new ground by highlighting its engagement with recent concerns in modernist studies: transnationalist feminism, global travel, emigration, queer theory, scientific discourse, technology, visual and material culture. While the impact of The Gender of Modernism is incontestable, the conceptual limits of that collection—privileging gender at the expense of other categories of identity, such as race, ethnicity, class, nation, and sexuality; focusing primarily on white women and exclusively on white men—are directly addressed by Scott in her ambitious and well presented introduction to Gender in Modernism, which is conceived as both a sequel and a corrective to the first now-classic modernism / modernity

Modern Novels and Vagueness

Abstract: In “Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” T. S. Eliot declares that the role of art in modern times is to provide a coherent “scaffolding”—the “mythical method” in Joyce’s case—for a world that is itself meaningless.2 Eliot’s contemporaries and critical descendants also emphasize the “hard” and firmly delineated quality of modernist writing. It must be “the definite and the concrete,” “exact,” “objective,” “particular”; its “watchword . . . is Precision”; it must seek “to refine, to clarify, to intensify”; it must avoid anything resembling symbolism’s “mushy technique”—above all, it must not be “vague.”3 But are concrete and precise really the best adjectives to describe works like Joyce’s “damned monster-novel”?4 Virginia Woolf offered a very different view of modern fiction when she recorded her revelation while writing Jacob’s Room:

William Morris, Print Culture, and the Politics of Aestheticism

Abstract: :LOOLDP0RUULV3ULQW&XOWXUHDQGWKH3ROLWLFVRI$HVWKHWLFLVP (OL]DEHWK&DURO\Q0LOOHU Modernism/modernity, Volume 15, Number 3, September 2008, pp. 477-502 (Article) 3XEOLVKHGE\-RKQV+RSNLQV8QLYHUVLW\3UHVV DOI: 10.1353/mod.0.0003 For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mod/summary/v015/15.3.miller.html Access provided by University of California, Davis (8 Feb 2016 02:30 GMT)

The Dissipating Nature of Decadent Paganism from Pater to Yeats

Abstract: Dennis Denisoff is Associate Professor in the English Department at Ryerson University in Toronto. His publications include Aestheticism and Sexual Parody (Cambridge University Press, 2001), Sexual Visuality from Literature to Film (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2004), and the co-edited essay collection Perennial Decay: On the Aesthetics and Politics of Decadence (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999). His current monograph project is tentatively entitled Dissipative Nature: The Eco-Pagan Vein of British Decadence. modernism / modernity volume fifteen, number three, pp 431–446. © 2008 the johns hopkins

Jean Patou's American Mannequins: Early Fashion Shows and Modernism

Abstract: In December 1924 the couturier Jean Patou brought six American fashion models from New York to Paris because, he claimed, the American mannequins' lean and leggy physique was needed to sell his clothes to his American clients. This paper focuses on the American mannequins' Paris debut alongside their French counterparts in Patou's February 1925 fashion show. It explores how Patou's presentation and marketing revealed a set of wider concerns about commerce, culture, gender, and work in the 1920s. The mathematics of fashion was translated into visual seduction on the catwalk as business methods became visual and were imprinted on women's bodies. In particular, Patou's modernist styling of the mannequins' bodies pictured both the Fordist aesthetics of 1920s fashion and the Taylorist management techniques that pervaded the couture houses. In this way, Patou's modernism, rather than belonging to the artistic avant garde, was part of the social and economic rationalization of the body in the early twentieth century.

'Make the World Your Salon': Poetry and Community at the Arensberg Apartment

Abstract: [I]n a mêlée there are meetings and encounters; there are those who come together and those who spread out, those who come into contact and those who enter into contracts, those who concentrate and those who disseminate, those who identify and those who modify— just like the two sexes in each one of us. . . . . Cultures, or what are known as cultures, do not mix. They encounter each another, mingle, modify each other, reconfigure each other. They cultivate one another; they irrigate or drain each other; they work over and plough through each other, or graft one onto the other. —Jean-Luc Nancy1

Nightwood's Freak Dandies: Decadence in the 1930s

Abstract: sociate Professor of English at the University of West Florida and publishes on twentiethcentury literature and culture. Her articles engage the life of the avant-garde in the U.S., modern and postmodern models of memory and history, and ethnographic authority since the 1960s. She is currently working on a longer study of the role of desire in the American avant-garde. modernism / modernity

Grid Games: Gertrude Stein's Diagrams and Detectives

Abstract: Gertrude Stein's notebooks reveal her acute awareness of a constitutive feature of late nineteeth- and early twentieth-century urban life, the grid. The grid structure, as a model of visual and material organization, characterizes and is consolidated across legible environments from the visual-textual integration of the printed page to the design of city streets, becoming the definitive paradigm of modern spatio-temporal experience. Stein's notebooks for "Subject-cases: The Background of a Detective Story" demonstrate that Stein, in playing with the grid, not only subjects its basic features to rearrangement through her diagrammatic method but also uncovers its political foundations.

Modernism & Australia: Documents on Art, Design and Architecture 1917-1967

Abstract: This first anthology of writings about modernist art, design and architecture in Australia reveals the raw nerves that modernism exposed. In more than two hundred documents—talks, letters, debates, public manifestos and private diaries—the main players of the period convey in their own words the tensions, aspirations and paradoxes behind the reception of modernism. Each document is introduced by informed editorial comment. Overturning many key assumptions about Australian culture, this book reveals that Australia was not in a "time-lag," but had an up-to-date engagement with international trends and developments in modernism. The documents show a willing acceptance of modernism in the commercial realm (design, fashion, interior decoration), yet they also chronicle the dogged institutional resistance that greeted modernism, particularly in the fine arts.

Steadily and Whole: Ford Madox Ford and Modernist Sociology

Abstract: Social fragmentation and cultural incoherence are conventionally regarded as trademark modernist themes, among the defining processes of modernity. Using Matthew Arnold as a touchstone, this paper frames the anxiety about wholeness as a Victorian inheritance, and anchors the discussion of fragmentation concretely in two early twentieth-century attempts to imagine society: Ford Madox Ford's social criticism and the first meetings of the London Sociological Society. I read Ford's 1905 impressionistic essay The Soul of London and his 1908 supernatural romance Mr. Apollo in light of Edwardian sociology's preoccupation with synthesis. Ford's social criticism supplemented and critiqued scientific sociology by the importance it assigned to the affect of interest, and to pathos.

Ulysses ’s Unanswered Questions

Abstract: Three enigmas confront Bloom near the end of "Ithaca." The first is "self-imposed" ("the cause of a brief sharp unforeseen heard loud lone crack emitted by the sentient material of a strainveined timber table"); the second is self-involved ("Who is M'Intosh?"); the third is self-evident ("Where was Moses when the lights went out?"). Only the self-involved enigma remains unsolved, by Bloom at least, leading us to suspect that there are certain mysteries that are—narratively as well as existentially—best left unanswered. This essay explores why this should be so.

Jackson Pollock's The Magic Mirror: Jung, Shamanism, and John Graham

Abstract: Professor of Art History Emeritus in the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia, Athens, has published numerous scholarly articles on nineteenthand twentieth-century art with a particular emphasis on Abstract Expressionism. Recent essays on Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock appear in Word & Image and Source: Notes in the History of Art. modernism / modernity volume fifteen, number four, pp 703–724. © 2008 the johns hopkins

American Valkyries: Richard Wagner, D. W. Griffith, and the Birth of Classical Cinema

Abstract: Focusing on the period from 1910 to 1915, this article argues that Richard Wagner's work was crucial to the development of American cinema. Critics and artists not only advocated Wagner's composition techniques for film accompaniment, but also turned Wagner into an emblem for far broader reforms. These reforms included a greater integration of music and film, a conception of film as a high art, and a conception of film as a medium for national purification and bourgeoisification. These reforms, and their connection to Wagner, helped set the stage for the use of "The Ride of the Valkyries" in D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915).

Ezra Pound's CANTOS DE LUXE

Abstract: The following text takes to heart the possibilities opened up by a work like The Cantos. My main argument is the most obvious one—it consists in the design of this paper, in the kind of discipline this paper required in its refusal to say more than it needs to say, its refusal to repeat, rehash, and rephrase (and so appropriate other scholars’ work). I have come to a point where it is impossible to go back—either to the idea that literary texts can be transparent and independent of what “container” they come into, or to a practice of criticism and scholarly work which assumes the same transparency for itself. The usual 12 point Times New Roman double-spaced page, which is then inflexibly poured into the template of whatever book or journal, is no longer neutral to my eyes. I see no reason why the objective, distanced, invisible position such page layout implies is often accepted to be the only option, and the resistances which keep it in place (lest we mistake criticism for something else) are yet to be brought to the table, especially as we are no longer dealing mainly with original texts, but with a rich (if not overwhelming) critical heritage on most subjects.

Classical Violence: Thierry Maulnier, French Fascist Aesthetics and the 1937 Paris World's Fair

Abstract: or academic—was evidence of their societal factionalism, which privileged one class, the proletariat, over all others. In addition, the writers for Combat accused the artistic allies of Socialist Realism and of the Popular Front of being opportunists who forfeited freedom of expression in the name of stylistic conventions that signified their party loyalty and class allegiances. By contrast Combat’s aesthetic program purportedly ▲ fig. 4. “Unfinished Buildings at the Paris World’s fair” (reproduced in L’Illustration January 10, 1937, 110). Antliff / classical violence 53 reconciled creative freedom with tradition to regenerate French culture for all classes, just as it reconciled Sorelian sublimity with Maurrassian order and discipline to bring about a national revolution. By this sleight of hand Maulnier and his allies claimed to defend freedom of expression even while they circumscribed ‘creativity’ within the classicizing confines of a nascent fascism. Maulnier set the stage for this campaign in an article titled “Les Essais: Inspiration et métier” (Essays: Inspiration and Craft) which appeared in the April 1936 issue of Revue universelle. He argued that the truly creative artist could not help but respect tradition because the creative impulse itself entailed a desire for order, as manifest in the venerable rules governing an artist’s particular métier (110–11). Classicism in the arts, asserted Maulnier, constituted “a will to impose regularity on the chaos of sensations and images” that gave birth to “style.” Maulnier then pitted this classicizing impulse against its Romantic counterpart, as exemplified by the Surrealists. The Surrealists reportedly gave free rein to the senses, thus converting the artist into the “docile victim” of a sensory onslaught—both internal and external—that stretched “aesthetic creation to the limits of lunacy.” This “cult of inspiration” untethered from all desire for order, converted the artist into “a sort of somnambulist” whose expressive powers were reduced to what the Surrealist called “automatic writing” (112–13). On this basis, Maulnier accused the Surrealists of separating inspiration from craft, creativity from tradition, and in so doing precipitating a complete break with the art of the past (114). By contrast Maulnier claimed that the sculpture of Aristide Maillol [Figure 5] paid homage to the classical tradition by modernizing it. In an October 1936 Combat essay titled “Les Conservateurs,” Maulnier categorically rejected tradition “if one means by tradition the fear of change, the cult of history, a singular focus on the art of the past.” “In the history of healthy civilizations,” Maulnier asserted, “tradition only expresses the continuity of life, it demands to be, without cease, surpassed” (unpag.). In his essay “A Bas la culture bourgeoise!,” published in the October 1936 issue of Combat, Maulnier condemned the Marxist doctrine of “proletarian culture” on similar grounds, arguing that the Communists broke the palingenetic link between the classical past and contemporary civilization. By designating the proletariat the sole arbiters of culture, the Communists wanted to make the least educated and most disenfranchised group the catalyst for an artistic renaissance. In a reductive fashion, French Communists had dismissed France’s “classical writers,” such as Racine, as bourgeois, when in fact classicism should be regarded as the heritage of all French people rather than that of a single class. Classicism successfully united “tradition” and “revolution” in the arts, just as the classical spirit succeeded in uniting revolutionary factions among the bourgeoisie and proletariat in the sphere of politics. By contrast the cultural and political policies of the Soviet Union and Popular Front only resulted in artistic “decadence” and class sectarianism. “Classical violence” alone could aestheticize politics and politicize aesthetics for the benefit of the French nation as a whole. Over the course of 1937, the Combat group joined Maulnier in promoting Maillol [Figure 6] and the sculptor Charles Despiau [Figure 7] as the chief defenders of French M O D E R n i S M / m o d e r n i t y

Modernist Articulations: A Cultural Study of Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy, and Gertrude Stein (review)

Abstract: 406 reader much refreshment in each dwelling on the importance of food in Ulysses—respectively, breakfast in bed and Mediterranean cooking. This catalogue of the collection’s many strengths also indicates its flaw: a lack of discernable coherence in the volume’s theme. The collection is tellingly labeled an “album,” and, perhaps wisely, neither Lernout nor McCourt have ventured to write an introduction, leaving that unenviable task to the series editor, Sebastian Knowles. Accordingly, Knowles’s introduction is eccentrically evasive, filling three of its nine pages with emails from renegade panelists—shamed but not named—explaining their failure, at the last minute, to make the journey to Trieste. The absent panelists unfortunately echo the absence of any obvious thread to draw this collection together, although several of the papers do speak to each other. This flaw is, perhaps, inevitable when condensing an essay collection from a conference of five hundred delegates, but the volume would have done well to take fewer risks with its readership. These three books give two rather different pictures of the state of Joyce scholarship at the moment. The latter two together suggest, no doubt inadvertently, that the vastness of the field threatens to overwhelm editors and readers alike. In one book, coherence of theme is scarcely attempted; in the other, Joyce criticism is presented as so daunting it needs a scholarship of its own. But John Nash’s thoughtful, original, and sparkling study acts as a reminder that there is still much to discover about this most absorbing of writers.

Open Your Eyes! Public Ordering and the Policing Gaze

Abstract: In November 1919, the Weimar Republic was a year old, yet no domestic consensus seemed in sight. The international military conflict had transformed into a war at home, where assassinations, street fighting, and protests disrupted public order. Through all this, law enforcement agencies in Berlin worked alongside other civic and private institutions to establish a sense of day-to-day normalcy and security. In the case discussed in this essay, a fictional manhunt known as "Augen auf!" or "Open Your Eyes!" sponsored by the Berliner Morgenpost, representatives of the newly reformed local criminal police helped to set the tone of the popular discourse on civility and sociability in the nascent democracy.

English by Example: F. R. Leavis and the Americanization of Modern England

Abstract: Raymond Williams tells a story about F. R. Leavis from their years teaching together at Cambridge. At a meeting in 1961 to consider a new course on the novel, Williams recalls that “There was one major argument . . . The crux was whether the paper should be the English novel, or the novel in general. [Leavis] wanted the English novel only. A majority were against him.”1 After Leavis rejects the inclusion of European novels, in part because of the difficulties of translation, a committee member poses a further question: “‘Then what about American novelists? Faulkner, for example’” (LRI, 117). Williams notes,

The Sound of Silence in Two of Jacob's Rooms

Abstract: Associate Professor of English in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. He has published on the figure of Salome, on Pater and time, on African American literary theory, on The Matrix, on T.S. Eliot, and on Gertrude Stein. His book, Literary Modernism and Musical Aesthetics appeared in 2002 with Cambridge University Press. His recent interest is in music, writing, and the problem of history. modernism / modernity volume fifteen, number four, pp 761–781. © 2008 the johns hopkins