Showing papers in "Modernism/modernity in 2010"
89 citations
43 citations
TL;DR: This article examined the creation of literary celebrity in the early twentieth century as a complex recursive process that involves authorial actions, the production of specific works, the promotion of texts and their authors, and audience reception.
Abstract: Using the careers of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein as examples, this article examines the creation of literary celebrity in the early twentieth century as a complex recursive process that involves authorial actions, the production of specific works, the promotion of texts and their authors, and audience reception. It ultimately contends that a more thorough exploration of this process can help scholars gain a better understanding of both the vocational sphere of authorship at the turn of the twentieth century and the texts produced at that time.
22 citations
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TL;DR: Pound's epigraph, from a chapter in The Man without Qualities titled "Cultural Revolution," has an equivocal tone that would appear to be lacking in Ezra Pound's exhortation "Make It New" as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: 1My epigraph, from a chapter in The Man without Qualities titled “Cultural Revolution,” has an equivocal tone that would appear to be lacking in Ezra Pound’s exhortation “Make It New.” Of the three terms, new seems concrete and unambiguous. The verb is forceful (action verbs were an idee fixe for Pound). But what is “it”? Squeezed between make and new, those brawny avatars, it would be ludicrous to suppose some veiled reference to aura or star power of the sort that made flapper and film star Clara Bow the “‘It’ girl” on the strength of pulp novelist Elinor Glyn’s thesis in It (1927). One would more sensibly take it to be an artwork, given Pound’s avocation. But considering the ubiquity of references to this famous phrase, it’s surprising to realize that Make It New was not published until 1934, when Pound was immersed in politics and economics. In Canto LIII, he commemorated the Chinese emperor Tching Tang [Ch’eng T’ang], founder of the Shang Dynasty in the eighteenth century, who in Pound’s account “wrote MAKE IT NEW / on his bath tub / Day by day make it new.” 2 In this context, the it in question concerns statecraft. Pound’s—or Tching Tang’s—adage has populated countless accounts of modernism, and it may be the most frequently repeated quip of the early twentieth century. It’s succinct, memorable, and relevant. But it’s also slightly anachronistic, for the steady drumbeat of The New preceded Make It New by several decades—during which Pound himself
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TL;DR: In this paper, the authors of the best-selling 1925 novel, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, developed a mode of writing in which literature and cinema unmoored the conventional relationship of the image to the word.
Abstract: Alongside the well-known controversy about the coming of sound, the history of early cinema also includes a debate about titling: words printed on the silent screen. Anita Loos, a screenwriter and author of the best-selling 1925 novel, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes , developed a mode of writing in which literature and cinema unmoored the conventional relationship of the image to the word. Taken together, Loos’s titles and her novel show a cross-genre relationship of exchange that has the effect of reconceiving language and image. At a transitional moment when literary institutions were changing and the cinema was being born, Loos invents new forms of vernacular pleasure: the literary cinema, and the cinematic novel.
11 citations
TL;DR: Stein's time in Chicago reveals the complex relationship among gender, literary celebrity, and the reception of literary modernism, as well as the ways in which an avant-garde lesbian writer becomes a "great" writer in a tradition that is dominated by men as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: This article draws on unpublished archival material to illuminate Gertrude Stein’s visits to Chicago during the 1930s. Stein caused a sensation all over the city--especially among the city’s literary ladies--but also met with resistance at the University of Chicago. Stein’s time in Chicago reveals the complex relationship among gender, literary celebrity, and the reception of literary modernism, as well as the ways in which an avant-garde lesbian writer becomes a “great” writer in a tradition that is dominated by men. Most importantly, Stein’s reception in Chicago is central to understanding new arguments not only about Stein’s identity but also about Stein’s aesthetic, which was significantly impacted by her experiences in a city characterized by its “middle”-ness and mobility.
10 citations
TL;DR: Hopkins as discussed by the authors is an assistant professor in the Department of English, Kingsborough Community College, The City University of New York and received both his MFA in Creative Writing and his PhD in English Literature from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and is a 2009-10 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in Non-Fiction Literature.
Abstract: sistant professor in the Department of English, Kingsborough Community College, The City University of New York. He received both his MFA in Creative Writing and his PhD in English Literature from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and is a 2009-10 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in Non-Fiction Literature. modernism / modernity volume seventeen, number one, pp 201–222. © 2010 the johns hopkins
8 citations
8 citations
TL;DR: Literary modernism—neither European, British, nor U.S. modernism, but the early twentieth-century literature of Iran—might be able to provide Ahmadinejad with an answer to his bafflement.
Abstract: “In Iran we don’t have homosexuals like in your country. We don’t have that in our country. I don’t know who has told you that we have it.” So, to the amusement and jeers of his audience during an appearance at Columbia University in September 2007, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad responded to a question about the report of executions in Iran of suspected homosexuals—hamajensbaaz is the derogatory term the President used.1 Literary modernism—neither European, British, nor U.S. modernism, but the early twentieth-century literature of Iran—might be able to provide Ahmadinejad with an answer to his bafflement. In the well-known “Aref nameh,” a linguistically innovative verse satire that appeared in 1921—one year before the publication of Eliot’s The Waste Land—Iraj Mirza, an Iranian poet and advocate of the modern Iranian state, makes graphically clear whom he thinks suffers from the curse of male homosexuality, and he does so in wry verses directed against a fellow Iranian poet and boy-lover, Aref-nameh of Qazvin (hence the poem’s title):
TL;DR: In this paper, Woolf describes a scene where the marble arch and the Shepherd’s Bush are eternally white letters upon a blue ground, and only at one point does the name mean shops where you buy things and houses, in one of which, down to the right, where the pollard trees grow out of the paving stones, there is a square curtained window and a bedroom.
Abstract: Beneath the pavement, sunk in the earth, hollow drains lined with yellow light for ever conveyed them this way and that, and large letters upon enamel plates represented in the underworld the parks, squares, and circuses of the upper. “Marble Arch—Shepherd’s Bush”—to the majority the Arch and the Bush are eternally white letters upon a blue ground. Only at one point—it may be Acton, Holloway, Kensal Rise, Caledonian Road—does the name mean shops where you buy things, and houses, in one of which, down to the right, where the pollard trees grow out of the paving stones, there is a square curtained window, and a bedroom. —Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room (1922)1
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that the hectic style of boxing Pound practiced, known as battling, provided a contemporary vocabulary to make legible Malatesta's life as a condotierro, as well as the conceptual terminology for aesthetic violence in The Malatessa Cantos.
Abstract: “Forms of Havoc: The Malatesta Cantos and The Battler” demonstrates Ezra Pound’s exploration of boxing as an aesthetic practice through the use of boxing terminology and images in The Malatesta Cantos (1925), reframing the text as a meditation on the constituent properties of aestheticized violence, and suggesting boxing’s impact on the formal features of the text itself. The article recovers Pound’s circulation in Parisian boxing subculture during the early 1920’s, and argues that the hectic style of boxing Pound practiced, known as battling, provided a contemporary vocabulary to make legible Malatesta’s life as a condotierro , as well as the conceptual terminology for aesthetic violence in The Malatesta Cantos.
TL;DR: In this article, the complex and ignored erotic friendship and collaboration between Bryher and Moore, during the years 1920-1923, was untangled, and the authors compared the Goncourt brothers' exceptional declaration that their work represented one self, one confession, one "I" with the conventional notion of the male genius working alone.
Abstract: This essay begins to untangle the complex and ignored erotic friendship and collaboration between Bryher and Marianne Moore, during the years 1920–1923. Until recently, as Wayne Koestenbaum explains in Double Talk, critics have often disparaged and misread collaboration. He contrasts the Goncourt brothers’ exceptional declaration that their work represented one self, one confession, one “I” with the conventional notion of the male genius working alone. Given that “male collaboration had already earned a reputation for perversity,” the dual authorship of
TL;DR: Meixner as mentioned in this paper studied the influence of French realists on American artists during the Great Depression and received the Gilbert Chinard Prize for French Realist Painting and the Critique of American Society, 1865-1900 (Cambridge, 1995).
Abstract: Laura L. Meixner is an associate professor of the history of art at Cornell University. In 1996, she received the Gilbert Chinard Prize for French Realist Painting and the Critique of American Society, 1865-1900 (Cambridge, 1995). She currently is researching the influence of French realists on American artists during the Great Depression. “Gambling with Bread”: Monet, Speculation, and the Marketplace
TL;DR: Hopkins et al. as discussed by the authors presented a major exhibition of British Vorticism, travelling from the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University in Fall 2010 to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, then Tate Britain, in 2011.
Abstract: sor of art history at Duke University; his most recent publications include AvantGarde Fascism: The Mobilization of Myth, Art and Culture in France (2007) and A Cubism Reader: Documents and Criticism, 1906–1914 (2008), co-authored with Patricia Leighten. He is currently cocurating a major exhibition of British Vorticism, travelling from the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University in Fall 2010 to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, then Tate Britain, in 2011. The present study derives from his current book project on Vorticism, anarchism, and aestheticized violence. modernism / modernity volume seventeen, number one, pp 135–169. © 2010 the johns hopkins
TL;DR: In the early 1920s, the film industry seized on the furor over the modern girls’ demands for sexual liberty and fulfillment inside and outside of marriage to introduce not only new subject matter, but new modes of addressing its diverse audience.
Abstract: In the early 1920s, the film industry seized on the furor over the modern girls’ demands for sexual liberty and fulfillment inside and outside of marriage to introduce not only new subject matter, but new modes of addressing its diverse audience. Social upheaval in this period coincided with the media industries’ movement toward unprecedented speed of adaptation and cooperation, making possible a powerful new intermediality. The film industry used this to generate layered meanings beyond the confines of the film text, encouraging bold viewers to see through the camouflage with which it sought to appease more traditionalist audience members. With Flaming Youth , through a smokescreen of melodramatic conventions and moral lessons, it delivered a strikingly modern conception of sexuality and marriage to the big screen.
TL;DR: Adonis as mentioned in this paper argued that the traditionalism espoused by these critics had not diminished with the passage of centuries, but rather had become stronger: "The understanding of poetry that dominated our past with all the force of tradition [al-taqlı̄d] continues into our present with the same force. Indeed, it has grown in acuteness and complexity."
Abstract: Speaking at a conference in Rome in 1961, the Syrian modernist poet Adonis launched a famous and famously intemperate attack on traditionalism in Arabic poetry and poetry criticism. His talk, entitled “al-Shi‘r al-‘arabı̄ wa mushkilat al-tajdı̄d” [Arabic Poetry and the Problem of Renewal], began by reviewing the classical tradition of literary criticism. Critics of the ‘Abbasid era (c.750–1250), Adonis argued, had only ever sought to inhibit poetic creativity, setting themselves up as guardians of tradition and obstacles to renewal: “The critics defended inherited values [qiyam mawrūtha] and clung to the ancient, exalting it because it was ancient, even when it was ridiculous.”1 Adonis went on to assert that the traditionalism espoused by these critics had not diminished with the passage of centuries, but rather had become stronger: “The understanding of poetry that dominated our past with all the force of tradition [al-taqlı̄d] continues into our present with the same force. Indeed, it has grown in acuteness and complexity.”2 For modern poets to free themselves from this powerful and creeping sclerosis, they would have to undertake radical measures. It was in this spirit that Adonis announced a “revolt against the traditionalist mentality.”
TL;DR: The first substantial translation of El Futurisme has been published in English in 2010 as mentioned in this paper, and it is hoped that the present rendering will at the very least afford Alomar's writing more scholarly attention in the Anglo-American world.
Abstract: 2010 marks the anniversary of a slightly older, and less strident, Futurism than that made (in)famous by the Italian impresario, F. T. Marinetti. On June 18, 1904, the Mallorcan poet and journalist Gabriel Alomar delivered his lengthy lecture, El Futurisme , which subsequently achieved a certain prominence in European literary circles. Various scholars have squared off as to the extent of Marinetti’s indebtedness to the Catalan’s precedent. Yet El Futurisme need not be held hostage--whether nominally or notionally, politically or poetically--to its disparities from any
other iteration of “futurism.” Aside from its importance to the fitful developments of twentieth-century Catalan and Spanish culture, and its unclassifiable resistance to various categorical imperatives (whether modernisme , noucentisme , or unreconstructed catalanisme ), the text merits further consideration as a tract on its own terms. It is hoped that the present rendering--the first substantial translation in English--will at the very least afford Alomar’s writing more scholarly attention in the Anglo-American world.
TL;DR: A Soldier of Humour, the opening story of Wyndham Lewis's 1927 collection of short stories entitled The Wild Body, is a neglected but important document in the history of modernism.
Abstract: “A Soldier of Humour,” the opening story of Wyndham Lewis’s 1927 collection of short stories entitled The Wild Body, is a neglected but important document in the history of modernism. Initially completed on the front line at the Battle of Messines Ridge, provocatively published in 1917–18 in The Little Review, and then extensively reworked during the 1920s, the story is central to Lewis’s thinking throughout the middle period of his career. Although The Wild Body is usually seen as a document of early modernism, marked by a savagely satiric anti-humanism, we can instead read “A Soldier of Humour” as an expression of the social and cultural anxiety in England which results from the political and economic rise of America during the 1920s. Taken together with Lewis’s theoretical statements in “The Meaning of the Wild Body,’” this story points towards a distinctively late modern poetics in Lewis’s work.