Showing papers in "Modernism/modernity in 2015"

Bottles, Bubbles, and Blood: Jean Toomer and the Limits of Racial Epidermalism

Abstract: I got my white coat. Under my friends [sic] guidance I learned to work the fountain, draw sodas, pile sundaes, brew special concoctions. Of course, I had imprinted upon me indelibly what my fellow-men consider tasty thirst-quenching drinks. . . . I was a serious youth at first, in every way an eager, earnest student of the job. . . . I soon became familiar with the store’s stock, the patent medicines, the chemicals in jars. Sime [sic] times I watched the doctor compound prescriptions and I had a feeling of fascination and mystery as if there were some magic about this and I were in—not the prosaic back of a modern drug store but in the work shop of an alchemist.1

Modern Manuscripts: The Extended Mind and Creative Undoing from Darwin to Beckett and Beyond by Dirk Van Hulle (review)

Abstract: 412 Of course, L’Innommable did continue past its original French, ending into the English version, which took considerable effort and was not without considerable pain for Beckett. The ending itself was reworked in the English version as if the English was not just a translation or transposition but also an additional revision. As originally published in French, the last line, just centimeters above the end of the page, read “il faut continuer, je vais continuer” (you must go on, I’ll go on). When working on the English translation, Beckett added a new, contradictory element to this imperative to continue: “you must go on, I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” For the 1971 printing of the French version, Beckett emended the French to accord with the English, thereby continuing The Unnamable yet again: “il faut continuer, je ne peux pas continuer, je vais continuer.” Van Hulle and Weller’s book is filled with examples—and, unsurprisingly, counter-examples—of these kinds of compositional machinations. The introduction situates the writing of L’Innommable/The Unnamable within the larger trajectory of Beckett’s career. It shows how the Unnamable’s predicament develops from Beckett’s predilection to linguistic negativity and his interest in Fritz Mauthner’s linguistic scepticism, concerns detailed in Beckett’s 1937 letter to Axel Kaun. Van Hulle and Weller’s discussion is thoroughly up to date, with references to and discussions of the latest, pertinent Beckett criticism. The introduction is followed by a thorough overview of the genetic dossier, the various extant manuscripts of the different drafts of both L’Innommable and The Unnamable, along with comprehensive publication histories. Such archival detailing is an indispensible component of any genetic investigation. This is then followed by in-depth analyses of the genesis of the text in both languages; this includes comprehensive discussions of each of the various draft stages, noting particular revisions and the implications they suggest. The section on the genesis of the English Unnamable includes discussions of translational cruxes, organized thematically. The volume nimbly negotiates between various different axes of genetic criticism, from the material and documentarian to the theoretical. The whole volume is lavishly illustrated with pictures of numerous manuscript pages; this will be especially helpful for those without access to the digital BDMP. Also discussed are Beckett’s various doodles, including one from the English version, which could well be some kind of caricature of Worm. While this volume is one component of the second module of the BDMP—the other being the online digital repository of the manuscripts for L’Innommable/The Unnamable—it easily stands on its own as a significant contribution to Beckett studies. In offering a comprehensive analysis of L’Innommable/The Unnamable from a genetic perspective, Van Hulle and Weller help enrich our understanding of this text in both of its languages. Their work also occasions the potential for further new and exciting analyses.

Shame, Subjectivity, and Self-Expression in Cora Sandel and Jean Rhys

Abstract: the author of Word of Mouth: Body/Language in Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf and Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys and the Aesthetics of Trauma, and she is the co-editor of Jean Rhys: Twenty-first Century Approaches, The Female Face of Shame, and Scenes of the Apple: Food and the Female Body in 19thand 20th-century Women’s Writing. Formerly Professor of English at the University of California, Davis, she is now a Lecturer in English at the University of Limerick. modernism / modernity volume twenty two, number four, pp 713–734. © 2015

"There is always the other side, always": Black Servants' Laughter, Knowledge, and Power in Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea

Abstract: Professor of English at Smith College, where she teaches literature of the British Empire, anglophone postcolonial literature from South Asia, Africa and the Caribbean, women’s and gender studies, and twentieth century literary theory. She is the author of Making Words Matter: The Agency of Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (2009), as well as articles on Kipling, Forster, Rushdie, Bapsi Sidhwa, Jhumpa Lahiri, Daniyal Mueenuddin, and the ethics of the postcolonial memoir. Her current book project is entitled “Postcolonial Servitude: Domestic Servants in Contemporary Transnational and Global South Asian Literatures.” “There is always the other side, always”: Black Servants’ Laughter, Knowledge, and Power in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea

Writing "Other Spaces": Katherine Anne Porter's Yaddo

Abstract: In 1947, Katherine Anne Porter published an essay in Harper’s Magazine titled “Gertrude Stein: A Self-Portrait” in which she accused Stein of “avarice” for the celebrity and financial success Stein had found in the wake of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. However, the essay is interesting less for what it claims— Stein-bashing was a full-fledged genre in the U.S. media by the 1940s—than for how it punctures Stein’s aura. Porter’s counternarrative of Stein’s life is also a counter-description of the space Stein made famous in her popular writings of the 1930s:

Bloom's Job: The Role of the Advertisement Canvasser in Joyce's Dublin

Abstract: This article reconsiders Joyce’s representation of Dublin’s 1904 advertising industry in Ulysses, with particular emphasis upon his protagonist Bloom’s role as an advertisement canvasser. It argues that our understanding of the narrative significance of Bloom’s job has been muddled by the generalizing accounts of the subject published in the 1980s and 90s, which extrapolated dubious historical claims from theoretical speculations on the text. With close attention to the details of Joyce’s narrative, this article demonstrates that Bloom’s professional responsibility in advertising has been overvalued. Conversely, while his limited involvement with other agents and agencies has been taken to reflect an underdeveloped Irish advertising industry, this article identifies the disconnection as a crucial aspect of Joyce’s characterization. With a new historical attention, this article shows that the state of Dublin’s advertising industry in 1904 has been seriously underestimated, and that the assumption of colonial underdevelopment has obscured a complex and particular history. Participating in the recent historicist turn in Joyce studies, it revises the received critical accounts to identify the specific details of Bloom’s advertising role as significant aspects of his social alienation as a Jewish outsider in 1904 Dublin.

Decadence Revisited: Evelyn Waugh and the Afterlife of the 1890s

Abstract: The young Evelyn Waugh’s first encounter with decadence came via his elder brother, Alec, in 1916: “He had a particular relish at that time for the English lyric poets of the nineties; their dying cadences were always the prelude to his departure.”1 Around the same time, Evelyn marked approvingly the lyrics of Oscar Wilde, Ernest Dowson, and Richard Le Gallienne in his copy of The Oxford Book of Victorian Verse (1912).2 This early encounter with the 1890s inaugurated a lifelong relationship that was marked by both influence and antagonism. The shifts and changes in Waugh’s position on the literature of decadence offer a salutary reminder that the relationship between modernism and its literary forebears is never simple or stable. Much scholarship on Waugh’s work tends to flatten out his attitude, reducing it to either an endorsement or a rejection of the nineties. For instance, Jonathan Greenberg suggests that Waugh shares with Wilde an “aggressively antisentimental” view of Victorian sentiment.3 Christine Berberich, on the other hand, has suggested that Waugh and his contemporaries at Oxford “rediscovered the dandies and aesthetes of the late nineteenth century, the likes of Wilde, Beerbohm and Firbank: writers who had been exposed to ridicule by their grandfathers and fathers.”4 Andrew Eastham, alternatively, has recently demonstrated the extent to which an engagement with Paterian aesthetics potentially underpins Brideshead Revisited. For Eastham, Waugh’s novel demonstrates the limits of aestheticism, mapped in the intricacies of style.5 In all three instances, the scholars focus on modernism / modernity

"Mountains Being a Language with Me" Marianne Moore, Marsden Hartley, and Modernist Revision

Abstract: sistant Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She is coeditor, with Susannah Hollister, of Gertrude Stein’s Stanzas in Meditation: The Corrected Edition. Her current book project is a literary and cultural history of modernism and photography told through the works and archives of three women writers: Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and Marianne Moore. modernism / modernity volume twenty two, number one, pp 153–182. © 2015

Interpretation and Reality: Anthropological Hauntings in The Waste Land

Abstract: Sheela Banerjee is completing her monograph, The Modernist Ghost: The Supernatural Aesthetic of T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf. Her chapter on Virginia Woolf will be appearing in Palgrave’s Modernist Women Writers and Spirituality: A Piercing Darkness. She has been working as a visiting lecturer at Queen Mary, University of London. Interpretation and Reality: Anthropological Hauntings in The Waste Land

Scholarship and the Modernist Public: Zora Neale Hurston and the Limitations of Art and Disciplinary Anthropology

Abstract: In perhaps the most famous scene in Zora Neale Hurston’s ethnography Mules and Men (1935), the character “Zora” stops conducting her research and flees a Florida sawmill camp when a violent fight breaks out in a bar whose clientele is an unsavory mix of outlaws and prostitutes. Zora is forced to abandon her detached participant-observer stance when Lucy, a local woman, suddenly attacks her with a knife, thinking she is attempting to steal her man; another woman named Big Sweet intercedes at the last moment, allowing her to escape. The scene makes palpable the scholar’s vulnerability and confusion, as she finds herself unable to make sense of, or remain apart from, the cultural practices in the field: “Curses, oaths, cries and the whole place was in motion. Blood was on the floor. I fell out of the door over a man lying on the steps, who either fell himself trying to run or got knocked down. I don’t know. I was in the car in a second and in high just too quick.”1 Although this moment of epistemological breakdown is circumscribed by Hurston’s own authoritative voice, which, in turn, is framed by a foreword written by the father of professional cultural anthropology in America, Franz Boas, it raises important questions about the limits of professional inquiry and the relationship between professionals and the public.2 In a letter to Boas, who had still to decide whether he would add his imprimatur to Mules and Men, Hurston blamed its unscholarly and unorthodox literary scenes on her publisher Bertram Lippincott, who was, she explained, insisting she deliver “a very readable book that the average reader can understand.”3 modernism / modernity

"The news in the Odyssey is still news" Ezra Pound, W. H. D. Rouse, and a Modern Odyssey

Abstract: Critics of modernist classicism have long been preoccupied with the ways the Odyssey helps contain and contextualize the brash formal experimentation of James Joyce’s Ulysses and Ezra Pound’s Cantos. Homer, the critical record suggests, has little to do with the historical, sociopolitical issues that have been at the center of Joyce and Pound (and indeed, modernist) studies for the past several decades. However, in a series of letters to British classicist W. H. D. Rouse between 1934 and 1940, Pound represents the Odyssey as a guidebook for the modern ruler and Odysseus as a proto-Fascist leader. These letters present a viewpoint that is a far cry from his better-known, earlier understanding of the Odyssey as a storehouse of poetic technique and of Odysseus, in an interpretation shaped by reading Joyce’s Ulysses, as a cosmopolitan wanderer who embodied the ideals Europe needed to hold up in order to heal the wounds opened by the Great War. 1 With a few exceptions, critical analyses of Pound’s Homeric project have tended to focus on Pound’s aesthetics in general and the vexing problem of the underlying structure of The Cantos in particular; these studies for the most part have taken a synchronic approach to Pound’s reading of Homer, using, for example, Pound’s writings on Homer from the 1930s to contextualize the 1925 version of Canto 1. 2 The published versions of Pound’s letters to Rouse would affirm such approaches, but the unpublished letters call for a response that also accounts for Pound’s politics and for the fact that his reading of Homer changed dramatically over the course of his long career. 3 The full archive makes legible the historicity of Pound’s interest in the

Capturing Modernity Jazz, Film, and Moholy-Nagy's Light Prop for an Electric Stage

Abstract: surfaces and lived space, anti-illusionism and immersive experience, the Light Prop liberated the shadow play of cinema from its narrative duration, visual cage, and M O D E R N I S M / m o d e r n i t y 40 emotional aspects. Instead of sitting isolated among other people in front of a screen, the viewers could even become part of the event by walking into the light projections and casting their own shadows and in this way relate to each other, not unlike the interactive experience of Kazimir Malevich’s White on White canvas, as Moholy-Nagy interpreted it (Von Material zu Architektur, 90). The Light Prop’s play, then, in its modest effort, counteracted the predetermination of perception by the ideology of the mainstream film industry by reviving and combining the by then displaced embodied perceptual experience of nineteenth-century precinematic attractions, as well as the communal environment and physical presence of live performances, both jazz and theater. Tom Gunning has made a similar comparison between the repetitive rhythmic dances featured in optical toys and in early cinema and the “serpentine” light dance of Loïe Fuller that exploited the effects of colored electric light on the moving body, calling these mutually informative aspects of early twentieth-century culture.45 By evoking the principles of earlier optical toys, which were originally used for scientific study of perception, however, Moholy-Nagy may have had something else planned besides calling for cinematic experimentation and a reexploration of earlier forms of subjectivity. One may wonder what role another contingency, the Light Prop’s disturbing, insistent slow motion, plays in this creative “technology,” since it induces a disparate temporality by failing to accord either with jazz tempo, with regular cinematic time, or, in fact, with the tempo of modernity. When the contraption is framed for inspection in a casing, the slow motion hypnotizes the viewer’s perception with the constant transformation of its mobile forms and space by the colored lights and reflections. Whereas in the still photograms and film sketch the suggested rhythmic, jazz-like experience still wears the imprint of the body that produced it as a sign of embodied presence and locus of meaning, the slow motion and abstract forms separate the Light Prop from the representational realm of everyday experience and tempo, introducing a distance that makes its phenomenal properties, sounds, and embodied perception itself the focus of attention. We could argue that Moholy-Nagy, an art educator rather than a hypnotist, magician, or a jazz musician, rationalized his artistic endeavor as being educational, as aiming to attune the human organism and technology to each other to create social interconnectedness by inducing heightened self-awareness, the awareness of perception itself. In his view the human eye’s dexterity, for instance, could be improved to meet the visual and mobile challenges of modernity through new light-based, technological, and mobile artistic media. As he argued, these artistic “devices” would “establish far-reaching new relationships between the known and the as yet unknown optical, acoustical, and other functional phenomena so that these are absorbed in increasing abundance by the [human] functional apparatus” (Painting, Photography, Film, 30; bold in original).46 Moholy-Nagy embraced (or intuitively investigated) many aspects of the bourgeoning Gestalt psychology, such as establishing relationships within different aspects of the visual field and paying attention to the perception of motion illusion and surface color under changing illumination.47 His mission of perceptual training, his interest in multiplicity (which is, however, not the sum of its parts), and the interTóTh / capturing modernity 41 relation of human physiological functions and mechanical structures of technological modernity nevertheless overlapped with the approach of elementarist empiricism (Von Material zu Architektur, 188–91). According to the then still prevalent empiricist view, perception was a learned behavior that occurred by a gradual coordination of eye movements, retinal stimulations, various tactile sensations, and largely unconscious associative processes acquired by extensive experience with the world, as most prominently theorized by Helmholtz. Thus the more thoroughly the observer engaged with various phenomena, it was believed, the richer and more complex his or her perceptions became. Helmholtz modeled his ideas of sensory inferences and testing on the structural workings of experimental science, while Moholy-Nagy correlated the structure of perception, mechanics, and his method of artistic elementarism.48 His works nevertheless demonstrated that perception is more complicated than material facts, earning the interest of phenomenologists in 1929 at the University of Freiburg, the center of phenomenological studies.49 Besides at least eight varieties of photographic seeing, Moholy-Nagy also distinguished a kind of cinematic perception of space-time that he would later call “vision in motion” (theorized in Vision in Motion of 1947 but already operative in Von Material zu Architektur of 1929), privileging dynamism, flexibility, and mutability instead of fantasy and imagery.50 Whereas the single frame of the photograms make one aware of bracketed intricate light, motion and spatial relationships, which the prevalence of commodity form renders less available, to anchor the perception of modern urban phenomena, the film sketch Dynamics of the Metropolis, the mobile Light Prop, and Moholy-Nagy’s experimental films loosen the anchor and further complicate the viewing relationships. According to modernist wisdom, “cinematic” perception is different from that of the everyday in its multiplicity of perspectives that accommodate a world in constant flux and that, like photography, can make things visible that are usually invisible to the human eye, such as minute details, complex optical illusions, and space-time relationships.51 Whereas this cinematically generated visual world is separate from the spectator and transmitted in a fixed form, Moholy-Nagy wanted to make it into an approximate, lived perceptual possibility. He even went so far to locate one of the main achievements of constructivism in its conscious use of “optical energy, visual illusion and after-image, which are the means of a new kinetic space-time rendering” (The New Vision, 38), reconfiguring the human perceptual apparatus.52 Film, along with the Light Prop, then would produce a viewing subject whose subjective vision is biologically instead of emotionally focused, that is, collective instead of conflicting or possessive. To progress toward this goal, the artist wanted the perceived light phenomena to enter us without any preconditions, theology, consumerist desire, or political doctrines. Instead, the various phenomenal relationships of cinema, jazz, and other mass cultural channels, interpreted by means of an artistic breakdown and transformation, would be registered psycho-physiologically, sustained in the nervous system, and responded to interactively, so that people could become producers of their own experience in their social interactions. M O D E R N I S M / m o d e r n i t y 42 Following this reasoning, the Light Prop can be interpreted as a paracinematic device of heightened temporality intended to activate a quasi-cinematic perception on the part of the spectator while also highlighting its three-dimensional differences. The paracinematic understanding of the Light Prop is facilitated by its photogenic quality, reinforced by the gleaming metal and modulated and mobile light play. French film commentators located the concept of photogénie in “electricity’s reign” in the music hall and defined it as the simultaneous movement and variability of a figure in space and time that ensured the development of its rhythmic variables.53 Seen through a cinematic glass, the glittering “dance” and shadow play of the Light Prop display their visibility through the evocation of cinematic framing techniques and the movement of the exposed “projector,” calling attention to the play of two and three dimensions, the phenomenal and the material. Whereas its metal frames separate (and connect) the three sections in the manner of the successive shots and intervals of a film, the visual relationships between the elements of each frame—and, since the metal frames are transparent or gridded, between the elements of different frames and their shadow formations—are continuously changing, in the manner of a montage, as the stage moves around. Their transparencies, superimpositions of reflections, and multilayered spaces, paralleling the multiple-exposure technique of films and Moholy-Nagy’s photographic works, create various space-time constellations and perceptual plays between proximity and distance that Moholy-Nagy hoped would enrich spatial vision and define the machine’s rhythmic variables. The aperture window of the box, echoing the masking used in early films (which in turn referred back to the viewing hole of optical attractions), acted as a kind of “close-up” focus of the partly dematerialized performance. (Interestingly, in the English summary of the article explaining the Light Prop, the translator used the term “moving picture,” instead of “kinetic play” to suggest the cinematic character of the mobile performances [“Lighting Requisite for an Electric Stage,” trans. E. T. Scheffauer, in “Lichtrequisit einer elektrischen Bühne,” 299].) The interaction of lights and reflections engenders flickering, as in early film, making the observing eye blink, whereas the flashing colors produce afterimages, and the changing configurations of geometric forms bring about various associations. These allusions to cinematic techniques and byproducts, which Moholy-Nagy made ample use of in the film Lichtspiel, would have become more ap

The Rage of Caliban: Disabling Bodies in Modernist Aesthetics

Abstract: Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Literature at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of five books of criticism and the editor of The New Collected Poems of George Oppen. His most recent books are Concerto for the Left Hand: Disability and the Defamiliar Body (University of Michigan Press) and Outskirts of Form: Practicing Cultural Poetics (Wesleyan University Press). modernism / modernity volume twenty two, number four, pp 609–625. © 2015

Hitchcock's Underground

Abstract: sor of Literature at American University. His books include Passage through Hell: Modernist Descents, Medieval Underworlds (1997), Subterranean Cities: The World beneath Paris and London, 1800–1945 (2005), Metropolis on the Styx: The Underworlds of Modern Urban Culture, 1800–2001 (2007), and Canadian Cinema since the 1980s: At the Heart of the World (2012). Current projects include the nineteenth-century city after the nineteenth century and a cultural history of the modern slum. modernism / modernity volume twenty two, number one, pp 125–152. © 2015