scispace - formally typeset
Search or ask a question
JournalISSN: 1753-8629

Modernist Cultures 

Edinburgh University Press
About: Modernist Cultures is an academic journal published by Edinburgh University Press. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Modernism (music) & Modernity. It has an ISSN identifier of 1753-8629. Over the lifetime, 199 publications have been published receiving 547 citations.
Topics: Modernism (music), Modernity, Middlebrow, Poetry, Art


Papers
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors consider the relationship between political modernity and aesthetic modernism, arguing that the two major divisions of professional intellectual activity are not in dialogue with one another.
Abstract: What can Matei Calinescu’s Five Faces of Modernity teach us today? One might be tempted to think that it is enough to know that Calinescu provided a foundational account of relations between what he identifies as ‘the clash between the two modernities’: ‘two conflicting and interdependent modernities – one socially progressive, rationalistic, competitive, technological; the other culturally critical and self-critical, bent on demystifying the basic values of the first’.1 And indeed, Five Faces of Modernity is still often invoked as the locus classicus for discussion of what critical shorthand now terms the relationship between political modernity and aesthetic modernism (or, in an even shorter hand, between modernity and modernism). The magnitude of the challenge faced by Calinescu – to think political modernity and modernism together – is perhaps best measured by the fact that when the journal Modernism/Modernity was founded in 1994 editors Lawrence Rainey and Robert von Hallberg considered that the most difficult task they faced seventeen years after the first edition of Calinescu’s book was ‘bring[ing] into dialogue writers in the social sciences engaged by issues of modernity and modernization and scholars of the literary and fine arts committed to the history of modernism in the arts’.2 Rainey and von Hallberg explained that although ‘scholars of the humanities have borrowed a great deal lately from social, political, and economic historians [. . . ] we have a long way to go before we can claim that these two large divisions of professional intellectual activity are in dialogue with one another’ (2). Since then the borrowing has gone on apace (with some reciprocal influence, especially on the writing of history

48 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Parade's End as discussed by the authors registers the potential and necessity for a transition in conceptions of music informed by new sounds experienced during the First World War, and Tietjens interprets a bombardment as a Wagnerian orchestra, encouraging contemplation of where and why demarcation lines between music and noise are drawn.
Abstract: Parade's End registers the potential and necessity for a transition in conceptions of music informed by new sounds experienced during the First World War. In the trenches, Tietjens interprets a bombardment as a Wagnerian orchestra, encouraging contemplation of where and why demarcation lines between music and noise are drawn, as well as reflection on the utopian project of Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk (Total Art-Work). Ford's tetralogy has a significant contribution to make towards understanding how writers were navigating the impact of noise on music in the early twentieth century.

18 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors show how Anand's work remediating contemporary texts for broadcast accompanied a shift in his approach to writing fiction, using the technique of intertextual scaffolding to accelerate composition.
Abstract: Mulk Raj Anand's self-description – in a 1945 broadcast about war-time London – as an ‘impatient modernist’ highlights Anand's ability to harness the velocity of broadcast production, transmission, and reception into an aesthetic of speed. Pairing Anand's unpublished BBC scripts with his war-time novel The Big Heart (1945), I show how Anand's work remediating contemporary texts for broadcast accompanied a shift in his approach to writing fiction, using the technique of intertextual scaffolding to accelerate composition. This article proposes that the name of Anand's impatience was realism – that Anand's fascination with literary modernists such as Joyce and Woolf was tempered with a desire for the immediacy and social embeddedness of realism and that broadcasting encouraged Anand in his attempt to pair modernism's cosmopolitanism and polyvocality with realism's speed, engagement, even ephemerality. Challenging the often feeble distinction between realism and modernist anti-representational technics, Anand...

18 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The relationship between jazz and modernist writing has in recent years increasingly interested musico-literary scholars as mentioned in this paper, whose interest centres on links between modernism, jazz, and the Harlem Renaissance, whose music and art extend beyond its geographic boundaries as well as beyond the relational boundaries of time.
Abstract: The relationships between jazz and modernist writing have in recent years increasingly interested musico-literary scholars. Much of this interest centres on links between modernism, jazz, and the Harlem Renaissance, whose music and art extend ‘far beyond its geographic boundaries as well as beyond the relational boundaries of time’. 1 As evidence of this trans-national and trans-temporal influence, especially as it applies to Anglo-American culture, writers like T. S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, and Philip Larkin, among others, have all been considered in relation to jazz and New York in the 1920s and 1930s. 2 Such studies contribute to the growing significance of African-American traditions within modernist scholarship and provide increasingly nuanced pictures of jazz’s impact upon literary modernism (both as creative stimulus and as ‘despised’ phenomenon). However, these interpretations of the jazz ‘influence’ need to be understood as more than a reductive dichotomy. For instance, Fitzgerald was attuned to the prevalence of jazz in twentieth-century modernity, and his jazz allusions ‘anxiously suggest that beneath the surface of [what he saw as] the music’s frivolous gaiety lurks the presence of violence and chaos, which threatens to erupt at any moment.’ 3 Therefore, his complex representations of jazz music–the fact that he wrote about jazz and its cultures so extensively in his fiction and non-fiction in the first place–indicate that he recognised jazz as a specifically modern, observable fact which was crucial to realistic portrayals of inter-war life. In this regard his work, and that

17 citations

Performance
Metrics
No. of papers from the Journal in previous years
YearPapers
202317
202227
20203
20195
20187
201711