Showing papers on "Modernism published in 1994"

Constructions of 'the Jew' in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations, 1875-1945

Abstract: 1. Introduction: semitism and the cultural realm 2. The promised land of liberalism: Matthew Arnold, Anthony Trollope and George Eliot 3. Empire and anarchy: John Buchan and Rudyard Kipling 4. The 'socialism of fools': George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells 5. The limits of liberalism: Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton 6. Modernism and ambivalence: James Joyce and T. S. Eliot 7. Conclusion: semitism and the crisis of representation Bibliography Index.

Pyramids at the Louvre : music, culture, and collage from Stravinsky to the postmodernists

Abstract: A pyramid in front of the Louvre, Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show and "The Rite of Spring", Schoenberg and Shirley Temple - just as the odd juxtapositions of modernism produced a fresh way of seeing, so collage, in the hands of Glenn Watkins, offers another perspective on the art of this age. In creating a picture of 20th-century music and arts, Watkins's work show how much the current postmodern aesthetic owes to its modernist past. Behind the many guises of modernism, is found an appetite for opposing impulses: the exotic and the home-grown, high and low, black and white, the passionate and the cool, the cerebral and the instinctive. Watkins reveals these oppositions at play in the music of Stravinsky and Ravel, Debussy and Schoenberg, Ives, Satie, Hindemith, Ellington, and Gershwin; in the art of Picasso and the Cubists, Cocteau, Leger, Brancusi and Moguchi; in the anthologies of Nancy Cunard and Alain Locke; in the ballet companies of Diaghilev and de Mare; and in the performances of Josephine Baker. Throughout, the technique of collage asserts its power to enlighten through juxtaposition, resist resolution, sponsor pluralism, and to promote understanding of an order that eludes all edicts. The masks of Oskar Schlemmer, Japanese Noh drama, and the "commedia dell'arte"; the mythologies attendant to the retrieval of folk traditions of artists in time of war; all have a place in this depiction and assessment of the legacy of modernism. An exploration of questions surrounding Primitivism, Orientalism and technology, as they surface at either end of our century, this work exposes the millenial preoccupations mutually invested in our search for "first times" and our convictions about "the end of culture".

The Cambridge companion to T.S. Eliot

Abstract: List of contributors Preface Chronology of Eliot's life and works Abbreviations 1. Where is the real T. S. Eliot? or the life of the poet James Olney 2. Eliot as a product of America Eric Sigg 3. Eliot as philosopher Richard Shusterman 4. T. S. Eliot's critical programme Timothy Matherer 5. The social critic and his discontents Peter Dale Scott 6. Religion, literature and society in the work of T. S. Eliot Cleo McNelly Kearns 7. 'England and nowhere' Alan Marshall 8. Early poems: from Prufrock to 'Gerontion' J. C. Mays 9. Improper desire: reading The Waste Land Harriet Davidson 10. Ash-Wednesday: a poetry of verification John Kwan-Terry 11. Four Quartets: music word meaning and value A. David Moody 12. Pereira and after: the cures of Eliot's theatre Robin Grove 13. 'Mature poets steal': Eliot's allusive practice James Longenbach 14. Eliot's impact on Anglo-American poetry Charles Altieri 15. Tradition and T. S. Eliot Jean-Michel Rabate 16. Eliot: modernism, postmodernism and after Bernard Sharratt 17. Eliot studies: a review and a select booklist Jewel Spears Brooker Index.

Criticizing Art: Understanding the Contemporary

Abstract: Criticizing Art: Understanding the Contemporary helps students of art and art history better understand and appreciate contemporary art by studying the principles of art criticism and applying them to contemporary forms of American art. This book provides a framework for critically considering contemporary art through describing, interpreting, evaluating, and theorizing. The diverse perspectives of contemporary critics such as Douglas Crimp, Arthur Danto, Elizabeth Heartney, Donald Kuspit, Lucy Lippard, Peter Plagens, and Arlene Raven on the work of Leon Golub, Jenny Holzer, Frida Kahlo, Elizabeth Murray, Martin Puryear, William Wegman, and many other artists help readers develop their own critical positions. Chapter 5, "Theory and Art Criticism, " offers clear definitions of modernism, post-modernism, feminism, and multiculturalism, enabling readers to understand the critical milieu in which twentieth century critics have been operating. An entire chapter (Chapter 6) devoted to writing and talking about contemporary art leads readers through the process of preparing thoughtful, well-constructed critical analyses. Two student papers provide useful examples of the principles discussed throughout the text. Guidelines for constructive group criticism are also included.

Making Modernism: Picasso and the Creation of the Market for Twentieth-Century Art

Abstract: Artists don't achieve financial success and critical acclaim during their lifetimes as a result of chance or luck The author documents Picasso's courting of dealers, critics, collectors and curators as he established his reputation during the first 40 years of the 20th century The book desribes the care, patience and resourcefulness invested by Paul Rosenberg, Picasso's dealer and close collaborator from 1918 to 1940, in building the financial value and public acceptance of Picasso's art It is based on quotes from previously unpublished correspondence between Picasso and dealers, collectors and museum curators

Early Modernism: Literature, Music, and Painting in Europe, 1900-1916

Abstract: Introduction. I. The Dynamics of Change: 1) Scepticism and Confrontation 2) The Withdrawal from Consensual Languages 3) Technique and Idea. II. The Development of a Modernist Aesthetic: New Languages for Painting and Music: 1) Matisse and Expression 2) Kandinsky and Abstraction 3) Schoenberg and Atonality 4) Braque, Picasso and Cubism 5) Language and Innovation. III. The Modernist Self: 1) Internal Divisions: Conrad, Nietzsche, Freud, Mann, Joyce, and Eliot 2) Subjectivity and Primitivism: The Demoiselles d'Avignon, Erwartung, and the Rite of spring. IV. The City: 1) The Individual and the Collective 2) The Futurists 3) Paris: the Poet in the City 4) Beyond the Stream of Consciousness: Simultaneism, Collage, and Parole in liberta 5) Berlin. V. London and the Reception of Modernist Ideas 1) From Hulme to Imagism 2) Post Impressionism 3) Futurism 4) Abstraction, Classicism, and Vorticism. VI. Aspects of the Avant-Garde 1) Diffusion and Adaptation 2) Progress and the Avant-Garde 3) Irrationalism and the Social 4) A Political Conclusion?. Notes Index.

Cultural mythologies of Russian modernism : from the golden age to the silver age

Abstract: LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS Introduction: The "Golden Age" and Its Role in the Cultural Mythology of Russian Modernism, Boris Gasparov I. The Cultural Myth of Pushkin Irina Paperno Olga Matich Joan Delaney Grossman Liza Knapp David M. Bethea Andrew Wachtel Boris Gasparov II. Pushkin as an Institution Marcus C. Levitt Robert P. Hughes Greta N. Slobin Stephanie Sandler III. Pushkin in the Twentieth Century: Readings, Texts, and Subtexts William Mills Todd III Monika Frenkel Greenleaf Alexander Zholkovsky Sarah Pratt Simon Karlinsky Carol Ueland Henryk Baran Tomas Venclova Irina Reyfman Sergei Davydov Appendix, John E. Malmstad

American Culture Between the Wars: Revisionary Modernism and Postmodern Critique

Abstract: This study examines the feminist, African-American and populist avant-garde that flourished in the era of American modernism. Arguing that American modernism runs much deeper than the seminal contributions of Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, Kalaidjian revisits the "historical avant-garde" showcased in magazines of the period. This revisionary study discusses public art in the Depression era, proletarian subculture, and the social poetics of Kenneth Fearing, Muriel Rukeyser and Langston Hughes. Kalaidjian establishes a continuity between interwar modernist movements and the contemporary work of Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, Sue Coe, Hans Haacke and others.

Transforming Genres: New Approaches to British Fiction of the 1890s

Abstract: Shakespeare and Mrs Grundy - Modernizing Literary Value in the 1890s, Ann Ardis "New Grub Street" and the Woman Writer of the 1890s, Margaret Diane Stetz Style Wars of the 1890s - The New Woman and the Decadent, Teresa Magnum Modernism's Mirror - The Sorrows of Marie Corelli, R.Brandon Kershner Fantasies de Siecle - Sex and Sexuality in the Late-Victorian Fairy Tale, Claudia Nelson Ethical Romance - Kipling's "The Man Who Would Be King", William J. Scheick Who is Kim?, Corinne McCutchan Imperial Fictions and Nonfictions - The Subversion Sources in Mary Kingsley and Joseph Conrad, Lynn Thiesmeyer Regaining a Focus - New Perspectives on "The Island" and "No. 5 John Street" by Richard Whiteing, Lynne Hapgood The Fingerprinting of the Foreigner - Colonizing the Criminal Body in 1890s Detective Fiction and Criminal Anthropology, Ronald R. Thomas Unearthing Holmes - 1890s Interpretations of the Great Detective, Frederick L. DeNaples The Story of a Confession Album - The Literary Precursor of Aubrey Beardsley's Fascination with Triangles, Linda G. Zatlin.

Writing After War: American War Fiction from Realism to Postmodernism

Abstract: In Writing After War, John Limon develops a theory of the relationship of war in general to literature in general, in order to make sense of American literary history in particular. Applying the work of war theorists Carl von Clausewitz and Elaine Scarry, John Limon argues that The Iliad inaugurates Western literature on the failure of war to be duel-like, to have a beautiful form. War's failure is literature's justification. American literary history is demarcated by wars, as if literary epochs, like the history of literature itself, required bloodshed to commence. But in chapters on periods of literary history from realism, generally taken to be a product of the Civil War, through modernism, usually assumed to be a prediction or result of the Great War, up to postmodernism which followed World War II and spanned Vietnam, Limon argues that, despite the looming presence of war in American history, the techniques that define these periods are essentially ways of not writing war. From James and Twain, through Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and even Hemingway, to Pynchon, our national literary history is not hopelessly masculinist, Limon argues. Instead, it arrives naturally at Bobbie Ann Mason and Maxine Hong Kingston. Kingston brings the discussion full circle: The Woman Warrior, like The Iliad, appears to condemn the fall from duel to war that is literature's endless opening.

Theorizing Modernism: Visual Art and the Critical Tradition

Abstract: Theorizing Modernism is a re-reading of the modernist tradition in the visual arts that provides a unique view of the history of modern art and art criticism. Concentrating on canonical critical texts and images, the book examines modern art through a rhetoric of representation rather than through formalist criticism or the history of the avant-garde.

A World of Art

Abstract: I. THE VISUAL WORLD: UNDERSTANDING THE ART YOU SEE. 1. A World of Art. The World as Artists See It. Works in Progress: The Creative Process. The World as We Perceive It. The Critical Process: Thinking About Making and Seeing. 2. Developing Visual Literacy. Words and Images. Works in Progress: Lorna Simpson's The Park. Describing the World. The Critical Process: Thinking about Visual Conventions. 3. The Themes of Art. The Representation of the World. The Power of Imagination. The Idea of the Beautiful. Works in Progress: Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. The Critical Process: Thinking about the Themes of Art. 4. Seeing the Value in Art. Art and Its Reception. Art, Politics, and Public Space. Works in Progress: Guillermo Gomez-Perez's Temple of Confessions. The Critical Process: Thinking about the Value of Art. II. THE FORMAL ELEMENTS AND THEIR DESIGN: DESCRIBING THE ART YOU SEE. 5. Line. Varieties of Line. Qualities of Line. Works in Progress: Vincent van Gogh's The Sower. Works in Progress: Hung Liu's The Three Fujins. The Critical Process: Thinking about Line. Works in Progress: J.-A.-D. Ingres's The Turkish Bath. 6. Space. Shape and Mass. Three-Dimensional Space. Two-Dimensional Space. Linear Perspective. Works in Progress: Peter Paul Rubens's The Kermis. Some Other Means of Representing Space. Distortions of Space and Foreshortening. Modern Experiments and New Directions. The Critical Process: Thinking about Space. 7. Light and Color. Light. Works in Progress: Mary Cassatt's In the Loge. Color. Works in Progress: Chuck Close's Stanley. Works in Progress: Sonia Delaunay's Electric Prism. The Critical Process: Thinking about Light and Color. 8. Other Formal Elements. Texture. Pattern. Time and Motion. Works in Progress: Jackson Pollock's Number 29 1950. The Critical Process: Thinking about the Formal Elements. 9. The Principles of Design. Balance. Emphasis and Focal Point. Works in Progress: Diego Velazquez's Las Meninas. Scale and Proportion. Works in Progress: Judith F. Baca's USC Mural. Repetition and Rhythm. Unity and Variety. The Critical Process: Thinking about the Principles of Design. III. THE FINE ARTS MEDIA: LEARNING HOW ART IS MADE. 10. Drawing. Drawing as an Art. Drawing Materials. Works in Progress: Raphael's Alba Madonna. Works in Progress: Beverly Buchanan's Shackworks. The Critical Process: Thinking about Drawing. 11. Printmaking. Relief Processes. Works in Progress: Utamaro's Studio. Intaglio Processes. Works in Progress: Albrecht Durer's Adam and Eve. Lithography. Works in Progress: June Wayne's Knockout. Silkscreen Printing. Monotypes. The Critical Process: Thinking about Printmaking. 12. Painting. Encaustic. Fresco. Works in Progress: Michelangelo's Libyan Sybil. Tempera. Oil Painting. Works in Progress: Milton Resnick's U + Me. Watercolor. Gouache. Synthetic Media. Computer-Generated Painting. The Critical Process: Thinking about Painting. 13. Sculpture. Carving. Works in Progress: Jim Sardonis's Reverence. Modeling. Casting. Assemblage. Works in Progress: Eva Hesse's Contingent. Earthworks. The Critical Process: Thinking about Sculpture. 14. Other Three-Dimensional Media. Craft Media. Works in Progress: Pater Voulkos's X-Neck. Mixed Media. Works in Progress: Hannah Hoch's Cut with the Kitchen Knife. Works in Progress: Goat Island's How Dear to Me the Hour When Daylight Dies. The Critical Process: Thinking about Other Three-Dimensional Media. 15. The Camera Arts. Photography. Film. Video. Works in Progress: Bill Viola's The Greeting. The Critical Process: Thinking about the Camera Arts. IV. THE VISUAL ARTS IN EVERYDAY LIFE: RECOGNIZING THE ART OF DESIGN. 16. Architecture. Topography. Technology. Works in Progress: Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater. Community Life. Works in Progress: Mierle Ukeles's Fresh Kills Landfill Project. The Critical Process: Thinking about Architecture. 17. Design. Design, Craft, and Fine Art. The Arts and Crafts Movement. Art Nouveau. Art Deco. The Avant-Gardes. The Bauhaus. Streamlining. The Forties and Fifties. Contemporary Design. Works in Progress: Fred Wilson's Mining the Museum. The Critical Process: Thinking about Design. V. THE VISUAL RECORD: PLACING THE ARTS IN HISTORICAL CONTEXT. 18. The Ancient World. The Earliest Art. Mesopotamian Culture. Egyptian Civilization. Aegean Civilizations. Greek Art. Roman Art. Developments in Asia. 19. The Christian Era. Early Christian and Byzantine Art. Christian Art in Northern Europe. Romanesque Art. Gothic Art. Developments in Islam and Asia. 20. The Renaissance Through the Baroque. The Early Renaissance. The High Renaissance. Art in China. Pre-Columbian Art in Mexico. Mannerism. The Baroque. 21. The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. The Rococo. Neoclassicism. Romanticism. Works in Progress: Theodore Gericault's The Raft of the Medusa. Realism. Impressionism. Post-Impressionism. 22. The Twentieth Century. Cubism. The Fauves. German Expressionism. Futurism. Dada and Surrealism. Works in Progress: Pablo Picasso's Guernica. American Modernism and Abstract Expressionism. Pop Art and Minimalism. Postmodern Directions. Works in Progress: Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. The Critical Process: Thinking about the History of Art.

Visions of the modern

Abstract: John Golding is one of the most highly regarded living writers on modern art. Visions of the Modern assembles many of his most important essays: some long out of print, others first published in journals inaccessible to the average reader, still others which started life as lectures. Taken together they create an authoritative, deeply informed and original account of this century's art. A distinguished painter in his own right, John Golding taught for many years at the Courtauld Institute in the University of London and at the Royal College of Art. He brings to his scholarship a particular understanding of the way in which the pioneering giants of artistic modernism - Picasso, Matisse, Leger, Malevich, Brancusi, Duchamp and others - faced challenges and achieved their individual goals. An appendix to the book, in the form of a dialogue between Golding and the philosopher Richard Wollheim, casts new light on the origins and aims of abstract art. Visions of the Modern presents some of the most astute critical analyses of contemporary art ever made. For anyone seeking to fully comprehend the radical artistic upheavals of the twentieth century, it is utterly indispensable.

The Romantic Spirit in German Art: 1790-1990

Abstract: The Romantic movement in art, with its emphasis on emotion, imagination and a sensitivity to nature, was at its height from the late 18th century to the mid 19th century. It has continued to influence some Western art, but in Germany it assumed a much greater significance, and has been closely linked to perceptions of national characteristics. This book, published to accompany exhibitions at the Scottish National Gallery of Art, Edinburgh, the Hayward Gallery, London, and the Alte Museum, Berlin in 1994-1995, examines the continuing engagement that German artists from Friedrich and Runge to Beuys, Kiefer and Baselitz have had with Romantic ideas over the past two centuries. A group of the world's leading scholars on German art of this period, including David Bindman, Helmut Borsch-Supan, Rudi Fuchs, Robert Rosenblum, John Gage, and Peter Vergo have contributed essays on a huge range of topics, among them the links between Romanticism and Modernism, music and the visual arts, and the impact of German Romanticism abroad. At-the heart of the book is the art itself: more than 300 paintings, drawings, woodcuts, sculptures and collages drawn from major collections around the world.

Art and authority : a comparative study of the modernist aesthetics of Ezra Pound

Abstract: Due to the pressure to define a contemporary literature, 'High' modernism in English is often presented as a univocal canon of authors and works whose ideals have been identified and surpassed. This study attempts to re-emphasise the diversity of this writing by showing how crises in inherited authority were 'staged' by its aesthetics. The manner of this staging is examined in the writings and programmes of a selected group of authors while a focus is provided by the aesthetics of Ezra Pound. Pound's work is taken to be of especial interest because of the scope of his influence in establishing a 'modern' movement, the extremism of his writing's antagonism to authority, and the ambiguity of critical responses that the politics of his project continue to elicit. Chapter 1 examines the ways in which Pound promotes an 'aesthetics' of history and politics as the key to contemporary revolutionary change, and views his writing through a body of thinking which considers that the artwork, and not authority, might 'found' a modem culture. Chapter 2 treats Pound's metaphysics, showing how 'de-authorised' conceptions of religion, sexuality and language underpin this project. Chapter 3 deals with the writing of T. S. Eliot, and with the particular anti-aesthetics that inhabit his criticism and the draft of The Waste Land. Eliots project is shown to oppose Pound's by defining a desired authority against the power of art, an opposition that Pound's editing of The Waste Land effectively masks. Chapter 4 discusses the 'mass' aesthetics of James Joyce's Ulysses, and shows that the processes of self-interrogation that feature in this work realign the antipathy between art and authority in ways that militate against the ideals of a Poundian art of 'power'. Chapter 5 treats the work of D. H. Lawrence as a site where an empowered art and culture is both overtly promoted and intrinsically challenged. The proximity of Lawrence's programmatic modernism to Pound's is stressed, while an inbuilt antagonism to its own ideals is shown to sharply distinguish the dynamic trajectory of Lawrencean aesthetics from a Poundian art of self-authorisation. While establishing the antagonism between art and authority as a common focus for modernism, this study underlines differences and antipathies that emerge between the projects and texts under discussion, charting the diversity of responses to a commonly felt crisis. The study concludes with a discussion of Pound's post-war poetry, examining the fate of a writer who failed to extend into his own aesthetics the insights that modem crises in authority delivered.

Blasting the Bombardier: Another Look at Lewis, Joyce, and Woolf

Abstract: It has been with considerable shaking in my shoes . . . that I have taken the cow by the horns in this chapter. (Wyndham Lewis, Men Without Art 140) In her essay "Jellyfish and Treacle: Lewis, Joyce, Gender and Modernism," Bonnie Kime Scott - leader of what she herself terms "the current wave of Joyce feminist criticism" (169) - offers an analysis of two modernisms: a "male modernism," as she puts it, embodied in the person and works of Wyndham Lewis, and a female modernism, best represented by Virginia Woolf. "I hope to demonstrate," Scott says, how Joyce coincides with some of Lewis's definitions early in his career, and how he and Lewis parted company in the 1920s, partially over the issue of the feminine. It is a debate that previously came to us under the masculine designation of Joyce as "the time man." As we play with new definitions involving gender and modernism, we discover that "the time man," one of "the men of 1914" [Lewis's term] was at least part woman. (169) Scott's objective is to set up two poles, the masculine (Lewis) and the feminine (Woolf), and to show how Joyce and his work are closer to the feminine pole than heretofore supposed. In the course of doing so, however, Scott presents a seriously distorted view of the writers involved, their interrelation, and the attitude toward gender offered in their texts. In this essay I will attempt to correct this view, or at the very least offer a counter-view. If Virginia Woolf is the modernist critics love to love - at least contemporary critics - then Wyndham Lewis is the modernist critics love to hate.(1) Scott clearly participates in this group antipathy. She tells us near the beginning of her essay that she wants to "compare aspects of gender and modernism" in Joyce's Portrait and Lewis's Tarr, both of which were first published in Harriet Shaw Weaver's magazine The Egoist in 1918. Scott prefaces her analysis with the comment "I think it interesting that Miss Weaver could identify with Stephen Dedalus in Joyce's novel, but never took to Tarr in the same way," and goes on to observe that "it seems typical of Lewis's incapacity for friendship, or his capacity for envy that he tipped off Miss Weaver to Joyce's considerable drinking" (169). Although Scott ostensibly wants to show that Joyce's apologetic letter to Miss Weaver about his drinking serves as "a critique of male camaraderie" (169), it seems to me all too typical of commentary on Lewis that the critic begins with an ad hominem bash, letting the reader know that Lewis was a thoroughly unpleasant person, a classic paranoid, and that we should be on our guard against both him and his works. In short, Scott begins her analysis by blasting the ex-bombardier, by reinforcing the already established view of Lewis as the modernist bogeyman. As she begins her comparative textual analysis, Scott observes that whereas Joyce's Portrait offers a representation of childhood, Lewis's Tarr "takes up where Joyce's leaves off. Lewis offers no sympathetic evocation of childhood; he had little sympathy for children" (170). A bad sort was Lewis, leaving a number of illegitimate children in his Enemy wake - as Scott is clearly aware.(2) What is more, although "Lewis was strongly attached to his own mother, and vice versa" - that is, although Lewis was a spoiled mama's boy - "he refuses to grant the mother an important place in his writings" (170). The fact that Joyce could be similarly ungrateful Scott concedes in a quick parenthesis: "(It has been argued by Colin MacCabe that Joyce did the same through much of Dubliners)" (170). So we see that the critic, even after her textual analysis begins, persists in her ad hominem argument - even when it imperils her thesis that Lewis and Joyce were different. Scott observes that both Tarr and Stephen "conceive of God and power as male, and like Aristotle and Nietzsche, place the female at the bottom of their conceptual hierarchies, with the mud, the vegetables, and the jellyfish" (170). …

Impressionism for England: Samuel Courtauld as Patron and Collector

Abstract: John Murdoch - The Courtauld Family and Money John House - Impressionism and its Contexts John House - Modern French Art for the Nation - Samuel Courtauld's Collection and Patronage in Context Andrew Stephenson - "An Anatomy of Taste" Samuel Courtauld and Debates about Art Patronage and Modernism in Britain in the Inter-War Years John House and William Bradford - Catalogue of Paintings and Drawings Elizabeth Prettejohn - Checklist of Paintings Acquired by Samuel Courtauld Elizabeth Prettejohn - Modern Foreign Paintings and the National Art Collections Anthology of British Texts, 1905-32.

A Small Nation's Contribution to the World: Essays on Anglo-Irish Literature and Language

Abstract: This collection contains a selection from the papers given at the 1989 conference of the International Association for the study of Anglo-Irish Literature. The selection is broadly representative of the truly international nature of the conference, whose delegates came from every continent, and of the study of Irish literature today. It includes essays on Beckett, Joyce, Friel, Yeats, O'Casey, Parker, Clarke, Kinsella, Muldoon, Mahon, Banville, Brian Moore, Edna O'Brien, Swift and Edgeworth, as well as on critical issues, such as the uses of the fantastic in prose and drama, modernism and romanticism, Irish semiotics, social criticisms in contemporary Irish poetry and, especially appropriate for the occasion, the relationship and influence of Hungary and Ireland in one another's literature. Contributors to this volume are Csilla Bertha, Eoin Bourke. Patrick Burke, Martin J. Croghan, Ruth Felischmann, Maurice Harmon, Werner Huber, Thomas Kabdebo, Veronica Kniezsa, Maria Raizis, Aladar Sarbu, Bernice Schrank, Joseph Swann and Andras Ungar. This is the forty-fifth volume of the Irish Literary Studies Series.

La sculpture dans la « querelle de l’Art Sacré » (1950-1960)

Abstract: Sculpture in the « quarrel of Sacred Art » (1950-1960). The renewal of sacred art in France after 1945 is marked by a major quarrel between the partisans of modernism and the upholders of tradition (1950-1952). Sculpture plays a significant part in this quarrel. But this art did not enjoy more than a modest influence at the time : only a small number of sculptures were realised, and these sculptures were mostly small in size. Contemporary historical studies pay but litde attention to them. Several of these sculptures, however, realised in a modern idiom, gave rise to lively scandals which are examined in this article as an ensemble : Richier’s Christ at Assy, V. Szekely’s Calvary at Fosse, Gilioli’s Christ at Mulhouse and Chavignier’s at Neuilly. All these examples lead to forms of iconoclasm (destruction or removal of the works) which neither the painting nor the architecture of the time witnessed. The particular fate reserved for sculpture is to be explained by the religious character generally recognised fot this art form during our century, and by the history of sculpture between the two wars, a history which hardly prepared sensibilities to welcome modern sculptures. These difficulties also help us understand the prudence of sculptors in the world of sacred art after 1960.

Arthur Machen & Montgomery Evans: Letters of a Literary Friendship, 1923-1947

Abstract: Arthur Machen (1863-1947), who achieved significant fame in the 1920s, was a general man of letters with echoes of Samuel Johnson, an important influence on later fantasy writers from H.P. Lovecraft to Ray Bradbury, and a great adventurer of the spirit. Montgomery Evans II, a wealthy book collector, and one of a small circle of Machen's friends and benefactors, carefully collected and mounted in two notebooks nearly 200 letters he had received from the Welsh writer. Sue Strong Hassler and Donald M. Hassler have arranged and edited material from the notebooks to reveal the story of a literary friendship between an old master, who knew he was a "master" and who continually valued what he called the "ecstasy" of fine writing, and a would-be writer and believer. From the 1920s on, literary materials by Machen had been popular with book collectors. Machen wrote an enormous number of letters, like these to Evans, in which he commented on literature, history (he was fascinated by the 18th century), cultural and political events ins England and America, publishing, bookselling and booksellers, his own writing, travel and food. Machen discusses many literary figures, including Robert Hillyer, Doroth Parker, Gilbert Seldes, H.L. Mencken, Sylvia Townsend Warner, James Branch Cabell, Holbrook Jackson, George Lacy, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sinclair Lewis, Rudyard Kipling and Vincent Starrett. The fullness of his correspondence provides a valuable insight into the literary life of Machen and his circle, which flourished around London from the 20s through to the Second World War. Machen's work is important not only as a source of ideas about writing, but also as a reflection of literary changes and as the critical foundation for modern fantasy. The Hasslers, in their analyses of the letters, explore Machen's versatility as a writer and offer an interpretation of his group and its opposition to literary modernism. This extensive publication of his letters should fascinate fans of horror fiction, for whom Machen is an early classic, and scholars of fantasy, science fiction, and literature in general. Book collectors and historians of bookselling and collecting should also find much of interest here.

Book Reviews -- American Culture between the Wars: Revisionary Modernism and Postmodern Critique by Walter Kalaidjian

Abstract: Walter Kalaidjian. American Culture Between the Wars: Revisionary Modernism and Postmodern Critique. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. xvi + 316 pp. $55.00 cloth; $18.50 paper.The avant-garde, popular, and working-class texts that Walter Kalaidjian discusses in his new work attempt to revise episodes in American culture that together constitute what he calls "a neglected cultural history" (8). Concentrating on such supposedly marginal moments in American culture as the Russian Revolution, the Harlem renaissance, the radical experimentations of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, and the popular interventions of feminism, Kalaidjian dexterously blurs the boundaries between high and low culture, politics and aesthetics, and academicism and popular forms. Kalaidjian's book is divided into five chapters, each of which is, in turn, nicely divided into subsections dealing with a more specific aspect of the theme that the chapter treats. The first chapter, entitled "Revisionary Modernism," discusses the role of transnationalism during the interwar years as a key episode in the shaping of American culture. Within the chapter, Kalaidjian pays particular attention to the influence of the Russian avant-gardes in the formation of a strong Marxist-socialist consciousness in America. The second chapter explores how various "subgroups." like the Chicago John Reed Club, the New Negro movement, and the politicized aesthetics of Diego Rivera, Hugo Gellert, and Louis Lozowick, among others, "signaled a communicative difference from the dominant ideological signs of American commodity culture" (61). The section on Diego Rivera is perhaps the best part of the whole book. Chapters 3 and 4 discuss feminist concerns and radical movements in poetry respectively. Kalaidjian places these two important contemporary movements vis-a-vis the economic, political, and social concerns that he claims inform these movements. The work of authors who tend to reclaim the mode of "cultural critique," whose political edge, Kalaidjian claims, "cuts through the semiosis of everyday life and goes to the heart of postmodern spectacle," is the concern of chapter 5. This chapter criticizes the postmodern emphasis on the disappearance of the "real" (263).Kalaidjian's purpose is not, however, simply to subvert the traditional, learned critical paradigm. His text shows that in High Modernism, Eliot, Pound, and Stevens, for instance, cohabited with the Dynamo group of poets. Kalaidjian's conflation of such apparently dissimilar poetic modes is not aimed at privileging one over the other. He argues, correctly I believe, that a thorough understanding of the period should take into account both discourses, since frequently the existence of one can throw light onto the other. One commonplace of High Modernist criticism, for instance, is to focus on the ahistorical stance most of the canonical poets adopted. By centering their discursive practices on transcendental concerns, poets like Eliot and Stevens ignored the urgent economic conditions affecting the country. This kind of anti-High Modernist discourse proves futile because it does not move further from the figures it supposedly attacks. Anti-Eliot discourse is, as it were, still focused on Eliot. Kalaidjian pushes beyond this sterile and circular critical move and cleverly shows, for example, how Ben Mait recasts Hart Crane's mythic bridge into a more politicized language to accommodate The Bridge to the discourse of political criticism. Kalaidjian argues that this kind of poetry arose from the period's deep dissatisfaction with American culture's emphasis on an increasingly automated labor process. Thus the critical veneration of such ahistorical writers as Eliot and Pound parallels the fate of society where workers "found themselves increasingly alienated from ever more automated systems of production, engineered and administered by a new class of technological experts" (154). Sol Funaroff, similarly, in "What the Thunder Said: A Fire Sermon," rearticulates Eliot's transcendental and historically unspecific resolution of social disillusion by turning it into a "materialistic vision of international class revolt, linking the unrest of pre-revolutionary Russia to depression era America" (154). …

Cubist Anachronisms: Ahistoricity, Cryptoformalism, and Business-as-Usual in New York

Abstract: New York's big modernist event in the fall of 1989 was the opening of the exhibition 'Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism' at the Museum of Modern Art, the swan song of retiring Director of the Department of Painting and Sculpture, William Rubin.1 Now was the culminating moment for Rubin to present his version of the formation of that foundational style of twentieth-century art, when two men heroically 'pioneered' Cubist form. This view of artmaking has long been associated with MoMA, which has stood for an unchanging canon of artists who singlehandedly (or, as in this celebrated case, collaboratively) created the greatest artistic achievements of modern art through personal 'genius' alone. Thus Rubin's narrowing the phenomenon of Cubism to the interaction of two men, despite the scores of artists and critics who participated in and theorized its manifestations, and his rigid focus on the biographies of Picasso and Braque, with little reference to social or historical issues, was thoroughly consonant with the version of modern art that unfolds in the display of MoMA's permanent collection.2 To celebrate this unprecedented two-man Cubist retrospective,3 in November 1989 Rubin assembled 25 Picasso and Braque scholars from France, Germany, England, Russia, and America in a fourday closed-door symposium, the proceedings of which were published last fall as a companion volume to his exhibition catalogue.4 A number of the essays raise issues quite new to Cubism studies, looking at ways Cubist art practices relate to French nationalist politics before the First World War, to issues of gender, to a plurality of cultural meanings and valences.5 Such complex historical considerations have been taken up only recently in this field, both encouraging in itself and appropriate as part of any dialogue on Cubism and its meanings.6 The pluralism of Rubin's concept, however, was largely defeated in the event itself. The discussions accompanying each paper disclose more succinctly than one would have thought possible the restricted terms of discourse at MoMA, its extraordinary deafness to voices in the street and beyond, and the remarkable comfort with which Cubism's procrustean bed can be shared by old-fashioned formalists like Rubin and cryptoformalists like Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss. The symposium's closed doors beautifully symbolized the exclusion of art historians of broader expertise than 'Picasso and Braque', not to mention historians of other aspects of Modernism who might have disturbed the focus on Cubism as a dialogue of two.7 The event's reductive discourse elegantly demonstrated how Rubin could nod in the direction of cultural studies even as the discussion proceeded along the well-worn formalist path, albeit with some semiotic twists and turns. This discourse was thoroughly in tune with the sort of event Rubin wanted, if the introduction to his catalogue can be taken as evidence. There Rubin has appropriated and decontextualized the importance of anarchist theory for an understanding of Picasso and his circle,8 by assimilating his cultural politics into an evocation of artistic temperament, a politics of essentialism. Thus in Rubin's introduction Picasso is declared to be 'anarchic by instinct', and his 'subversion of Western art' in the service of

Modernism as biography: American salons and European encounters

Abstract: In one of the often piquant asides addressed to his readers, Robert M Crunden complains off-handedly that "too much literary history has text speaking to text in a contextual vacuum" (p 107) This unobtrusive homily is, in fact, the premise for Crunden's monumental kaleidoscope American Salons: Encounters with European Modernism, 1885-1917 For Crunden envisions modernism as a rich canvas of individual personalities, interacting and influencing each other in cities as provincial as Baltimore and as cosmopolitan as Paris His work reflects his enthusiasm for the individual artist in his concrete "contextual" place, just as his ideological basis is a deliberate decision to avoid the pitfalls of poststructural theorizing These choices are the focus for a very compelling, well peopled, and, at times, provocative book But they bind Crunden's study as well American Salons fails, in the end, to address the ambiguity of modernism itself, just as the book's actors often fail to fit into the parameters of Crunden's definition of a modernist American Salons is based on the format of Crunden's Ministers of Reform: The Progressives' Achievement in American Civilization, 1889-1910 (1982), an analysis of progressivism as a "climate" of cultural creativity that is grounded on biographical sketches of the major Progressives In Ministers of Reform, Crunden's affection for his cast and his propensity for the artist signals his inclusion of seemingly unaligned "modernists" in American Salons Crunden creates a schema dictated by his definition of the modernist (chiefly the profile of the avant-garde iconoclast) and manipulates this profile to embrace figures as diverse as Harriet Monroe, editor of Poetry in Chicago; Jelly Roll Morton, the innovator of ragtime in New Orleans; Mack Sennett, the creator of slapstick comedy in Los Angeles; and Robert Frost, the New Hampshire poet Crunden explores the late nineteenth century too, naming James Whistler, and William and Henry James as "precursors," thus extending his thematic argument into the Victorian epoch There are, of course, the stock

Cultural Counterpoints in Society and Art

Abstract: As a teaching sociologist, with a few close artist friends who like to talk and to eat, I have spent the sociological equivalent of the thousand-and-one nights talking about art, for example, a Lois Johnson print or a Phil Simkin installation, in terms of one or another of the classic sociological theorists' insights into the dilemmas of life in modern times. Occasionally, the connections have been uncannily direct: Simkin's Secrets piece was the installation equivalent of the Berlin sociologist Georg Simmel's turn-of-the-century analysis of secrecy in urban society.' But whether the connections were direct or indirect, the links between sociological theory and particular works of art were repeatedly plausible. In retrospect, this is not surprising: the European theorists I drew on most frequently-in our dining out salon-were, in addition to Simmel, Emile Durkheim and Max Weber. All were born in the nineteenth century and their careers extended into the twentieth century. All observed the birth of modernism in art and had intense and complex responses to the evolving social environments of their time. If there are connections between the content of art and characteristics of modern life, then connections between them should be reflected in the concerns of sociology as well. Thus encouraged, a more general review of this phenomenon is in order, based on four decades of art viewing and using sociological reference points. My general premise: there are, from the 1950s to the 1990s, several significant cultural counterpoints in social behavior and in innovative art, consisting of intersecting attitudes and choices of actions; they are contrasting and/or parallel, depending on the particular period. In the 1950s, in art, it was the intensity of work, expressive individualism, and the spectacular international successes of first-generation Abstract Expressionists that provoked sociological discussion. According to the sociologist David Riesman, in The Lonely Crowd, we were, in the 1950s, moving toward a new character type, the other-directed American who was socialized to attend closely to others in the immediate environment and to look to them for guidance and confirmation.2 Older types had been inner-directed or tradition-directed. The Abstract Expressionists were both intensely sociable in their own group and, at the same time, firmly committed to finding their own unique mode of painting within the modernist tradition. Thus, they represented a combination of Riesman's otherand inner-directed types. They were as committed to their shared search for great painting as other, more ordinary conformist groups were committed to their organizational lives. Of course they were, in their own views, alienated from society, as the sociologists Bernard Rosenberg and Norris Fliegel demonstrated in their 1960s interview study, The Vanguard Artist.3 From his vantage point at Fortune magazine, the sociologist William Whyte's description of the 1950s "organization man" is the clearest cultural counterpoint to the Abstract Expressionists; this new American type was fully other-directed and devoted to the large business, government, or legal organization in which he worked. The tendency of the organization man to fit into his surroundings contrasts with the outsider stance of the Abstract Expressionist artist, yet both adapted to institutional pressures brought about by inclusion and success in the corporate environment and the art world, respectively.4 In the 1960s it was the shock of Pop, the excitement of Happenings, and the cool of Minimalism that provided the grist for sociological milling. Happenings directly challenged viewers' perceptions of social patterns and of conformity to conventions. Pop raised questions of meaning: Was it art? What was the message? Was it the celebration or parody of our massconsumer world? The functional role of art in society is at issue in these questions. In Parsonian functional analysis, artists are specialists in the creation of expressive symbols. Sociological theorist Talcott Parsons pointed out that art may trigger conflict in society because of our preference for "affective neutrality" in our sciencebased, rational culture.5 Both Happenings and Pop art evoked strong emotional responses in the 1960s. Artworks in these styles challenged social conventions and offered models for new ways to relate to our culture and to one another. At the same time, the anti-poverty, anti-war, civil-rights, and alternative-life-style movements provided us with real-life parallels to these art models for change. Herbert Marcuse's "one-dimensional man" was a negative image of narrow conventionality, contrasting with the critical culture of these art and real-life alternatives.6

A Society Without Soul: The Fear of Modernism in the 1937 Opera The Romance of Robot

Abstract: The lowlands have fostered enough of sons, and thehills, and the sea.Now a strange mother with nipples of iron gives suckto a nation.At her side the young towns take strength on theirlips.(Black)The above, taken from MacKnight Black's 1929 poem "New Mother," heralded the birth of a brave new world where organization and efficiency were the keys to the future. The people of these modern times worshipped the positive changes the machine brought to humanity, especially as it eliminated the daily drudgery of many industrial occupations. Shortly after its release, however the economy began to slide and then tumble ushering in an economic and social Depression which challenged America and its citizens. The modern engineers of the free economy, led by Herbert Hoover, had failed, it seemed, to fulfill the promises of a brighter, machine age future.In 1937 the Federal Music Project, part of the larger work relief program of the Works Progress Administration created in 1935, sponsored a short opera entitled The Romance of Robot, which in many ways is the antithesis of "New Mother." The production appeared during Franklin Roosevelt's New economic recovery plan which championed the positive attributes of organization and efficiency, if tempered with a human understanding of the social realities of the crisis. The opera satirized a society in which machines, and by extension the ideals of a now-suspect modernism, would replace individual initiative and feelings with logical decisions and stress organization over humanity. The new world order of the machine, Romance opined, was in fact a future that had no soul.In a soliloquy near the end of Romance, Robot rejects the coldness of his machine existence in favor of the human emotion love. His description of who he was defines, in part, the ideals of the machine age and the concept of modernism:Free from traditions of old,Called a new mechanist, forced to be hard,Made to be brutal and cold.Robot, they called me, the great man of steel.(The Romance of Robot)It Is relatively easy to understand what "Machine Age" means, but defining modernism has been a bit more problematic. David Hollinger compares the defining process to entering a room: "each wall is said to be 'modernist" yet each reflects light differently." In literature, modernists sought to break with the Victorian past, especially its middle-class pretensions, and re-create a new, more organic literature based on the experiences of the self. For political scientists, modernism held that science and its intellectuals would provide the cures for social ills. Religious modernism tied the methods of scientific inquiry to the Protestant work ethic in order to meet the needs of the modern world (Hollinger 37-55).Even more complicated is the relationship between modernism and the idea of modernization. Joseph Singal argues that modernism, especially as a literary avant garde movement, rose up in response to the forces of modernization. The modernists attempted to restore some sense of human order to "the rise of industry, technology, urbanization, and bureaucratic institutions." Using William James and John Dewey as guides, Singal describes two strains of modernism: one, which celebrates the individual consciousness, spontaneity and the new realms of personal experience manifesting itself mainly in art and literature (James), and two, which focuses on the elimination of social barriers and joins reason with emotion to eradicate the social problems of the day (Dewey). However, the problem is complicated by Singal's modernists ambivalence. On one hand, they admired the vitality and progress that modernization and technology brought (in fact they would utilize the new technology in their works) but, on the other, they feared the dehumanization they saw resulting from society's increasing dependence on machines. Daniel Bell argues that this ambivalence led to a modernist culture that was all form, but no content, and based upon the "machine aesthetic," where much of what was created was defined as "functional. …