Literature, Art, Aesthetics, Avant-Garde, Modernism

“Sin and Redemption in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” in Bloom’s Literary Themes: Sin and Redemption. Eds. Harold Bloom and Blake Hobby. New York: Chelsea House, 2010: 223-230

by neil murphy

"Aidan Higgins," Review of Contemporary Fiction, Fall 2003 Vol. XXIII, no. 3: 49-84.

by neil murphy

Realtà bruta. Una polemica tra Papini e Boccioni “

by Alessandro Del Puppo

Draft version. "Prospettiva", n. 72, 2000, p. 82-94.

Enlisting and Updating: Ruggero Vasari and the Shifting Coordinates of Futurism in Eastern and Central Europe

by Maria Elena Versari

"International Yearbook of Futurism Studies"
ed. by Günter Berghaus (1) (November 2011): 277–298

Por uma Historiografia do Modernismo: O Caso da Competitividade nas Literaturas Anglófonas

by Gustavo Vargas Cohen

The present text brings and comments on a series of dichotomies and conflicts that ravaged the English language... more The present text brings and comments on a series of dichotomies and conflicts that ravaged the English language modernists. The context of creation of their works is introduced
and external conflicts are highlighted, such as the world wars and their social, cultural and artistic implications, so as to reach the internal conflicts, those motivated by the anxiety and the disorientation that stemmed from that turbulent era and that generated a number of injurious observations among writers, i.e., the invectives which are the focus of this investigation. Based on oral and printed documents, this sagacious, oftentimes unhealthy, competition explored by Anglophone Modernists the likes of Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams, among others, is presented through the search of a balance between historical-scientific rigor and good humor.

A Hammer to Shape Reality: Alan Moore’s Graphic Novels and the Avant-Gardes

by Andres Romero-Jodar

Published in Studies in Comics, Volume 2 Issue 1, May 2011, pp. 39-56

Alan Moore’s graphic novels have marked essential standpoints in the history of narrative iconical genres. Works like... more Alan Moore’s graphic novels have marked essential standpoints in the history of narrative iconical genres. Works like Watchmen or V for Vendetta helped reorient the 1980s Anglo-American comic book into the graphic novels of the 1990s by pushing the boundaries of the comic-book genre into the realm of postmodernity. Moore’s graphic novels depict characters that are suffocated by the grand narratives of capitalist societies, Orwellian dystopias and totalizing ideologies. In this vein, his works may be placed in the context of postmodernist thinking postulated by Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard or Fredric Jameson. However, the rebellious attitude shown in his narratives against those globalizing definitions of the self and homogenizing social orders strongly recalls the efforts of the early twentieth-century avant-gardes to provoke their bourgeois audiences into action by fostering their radical distaste. The aim of this article is to consider certain examples of Alan Moore’s graphic novels as direct inheritors of the committed ideology and technical experimentalism proposed by avant-garde movements at the beginning of the twentieth century. As Brecht famously argued, ‘art is not a mirror to reflect the world, but a hammer with which to shape it’. This article will thus centre on Moore’s works that best reflect the same experimental spirit of revolutionary art forms fostered by Cubism, Modernism, Futurism and other European avant-garde movements. These movements, by using the power of artistic creation, called audiences to social action against the rising fascist discourses of the first decades of the twentieth century. It is my contention that graphic novels like Lost Girls, Watchmen, From Hell and V for Vendetta connect with the recovery of avant-garde ethics and aesthetics, and seem to renew their attacks against the moral double standard of bourgeois, accommodated social classes. Then, Moore’s graphic novels raise public awareness and serve as social denunciation, becoming, at certain moments, examples of intellectual terrorism against the status quo.

Aidan Higgins: The Fragility of Form

by neil murphy

Edited by Neil Murphy, with essays by John Banvlle, Annie Proulx, Derek Mahon, Dermot Healy, Morris Beja, Keith Hopper, and Aidan Higgins, among others.
Published by Dalkey Archive 2010

Drawing together a wide range of focused critical commentary and observation by internationally renowned scholars and... more Drawing together a wide range of focused critical commentary and observation by internationally renowned scholars and writers, this collection of essays offers a major reassessment of Aidan Higgins’s body of work almost fifty years after the appearance of his first book, Felo De Se. Authors like Annie Proulx, John Banville, Derek Mahon, Dermot Healy, and Higgins himself, represented by a previously uncollected essay, offer a variety of critical and creative commentaries, while scholars such as Keith Hopper, Peter van de Kamp, George O’Brien, and Gerry Dukes contribute exciting new perspectives on all aspects of Higgins’s writing, including his radio plays, his critical work, and the Harold Pinter film adaptation of Langrishe, Go Down. Langrishe too is revisited, while convincing cases are made for the major significance of later novels such as Bornholm Night-Ferry and Lions of the Grunewald, as well as Higgins’s unorthodox trilogy of autobiographies. This collection confirms the enduring significance of Aidan Higgins as one of the major writers of our time, and also offers testament that Higgins’s work is being rediscovered by a new generation of critics and writers.

Irish Fiction and Postmodern Doubt: An Analysis of the Epistemological Crisis In Modern Irish Fiction

by neil murphy