Modernist Literature (Literary Modernism)

Perspectives on Modernity: Habermas and Lyotard

by Kevin Boyle

Draft only.

'Realism, Late Modernist Abstraction, and Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Fictions of Impersonality'

by David James

Published in Modernism/Modernity (2005)

'The New Purism'

by David James

Published in Textual Practice (2007)

'By Thrifty Design: Ford's Bequest and Coetzee's Homage'

by David James

Published in International Ford Madox Ford Studies (2008)

'Localizing Late Modernism'

by David James

Published in Journal of Modern Literature (2009)

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

by neil murphy

Visions of Jewish Modernism

by Barbara Mann

"Dressed to Kill: The Sex of the Wars in Faulkner and Cather"

by Paula Elyseu Mesquita

in Irene Ramalho Santos and António Ribeiro , eds. *Translocal Modernisms - International Perspectives*, Transatlantic Aesthetics and Culture Series, Peter Lang, 2008.

This reading analyzes the use of the war motif in the representation of sociosexual tension in William Faulkner's *The... more This reading analyzes the use of the war motif in the representation of sociosexual tension in William Faulkner's *The Unvanquished* and Willa Cather's *One of Ours.*

Nature Has Forgotten Us: Reactions to the Apocalypse in Beckett and The Road

by Lauren Baker

Similarities in the apocalyptic narrative of Beckett and McCarthy Similarities in the apocalyptic narrative of Beckett and McCarthy

I Hear Singing: Rhythmic and affective characteristics in three choral settings of E. E. Cummings’ “i thank You God for most this amazing” compared with a recording of the poet reading his own work.

by Philip Rice

Written for "Seminar in Analysis of American Vocal Music", graduate course at Westminster Choir College, Spring, 2012. Instructor: Dr. Christian Carey.

Comparison of three choral settings of E. E. Cummings' "i thank You God for most this amazing" using a 1953... more Comparison of three choral settings of E. E. Cummings' "i thank You God for most this amazing" using a 1953 recording of the poet reading the poem as a control group for analysis of rhythmic features and affects within each work. Settings explored are by Jacob Avshalomov (1971), Gwyneth Walker (1998), and Eric Whitacre (2000).

Modernist Indexicality: The Language of Gender, Race, and Domesticity in Hebrew and Yiddish Modernism

by Allison Schachter

Bergelson and the Landscape of Yiddish Modernism

by Allison Schachter

Bryher, Havelock Ellis and the Adventure of Sex

by Jana Funke

Communal Modernisms. Ed. Emily Hinnov. (forthcoming with Palgrave, 2013)

The Old Men and the "Sea of Masscult": T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and Middlebrow Aesthetics

by Tom Perrin

forthcoming in American Literature 84.1 (March 2012)

This essay examines the late work of Ernest Hemingway and T. S. Eliot, both accused of having descended into... more This essay examines the late work of Ernest Hemingway and T. S. Eliot, both accused of having descended into “middlebrow” territory during the post-World-War-II years when the term was most in vogue. I argue that Eliot’s and Hemingway’s middlebrow work develops an aesthetic program that offers solutions to the contradictions and incoherencies of postwar modernism. I aim to show thereby that so-called middlebrow literature might be thought of not merely in terms of the set of structures for marketing and distribution through which it was consumed, but as having a self-conscious, counter-modernist aesthetic philosophy of its own—one that anticipates the “critical aesthetics” called for by today’s scholars.

'What are the roots that clutch’?: Extending Environmental Thought to Urban Landscapes through T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.

by Elizabeth Harris

LLAS. 27/04/2012. University of Birmingham
Nature and the Natural in the Humanities: Teaching for Environmental Sustainability

Ecocriticism has tended to focus primarily on texts which either have rural settings or have nature as their central... more Ecocriticism has tended to focus primarily on texts which either have rural settings or have nature as their central subject matter. However, as most universities in the UK are located in cities it is important not to overlook urban environments and urban-centred texts in discussions about environmental sustainability. If texts with urban settings are excluded from consideration as environmental literature in our teaching we risk alienating students from urban backgrounds, as well limiting our understanding of the range and diversity of natural habitats in Britain.
A modernist text such as The Waste Land provides a perfect example of the vibrant multiplicity of urban places and the complex interaction of personal, historical and cultural meaning in shaping our comprehension of the modern city. The Waste Land also raises discussion over the spiritual and psychological impact of city living by depicting a soulless society which has become disconnected from the processes and cycles of the nature and lives only for human concerns.
Teaching urban texts from a green perspective can extend the scope of ecocriticism, provide fresh insights into well known texts and increase students’ awareness of the presence and processes of nature within their immediate environment. This can then extend into a wider discussion of how the individual can increase their awareness of nature and wild places in the city, and how urban lifestyles can be made compatible with environmental sustainability.

Literary Celebrity and the Discourse on Authorship in Dutch Literature

by Gaston Franssen

Literary celebrity results from a clash between two discursive configurations: literary authorship and popular... more Literary celebrity results from a clash between two discursive configurations: literary authorship and popular celebrity. In order to gain an understanding of the contradictions that lie at the heart of literary celebrity, the authorial subjectivity of two Dutch authors are analyzed: Menno ter Braak (1902-1940) and Jan Cremer (1940-). Ter Braak will be shown to personify a classic, high modernist notion of authorship, which entails a resistance to commodification, a critique of personality cult, and a privileging of originality. Cremer, on the other hand, constructs his authorial subjectivity by embracing commerciality, posing as an overtly public individual, and preferring repetition over originality. Yet literary celebrity cannot be understood as a simple inversion of the hierarchical oppositions that characterize the discourse on literary authorship: by analyzing Cremer’s work and reception, I demonstrate that literary celebrity entails a 'staging’ of high modernist authorship

A Lens for an Eye: Photography and Proust

by Dora Zhang

Representations 118 (Spring 2012), 103-125.

Crises de la mémoire

by Yan Hamel

Comte-rendu critique de Susan Rubin Suleiman, Crises of Memory and the Second World War, Cambridge/London, Harvard University Press, 2006, 286 p.

Berber Poetry and the Issue of Derivation: Alternate Symbolist Trajectories, Oxford Handbook of Global Modernism, Ed. Mark Wollaeger (2012): 81-108; available on google books

by Edwige Tamalet Talbayev

Lyric and its Discontents

by Walt Hunter

forthcoming in Minnesota Review

The lyric poem has often been understood as incompatible with other discourses, set apart by its compression, privacy,... more The lyric poem has often been understood as incompatible with other discourses, set apart by its compression, privacy, and identification with the individual self. Recently, the New Lyric Studies has rejected both the essentialism and the exceptionalism of the lyric as a genre or mode, seeking instead to expose the term lyric as an ideological reading practice that separates the text from its historical context. This essay examines some of the ways in which four new books on poetry by Siobhan Phillips, Joel Nickels, Christopher Nealon, and Oren Izenberg contribute to lyric theory by emphasizing what the poem holds in common with other discourses. I analyze the intersection between the lyric and four terms borrowed from sociology, moral philosophy, political theory, and economics: the everyday, the person, the multitude, and capital. Stressing the lyric’s compatibility rather than its distinction, these critics reveal the universalism and collectivity out of which the lyric voice is constructed. I argue that the New Lyric Studies, widely construed to include these critics, brings poetry in line with the social poetics, world systems, and democratic inclusivity that figure prominently in current literary discourse, as well as with European theories of poetic subjectivity and community.