Browsing by Subject "Modernism"

Literary modernism followed a century during which philosophical speculations about the mechanistic basis of human life found experimental validation in the work of physiologists, who stressed the power of environment to shape and delimit thought and action. By the late 19th century, the hypothesis that humans were "automata," as Descartes had conjectured, began to seem much more than philosophical speculation, as statesmen and industrialists appropriated blueprints of the human machine originally mapped by the sciences. So dominant was the conjunction of politics and habit that, writing in 1890s, the American psychologist William James would call the automatic operations of body and mind the very engine of political life: "Habit," he declared, "is the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor." But James was only anticipating the wide range of thinkers who would associate physiological automatism with politics in the coming years. By century's end, the belief that habit determined social action and circumscribed individual volition was to find wide currency in a variety of cultural fields, including literary modernism.

Situating literary modernism in relation to this emergent sense of political modernity, Automatic Modernism argues that modernists reconfigured the discourse of automatism for political and aesthetic ends. Wary of the new political environment in which government, political parties and industry exploited the science of conditioned reflex to ensure automatic responses from docile subjects, writers of this period turned to the resources of literature in order to both disrupt the clichés of thought and action enforced by environmental stimuli and to imagine forms of politics adapted to the physiologically automatic body. Looking in particular at the fiction and non-fiction work of D. H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, Rebecca West, and Samuel Beckett, this dissertation attempts to understand the recurrent equation of automatic behavior and twentieth-century modernity. Even as modernists vigorously rejected habitual behavior as the very element of twentieth century life that imperiled authentic art and social belonging, they forged alternative notions of bodily being, investing in the potentialities of human automatism as the basis of aesthetic possibility and social coherence. The formal experiments of these modernists emerge, then, as efforts to foreground, manipulate, rupture, and mimic the political habits of readers.

This dissertation explores the particular significance of South Asia to international literary and political spheres, beginning with the formative moments of modernist internationalism. At the height of the Harlem Renaissance, W. E. B. Du Bois interrupted his work with the NAACP and the pan-African congresses to write Dark Princess: a Romance. Du Bois's turn to the romance and to India forms the point of departure for my dissertation, for India, both real and imagined, offered modernist intellectuals a space of creative possibility and representative impossibility. The fiction of Cornelia Sorabji, for instance, obfuscates and allegorizes practices of women's seclusion, both to refute imperial feminist solutions and to support her legal activism. From the imperial romance to the anti-racist one, the misrepresentation endemic to the romance genre enables the figuration of a discrepant globe. This modernist practice of transfiguring India, usually in the service of a global political vision, is undertaken both within India as well as outside of it. Rabindranath Tagore, for example, interrupted his leading role in the anti-colonial movement to write Gora, a novel of mistaken identity and inappropriate love, and to mistranslate his own poetry, particularly his Nobel-Prize-winning collection Gitanjali. If realism aims to translate cultural difference, to faithfully carry meaning across boundaries, the romances I consider in my dissertation work instead to mistranslate those differences, to produce a longed-for object beyond cultural specificity. In conversation with postcolonial theorists of Anglophone literary practice, as well as debates around translation in comparative literature, I suggest that we should think about intercultural texts in terms of transfiguration: not the carrying across of meaning from one sign system to another, but the reshaping of culturally specific materials, however instrumentally and inaccurately, in the service of internationalist goals.

This study examines Irish modernist literature in order to complicate established critical modes which read modernist movements as reflective of distinctly vernacular or cosmopolitan aesthetic and political commitments. I argue that neither recent models of vernacular modernism nor older models of cosmopolitan modernism entirely account for the stylistic innovations and formal experiments of modernist literature. Instead, modernist writers negotiate a field of tension between the poles of cosmopolitan and vernacular, and demonstrate that their works represent forms of identity that accommodate elements of both national belonging and cosmopolitan individualism.

Examining works by four authors - William Butler Yeats, Elizabeth Bowen, Samuel Beckett, and Raymond Queneau - this project argues that modernist literature represents a set of idiosyncratic, dynamic efforts to negotiate the tensions between the limits of the nation-state system and a variety of emerging transnational modes of cultural exchange in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The nature of modernist writers' efforts to negotiate a period of passage between national and global systems of exchange is, I think, especially visible in the case of Irish modernism. Ireland's transition from a part of the United Kingdom to an independent nation-state in the interwar period makes that nation's literature an exemplary case for my argument, as does the critical importance of Irish writing in the modernist canon.

By examining these and other critical and historical perspectives alongside a sampling of plays, novels, short stories, and memoirs, this study makes the case that modernist literary aesthetics spring from writers' efforts to make sense of competing desires for national belonging and cosmopolitan autonomy. Focusing on works that cross categorical boundaries between Irish and cosmopolitan modernism, this study traces the ways in which modernist aesthetics construct dynamic, adaptive relationships between the global and the national, and suggest that we can imagine them as something other than static, exclusive alternatives.

Art historians have identified a rightward turn in the artistic climate of France in the interwar period, one opposed to an avant-garde accused of being foreign to national culture, and reflective of a broader cultural and political shift towards the right. However, a study detailing the strength and variety of forces opposed to modernism and the avant-gardes in this period has yet to be written.

Drawing on newspapers, art journals, art history books, and sources from private and national archives in France, my dissertation presents four detailed case studies of reactionary, anti-avantgardeist and anti-modernist critics, art educators and art historians during this period, expanding our understanding of the position and influence of these rightwing intellectuals. Analyzing their aims, the artists they supported, their audiences, their social networks, and finally their links to the French state, the dissertation will reconstitute the multiple and multifaceted platforms of conservative cultural activism, revealing the contours of a powerful, persistent, and often successful cultural and political agenda that sought to undermine or reverse the course of modernism.

Accounting for the strategies through which rightwing art world actors battling modernism and the avant-gardes sought to institutionalize their campaigns, this dissertation complicates and revises our understanding of the substantial challenges posed to modern art in the interwar period, demonstrating the power of these interventions while also pointing to the tacit complicity of the French state with these efforts.

"Existential Realism: Modernism and the Ethics of Agency in the Franco-American Existentialist Tradition, 1937-1955” unearths the pivotal role American fiction played in the development and dissemination of the French existentialist ethics of agency. French intellectuals regarded American fiction as a reinvention of novelistic realism based on its engrossing quality. Through readings of novels by John Steinbeck, Richard Wright, and Patricia Highsmith, I show how such immersive narratives invite readers to inhabit characters’ agency. These novels illuminate a dimension of character agency that has gone overlooked in the prevailing modernist accounts of twentieth-century literature in that they allow the reader experience by proxy moral clarity and blindness. By tracing agency through the motif of gratuitous murder, I show that this fiction critiques a notion of authenticity that prizes overweening ability of one’s own ability to act. Ultimately “Existential Realism” shows both how existentialist thought enriches our appreciation of a strain of American fiction, and also how action-driven fiction dramatizes the triumphs and failures of agency.

This dissertation focuses on the fictional narratives of Eastern and Central European women authors writing in German and explores the ways in which historical and political trauma shapes their approach to narrative. By investigating the atrocities of the World War II era and beyond through a lens of trauma, I look at the ways in which their narrative writing is disrupted by traumatic memory, engendering a genre that calls into question official accounts of historical events. I argue that without the emergence and proliferation of these individual trauma narratives to contest, official, cemented accounts, there exists a threat of permanent inscription of official versions into public consciousness, effectively excluding the narratives of communities rendered fragile by war and/or displacement. The dissertation demonstrates how these trauma fictions i) reveal the burden of unresolved, transmitted trauma on the second generation as the pivotal generation between the repressive Stalinist era and the collapse of communism, ii) disrupt official accounts of events through the intrusion of individual traumatic memory that is by nature unmediated and uncensored, iii) offer alternative plural accounts of events by rejecting normal everyday language as a vehicle for narrative and instead experimenting with alternative modes of representation, articulating trauma through poetic language, through spaces, and through the body, and v) struggle against theory, while paradoxically often succumbing to the very same institutionalized language of trauma that they seek to contest. Trauma fiction therefore emerges as a distinct genre that forestalls the threat of erasure of alternative memories by constantly challenging and exposing the equivocal nature of official narratives, while also pointing to the challenges faced in attempting to give a voice to groups that have suffered trauma in an age where the term has become embedded and overused in our everyday language.

This dissertation reconsiders the relationship between nineteenth and twentieth century artists and the paranormal. Historically, the term “paranormal” has denoted an array of otherworldly phenomena that has captivated artists and the public alike. Indeed, this period, host to William Blake’s spiritual visions and William Butler Yeats’s ghostly dictations, showcases the indelible influence the paranormal has had on art. Unsurprisingly, this influence has long attracted critical attention. The prevailing narrative of critics such as Leon Surette and Helen Sword argues that the period’s artists expressed their paranormal interests by aestheticizing the practices of spiritualist movements, which professed the existence of a “spirit world” that could be contacted by humans via séances or psychic mediums. But there has been little consideration of how artists identified these interests with the very mechanics of artistic creation, believing art could engage otherworldly phenomena in ways that spiritualist techniques could not.

In Guided by Voices, I argue that a diverse strand of nineteenth and twentieth century artists conceived of poetry as an access point to a transgressive, generative kind of paranormality. Some, for instance, understood the poetical text and its creator as haunted entities, while others believed their poetry-making could conjure spirits. Regardless, these poets all turned to the paranormal to achieve liberation. In their quest to expand the imaginative possibilities of their craft, they invoked the paranormal to revolutionize our perceptions of language, humanity, and politics. When read as such, their work comprises a distinct historical arc, a tradition of liberated poetics that unifies artists across disparate times and spaces. Hence, Guided by Voices not only reassess artistic engagements with the paranormal but also illuminates conceptual-historical links between artists that scholarship has not yet recognized.

Over three chapters and an epilogue, I demonstrate how parapoiesis, the unique enmeshment of poetry and the paranormal, enables a series of liberations: liberation from embodiment; liberation from poetic form; liberation from individuality; and liberation from sociohistorical reality. Close readings of primary sources direct my assertions, as do some wide-ranging theoretical reference points. I harness Jacques Derrida’s concept of hauntology to help articulate my definition of the paranormal, for example, and I incorporate Georges Bataille’s ideas about the mythic to flesh out my examination of poetical mythmaking. The project does, however, draw as much from a popular imaginary as it does academic discourses; folk spirituality’s characterizations of ghosts, magic, and the occult also help anchor my claims.

Ultimately, I argue that parapoiesis’ significance lies in its capacity to transform, often in a material sense, our world. Parapoiesis illustrates how and why poets perceive their works’ relationship with paranormality as intrinsic, procreative, and alchemical. I contend that these poets reveal a broader facet of nineteenth and twentieth century artistic production which maintains a contemporary resonance and usefulness: art’s paranormal entanglements deconstruct prevailing ideological narratives and histories, imagine alternative, liberatory ones, and, in doing so, alter the very material conditions within which culture itself germinates.

This dissertation intervenes in the fields of modernist criticism and new media studies to examine an under-appreciated reciprocity between them. I argue that this reciprocity has not yet been adequately incorporated into a critical reckoning of the modernist period, a literary age too often neglected by new media studies as an epoch of "old media" productions. Even if modernist poets did create works largely intended for traditional book-bound channels, the imaginations that produced those works were forged in the combustible mix of new media and technologies that emerged in the early 20th century.

The argument focuses on the poetics of Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein, innovative poets who composed some of the most prescient, insightful writings on record about the connections linking technological and poetical developments. Through an examination of these poets' speculative writings, I argue that their experimental poetic methods emerged from their understanding of the challenges posed by new media and technologies. Among these challenges were new velocities of signification that emerged with the proliferation of the telegraph, new capacities for the storage of information that arrived with the introduction of the phonograph, an altered relationship to language itself with the externalized alphabet of the typewriter, and a new feel for how meaning could be generated through the montage logic of the cinema.

Drawing on a critical perspective derived from Martin Heidegger, pragmatist philosophers, Frankfurt School theorists and new media scholars such as Friedrich Kittler and Marshall McLuhan, I examine how modernist poetry, when framed as a media event, can help us understand how technological and media shifts influence our conceptions of our own inner and outer domains.

Focusing on a diverse set of creative work from Europe, East and South Asia, the Americas, Middle East, and Africa, Minor Measures investigates modalities of world writing through modernist, postcolonial and contemporary transnational literatures in the intertwined moments of imperialism, developmentalism and globalism. It studies the category of world literature as a heterogeneous set of narrative-cognitive forms and comparative modes of gauging from a particular positionality the world-systemic pressures on individual and collective bodies. To this end, Minor Measures focuses on the dynamic and increasingly central role of geoliterary imagination in fashioning a secular hermeneutic that maps the relationships and overlaps between the local and the global, here and there, past and present, self and other. Moreover, it highlights the capacities of the literary aesthetics in configuring local subjectivities, affiliations and histories in relation to the abstract cartographic totality of global modernity. Shuttling back and forth between the two poles, literature as world writing refers to the unconscious framework of representing the contingencies of the lived experience of economically, racially, and geographically differentiated subjects from metropolitan, (post)colonial and diasporic positions.

This dissertation uses Nietzsche's writings on truth and metaphor as a lens through which to reconsider the contribution that modernist art sought to make to both the understanding and, ultimately, the reconstruction of everyday life. It begins with a consideration of the sentiment, first articulated on a wide scale by the artists and philosophers of the romantic era, that something essential to the cohesion of individual and social experience has been lost during the turbulent transition to modernity. By situating Nietzsche's thought vis-à-vis the decline of nineteenth-century idealism in both its Continental and Victorian forms, I demonstrate how his principal texts brought to an advanced stage of philosophical expression a set of distinctly post-romantic concerns about the role of mind and language in the construction of reality that would soon come to define the practice of modernism in philosophy and the arts. Nietzsche's contribution to moral philosophy is typically regarded as a skeptical, and even wholly negative, one. Yet a central element of his thought is obscured, I argue, when we fail to account for its positive conviction that "higher moralities are, or ought to be, possible." Because his philosophy attempts to diagnose "genealogically" the concrete social, historical, and psychological conditions under which truth-relations are generated and maintained within a given cultural framework, it is in fact every bit as constructive as it is deconstructive, involving a sustained and ethically significant reflection on the character of normativity itself.

This initial confrontation with Nietzsche's philosophy sets the stage for the studies of individual artists--the American poets Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens, as well as the Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman--for whom these traditionally epistemological concerns about the nature of representation also shade naturally into the domain of ethics. In these chapters, I demonstrate how aesthetic modernism produces a range of sophisticated responses to the predicament of relativism that Nietzsche articulated while reaching sometimes radically different conclusions than Nietzsche about the nature and extent of human agency in the modern world. This enables us to see how modernism makes an essential contribution to what the philosopher Charles Taylor has characterized as the broader cultural effort to "overcome epistemology" by exploring the structures of intentionality and fostering in us a basic "awareness about the limits and conditions of our knowing"--a project to which modernist art and philosophy both make essential contributions.

This dissertation explores formal fragmentation in the modernist novel. It shows that such fragmentation not only represents the historical conditions of modernism, but also posits the potential for new forms of human relation. Each chapter explores test cases of this potential through a close analysis of a novel and argues that in order to understand such literary structure one must look beyond literature to the wider episteme of modernism. Each chapter therefore positions literature alongside a related field, where the affinities are shown to be found not in a shared content but in a shared form. The chapters include explorations of: the problem of language in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying read alongside advertising; the problem of continuity and fragmentation in Ford’s Parade’s End read alongside security and administrative governance; and the problem of perception in Woolf’s The Waves read alongside physics. As the discussion of these pairings proceeds from chapter to chapter, it is shown that the fragmentation of each respective novel reveals an increasingly successful utopian experiment in alternative forms of human relationality. At an additional register, this dissertation also shows that such experimentation requires a redefined role for the critic, for the novels each draw the reader into their texts by not only representing but enacting fragmentation in a way that requires the reader to participate in the utopian experiment. Through the practice of criticism, the critic is therefore implicated in the modernist project, and complicit in all of the political and ethical concerns the project carries.

This dissertation explores the modernist novel's response to the Bildungsroman. Through extensive close readings of the three modern versions of the genre -- In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust, The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, and Ferdydurke by Witold Gombrowicz -- it shows that the tensions buried deep in the unconscious of this great narrative of organic development finally erupt as formal problems in modernism, when the classical Bildungsroman meets its demise through a relentless dehumanization of form. If the classical Bildungsroman presents us with "the image of man in the process of becoming" as Bakhtin has suggested, it argues that the modernist Bildungsroman enacts the dissolution of that process in its very form.

This dissertation argues that one of the distinguishing characteristics of modernist literature is its desire to represent the social totality and that some of the significant modernist narrative-formal experiments can be read as attempts to respond to the complex phenomenon of fragmentation witnessed in modernity. The crisis in the representation of totality is presented as a general framework within which different national situations and their literary works can communicate with each other, and the conventional definition of modernism can be broadened accordingly. This study focuses on the formal solutions offered to the mentioned problem in James Joyce’s Ulysses, A.H. Tanpınar’s A Mind at Peace, and Sadeq Hedayat’s The Blind Owl. The forms it analyzes extensively are Tanpınar’s dream aesthetics and Hedayat’s allegorical and non-oriented narrative resembling a Möbius band.

My dissertation, Wanderers in Contradiction. The Italian Road to Modernism (1903-1922), analyzes how a generation of intellectuals approach the cultural revolution brought by Modernism. In Chapter One, dedicated to Pirandello’s essay On Humor, modernist themes, such as the perception of life as an unstoppable and unrepresentable flux, are examined in the Italian work that best represents them in the context of nineteenth-century ‘negative thought.’ Chapter Two, which is devoted to the writings of Giovanni Papini and Giuseppe Prezzolini, and Chapter Three, in which I focus on the work of Ardengo Soffici and Aldo Palazzeschi, analyze the ‘positive’ response to Modernism. These intellectuals highlighted how the cultural crisis was an opportunity to reject dangerous forms of essentialism, and opened the way for a new form of art committed to the representation of contingency. Conversely, Chapter Four, which deals with Giovanni Boine and Piero Jahier, and Chapter Five, on Scipio Slataper and Carlo Michelstaedter, illustrate the ‘negative’ reaction to the modernist crisis of values. These authors, who abandoned a purely epistemological perspective in favor of a religious or ethical one, manifest an anti-modernist thread within Modernism itself. Therefore, my research contributes to three different general areas of scholarship: literature, philosophy, and history. Broadly speaking, it advances the understanding of Italian culture and the way Italian intellectuals participate in and are influenced by European interactions. It also engages with philosophical debates concerning the crisis of metaphysical Foundations, including the role of Italian writers in this process.

“War Worlds” reads twentieth-century British and Anglophone literature to examine the social practices of marginal groups (pacifists, strangers, traitors, anticolonial rebels, queer soldiers) during the world wars. This dissertation shows that these diverse “enemies within” England and its colonies—those often deemed expendable for, but nonetheless threatening to, British state and imperial projects—provided writers with alternative visions of collective life in periods of escalated violence and social control. By focusing on the social and political activities of those who were not loyal citizens or productive laborers within the British Empire, “War Worlds” foregrounds the small group, a form of collectivity frequently portrayed in the literature of the war years but typically overlooked in literary critical studies. I argue that this shift of focus from grand politics to small groups not only illuminates surprising social fissures within England and its colonies but provides a new vantage from which to view twentieth-century experiments in literary form.