Katherine Biers
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816667543
- eISBN:
- 9781452946542
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816667543.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
This introductory chapter focuses on virtual poetics and American literary modernism. It discusses the formal properties of language in reaction to modernity and its new technologies. Vitalist ideas ...
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This introductory chapter focuses on virtual poetics and American literary modernism. It discusses the formal properties of language in reaction to modernity and its new technologies. Vitalist ideas such as “creative evolution” or “pure experience,” became a way for some intellectuals to sanctify industrialization, urbanization, cultural nationalism, and a host of new technologies, including media technologies. Philosophers Henry Bergson and William James sought to rethink experience as virtual, in order to find an alternative to the battle between idealism and empiricism in the nineteenth century. James placed special weight on the way language offered evidence for the reality of virtual experience. The virtual thus becomes redemption for literature with the advent of mass culture.Less
This introductory chapter focuses on virtual poetics and American literary modernism. It discusses the formal properties of language in reaction to modernity and its new technologies. Vitalist ideas such as “creative evolution” or “pure experience,” became a way for some intellectuals to sanctify industrialization, urbanization, cultural nationalism, and a host of new technologies, including media technologies. Philosophers Henry Bergson and William James sought to rethink experience as virtual, in order to find an alternative to the battle between idealism and empiricism in the nineteenth century. James placed special weight on the way language offered evidence for the reality of virtual experience. The virtual thus becomes redemption for literature with the advent of mass culture.
Josh Lambert
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- March 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781479876433
- eISBN:
- 9781479851584
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479876433.003.0004
- Subject:
- Religion, Judaism
This chapter puts forth a term for characterizing and analyzing suppressions of sexual representation in literature and culture. The term is the same one that Yiddish literary critics typically used ...
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This chapter puts forth a term for characterizing and analyzing suppressions of sexual representation in literature and culture. The term is the same one that Yiddish literary critics typically used to describe the regulation of sexual expression in their cultural field: modesty (in Yiddish, tsnies and, in Hebrew, tzniut). Using modesty as a frame for reading the regulation of sexual expression in America, it is argued that American Yiddish literary modernism, which was virtually never subject to government intervention, presaged the situation of American literature in English after Memoirs v. Massachusetts (1966), which established broad First Amendment protections for literature. The chapter also offers a comparative study of two related modesty discourses—early 20th-century Yiddish literary modesty and late 20th-century American cultural modesty as it was rooted in the sources of Orthodox Judaism. It demonstrates that modesty discourses follow from and reflect the diasporization of culture, the uncoupling of cultural production from both the constraints and the opportunities of legal control and state support.Less
This chapter puts forth a term for characterizing and analyzing suppressions of sexual representation in literature and culture. The term is the same one that Yiddish literary critics typically used to describe the regulation of sexual expression in their cultural field: modesty (in Yiddish, tsnies and, in Hebrew, tzniut). Using modesty as a frame for reading the regulation of sexual expression in America, it is argued that American Yiddish literary modernism, which was virtually never subject to government intervention, presaged the situation of American literature in English after Memoirs v. Massachusetts (1966), which established broad First Amendment protections for literature. The chapter also offers a comparative study of two related modesty discourses—early 20th-century Yiddish literary modesty and late 20th-century American cultural modesty as it was rooted in the sources of Orthodox Judaism. It demonstrates that modesty discourses follow from and reflect the diasporization of culture, the uncoupling of cultural production from both the constraints and the opportunities of legal control and state support.
Katherine Biers
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816667543
- eISBN:
- 9781452946542
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816667543.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
This book offers a fresh view of the emergence of American literary modernism from the eruption of popular culture in the early twentieth century. Employing dynamic readings of the works of Stephen ...
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This book offers a fresh view of the emergence of American literary modernism from the eruption of popular culture in the early twentieth century. Employing dynamic readings of the works of Stephen Crane, Henry James, James Weldon Johnson, Djuna Barnes, and Gertrude Stein, it argues that American modernist writers developed a “poetics of the virtual” in response to the rise of mass communications technologies before World War I. These authors’ modernist formal experimentation was provoked by the immediate, individualistic pleasures and thrills of mass culture. But they also retained a faith in the representational power of language—and the worth of common experience—more characteristic of realism and naturalism. In competition with new media experiences such as movies and recorded music, they simultaneously rejected and embraced modernity. This book establishes the virtual poetics of these five writers as part of a larger “virtual turn” in the United States, when a fascination with the writings of Henri Bergson, William James, and vitalist philosophy—and the idea of virtual experience—swept the nation. The book contends that a turn to the virtual experience of language was a way for each of these authors to carve out a value for the literary, both with and against the growth of mass entertainments. This technologically inspired reengagement with experience was formative for American modernism.Less
This book offers a fresh view of the emergence of American literary modernism from the eruption of popular culture in the early twentieth century. Employing dynamic readings of the works of Stephen Crane, Henry James, James Weldon Johnson, Djuna Barnes, and Gertrude Stein, it argues that American modernist writers developed a “poetics of the virtual” in response to the rise of mass communications technologies before World War I. These authors’ modernist formal experimentation was provoked by the immediate, individualistic pleasures and thrills of mass culture. But they also retained a faith in the representational power of language—and the worth of common experience—more characteristic of realism and naturalism. In competition with new media experiences such as movies and recorded music, they simultaneously rejected and embraced modernity. This book establishes the virtual poetics of these five writers as part of a larger “virtual turn” in the United States, when a fascination with the writings of Henri Bergson, William James, and vitalist philosophy—and the idea of virtual experience—swept the nation. The book contends that a turn to the virtual experience of language was a way for each of these authors to carve out a value for the literary, both with and against the growth of mass entertainments. This technologically inspired reengagement with experience was formative for American modernism.
Aaron Shaheen
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- August 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780198857785
- eISBN:
- 9780191890406
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198857785.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
Drawing on rehabilitation publications, novels by both famous and lesser-known American writers, and even the prosthetic masks of a classically trained sculptor, Great War Prostheses in American ...
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Drawing on rehabilitation publications, novels by both famous and lesser-known American writers, and even the prosthetic masks of a classically trained sculptor, Great War Prostheses in American Literature and Culture addresses the ways in which prosthetic devices were designed, promoted, and depicted in America in the years during and after the First World War. The war’s mechanized weaponry ushered in an entirely new relationship between organic bodies and the technology that could both cause and attempt to remedy hideous injuries. This relationship was evident in the realm of prosthetic development, which by the second decade of the twentieth century promoted the belief that a prosthesis should be a spiritual extension of the person who possessed it. This spiritualized vision of prostheses held a particular resonance in American postwar culture. Relying on some of the most recent developments in literary and disability studies, the book’s six chapters explain how a prosthesis’s spiritual promise was largely dependent on its ability to nullify an injury and help an amputee renew (or even improve upon) his prewar life. But if it proved too cumbersome, obtrusive, or painful, the device had the long-lasting power to efface or distort his “spirit” or personality.Less
Drawing on rehabilitation publications, novels by both famous and lesser-known American writers, and even the prosthetic masks of a classically trained sculptor, Great War Prostheses in American Literature and Culture addresses the ways in which prosthetic devices were designed, promoted, and depicted in America in the years during and after the First World War. The war’s mechanized weaponry ushered in an entirely new relationship between organic bodies and the technology that could both cause and attempt to remedy hideous injuries. This relationship was evident in the realm of prosthetic development, which by the second decade of the twentieth century promoted the belief that a prosthesis should be a spiritual extension of the person who possessed it. This spiritualized vision of prostheses held a particular resonance in American postwar culture. Relying on some of the most recent developments in literary and disability studies, the book’s six chapters explain how a prosthesis’s spiritual promise was largely dependent on its ability to nullify an injury and help an amputee renew (or even improve upon) his prewar life. But if it proved too cumbersome, obtrusive, or painful, the device had the long-lasting power to efface or distort his “spirit” or personality.
