Vincent Sherry
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780195178180
- eISBN:
- 9780199788002
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195178180.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
What basis did the Great War of 1914-1918 provide for the verbal inventiveness of “modernist” poetry and fiction? This book reopens this long unanswered question with a work of original historical ...
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What basis did the Great War of 1914-1918 provide for the verbal inventiveness of “modernist” poetry and fiction? This book reopens this long unanswered question with a work of original historical scholarship. It directs attention to the public culture of the English war. It reads the discourses through which the Liberal party constructed its Cause, its Great Campaign. A breakdown in the established language of liberal modernity—the idiom of Public Reason—marks the sizeable crisis this event represents in the mainstream traditions of post-Reformation Europe. Identifying it as such, the book outlines the occasion for momentous innovations in the work of Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound. If modernist writing attempts characteristically to “talk back” to the standard values of Enlightenment rationalism, this book has recovered the cultural setting of its most substantial—and daring—opportunity. The literature that witnesses this exceptional moment in historical time regains its proper importance as the book retrieves the means of reading it accurately. In this book, the records of political journalism and popular intellectual culture combine with abundant visual illustration to provide the framework for groundbreaking engagements with the major texts of Woolf, Eliot, and Pound. The book relocates the verbal imagination of modernism in the context of the English war and, by restoring the historical content and depth of this literature, reveals its most daunting import.Less
What basis did the Great War of 1914-1918 provide for the verbal inventiveness of “modernist” poetry and fiction? This book reopens this long unanswered question with a work of original historical scholarship. It directs attention to the public culture of the English war. It reads the discourses through which the Liberal party constructed its Cause, its Great Campaign. A breakdown in the established language of liberal modernity—the idiom of Public Reason—marks the sizeable crisis this event represents in the mainstream traditions of post-Reformation Europe. Identifying it as such, the book outlines the occasion for momentous innovations in the work of Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound. If modernist writing attempts characteristically to “talk back” to the standard values of Enlightenment rationalism, this book has recovered the cultural setting of its most substantial—and daring—opportunity. The literature that witnesses this exceptional moment in historical time regains its proper importance as the book retrieves the means of reading it accurately. In this book, the records of political journalism and popular intellectual culture combine with abundant visual illustration to provide the framework for groundbreaking engagements with the major texts of Woolf, Eliot, and Pound. The book relocates the verbal imagination of modernism in the context of the English war and, by restoring the historical content and depth of this literature, reveals its most daunting import.
Vincent Sherry
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780195178180
- eISBN:
- 9780199788002
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195178180.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
The Epilogue follows the book's account of the ways in which English literary modernism was formed in response to the Great War, by showing how various movements in the history of literary criticism ...
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The Epilogue follows the book's account of the ways in which English literary modernism was formed in response to the Great War, by showing how various movements in the history of literary criticism were unable to identify or admit the historical content and implication of this fact. Beginning with F. R. Leavis's New Bearings in English Poetry, the misreading of modernism is often repeated and culminates in the New Critical movement in America in the 1930s, which witnesses a severe misapprehension of I. A. Richards's historically informed critical principle of pseudo-statement, while the critical understanding of Kenneth Burke, most notably in Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose, marks a signal exception to this rule.Less
The Epilogue follows the book's account of the ways in which English literary modernism was formed in response to the Great War, by showing how various movements in the history of literary criticism were unable to identify or admit the historical content and implication of this fact. Beginning with F. R. Leavis's New Bearings in English Poetry, the misreading of modernism is often repeated and culminates in the New Critical movement in America in the 1930s, which witnesses a severe misapprehension of I. A. Richards's historically informed critical principle of pseudo-statement, while the critical understanding of Kenneth Burke, most notably in Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose, marks a signal exception to this rule.
Vincent Sherry
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780195178180
- eISBN:
- 9780199788002
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195178180.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter puts the Liberal support of the Great War in the context of 19th-century British Liberalism. This legacy places an exceptionally high degree of value on Reason, a priority that results ...
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This chapter puts the Liberal support of the Great War in the context of 19th-century British Liberalism. This legacy places an exceptionally high degree of value on Reason, a priority that results often in a reliance on verbal reason over factual evidence. This susceptibility is evidenced in the rhetoric of support for the war, which was at odds with the major tenets of Liberal policy, and so evinced a most strenuous exercise of sheer verbal rationalization. The language of “seeming reason” is followed across a wide body of writing in support of the war, ranging from the partisan press to scholarly articles and monographs. The prevalence of this new tone in national politics is established as the basis of a number of verbal initiatives in literary modernism, beginning with the critical work of I. A. Richards, whose signature doctrine of “pseudo-statement” answers specifically to the tone of the political times.Less
This chapter puts the Liberal support of the Great War in the context of 19th-century British Liberalism. This legacy places an exceptionally high degree of value on Reason, a priority that results often in a reliance on verbal reason over factual evidence. This susceptibility is evidenced in the rhetoric of support for the war, which was at odds with the major tenets of Liberal policy, and so evinced a most strenuous exercise of sheer verbal rationalization. The language of “seeming reason” is followed across a wide body of writing in support of the war, ranging from the partisan press to scholarly articles and monographs. The prevalence of this new tone in national politics is established as the basis of a number of verbal initiatives in literary modernism, beginning with the critical work of I. A. Richards, whose signature doctrine of “pseudo-statement” answers specifically to the tone of the political times.
Margery Palmer McCulloch
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748634743
- eISBN:
- 9780748651900
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748634743.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This book proposes the expansion of the existing idea of an interwar Scottish Renaissance movement to include its international significance as a Scottish literary modernism interacting with the ...
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This book proposes the expansion of the existing idea of an interwar Scottish Renaissance movement to include its international significance as a Scottish literary modernism interacting with the intellectual and artistic ideas of European modernism as well as responding to the challenges of the Scottish cultural and political context. Topics range from the revitalisation of the Scots vernacular as an avant-garde literary language in the 1920s and the interaction of literature and politics in the 1930s to the fictional re-imagining of the Highlands, the response of women writers to a changing modern world and the manifestations of a late modernism in the 1940s and 1950s. Writers featured include Hugh MacDiarmid, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Neil M. Gunn, Edwin and Willa Muir, Catherine Carswell, Naomi Mitchison, Sydney Goodsir Smith and Sorley MacLean.Less
This book proposes the expansion of the existing idea of an interwar Scottish Renaissance movement to include its international significance as a Scottish literary modernism interacting with the intellectual and artistic ideas of European modernism as well as responding to the challenges of the Scottish cultural and political context. Topics range from the revitalisation of the Scots vernacular as an avant-garde literary language in the 1920s and the interaction of literature and politics in the 1930s to the fictional re-imagining of the Highlands, the response of women writers to a changing modern world and the manifestations of a late modernism in the 1940s and 1950s. Writers featured include Hugh MacDiarmid, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Neil M. Gunn, Edwin and Willa Muir, Catherine Carswell, Naomi Mitchison, Sydney Goodsir Smith and Sorley MacLean.
Con Coroneos
- Published in print:
- 2002
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198187363
- eISBN:
- 9780191674716
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198187363.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism, European Literature
This chapter examines the so-called enucleation in the fiction of Joseph Conrad. It suggests that the double meaning of enucleation which caused tension in literary modernism was accurately expressed ...
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This chapter examines the so-called enucleation in the fiction of Joseph Conrad. It suggests that the double meaning of enucleation which caused tension in literary modernism was accurately expressed in Conrad's Heart of Darkness where the narrative method directs the reader to the possibility of a writing in which meaning in not inside like a kernel but outside enveloping the tale which brought it out. Another example of this was his The Secret Agent where the narrative can either be considered an imaginative shortcoming or wilful effect.Less
This chapter examines the so-called enucleation in the fiction of Joseph Conrad. It suggests that the double meaning of enucleation which caused tension in literary modernism was accurately expressed in Conrad's Heart of Darkness where the narrative method directs the reader to the possibility of a writing in which meaning in not inside like a kernel but outside enveloping the tale which brought it out. Another example of this was his The Secret Agent where the narrative can either be considered an imaginative shortcoming or wilful effect.
Thomas Docherty
- Published in print:
- 1996
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198183570
- eISBN:
- 9780191674075
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198183570.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Literary modernism is always concerned with the activity of ‘seeing things’ in the sense of attending to objects of everyday life. This chapter argues for a renewed attention to the status of the ...
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Literary modernism is always concerned with the activity of ‘seeing things’ in the sense of attending to objects of everyday life. This chapter argues for a renewed attention to the status of the literary in poetry and that such a renewed attention is consonant with a postmodern critical attitude. It focuses on imagist poetry, where there is the implication of a point of view from which the objects make sense, and from which they can be inserted into a meaningful and necessary narrative.Less
Literary modernism is always concerned with the activity of ‘seeing things’ in the sense of attending to objects of everyday life. This chapter argues for a renewed attention to the status of the literary in poetry and that such a renewed attention is consonant with a postmodern critical attitude. It focuses on imagist poetry, where there is the implication of a point of view from which the objects make sense, and from which they can be inserted into a meaningful and necessary narrative.
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780804784085
- eISBN:
- 9780804784658
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804784085.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This concluding chapter summarizes the ways in which close attention to slow print might unbalance some of our dominant ideas about literary modernism in particular. Drawing upon the preceding ...
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This concluding chapter summarizes the ways in which close attention to slow print might unbalance some of our dominant ideas about literary modernism in particular. Drawing upon the preceding discussions, it identifies elements of modernist aesthetics emerging in the radical sphere, as well as conventional critical ideas about modernism emerging in this same discursive space. It also suggests that attention to the radical press archive will remind us that literary movements coalesce not merely around the collective work of a group of individual writers, but around a print context that shapes literary production both materially and culturally.Less
This concluding chapter summarizes the ways in which close attention to slow print might unbalance some of our dominant ideas about literary modernism in particular. Drawing upon the preceding discussions, it identifies elements of modernist aesthetics emerging in the radical sphere, as well as conventional critical ideas about modernism emerging in this same discursive space. It also suggests that attention to the radical press archive will remind us that literary movements coalesce not merely around the collective work of a group of individual writers, but around a print context that shapes literary production both materially and culturally.
Alan M. Wald
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- July 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780807835869
- eISBN:
- 9781469601502
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/9780807837344_wald.13
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
This conclusion examines the afterlife of Literary Communism. It also discusses the concept of Communist literary modernism as an expression of Theodor Adorno's “negative dialectics,” a term that ...
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This conclusion examines the afterlife of Literary Communism. It also discusses the concept of Communist literary modernism as an expression of Theodor Adorno's “negative dialectics,” a term that came to embody the Frankfurt School theorist's method as it evolved after the 1930s.Less
This conclusion examines the afterlife of Literary Communism. It also discusses the concept of Communist literary modernism as an expression of Theodor Adorno's “negative dialectics,” a term that came to embody the Frankfurt School theorist's method as it evolved after the 1930s.
Alison Lewis
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780719099434
- eISBN:
- 9781526124098
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719099434.003.0006
- Subject:
- History, History of Ideas
This chapter investigates examples of literary case studies by Alfred Döblin, a medical doctor and a main representative of the 1920s ‘New Objectivity’ aesthetic movement in Weimar Germany. Like ...
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This chapter investigates examples of literary case studies by Alfred Döblin, a medical doctor and a main representative of the 1920s ‘New Objectivity’ aesthetic movement in Weimar Germany. Like fellow poet Gottfried Benn, Döblin brought his professional expertise in medicine to bear on his literary projects. Whereas his contemporaries were preoccupied with questions of social justice, Döblin was particularly interested in gender relations and the nexus between sexuality and crime, and used literature as a metaphorical laboratory to explore shocking and topical themes of the day. With his realistic case studies based on trials and his own expert knowledge of psychiatry, sexology and psychoanalysis, Döblin strove to bridge the gap between highbrow literature and the new empirical life sciences, as well as between his medical practice and his love of literature. His work demonstrates both the benefits and limits of the case study genre as a vehicle for transporting new forms of knowledge. While his attempts to refashion the literary case study as a crime novel by incorporating the latest theories about the human psyche and female homosexuality were of limited success, he achieved greater success with Berlin Alexanderplatz, a modernist novel about crime and sex in the metropolis.Less
This chapter investigates examples of literary case studies by Alfred Döblin, a medical doctor and a main representative of the 1920s ‘New Objectivity’ aesthetic movement in Weimar Germany. Like fellow poet Gottfried Benn, Döblin brought his professional expertise in medicine to bear on his literary projects. Whereas his contemporaries were preoccupied with questions of social justice, Döblin was particularly interested in gender relations and the nexus between sexuality and crime, and used literature as a metaphorical laboratory to explore shocking and topical themes of the day. With his realistic case studies based on trials and his own expert knowledge of psychiatry, sexology and psychoanalysis, Döblin strove to bridge the gap between highbrow literature and the new empirical life sciences, as well as between his medical practice and his love of literature. His work demonstrates both the benefits and limits of the case study genre as a vehicle for transporting new forms of knowledge. While his attempts to refashion the literary case study as a crime novel by incorporating the latest theories about the human psyche and female homosexuality were of limited success, he achieved greater success with Berlin Alexanderplatz, a modernist novel about crime and sex in the metropolis.
Liesl Olson
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- May 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780195368123
- eISBN:
- 9780199867639
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195368123.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
The book overturns conventional accounts of the modernist period as primarily drawn toward the new, the transcendent, and the extraordinary. The book shows how modernist writers were preoccupied, ...
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The book overturns conventional accounts of the modernist period as primarily drawn toward the new, the transcendent, and the extraordinary. The book shows how modernist writers were preoccupied, instead, with the unselfconscious actions of everyday life, even in times of political crisis and war. Experiences like walking to work, eating a sandwich, or mending a dress were often resistant to shock, and these daily activities presented a counter-force to the aesthetic of heightened affect with which the period is often associated. The book examines works by Joyce, Woolf, Stein, Stevens, Proust, Beckett, and Auden alongside the ideas of philosophers such as Henri Bergson and William James. The book shows how these writers responded to the difficulty of representing the ordinary without defamilarizing it or making it transcendent. The book also connects this problem to earlier modes of literary realism on both sides of the Atlantic, and situates modernism’s preoccupation with ordinary experience within the major historical events of the period, especially the two world wars. Ultimately, the book reveals the non-transformative power of the ordinary as one of modernism’s most compelling attributes: day-to-day experience comes to stand not as an impediment to the creative life, but as a satisfaction with the material rather than the spiritual, the local rather than the exotic, the constant rather than the unknown, and the democratic rather than the privileged.Less
The book overturns conventional accounts of the modernist period as primarily drawn toward the new, the transcendent, and the extraordinary. The book shows how modernist writers were preoccupied, instead, with the unselfconscious actions of everyday life, even in times of political crisis and war. Experiences like walking to work, eating a sandwich, or mending a dress were often resistant to shock, and these daily activities presented a counter-force to the aesthetic of heightened affect with which the period is often associated. The book examines works by Joyce, Woolf, Stein, Stevens, Proust, Beckett, and Auden alongside the ideas of philosophers such as Henri Bergson and William James. The book shows how these writers responded to the difficulty of representing the ordinary without defamilarizing it or making it transcendent. The book also connects this problem to earlier modes of literary realism on both sides of the Atlantic, and situates modernism’s preoccupation with ordinary experience within the major historical events of the period, especially the two world wars. Ultimately, the book reveals the non-transformative power of the ordinary as one of modernism’s most compelling attributes: day-to-day experience comes to stand not as an impediment to the creative life, but as a satisfaction with the material rather than the spiritual, the local rather than the exotic, the constant rather than the unknown, and the democratic rather than the privileged.
Vera M. Kutzinski
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780801451157
- eISBN:
- 9780801466250
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9780801451157.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
The poet Langston Hughes was a tireless world traveler and a prolific translator, editor, and marketer. Translations of his own writings traveled even more widely than he did, earning him adulation ...
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The poet Langston Hughes was a tireless world traveler and a prolific translator, editor, and marketer. Translations of his own writings traveled even more widely than he did, earning him adulation throughout Europe, Asia, and especially the Americas. This book contends that, for writers who are part of the African diaspora, translation is more than just a literary practice: it is a fact of life and a way of thinking. Focusing on Hughes' autobiographies, translations of his poetry, his own translations, and the political lyrics that brought him to the attention of the infamous McCarthy Committee, the book shows that translating and being translated—and often mistranslated—are as vital to Hughes' own poetics as they are to understanding the historical network of cultural relations known as literary modernism. As the book maps the trajectory of Hughes' writings across Europe and the Americas, we see the remarkable extent to which the translations of his poetry were in conversation with the work of other modernist writers. The book spotlights cities whose roles as meeting places for modernists from all over the world have yet to be fully explored: Madrid, Havana, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, and Harlem. The result is a fresh look at Hughes, not as a solitary author who wrote in a single language, but as an international figure at the heart of a global intellectual and artistic formation.Less
The poet Langston Hughes was a tireless world traveler and a prolific translator, editor, and marketer. Translations of his own writings traveled even more widely than he did, earning him adulation throughout Europe, Asia, and especially the Americas. This book contends that, for writers who are part of the African diaspora, translation is more than just a literary practice: it is a fact of life and a way of thinking. Focusing on Hughes' autobiographies, translations of his poetry, his own translations, and the political lyrics that brought him to the attention of the infamous McCarthy Committee, the book shows that translating and being translated—and often mistranslated—are as vital to Hughes' own poetics as they are to understanding the historical network of cultural relations known as literary modernism. As the book maps the trajectory of Hughes' writings across Europe and the Americas, we see the remarkable extent to which the translations of his poetry were in conversation with the work of other modernist writers. The book spotlights cities whose roles as meeting places for modernists from all over the world have yet to be fully explored: Madrid, Havana, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, and Harlem. The result is a fresh look at Hughes, not as a solitary author who wrote in a single language, but as an international figure at the heart of a global intellectual and artistic formation.
Laura Frost
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- November 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780231152723
- eISBN:
- 9780231526463
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231152723.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This book explores the interwar debate about pleasure and the rise of unpleasure, with particular emphasis on how pleasure is reconceptualized in modernist literature. Focusing on stimulants as ...
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This book explores the interwar debate about pleasure and the rise of unpleasure, with particular emphasis on how pleasure is reconceptualized in modernist literature. Focusing on stimulants as diverse as perfume, bearskin rugs, Rudolph Valentino, and linguistic puzzles, as well as experiences ranging from wordplay to foreplay, tickling, and drunkenness, the book investigates the counterintuitive condemnation of experiences of delight and enjoyment as a discursive issue in modernism. It places pleasure at the center of the twentieth century and casts the history of literary modernism as a tumultuous and revealing chapter in the history of bliss. It considers how modernism's signature formal rhetorics, including irony, fragmentation, indirection, and allusiveness, promote a particularly knotty, arduous reading effect. It also discusses the theory of unpleasure as a dialectical approach to the opposition of pain and pleasure that describes modernist sensibilities.Less
This book explores the interwar debate about pleasure and the rise of unpleasure, with particular emphasis on how pleasure is reconceptualized in modernist literature. Focusing on stimulants as diverse as perfume, bearskin rugs, Rudolph Valentino, and linguistic puzzles, as well as experiences ranging from wordplay to foreplay, tickling, and drunkenness, the book investigates the counterintuitive condemnation of experiences of delight and enjoyment as a discursive issue in modernism. It places pleasure at the center of the twentieth century and casts the history of literary modernism as a tumultuous and revealing chapter in the history of bliss. It considers how modernism's signature formal rhetorics, including irony, fragmentation, indirection, and allusiveness, promote a particularly knotty, arduous reading effect. It also discusses the theory of unpleasure as a dialectical approach to the opposition of pain and pleasure that describes modernist sensibilities.
Margery Palmer McCulloch
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748634743
- eISBN:
- 9780748651900
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748634743.003.0101
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter is concerned with Christopher Murray Grieve, looking at his experiences fighting the war in Greece, as well as his correspondence from Salonika and Marseilles during that period. The ...
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This chapter is concerned with Christopher Murray Grieve, looking at his experiences fighting the war in Greece, as well as his correspondence from Salonika and Marseilles during that period. The discussion then shifts to the little magazines that he founded and edited during the early 1920s, determining that these magazines started the Scottish contributions to literary modernism.Less
This chapter is concerned with Christopher Murray Grieve, looking at his experiences fighting the war in Greece, as well as his correspondence from Salonika and Marseilles during that period. The discussion then shifts to the little magazines that he founded and edited during the early 1920s, determining that these magazines started the Scottish contributions to literary modernism.
Irving Howe
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- January 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780300203660
- eISBN:
- 9780300210583
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300203660.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
This chapter presents Irving Howe's 1969 essay “The New York Intellectuals,” in which he talks about the New York Intellectuals, a group of writers and literary critics based in New York City in the ...
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This chapter presents Irving Howe's 1969 essay “The New York Intellectuals,” in which he talks about the New York Intellectuals, a group of writers and literary critics based in New York City in the mid-twentieth century. Howe first traces the social roots of this group to the immigrant Jews in the 1930s, but suggests that Jewishness as idea and sentiment played no significant role in the intellectuals' expectations. He then describes many instances in which Jewish intellectuals played an important role in the development of political radicalism, and how this radicalism helped destroy Stalinism as a force in American intellectual life. He also comments on the New York intellectuals' attitudes toward socialist politics, literary modernism, mass culture, and Communism. Howe ends his essay by explaining how McCarthyism brought into question the role of the intellectuals.Less
This chapter presents Irving Howe's 1969 essay “The New York Intellectuals,” in which he talks about the New York Intellectuals, a group of writers and literary critics based in New York City in the mid-twentieth century. Howe first traces the social roots of this group to the immigrant Jews in the 1930s, but suggests that Jewishness as idea and sentiment played no significant role in the intellectuals' expectations. He then describes many instances in which Jewish intellectuals played an important role in the development of political radicalism, and how this radicalism helped destroy Stalinism as a force in American intellectual life. He also comments on the New York intellectuals' attitudes toward socialist politics, literary modernism, mass culture, and Communism. Howe ends his essay by explaining how McCarthyism brought into question the role of the intellectuals.
Tom Walker
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781526100566
- eISBN:
- 9781526132321
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781526100566.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter looks at the interconnected Dublin and London contexts to McGahern’s reception of literary and visual modernism. It does so primarily through the prism of the material and ideas ...
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This chapter looks at the interconnected Dublin and London contexts to McGahern’s reception of literary and visual modernism. It does so primarily through the prism of the material and ideas circulating in the magazine X: A Quarterly Review and among the coterie (Patrick Swift, Anthony Cronin and others) involved in its production – with whom McGahern had considerable contact leading up to and following his first appearance in print in the magazine. This context is accessed through fresh archival research, including drawing on some previously un-discussed correspondence between the editors, and their patrons and contributors. This is also aligned to broader theoretical and historical perspectives on the relationship between the abstract and the actual within visual and literary modernism, as well as the post-war fate of modernism and the avant-garde.Less
This chapter looks at the interconnected Dublin and London contexts to McGahern’s reception of literary and visual modernism. It does so primarily through the prism of the material and ideas circulating in the magazine X: A Quarterly Review and among the coterie (Patrick Swift, Anthony Cronin and others) involved in its production – with whom McGahern had considerable contact leading up to and following his first appearance in print in the magazine. This context is accessed through fresh archival research, including drawing on some previously un-discussed correspondence between the editors, and their patrons and contributors. This is also aligned to broader theoretical and historical perspectives on the relationship between the abstract and the actual within visual and literary modernism, as well as the post-war fate of modernism and the avant-garde.
William Solomon
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- April 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780252040245
- eISBN:
- 9780252098468
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5406/illinois/9780252040245.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Media Studies
Slapstick comedy landed like a pie in the face of twentieth-century culture. Pratfalls and nyuk-nyuks percolated alongside literary modernism throughout the 1920s and 1930s before slapstick found ...
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Slapstick comedy landed like a pie in the face of twentieth-century culture. Pratfalls and nyuk-nyuks percolated alongside literary modernism throughout the 1920s and 1930s before slapstick found explosive expression in postwar literature, experimental film, and popular music. This book charts the origins and evolution of what it calls “slapstick modernism”—a merging of artistic experimentation with the socially disruptive lunacy made by the likes of Charlie Chaplin. Romping through texts, films, and theory, the book embarks on a harum-scarum intellectual odyssey from high modernism to the late modernism of the Beats and Burroughs before a head-on crash into the raw power of punk rock. Throughout, the book shows the links between the experimental writers and silent screen performers of the early century, and explores the potent cultural undertaking that drew inspiration from anarchical comedy after World War II.Less
Slapstick comedy landed like a pie in the face of twentieth-century culture. Pratfalls and nyuk-nyuks percolated alongside literary modernism throughout the 1920s and 1930s before slapstick found explosive expression in postwar literature, experimental film, and popular music. This book charts the origins and evolution of what it calls “slapstick modernism”—a merging of artistic experimentation with the socially disruptive lunacy made by the likes of Charlie Chaplin. Romping through texts, films, and theory, the book embarks on a harum-scarum intellectual odyssey from high modernism to the late modernism of the Beats and Burroughs before a head-on crash into the raw power of punk rock. Throughout, the book shows the links between the experimental writers and silent screen performers of the early century, and explores the potent cultural undertaking that drew inspiration from anarchical comedy after World War II.
Michael Nort
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748620111
- eISBN:
- 9780748651863
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748620111.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter discusses the modernist as international hero and examines The Waste Land. The discussion begins with a meeting of three American writers and an Irish writer in Paris in order to discuss ...
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This chapter discusses the modernist as international hero and examines The Waste Land. The discussion begins with a meeting of three American writers and an Irish writer in Paris in order to discuss the future of English literature, which could be affected by the process of constant cultural exchange. It then argues that literary modernism enters commerce only to secure itself from competition. The chapter shows that modern life is essentially international, and that The Waste Land is a modern opening poem.Less
This chapter discusses the modernist as international hero and examines The Waste Land. The discussion begins with a meeting of three American writers and an Irish writer in Paris in order to discuss the future of English literature, which could be affected by the process of constant cultural exchange. It then argues that literary modernism enters commerce only to secure itself from competition. The chapter shows that modern life is essentially international, and that The Waste Land is a modern opening poem.
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.
Sam Halliday
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780748627615
- eISBN:
- 9780748689156
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748627615.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter surveys philosophical and aesthetic accounts of sound and hearing from antiquity to the first half of the twentieth century, focusing on theories of particular relevance for literary and ...
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This chapter surveys philosophical and aesthetic accounts of sound and hearing from antiquity to the first half of the twentieth century, focusing on theories of particular relevance for literary and other artistic modernism. To do this, the chapter takes a very quick look at the ancient and early Christian periods, moves swiftly to the late-eighteenth-century, and then offers a more detailed account of nineteenth- and early-twentieth century thinkers, before concentrating more closely still on literary modernism itself. Nineteenth-century sources get heavy coverage, because, I argue, ideas originating in the nineteenth-century play a pivotal role in twentieth-century thinking. This is especially the case where music is concerned, music being the topic onto which questions about sound and hearing often devolved. Authors and other thinkers discussed include Proust, Wagner, Aristotle, Lessing, Bergson, Rilke, Conrad, T. S. Eliot, Adorno, Benjamin and Schopenhauer.Less
This chapter surveys philosophical and aesthetic accounts of sound and hearing from antiquity to the first half of the twentieth century, focusing on theories of particular relevance for literary and other artistic modernism. To do this, the chapter takes a very quick look at the ancient and early Christian periods, moves swiftly to the late-eighteenth-century, and then offers a more detailed account of nineteenth- and early-twentieth century thinkers, before concentrating more closely still on literary modernism itself. Nineteenth-century sources get heavy coverage, because, I argue, ideas originating in the nineteenth-century play a pivotal role in twentieth-century thinking. This is especially the case where music is concerned, music being the topic onto which questions about sound and hearing often devolved. Authors and other thinkers discussed include Proust, Wagner, Aristotle, Lessing, Bergson, Rilke, Conrad, T. S. Eliot, Adorno, Benjamin and Schopenhauer.
Justin Carville
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199609888
- eISBN:
- 9780191731778
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199609888.003.0012
- Subject:
- Literature, Drama, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter examines John Millington Synge’s use of photography in late Victorian and Edwardian Ireland. Drawing on the writings of Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin, the chapter discusses Synge’s ...
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This chapter examines John Millington Synge’s use of photography in late Victorian and Edwardian Ireland. Drawing on the writings of Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin, the chapter discusses Synge’s engagement with photography along with that of his contemporary John Joseph Clarke. Through a discussion of the shifting cultural practices of amateur photography and the industrialisation of camera technologies, the influence of street-photography on Synge’s writings are considered with particular reference to the politics of eye-contact in public spaces. These anxieties about ocular exchange became increasingly embedded within Edwardian modernity, and the cultural practices of street-photography became an arena through which face to face encounter between different classes and genders in urban space could be negotiated. This chapter suggests that Synge played out his own version of these apprehensions about ocular exchange and urban modernity through the use of photography in his ethnographic and journalistic writings.Less
This chapter examines John Millington Synge’s use of photography in late Victorian and Edwardian Ireland. Drawing on the writings of Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin, the chapter discusses Synge’s engagement with photography along with that of his contemporary John Joseph Clarke. Through a discussion of the shifting cultural practices of amateur photography and the industrialisation of camera technologies, the influence of street-photography on Synge’s writings are considered with particular reference to the politics of eye-contact in public spaces. These anxieties about ocular exchange became increasingly embedded within Edwardian modernity, and the cultural practices of street-photography became an arena through which face to face encounter between different classes and genders in urban space could be negotiated. This chapter suggests that Synge played out his own version of these apprehensions about ocular exchange and urban modernity through the use of photography in his ethnographic and journalistic writings.
