Joint attention, To the Lighthouse, and modernist representations of intersubjectivity

This paper argues that literary modernism can be productively understood as a reflection on what happens when joint attention is frustrated in its operation. Experimental fictions of the early twentieth century frequently dramatize problems of joint attention that can be traced to the ultimate relation between author, reader, and text. Analysis of these dramatizations demonstrates the importance of this joint attentional trope, and suggests a fresh reading of the famous “phantom table” in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.

Download Full-text

Woolf, (Adeline) Virginia (1882–1941)

Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism ◽

10.4324/9781135000356-rem138-1 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Bryony Randall

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Short Story ◽

Virginia Woolf ◽

Narrative Form ◽

Bloomsbury Group ◽

To The Lighthouse ◽

Early Twentieth Century ◽

Leonard Woolf ◽

Story Writer ◽

Literary Output

Virginia Woolf was one of the foremost literary innovators of the early twentieth century. A novelist, essayist, short-story writer and literary critic, she was also instrumental in disseminating the work of other key modernist writers, through the Hogarth Press which she ran with her husband Leonard Woolf. Author of such major works as Mrs Dalloway¸ To the Lighthouse and A Room of One’s Own, she was a key figure in the Bloomsbury Group of writers, artists and intellectuals active in the early twentieth century. Although her bouts of mental illness (culminating in her suicide by drowning in March 1941) for many years overshadowed appreciations of her literary output, she is now recognized as one of the most important figures in the literature and culture of the period, whether in terms of the feminist politics of her work, or her ground-breaking experiments with narrative form and technique.

Download Full-text

SPEAKING IN MEDIAS RES: MODERNISM VERSUS MODERNITY IN SHERWOOD ANDERSON’S WINESBURG, OHIO

Journal of Awareness ◽

10.26809/joa.6.2.02 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 6 (2) ◽

pp. 105-115

Author(s):

Yonca DENİZARSLANI

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Oral Traditions ◽

Literary Modernism ◽

Shared Experiences ◽

Early Twentieth Century ◽

Sense Of Time ◽

National Boundaries ◽

The Times ◽

Narrative Techniques ◽

The Individual

Since the times of Homeric epics, speaking in medias res has been the most suitable form of storytelling, leaving the threshold of narrative ajar in the present, upholding a historical sense. This ancient historical sense of time, inherent in oral traditions revived in early twentieth century literary Modernism as T. S. Eliot stated in his 1919 essay, “Tradition and The Individual Talent:” “… And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity.” Be it a messianic revival or primitivism, calling for a coherent context for all, the Modernists were in urge for new narrative techniques overcoming the devastating traumas of the World Wars, representing the shared experiences worldwide. In this respect, early twentieth-century. Modernism provided a literary niche for a new generation of storytellers engaged in the momentous grasp of time coalescing with an epiphany. Thus, regarding the present global crises of humanity against which we need to retreat to our local worlds, a review on literary Modernism would suggest a solution as it had once achieved as an internationalist current by gathering the minds and shared experiences in recovering from the overwhelming forces of modernity. This article aims to review literary Modernism and its correspondence with ancient forms of storytelling and sense of time in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio stories regarding the shared thematic motifs transcending the cultural and national boundaries in representing the overwhelming traumas of early twentieth century modernity.

Download Full-text

“It was one’s body feeling, not one’s mind”

FORUM: University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture & the Arts ◽

10.2218/forum.29.4141 ◽

2019 ◽

Author(s):

Chloe Leung

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Virginia Woolf ◽

Close Reading ◽

The Novel ◽

Bloomsbury Group ◽

To The Lighthouse ◽

Early Twentieth Century ◽

Physical Gestures ◽

The Aesthetic ◽

The Mind

The Russian ballet was celebrated amongst the Bloomsbury group in the early twentieth-century. Throughout 1910s-1930s, Virginia Woolf enjoyed Russian ballets such as Petrushka, Le Spectre de la Rose and Scheherazade staged by Michel Fokine and Sergei Diaghilev. The expressivity of the dancing body rectifies words which, as Woolf delineates in “Craftsmanship,” are dishonest in articulating emotions (Selected Essays 85). This paper thus divulges an oppositional thinking that belies Woolf’s modernist aesthetics – a compulsion to give words to emotions that should be left unsaid. In To the Lighthouse (1928), this “silence” is communicated in the dancing gestures that populate the novel. Juxtaposing the context of Woolf’s attendance at the ballet with her concurrent composition of Lighthouse, I shall argue that the aesthetic convergence between Woolf’s prose and the Russian ballet is not a coincidence – that Woolf very much had the ballet in mind when she wrote. Woolf’s and the Russian ballet’s shared aesthetics however, do not characterise this paper as a study of influence the Russian ballet had on Woolf. Rather, Woolf involuntarily deploys the language of dance/ballet in articulating ineffable emotions. I will offer a close reading that scrutinizes the underexplored physical gestures of Mr and Mrs Ramsay with a perspective of dance. In projecting emotions, Woolf’s novel sketches a reciprocal network between the dancing body and the mind. I conclude by suggesting that the communicational lapses do not sentence the failure of but sustain human kinship. By extension, the Russian balletic presentation of the dancing body will also reanimate the mind-body conundrum that has haunted academia for centuries.

Download Full-text

Literary Modernism, Anti-Semitism Jewishness and the Anxiety of Assimilation in Interwar Hungary

Hungarian Cultural Studies ◽

10.5195/ahea.2017.296 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 10 ◽

pp. 145-157

Author(s):

Dávid Szolláth

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Literary Modernism ◽

Literary Style ◽

Hungarian Literature ◽

Anti Semitism ◽

Foreign Culture ◽

Early Twentieth Century ◽

Western European ◽

Second Wave ◽

European Modernism

In this paper I will provide a brief overview of early twentieth-century, Hungarian history in order to examine how anti-Semitism and anti-modernism influenced modernism’s reception in fin- de- siècle Hungary. In 1908 the most significant Hungarian literary review of the twentieth century was founded by Hugo Ignotus, Miksa Fenyő and Ernő Osvát, all of whom were assimilated Jews. The journal’s title, Nyugat, [‘West’] unambiguously marked the editors’ orientation and program of accelerating cultural modernization by reviewing and translating Western European works. For conservatives this aim of transferring aestheticism, late Symbolism and decadence was regarded as an attack against the nation’s patriotic traditions. Anxiety surrounding the Jewry’s purported “failed assimilation” was compounded by the fear that a foreign culture would have an undue impact on Hungarian literature. It is my aim to analyze both the first and second wave of modernism in Hungary so as to reveal the analogous relationship between the argument that Western European modernism is alien to the Hungarian literary style and language and the anti-Semitic argument stating that assimilation of the Jews is superficial.

Download Full-text

On the Interplay between Poets’ and Philologists’ Translations of Chinese Poetry into German

Comparative Critical Studies ◽

10.3366/ccs.2020.0361 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 17 (2) ◽

pp. 245-262

Author(s):

Sara Landa

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Background Knowledge ◽

Cultural Background ◽

Chinese Poetry ◽

Literary Modernism ◽

Tang Poetry ◽

Early Twentieth Century ◽

Competitive Relations

‘[I]t has unfortunately become a fashion that people who obviously cannot claim to have any legitimation or any understanding in the field of sinology […], take hold of the sinological works of others and exploit them merely for business reasons’, complains the sinologist Leopold Woitsch in 1924, referring to Albert Ehrenstein's newest translations of Chinese poetry. The debate on who could authoritatively translate Chinese poetry was fiercely contested in German modernist circles and still rages to this day. Most scholars still contrast ‘poetical’ and ‘scholarly’ translations of Chinese poetry, either claiming that the former in an intuitive way come closer to the original, or criticizing the work of the poets who did not possess the linguistic and cultural background knowledge to dare approach Chinese poetry. However, it is exactly the interaction between the two modes that shaped the German reception of Chinese poetry in the twentieth century. Referring to a number of examples from the early-twentieth-century adaptations of Tang poetry, this article offers a more differentiated perspective on the cooperative and competitive relations between poets’ and scholars’ translations of Chinese poetry. Against the background of controversies surrounding ‘legitimate’ translations which shaped literary modernism in the early twentieth century, I show how the poetic and scholarly approaches were (and remain) closely interconnected, and discuss the thematic and aesthetic implications of this interrelationship.

Download Full-text

Modernism, Fiction and Mathematics

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474416238.001.0001 ◽

2018 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Nina Engelhardt

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Cultural Studies ◽

Science Studies ◽

Central Place ◽

Cultural Analysis ◽

Literature And Science ◽

Literary Modernism ◽

Interdisciplinary Perspective ◽

Early Twentieth Century ◽

And Mathematics

Modernism in mathematics – this unusual notion turns out to provide new perspectives on central questions in and beyond literary modernism. This books draws on prose texts by mathematicians and on historical and cultural studies of mathematics to introduce the so-called ‘foundational crisis of mathematics’ in the early twentieth century, and it analyses major novels that employ developments in mathematics as exemplary of wider modernist movements. The monograph focuses on Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day (2006) and Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Hermann Broch’s novel trilogy The Sleepwalkers (1930-32), and Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities (1930/32). These novels accord mathematics and its modernist transformation a central place in their visions and present it as interrelated with political, linguistic, epistemological and ethical developments in the modern West. Not least, the texts explore the freedoms and opportunities that the mathematical crisis implies and relate the emerging notion of ‘fictional’ characteristics of mathematics to the possibilities of literature. By exploring how the novels accord mathematics a central role as a particularly telling indicator of modernist transformations, this book argues that imaginative works contribute to establishing mathematics as part of modernist culture. The monograph thus opens up new frames of textual and cultural analysis that help understand the modernist condition from the interdisciplinary perspective of literature and mathematics studies, and it demonstrates the necessity to account for the specificity of mathematics in the field of literature and science studies.

Download Full-text

Some Polish Composers of To-Day

Tempo ◽

10.1017/s0040298200053596 ◽

1948 ◽

pp. 25-28

Author(s):

Andrzej Panufnik

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Fertile Soil ◽

Early Twentieth Century ◽

Progressive Group ◽

Karol Szymanowski

It is ten years since KAROL SZYMANOWSKI died at fifty-four. He was the most prominent representative of the “radical progressive” group of early twentieth century composers, which we call “Young Poland.” In their manysided and pioneering efforts they prepared the fertile soil on which Poland's present day's music thrives.

Download Full-text