“Shocked at my Levity”

2021 ◽  
pp. 123-155
Author(s):  
Rachel Trousdale

Ezra Pound’s humor promotes unorthodox intimacies between readers and writers. His portraits in The Pisan Cantos catch Henry James and James Joyce laughing, emphasizing their human peculiarities and Pound’s personal knowledge of them. These scenes suggest how unsatisfactory he finds traditional notions of poetic immortality. Instead, his portraits of jesting writers make literary texts contain the artist as both heroic figure and human individual, doing the work of high art and personal interaction simultaneously. Pound loves the Romantic figure of the poet-hero, but his laughter emphasizes that artist’s fallible humanity, and highlights modernism’s concern with creating accurate models of imaginative sympathy. As Pound’s laughter becomes more intimate, however, it is also more troubling: humor in The Cantos seeks to enlist his reader not just in his poem but in his hierarchical vision of art and his fascist politics.

Author(s):  
Brian Gingrich

We talk about pace, often: the pace of history, modern life, everyday movement. And, really, we have talked about pace for centuries. But we hardly know what it means or how one might analyze it. The Pace of Fiction starts from the notion that all pace is, essentially, a product of narrative, and narrative fiction is what produces pace most elaborately. It moves forward as a history of transformations in narrative movement, from Fielding and Goethe and Austen to George Eliot, Flaubert, Henry James, James Joyce, Hemingway, Woolf, and Mann. Pace reveals narrative in its most elaborate effects. And the way pace changes in fiction expresses much of what we refer to as the pace of modernity.


2020 ◽  
pp. 145-202
Author(s):  
Jonah Siegel

This chapter addresses the constantly shifting forms that mediated audiences’ experiences of admired antiquities from the late eighteenth century to the late nineteenth. Literary texts and reproductive prints not only diffused knowledge of ancient art, but shaped new creation in literature and the visual arts, which in turn contributed to the establishment of new aesthetic norms. Through analyses of authors ranging from Lessing to Winckelmann, from Coleridge to Blake, from George Eliot to Henry James, and culminating with Ruskin and Pater, this chapter argues that the emergence of an ever-more abstract and formalist vision of antiquity was shaped by the ongoing shifts in the cultural presence of antique objects.


Author(s):  
Rachel Crossland

Chapter 6 applies the ideas explored in Chapter 5 to a range of early twentieth-century literary texts, especially those by Woolf and Lawrence. The focus here is on crowd and city scenes, including the modernist figures of the flâneur and the passante. The chapter as a whole argues for the relevance of contemporary ideas on molecular physics, especially Brownian motion, to portrayals of individual characters in relation to crowds, drawing on a range of texts including Woolf’s Night and Day and Mrs Dalloway, Lawrence’s The Trespasser and The White Peacock, and texts by Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, and H. G. Wells. Together with Chapter 5, this chapter demonstrates how ideas, language, and imagery were shared across disciplines in the early twentieth century, and argues that considering different disciplines together can help us to recapture a sense of the ways in which particular issues were experienced at the time.


1991 ◽  
Vol 63 (4) ◽  
pp. 754
Author(s):  
Rob Johnson ◽  
Daniel Mark Fogel

Author(s):  
Safoura Eskandari

This study aims to investigate how the notion of language as cultural practices which construct social and cultural products function in James Joyce selected short stories, The Grace and The Araby within the framework of cultural materialism. Language is major concern of cultural studies and language is as the symbol of power. Language in literary texts plays a major role in constructing meaning and reflecting the author`s intention. James Joyce could be placed among the most dominant cultural authors whose concern is the material life, social class, social identity and cultural crisis. As an outstanding author, Joyce is well known for his typical depiction, musical decoration as well as his sticking to proper cultural and social materials and issues such as religious matters. His selected short stories of Dubliners, revolve around the lifestyle of the Irish middle-class in Dublin around the late 1800s and early 1900s. James Joyce is not so much a writer as he is a painter of words. His works appear simplistic at first glance, but under analysis they reveal the inner world of a character and the reality of the common man through symbols, metaphors, and sensory analysis. Dublin is the city of silence which threads its way through the lives of the Dubliners, for this reason Joyce‘s characters are presented in a silent state. Such silence denotes the sterility of communication and the absence of the art of conversation. Most of Dubliners characters are portrayed as having the ability of verbal activity and they can speak, yet in most cases this ability fails them and they become tongue-tied .The only way which is left for them is speak in a whispering voice. In the modern age, life has completely changed and the city has become a modernized one. This latter is the epitome of such change that has a great effect upon the modern life, bringing with it the trauma and frustration of modern failure. Joyce’s attempts to harness the effects of language and, increasingly with time, languages, may arguably be selected as the feature of his writing which mostly conditioned its technical transformations. Language is only one of those practices implicated in the symptoms of the crisis of late capitalist society. Faced with the ideological mystification of personal lives, Raymond Williams stressed the imperative of establishing connections by emphasizing the role of means of communication, he speaks of "productive communication in shaping community.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document