Returning the Gift

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Colesworthy
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Gertrude Stein ◽  
Free Market ◽  
Special Kind ◽  
Jean Rhys ◽  
Literary Modernism ◽  
Market Society ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Gift

The decades following World War I saw a widespread turn across disciplines to questions about the nature and role of gifts: What is a gift? What do gifts mean and do? Which individuals and institutions have the authority to give? Returning the Gift argues that these questions centrally shaped literary modernism. The book begins by revisiting the locus classicus of twentieth-century gift theory, Marcel Mauss’s The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, to show that, his title notwithstanding, the gift Mauss envisions is a distinctively modern phenomenon. Subsequent chapters offer nuanced readings of novels and nonfiction by Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, Gertrude Stein, and H.D. from the 1920s to 1940s, drawing on developments in the social sciences, economics, and politics to illuminate their writing, while also making a case for their unique contributions to broader interdisciplinary debates. Not only do these writers insist that literature is a special kind of gift, but they also challenge the primitivist treatment of women as gifts in the work of their Victorian forebears and contemporary male theorists. Each of these writers uses tropes and narratives of giving to imagine more egalitarian social possibilities under the conditions of the capitalist present. The language of the gift is not, as we might expect, a mark of hostility to the market, but rather a means of giving form to the “society” in market society—of representing everyday experiences of exchange that the myth of the free market works, even now, to render unthinkable.

Marcel Mauss and the Turn to the Gift

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Colesworthy
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Experimental Writing ◽  
Market Society ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Gift ◽  
New Material ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Leonard Woolf

Chapter 1 takes a cue from recent anthropologists who have stressed the influence of Mauss’s socialism on his sociological work. Returning to Mauss’s The Gift, the chapter argues that what links his essay to the experimental writing of his literary contemporaries is not their shared fascination with the primitive, as other critics have suggested, but rather their shared investment in reimagining social possibilities within market society. Mauss was, as his biographer notes, an “Anglophile.” Shedding light on his admiration of British socialism and especially the work of Beatrice and Sidney Webb—friends of Virginia and Leonard Woolf—as well as competing usages of the language of “gifts” in the social sciences and the arts, the chapter ultimately provides a new material and conceptual framework for understanding the intersection of largely French gift theory and Anglo-American modernist writing.

Dynamic Form

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cara L. Lewis
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Henry James ◽  
Gertrude Stein ◽  
Political Commitment ◽  
Literary Modernism ◽  
Mina Loy ◽  
Spatial Form ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modernist Studies ◽  
Verbal Category

This book traces how intermedial experiments shape modernist texts from 1900 to 1950. Considering literature alongside painting, sculpture, photography, and film, the book examines how these arts inflect narrative movement, contribute to plot events, and configure poetry and memoir. As forms and formal theories cross from one artistic realm to another and back again, modernism shows its obsession with form—and even at times becomes a formalism itself—but as the book states, that form is far more dynamic than we have given it credit for. Form fulfills such various functions that we cannot characterize it as a mere container for content or matter, nor can we consign it to ignominy opposite historicism or political commitment. As a structure or scheme that enables action, form in modernism can be plastic, protean, or even fragile, and works by Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Mina Loy, Evelyn Waugh, and Gertrude Stein demonstrate the range of form's operations. Revising three major formal paradigms—spatial form, pure form, and formlessness—and recasting the history of modernist form, the book proposes an understanding of form as a verbal category, as a kind of doing. It thus opens new possibilities for conversation between modernist studies and formalist studies and simultaneously promotes a capacious rethinking of the convergence between literary modernism and creative work in other media.

scholarly journals The Literary Madness: Language as an Indicator of Insanity in the Fiction of the 20th Century (1920s)

2021 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 316-338
Author(s):  
E. B. Kryukova ◽  
O. A. Koval
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Linear Logic ◽  
Borderline Case ◽  
Stream Of Consciousness ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Gift ◽  
Disastrous Experience ◽  
The One

The article is devoted to the phenomenon of insanity in the artistic discourse of the 1920s. Such a literary reception is interesting because, on the one hand, it goes against the dominant clinical approaches at that time, which emphasized the medical aspect of the problem, and on the other hand, it anticipates the antipsychiatric philoophical theories, whereby the marginal figure of the madman was gradually included in the social space. Using the example of three iconic works of modernist literature, the article demonstrates how innovative techniques of working with language make the speech of a mentally ill person distinctly audible. Virginia Woolf in “Mrs Dalloway” conveys the disastrous experience of the First World War through the stream of consciousness of the mentally traumatized character Septimus Smith. Woolf puts an anti-militaristic appeal into the mouth of a madman and thus makes him the herald of a simple truth that reasonable people, however, prefer not to notice. Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’s short story “Cogwheels” reproduces the experiences of the author, who feels the approach of insanity. Madness opens up as a borderline case that reveals its deep kinship with the source of writing, understood as a lack of form, lack of meaning, lack of creation. William Faulkner in the novel “The Sound and the Fury” gives the gift of speech to the weak-minded Benji, who doesn’t talk. His im-possible narrative offers an alternative to the linear logic, which clarify Benji’s confusing narration but fail to rival it in conveying the directness of human suffering or happiness.

1922: The Annus Mirabilis of Literary Modernism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Levenson
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Rapid Expansion ◽  
Bertrand Russell ◽  
Consumer Society ◽  
Traumatic Memory ◽  
Literary Modernism ◽  
The Social ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Annus Mirabilis

The year 1922 has been known as the annus mirabilis (“miracle year”) of Anglo-American literary modernism, chiefly because of the near-simultaneous publication of T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” James Joyce’s Ulysses, and Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room. The distinctive historical character of 1922 remains an ongoing concern: the year was at once a time of traumatic memory of World War I and a moment of renewed ambition for the radical experiments of modernism. During the war, Eliot, Joyce, and Woolf had enjoyed an unusual opportunity to revise and extend their aesthetic ambitions. Each of their works registers the more defiant provocation of postwar literature, but each confronts the powerful resistance of cultural and political authorities who saw the efforts, especially of Eliot and Joyce, as both meaningless and dangerous. The postwar period also saw the rapid expansion of new technologies (especially in transport and telecommunications) and a consumer society keen to enjoy the availability of freshly circulating material goods. D. H. Lawrence described the end of war as both a relief and a menace. This double valence captures the contrast between searing memories of battlefield death and anticipation of pleasure and plenitude in the Jazz Age. The central figures in this entry are at once newly confident in the adversarial mission of modernism and fully aware of the social complacency and cultural conservatism arrayed against them. The immediate felt disturbance of these works came through their formal challenge, in particular through the intersecting uses of many-voiced and multi-perspectival montage, an assemblage of fragmentary views, and a diversity of speaking tones. This conspicuous technique appears in closely related terms within the early films of Dziga Vertov and the postwar philosophy of logical atoms developed by Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein. But the formal inventiveness exhibited during the year is no more prominent than the social concern. Especially as in 21st century, historical studies of the period have recovered the depth of interest in questions of race, empire, sexual debility, and social failure.

Iconic Shade … and Other Professional Hazards of Woolf Scholarship

2020 ◽  
pp. 203-220
Author(s):  
Madelyn Detloff
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Liberal Education ◽  
Gertrude Stein ◽  
Public University ◽  
Literary Modernism ◽  
Dominant Culture ◽  
The Public ◽  
Institutional Structures ◽  
Important Site

“Iconic Shade” addresses in a humorous way some of the ironies associated with writing and teaching about a literary “icon” such as Virginia Woolf in a volume dedicated to expanding our conception of literary modernism to include women writers beyond the “big three” (H.D., Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf). What happens when a previously marginalized writer becomes institutionalized in the canon? Or when previously marginalized scholars become absorbed and transformed by institutional structures that previously excluded them? Woolf herself wrote perceptively about the ambivalence of being situated both inside and outside of dominant culture. Her insights (communicated in her critical chapters) might be helpful to those of us who straddle the line between belonging and marginalization in dominant culture, and who are often tasked with what Sara Ahmed has called “diversity work” within academe. While diversity work is often painful and thankless, the public university is nevertheless still an important site to protect from neoliberal instrumentalization, as it is one of the few places where the democratizing hope of liberal education is still (if in some cases barely) alive.

Farming and Agriculture in Literary Modernism

2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 86-113
Author(s):  
Jeremy Diaper
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Ford Madox Ford ◽  
Active Engagement ◽  
Literary Modernism ◽  
Monetary Reform ◽  
Organic Movement ◽  
Social Credit ◽  
Political Criticism ◽  
The Social ◽  
John Middleton Murry

This article seeks to cultivate a better understanding of the influence of agriculture and farming on literary modernism. It begins with a brief analysis of agriculture in the work of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf, before exploring the significance of farming in relation to Ford Madox Ford, John Middleton Murry and T. S. Eliot. Following on from this initial consideration of literary modernism and agriculture, it then proceeds to investigate Ezra Pound's position within environmental modernism, through exploring the influence of the organic husbandry movement on his social and political criticism. In particular, it examines Pound's active engagement with notable organic magazines of the period including the New English Weekly (to which Pound contributed over 200 pieces between 1932–1940 and authored its ‘American Notes’ in 1935) and the Townsman. Through an examination of Pound's affiliation with the organic movement, it will illustrate that their mutual agricultural concerns were invariably connected to the wider financial considerations of economic and monetary reform, including the social credit theories of Major C. H. Douglas.

Economic Development in 2006 and the Future of the Russian Economy: The Non-Resource-Based Sector Potential (The Economic Report of All-Russia Business Union “Delovaya Rossiya”)

2007 ◽  
pp. 27-45
Author(s):  
B. Titov ◽  
I. Pilipenko ◽  
A. Danilov-Danilyan
Keyword(s):  
Economic Development ◽  
Free Market ◽  
Economic Report ◽  
Russian Economy ◽  
The Social ◽  
National Economic ◽  
Investment Capital ◽  
Export Industries ◽  
Sustainable Economic Growth

The report considers how the state economic policy contributes to the national economic development in the midterm perspective. It analyzes main current economic problems of the Russian economy, i.e. low effectiveness of the social system, high dependence on export industries and natural resources, high monopolization and underdeveloped free market, as well as barriers that hinder non-recourse-based business development including high tax burden, skilled labor deficit and lack of investment capital. We propose a social-oriented market economy as the Russian economic model to achieve a sustainable economic growth in the long-term perspective. This model is based on people’s prosperity and therefore expanding domestic demand that stimulates the growth of domestic non-resource-based sector which in turn can accelerate annual GDP growth rates to 10-12%. To realize this model "Delovaya Rossiya" proposes a program that consists of a number of directions and key groups of measures covering priority national projects, tax, fiscal, monetary, innovative-industrial, trade and social policies.

Envoi

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vike Martina Plock
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Edith Wharton ◽  
Jean Rhys ◽  
Suez Crisis ◽  
The Cold War

It is 1956, the height of the Cold War. The year will end in the Suez Crisis and the Hungarian Uprising. Edith Wharton and Virginia Woolf have both been dead for a while, Jean Rhys is all but forgotten and Rosamond Lehmann’s career as a novelist is on the wane....

Micah’s Theory of the Justice of Judgement (Micah 3:1-12)

2018 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Blessing Onoriode Boloje
Keyword(s):  
Theory Of Justice ◽  
Background Structure ◽  
The Social ◽  
Egalitarian Society ◽  
The Gift ◽  
Special Concern

This article is an examination of Micah’s theory of justice within the overall context of his oracles of judgements. While there are competing perspectives in the justice of judgement in the book of Micah, particularly in relation to the extent of judgement, this article concerns itself with the interrelatedness and connection between sin and judgement. The judgements envisioned in Micah’s oracles are provoked by the violations of the traditional moral and social solidarities resulting from the Covenant, which formed the basis of society. As an egalitarian society, the social blueprint of Yahweh’s Torah for Israel advocated special concern for weak and vulnerable individuals as fundamental. The gift of Torah inaugurated Israel as a community meant to personify Yahweh’s justice. However, increasing injustice profoundly jeopardized this witness to God’s healing agenda. For failing to uphold justice the perpetrators are liable and the judgements constitute justice. This justice may not necessarily be corrective in quality but punitive. The article therefore examines briefly the background, structure, and approaches to the book of Micah, analyses a unit of judgement oracle (3:1–12), and concludes by synthesising Micah’s theory of justice within the overall context of his oracles of judgements.

Coerced Human Mobility and Elite Social Networks in Early Dynastic Iraq and Iran

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-57
Author(s):  
Vitali Bartash
Keyword(s):  
Human Mobility ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Spatial Mobility ◽  
Male Adult ◽  
Early Dynastic ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Gift ◽  
The Persian Gulf ◽  
City State ◽  
Social Profiles

AbstractThe article provides a historical analysis of cuneiform records concerning the circulation of unfree humans among the political-cultic elite in southern Mesopotamia and the Persian Gulf during the Early Dynastic IIIb period, ca. 2475–2300 BCE. The analysis of the written data from the Adab city-state demonstrates that the royal house used the unfree as gifts to maintain a sociopolitical network on three spatial levels – the internal, local, and (inter)regional. The gift-givers and gift-receivers were mostly male adult members of the local and foreign elite, whereas the dislocated unfree humans were heterogeneous in terms of age, gender, and the ways they lost their freedom. The author relates the social profiles of both groups to the logistics of human traffic to reveal the link between social status and forms and nature of spatial mobility in the politically and socially unstable Early Dynastic Near East.

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