Backgazing: Reverse Time in Modernist Culture

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Giles
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Southern Hemisphere ◽  
Modernist Literature ◽  
Reverse Time ◽  
Material Forces ◽  
Middle Years ◽  
Canonical Narratives ◽  
Opening Up

The focus of this book is on how time is represented in reverse forms throughout modernist literature and culture, from about 1900 until the middle years of the twentieth century. It is particularly concerned with how antipodean reorientations of chronological scale reconfigure ways in which the conventional temporal categories of modernism are understood. It treats time neither as a philosophical nor as a theological concern but, rather, as a phenomenon shaped by material forces across different spatial and temporal trajectories. By foregrounding the antipodean slant of this project, it not only integrates the literature of Australia and other parts of the Southern Hemisphere into the broader trajectories of modernism, but also considers ways in which canonical narratives might productively be considered in relation to their antipodean dimensions, thereby opening up modernist narratives to various forms of systematic reversal. Backgazing thus reads canonical authors (Proust, Conrad, Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, Mann, Auden) in relation to Australasian modernist writers (Mansfield, H. H. Richardson, Dark, White, and others), and it considers how the shape of modernism appears different if viewed from an antipodean perspective. It also considers various neglected modernist writers (Cunard, Farrell, Powell, Slessor, R. D. FitzGerald) and suggests how their modernist idiom becomes more recognizable in relation to an aesthetics of backwardness and burlesque.

Proletarian Modernism: Film, Literature, Theory

PMLA ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 134 (5) ◽  
pp. 1056-1075
Author(s):  
Benjamin Kohlmann
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Aesthetic Theory ◽  
Alternative Route ◽  
Modernist Literature ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Literature Theory ◽  
Opening Up

This article identifies a body of work—films, literary texts, and theories of the aesthetic—that can help us reopen the question of what it means for an artwork to project a vision of classlessness. The article begins by focusing on early-twentieth-century proletarian modernism, in particular in the cinematic work of Sergey Eisenstein and in British literary works that repurposed Woolfian and Joycean styles during the later interwar years. Proletarian modernism, I argue, highlights an alternative route taken by modernist literature and art: unlike the late modernists feted in much recent scholarship, proletarian modernists aimed to retool modernism, opening up new and global political futures for it rather than anticipating its end. The article concludes by showing that the cultural genealogy of proletarian modernism mapped out here doubles as a prehistory of contemporary aesthetic theory: it enables us to recognize the significant political and theoretical erasures that structure recent accounts of art's democratic potential.

Conclusion

Moonlighting ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 195-224
Author(s):  
Nathan Waddell
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
Modernist Literature ◽  
Main Thrust ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Opening Up

This chapter provides an overview of the main thrust of this book: how Beethovenian legend—there being no better example than the influential account of Beethoven as the archetypally suffering, Romantic composer, one whose ‘true’ origins in Beethoven’s day-to-day life seem always already hidden by the tales which have accumulated around him and his work—is a kind of encryption. This chapter accounts for the significance of that legendariness as it made its way through modernist literature in the early twentieth century, while also opening up the discussion, in conclusion, to look at the link between Beethovenian cultures and politics, and musico-literary analysis. It suggests that the importance of the book is that its argument gives us a means with which to demonstrate the existence of a hitherto-unacknowledged Beethovenian trajectory within modernist writing, and in so doing to describe its musico-literary operations in a markedly new way.

Hopscotch Modernism: On Everyday Life and the Blurring of Art and Social Science

2006 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben Highmore
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Systematic Study ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Health Centre ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Modernist Literature ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Point Of Departure

From a remarkably innovative point of departure, Ben Highmore (University of Sussex) suggests that modernist literature and art were not the only cultural practices concerned with reclaiming the everyday and imbuing it with significance. At the same time, Roger Caillois was studying the spontaneous interactions involved in games such as hopscotch, while other small scale institutions such as the Pioneer Health Centre in Peckham, London attempted to reconcile systematic study and knowledge with the non-systematic exchanges in games and play. Highmore suggests that such experiments comprise a less-often recognised ‘modernist heritage’, and argues powerfully for their importance within early-twentieth century anthropology and the newly-emerged field of cultural studies.

Gertrude Stein's Transmasculinity

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Coffman
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Ernest Hemingway ◽  
Pablo Picasso ◽  
False Consciousness ◽  
Mass Consumption ◽  
Museum Exhibits ◽  
Carl Van Vechten ◽  
The Media ◽  
Future Work ◽  
Opening Up

By reading written and visual artefacts of Gertrude Stein’s life, Gertrude Stein’s Transmasculinity reframes earlier scholarship to argue that her gender was transmasculine and that her masculinity was positive rather than a self-hating form of false consciousness. This book considers ways Stein’s masculinity was formed through her relationship with her feminine partner, Alice B. Toklas, and her masculine homosocial bonds with other modernists in her network. This broadens out Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s account of “male homosocial bonding” to include all masculine persons, opening up the possibility of examining Stein’s relationship to Toklas; masculine women such as Jane Heap; and men such as Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, and Carl Van Vechten. The Introduction and first four chapters focus on surfacings of Stein’s masculinity within the visual and the textual: in others’ paintings and photographs of her person; her hermetic writings from the first three decades of the twentieth century; and her self-packaging for mass consumption in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933). Whereas the chapter on The Autobiography underscores Toklas’s role in the formation of Stein’s masculinity and success as a modernist, the final three register the vicissitudes of the homosocial bonds at play in her friendships with Picasso, Hemingway, and Van Vechten. The Coda, which cross-reads Stein’s Everybody’s Autobiography (1937) with the media attention two museum exhibits about her attracted between 2011 and 2012, points to possibilities for future work on the implications of her masculine homosocial bonds with Vichy collaborator Bernard Fäy.

Filthy Material

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Forster
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Media ◽  
Twentieth Century Literature ◽  
Modernist Literature ◽  
Literary Value ◽  
Radclyffe Hall ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media

Modernist literature is inextricable from the history of obscenity. The trials of such figures as James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and Radclyffe Hall loom large in accounts of twentieth-century literature. Filthy Material: Modernism and the Media of Obscenity reveals the ways that debates about obscenity and literature were shaped by changes in the history of media. The emergence of film, photography, and new printing technologies shaped how “literary value” was understood, altering how obscenity was defined and which texts were considered obscene. Filthy Material rereads the history of modernist obscenity to discover the role played by technological media in debates about obscenity. The shift from the intense censorship of the early twentieth century to the effective “end of obscenity” for literature at the middle of the century was not simply a product of cultural liberalization but also of a changing media ecology. Filthy Material brings together media theory and archival research to offer a fresh account of modernist obscenity with novel readings of works of modernist literature. It sheds new light on figures at the center of modernism’s obscenity trials (such as Joyce and Lawrence), demonstrates the relevance of the discourse of obscenity to understanding figures not typically associated with obscenity debates (such as T. S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis), and introduces new figures to our account of modernism (such as Norah James and Jack Kahane). It reveals how modernist obscenity reflected a contest over the literary in the face of new media technologies.

scholarly journals Solidarity of the shaken: from the experience (Erlebnis) to history

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michaela Belejkaničová
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
Critical Dialogue ◽  
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin ◽  
Ex Nihilo ◽  
Post War ◽  
Opening Up ◽  
Usual Pattern

AbstractIn his Heretical Essays, Jan Patočka introduces the concept of the solidarity of the shaken. He argues that it emerges in the conditions of political violence—the frontline experience (Fronterlebnis). Moreover, Patočka brings into discussion the puzzling concepts of day, night, metanoia and sacrifice, which only further problematise the idea. Researching how other thinkers have examined the phenomenon of the frontline experience, it becomes obvious that Patočka did not invent the obscure vocabulary ex nihilo. Concepts such as frontline experience, sacrifice and the metaphors of the day and night were commonly used by thinkers in the inter-war and post-war eras in their examination of community (Gemeinschaft). This study aims to reconstruct the idea of the solidarity of the shaken as contextualized within a broader scholarly debate on the concept of community (Gemeinschaft). Through the critical dialogue between Patočka’s works and the works of Ernst Jünger and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, this study will portray how Patočka, in his discourse on the frontline experience, follows the usual pattern of overcoming one’s individuality, transcending and opening up to the constitution of solidarity. This paper will argue that Patočka defined the solidarity of the shaken in an attempt to revive the positive aspects of a community and break with the regressive (if not sinister) uses to which it was put in the twentieth century.

Diaspora Capitalism and the Homeland: Australian Chinese Networks into China

1996 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 239-273
Author(s):  
Constance Lever-Tracy ◽  
David Ip
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Economic Development ◽  
Global Capitalism ◽  
The Other ◽  
The World ◽  
World Economic ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
Opening Up

This article explores two new and related phenomena of the late twentieth century that will surely play a major role in shaping the world of the twenty-first: the economic development and opening up of China, and the emergence onto the world economic stage of diaspora Chinese businesses, producing a significant, identifiably Chinese current within global capitalism. Each of these has, we believe, been crucial and perhaps indispensable to the other.

scholarly journals Captain Vivian Hewitt and the fate of his collection of birds’ eggs and specimens

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 349-357
Author(s):  
David Clugston ◽  
Errol Fuller
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Middle Years

Vivian Hewitt was a little-known collector of natural history specimens (mainly birds and their eggs) during the early and middle years of the twentieth century. Although an obscure figure his influence on the museum world of his time – and later – was considerable and his collection of Great Auk material became almost legendary. Some of his story and that of his collection is a matter of published record but many elements remain obscure. In this study, we present previously unpublished details of Hewitt’s extraordinary life.

Simon of Pattishall, Pioneer Professional Judge

1977 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ralph V. Turner
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Civil Servant ◽  
Law And Order ◽  
Middle Years ◽  
Magna Carta ◽  
English Law

The latter part of the twentieth century may not find many of us wishing to pay tribute to bureaucrats, but as Helen Cam reminded us, the civil servant “deserves more credit than he has yet had for building up and maintaining our precious tradition of law and order.” In the late twelfth century and the thirteenth century the process of “bureaucratization” first got underway in England. An early professional civil servant, one specializing in judicial activity, was Simon of Pattishall. His name surfaces in the records in 1190, and it disappears after 1216. His time of activity, then, coincides with an important period for English common law: the years between “Glanvill” and Magna Carta.Simon was one of that group of royal judges who might be termed the first “professionals,” a group that took shape by the middle years of Richard I's reign. By the time of John, about ninety men acted at various times as royal judges, either at the Bench at Westminster, with the court following the king, or as itinerant justices. Many of these had only temporary appointments, making circuits in the counties; but a core of fifteen, who concentrated on the work of the courts, can be regarded as early members of a professional judiciary. Simon of PattishalPs is perhaps the most respected name among the fifteen. He had the longest career on the bench, from 1190 until 1216. He founded a judicial dynasty, for his clerk, Martin of Pattishall, became a judge, as did his clerk, William Raleigh, who had as his clerk Henry of Bracton, author of the great treatise on English law.

Ordering Empire and Democracy, 1902–1921

2020 ◽  
pp. 24-67
Author(s):  
Tobias Harper
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
British Empire ◽  
British Society ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Order ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Opening Up

This chapter examines the creation of new orders at the beginning of the twentieth century, which was the culmination of a prolonged period of “unprecedented honorific inventiveness” starting in the late nineteenth century. In Britain the new Order of the British Empire was branded the “Order of Britain’s Democracy” in recognition of the fact that it extended far deeper into non-elite classes in British society than any previous honour. Between 1917 and 1921 more than 20,000 people in Britain and throughout the British Empire were added to this new Order. This was an unprecedented number, orders of magnitude larger than honours lists in previous years. While the new Order was successful in reaching a wider, more middle-class audience than the honours system before the war, which was socially narrow, there was a substantial backlash to what was widely perceived by elites to be an excessive (and diluting) opening-up of the “fount of honour.” This backlash was connected to political controversies about the sale of honours that eventually helped bring about Lloyd George’s downfall. This chapter also contains a brief description of all the components of the British honours system at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document