Invalid Modernism

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Davidson
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Henry James ◽  
Medical Discourse ◽  
William Carlos Williams ◽  
Djuna Barnes ◽  
Sensory Response ◽  
Jean Toomer ◽  
Natural Formation ◽  
Progressive Reforms ◽  
Historical Developments

Invalid Modernism contributes to an intersectional moment in disability studies by looking at aesthetics through non-conforming bodies and minds. It also offers an intersectional understanding of modernism by studying the representation of physical and cognitive difference during a period marked by progressive reforms in health, labor, and welfare. Readings of texts by Henry James, Samuel Beckett, Virginia Woolf, William Carlos Williams, James Joyce, Djuna Barnes, Oscar Wilde, F. T. Marinetti, Jean Toomer, an opera by Alexander Zemlinsky, and paintings and constructions of Dadaists and Surrealists are set against historical developments in sexology, medical discourse, and eugenics and anthropometry. Modernist works are well known for challenging formal features of narration and representation, but this challenge has often been enabled by shell-shocked veterans, tubercular heroines, blind soothsayers, invalid aesthetes, and neurasthenic women. Such figures complicate an aesthetics of autonomy by which modernism is often understood. Since its evolution in the eighteenth century modern aesthetics has been seen in terms of judgments based on detached appreciation. What begins as a private sensory response to an object or natural formation results in a disinterested judgment about the value of that response. By looking at modernist aesthetics through a disability optic, Invalid Modernism attempts to restore the missing body to aesthetic discourse through figures marked by medical discourse of the period as “invalid” subjects.

Uncanny Encounters

2019 ◽  
pp. 123-140
Author(s):  
Michael Davidson
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Henry James ◽  
Cultural Theory ◽  
Affect Theory ◽  
The Body ◽  
Frank Norris ◽  
Jean Toomer ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Historical Changes

The emergence of affect theory has returned the body to cultural theory by stressing the phenomenological impact of bodies on other bodies. Chapter 6 opens with a reading of Baudelaire’s “Une Passante” that offers one such instance. Despite its emphasis on what Lauren Berlant calls the “messy dynamics of attachment,” affect theory has not attended to disability where the encounter with the non-traditional body incites emotions of anxiety, confusion, and in some cases solidarity. This chapter explores a structure of feeling around dynamic historical changes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through works by Sigmund Freud, Frank Norris, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and Jean Toomer. Each illustrates stages in what Sara Ahmed calls “dramas of contingency” by which world historical changes are registered through quotidian moments of attention and confrontation. These stages mark a trajectory in the novel, from Realism and Naturalism to the modernism of Woolf and Toomer.

Modernist Dante

2021 ◽  
pp. 633-650
Author(s):  
Daniela Caselli
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
James Joyce ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Ezra Pound ◽  
First Century ◽  
Djuna Barnes ◽  
Dorothy Richardson ◽  
Anglophone Literature ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of

This chapter traces a history of Dante’s reception in anglophone literature between the 1870s and the 1950s. It acknowledges his importance in Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and James Joyce, but engages more closely with Samuel Beckett, Djuna Barnes, and Virginia Woolf. It shows that the modernist Dante that emerges from these authors’ work is both a formal and political one: recruited as an anti-authoritarian voice from the past and seen anew from feminist and queer perspectives, this is not a twenty-first century Dante forced against his will to virtue-signal, however; on the contrary, this is a Dante anachronistically familiar with key ‘vices’ of twentieth-century authors, readers and commentators. Focusing on sullenness, resistance, and fatigue, the chapter argues for a new understanding of modernist experiments with Dante’s political and formal complexity that refuse to use him as a ‘code or a weapon […] to crush someone’, as Dorothy Richardson put it.

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.

London

2019 ◽  
pp. 168-220
Author(s):  
Andrew Thacker
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Henry James ◽  
Joseph Conrad ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
World War Two ◽  
Hill Area ◽  
Secret Agent ◽  
The City ◽  
Literary Networks

This chapter considers how London developed as a modernist city, from the late nineteenth century to the period after World War Two. It analyses the geographical emotions produced by particular locations within London, such as the London Underground and Metro-Land suburbs; the cultural institutions of Bloomsbury and Fleet Street; the bohemia of Soho and the nightlife of Piccadilly Circus; and the Notting Hill area settled by postwar immigrants to the city. It considers the affective responses of writers such as Virginia Woolf and Henry James to the material restructuring of the city, before turning to the role of publishers, bookshops, and literary networks in helping establish modernism in the city, in the shape of poetic movements such as the Rhymers and the Imagists. The final part of the chapter analyses texts by two important outsiders in London: Joseph Conrad in The Secret Agent and Sam Selvon in The Lonely Londoners.

Gerardine Franken, 1920-2004

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ton Naaijkens
Keyword(s):  
James Joyce ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Djuna Barnes

Gerardine Franken was het vergund vertalingen te mogen maken van werk van Djuna Barnes, James Joyce en Virginia Woolf: drie van de meest vooraanstaande auteurs uit de Engelstalige literatuur van de twintigste eeuw. Bij twee van hen betrof het ook nog eens hun belangrijkste boek. Haar vertaaloeuvre, begonnen toen zij niet meer de allerjongste was en in zekere zin voortijdig gestopt, is niet omvangrijk, maar bestaat voor een substantieel deel uit literaire meesterwerken; haar debuut, het befaamde Nachtwoud van Djuna Barnes, verscheen in 1963, toen zij 43 was.

Covert Relations: James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Henry James.

1991 ◽  
Vol 63 (4) ◽  
pp. 754
Author(s):  
Rob Johnson ◽  
Daniel Mark Fogel
Keyword(s):  
James Joyce ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Henry James
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