Joyce’s Atavism and the New Ireland

2021 ◽  
pp. 70-100
Author(s):  
Václav Paris
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Social Darwinism ◽  
The Sun ◽  
Evolutionary State ◽  
Literary Evolution ◽  
Developed Nations ◽  
Scientific Ideas ◽  
Opening Up

Atavism plays a central role in James Joyce’s Ulysses. Describing the return of an earlier evolutionary state in the present, atavism, at the beginning of the twentieth century, was loosely associated both with the epic genre (itself a kind of fossil) and with supposedly less-developed nations. This chapter argues that Joyce shaped Ulysses as a response to both associations. Joyce rejected the idea that literature evolves or improves through history. He also recognized that Ireland lost out when seen through the hierarchies of social Darwinism. In order to counter both, he presented Ireland’s modernity in terms of Homer’s Odyssey. Bringing back the deep past as radically contemporary, Joyce’s fiction questions our assumptions about the archaic and primitive as well as the progressive nature of national and literary history. In Ulysses, scientific ideas of biological and literary evolution are subordinated into Joyce’s own idiosyncratic vitalism to produce a new and quite queer national vision. In a series of detailed readings of various episodes, including “Oxen of the Sun,” “Cyclops,” and “Proteus,” the chapter establishes the logic of Joyce’s imagined lifeword. It then suggests how Joyce’s work on atavism reveals a larger trend in modernist epic fiction, opening up to this book’s rereading of the genre more generally.

Espionage and Exile

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phyllis Lassner
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
The Political ◽  
International Crises ◽  
Popular Entertainment ◽  
John Le Carre ◽  
The Cold War

Espionage and Exile demonstrates that from the 1930s through the Cold War, British Writers Eric Ambler, Helen MacInnes, Ann Bridge, Pamela Frankau, John le Carré and filmmaker Leslie Howard combined propaganda and popular entertainment to call for resistance to political oppression. Instead of constituting context, the political engagement of these spy fictions bring the historical crises of Fascist and Communist domination to the forefront of twentieth century literary history. They deploy themes of deception and betrayal to warn audiences of the consequences of Nazi Germany's conquests and later, the fusion of Fascist and Communist oppression. Featuring protagonists who are stateless and threatened refugees, abandoned and betrayed secret agents, and politically engaged or entrapped amateurs, all in states of precarious exile, these fictions engage their historical subjects to complicate extant literary meanings of transnational, diaspora and performativity. Unsettling distinctions between villain and victim as well as exile and belonging dramatizes relationships between the ethics of espionage and responses to international crises. With politically charged suspense and narrative experiments, these writers also challenge distinctions between literary, middlebrow, and popular culture.

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.

The Obligation to Choose

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Crossland
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
The Past ◽  
Light Quanta ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Wave Particle Duality ◽  
Night And Day ◽  
Scientific Ideas

Chapter 1 explores Woolf’s writings up to the end of 1925 in relation to scientific ideas on wave-particle duality, providing the ‘retrospect of Woolf’s earlier novels’ which Michael Whitworth has suggested shows that she was working ‘in anticipation of the physicists’. The chapter as a whole challenges this idea of anticipation, showing that Woolf was actually working in parallel with physicists, philosophers, and artists in the early twentieth century, all of whom were starting to question dualistic models and instead beginning to develop complementary ones. A retrospect on wave-particle duality is also provided, making reference to Max Planck’s work on quanta and Albert Einstein’s development of light quanta. This chapter pays close attention to Woolf’s writing of light and her use of conjunctions, suggesting that Woolf was increasingly looking to write ‘both/and’ rather than ‘either/or’. Among other texts, it considers Night and Day, Mrs Dalloway, and ‘Sketch of the Past’.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Crossland
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
New Physics ◽  
Literature And Science ◽  
Direct Influence ◽  
Cultural Impact ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Scientific Ideas

Drawing on Gillian Beer’s suggestion that literature and science ‘share the moment’s discourse’, the Introduction sets out the approach adopted across this study as a whole as one which will combine, but also distinguish between, the two standard approaches within the field of literature and science: direct influence and the zeitgeist. Rejecting the previous critical focus on 1919 in studies of Albert Einstein’s cultural impact in favour of 1905, it argues for a more precise engagement with the scientific ideas, as well as a clearer acknowledgement of similar ideas across a broader range of disciplines in the early twentieth century. It also highlights Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence as particularly apt literary figures for such a study, given their complicated individual relationships with the science of their day, relationships which combine a dislike of science in general with more positive responses to the new physics.

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.

Rethinking the Print Object: Goethe and the Book of Everything

PMLA ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 121 (1) ◽  
pp. 124-138 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Piper
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Print Media ◽  
Book History ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Technological Capabilities ◽  
Final Version ◽  
Publishing Strategy ◽  
Opening Up

This essay combines a consideration of the two-decades-long publishing strategy of Goethe's last major prose work, Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (1808–29), with a reading of specific formal features unique to the final version of the novel. In doing so, it argues that Goethe's use of print and narrative work in concert to form what we might call a particular media imaginary–to reimagine the printed book not according to emerging nineteenth-century criteria of sovereignty, nationality, and permanence but instead according to values more in keeping with the technological capabilities of print media, such as transformation, diffusion, and connectivity. In his vigorous engagement with the material manifestations of his work as a key site of literary work, Goethe offers us an ideal place to explore the productive intersections that the disciplines of book history and literary history are opening up today. (AP)

scholarly journals Celibacy or Marriage? Dilemmas for Buddhist Monks in Korea

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (2021/1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Beatrix Mecsi
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Relevant Literature ◽  
Social Darwinism ◽  
Viable Alternative ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Daily Lives ◽  
Korean Buddhism ◽  
Complex Picture ◽  
Japanese Colonial

Following the Confucian period of the Chosŏn era, which overshadowed Buddhists and confined them to the margins of society, at the beginning of Japanese colonial rule the possibility of monastic marriage typical of Japanese practice emerged as a viable alternative for Korean Buddhists in the early twentieth century. While the repressive memory of Japanese colonial heritage often appears in the relevant literature about clerical marriage today as the main reason for Korean Buddhists to get married, an analysis of contemporary documents presents us with a much more complex picture. Most notably among Korean intellectuals, one of the most significant personalities of the era, Manhae Han Young’un’s (1879−1944) systematically urged the reform of Korean Buddhism, Chosŏn Pulgyo yusinnon 朝鮮 佛 敎 維新 論 (Treatise on the Restoration of Korean Buddhism). In connection with the presentation and circumstances of the thirteenth point formulated to allow polemics and the practice of priestly marriage, we can see that his Confucian education, personality, and life play as important a part in his reasoning as the ideologies of the era, social Darwinism and modernism, and democracy. But primary sources revealing the daily lives and circumstances of the monks also show that thewillingness to marry was also greatly influenced by the new inheritance rules introduced in the Japanese colonial system.

The Autonomy of Art and the Legitimization of Biofiction: An Aesthetic Turning Point in Twentieth-Century Literature

2021 ◽  
Vol 82 (3) ◽  
pp. 345-369
Author(s):  
Michael Lackey
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
Twentieth Century Literature ◽  
Robert Penn Warren ◽  
William Styron ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
Historical Figure ◽  
One Year ◽  
Century Literature

Abstract Biofiction is literature that names its protagonist after a historical figure, and since the 1990s it has become one of the most dominant literary forms. This is surprising because many prominent scholars, critics, and writers have criticized and even condemned it. This essay hypothesizes that postmodern theories of truth and concomitant transformations in reader sensibilities partly account for the legitimization and now dominance of biofiction. The essay analyzes a 1968 literary debate among Ralph Ellison, William Styron, and Robert Penn Warren, which on the surface concerned the uses of history in literature. But because it happened just one year after the publication of Styron’s controversial novel about Nat Turner, the debate ended up focusing primarily on the nature and value of biofiction. By analyzing the discussion in relation to contemporary formulations about and theorizations of biofiction, this essay illustrates why the forum represents a turning point in literary history, resulting in the decline of a traditional type of literary symbol and the rise of a more anchored and empirical symbol—that is, the type of symbol found in biofiction.

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