A Queer Romance

2021 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 58-72
Author(s):  
Eric H. Newman
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Organization ◽  
Social Relation ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Primary Function ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
A Site

Abstract This essay argues that the queer romances at the margins of Claude McKay’s Romance in Marseille operate as sites of possibility for a happy, egalitarian social relation that is longed for but not otherwise accessible in the novel. The essay contends that this novel, read against Home to Harlem (1928) and Banjo (1929), offers one of the most sustained, nuanced representations of queer life in McKay’s archive and in early twentieth-century LGBT literature more generally, one in which same-sex-oriented characters are rendered as normal, integral figures in urban life rather than as outré characters whose primary function is to add spice to the narrative. As the novel demonstrates the continuing appeal of queerness as a site for imagining a more liberated, loving form of social organization—one that relishes the pleasure-in-difference that is a hallmark of McKay’s writing—it also anticipates formations within the queer liberationist politics of the decades that followed.

scholarly journals A MODEL OF EXPRESSIONIST STRATEGY DEVELOPMENT IN THE WORK OF THE WRITER (ON THE EXAMPLE OF THE WORKS OF LEO PERUTS)

2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (78) ◽  
pp. 59-63
Author(s):  
E.A. Radaeva ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Strategy Development ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Large Interval ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Historical Past ◽  
First Time

The purpose of this study is to present a model for the development of the expressionist method in the genre of the novel using the example of the evolution of the novelistic work of the Austrian writer of the early twentieth century L. Perutz. The results obtained: the creative method of the Austrian writer is moving from scientific knowledge to mysticism; in the center of all novels created with a large interval, there is always a confused hero, broken by what is happening (in other words, the absurdity of the world), whose state is often conveyed through gestures; the author finally moves away from linear narration to dividing the plot into almost autonomous stories, thematically gravitating more and more to the distant historical past. Scientific novelty: the novels of L. Perutz are for the first time examined in relative detail through the prism of the aesthetics of expressionism.

Epilogue

2021 ◽  
pp. 231-236
Author(s):  
Bill Bell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Robinson Crusoe ◽  
Reading Habits ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Official Sources ◽  
The Web

The epilogue rounds off the argument by returning to Crusoe as a paradigm of the act of reading in the British empire. In the hands of different readers not even Robinson Crusoe was as straightforward as it seemed. Despite the fact that the novel has often been read as a manual for empire, it is far more complex than some commentaries would have us believe. Similar ambivalences apply to the lives and minds of many overseas British in the long nineteenth century. While the early twentieth century is commonly thought to have embodied a decline in imperial values, the reading habits of colonial subjects throughout the period would seem to indicate that imperial assurances were less robust than official sources would seem to suggest. The five reading constituencies that are described in the foregoing chapters, all of them in different ways operating within the web of empire, were ones in which individuals often found imperial confidence in its own mission wanting, something that was time and again demonstrated through in their acts of reading.

Richard Wright and the Americanism of Lawd Today!

2014 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 505-522 ◽  
Author(s):  
JAY GARCIA
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Richard Wright ◽  
Social Criticism ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Common Features ◽  
Ernesto Laclau ◽  
Cultural Renewal ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Social ◽  
Van Wyck Brooks

This essay examines Lawd Today!, Richard Wright's posthumously published novel, written in the 1930s but only made available to readers in 1963. Concentrating on the epigraphs that punctuate the novel, the essay demonstrates the significance of the social criticism of the 1910s and 1920s to Wright's formation as literary artist. In particular, Wright was drawn to the writings of the Young American critics, including Van Wyck Brooks and Waldo Frank, whose criticisms of national ideologies furthered a commitment to “Americanism” as a horizon of social and cultural renewal. Wright's intellectual immersion in early twentieth-century US social criticism gave Lawd Today! a Young American critical imprint. Drawing upon the work of Ernesto Laclau on “populism,” the essay reads Wright's novel as invested in an “Americanism” that seeks to describe common features of early twentieth-century black migrant experience in the urban North in terms of larger national and modern dynamics.

Reclaiming Competitive Tango

2018 ◽  
pp. 304-330 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juliet McMains
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
International Image ◽  
Ballroom Dance

This chapter explores Argentina’s Campeonato Mundial de Baile de Tango (World Tango Dance Championships) in the context of tango’s history in the English-designed ballroom dance competitions that have defined tango’s international image since the “tango-mania” of the early twentieth century. Use of the Mundial by the Argentine government to advance commercial and national branding agendas is examined in conjunction with the Mundial’s use by dancers to launch careers and expand acceptance of same-sex dancing. It is argued that Argentines are redefining tango competition on their own terms in ways that both reclaim the dance from foreigners and simultaneously reproduce some of the same aesthetic shifts that were effected through tango’s inclusion in ballroom dance competitions, resulting in a whiter, more homogenous, and externally focused expression.

“The Letter Said That My Wife Had Died”

2020 ◽  
pp. 39-56
Author(s):  
Marìa Bjerg
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Marital Relations ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
European Immigrants ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Positive Feelings ◽  
A Site ◽  
Shed Light

Based on two trials for bigamy involving European immigrants in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Argentina, this chapter illustrates how emotions affected transnational marital relations and how different meanings of love, and its mutations into myriad less positive feelings, shaped migration. In the context of migration and family—a site of intimacy and affection, but also one of disagreement, contest, deceit, and heartbreak—the experience of bigamists and their betrayed spouses reveal the multiple complexities of leaving one’s family and of being left behind, and shed light on the encounter of immigrants with the emotional standards of the Argentine society.

Music in Early Twentieth-Century Istanbul

2021 ◽  
Vol 89 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-84
Author(s):  
Onur Öner
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social History ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Limited Attention ◽  
The Political ◽  
Music Schools ◽  
Political Crises ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Status

This study addresses the social history of music in early twentieth-century Ottoman Istanbul. The paper argues that private music schools were at the center of transformations in music and that their history is profoundly related to the political crises the Ottoman state experienced after the turn of the twentieth century. More precisely, by approaching the Ottoman bureaucracy from a musical perspective, the paper tries to link the reorganization of the Ottoman bureaucracy in 1909 with the emergence of private music schools in Istanbul. To explore the process, the paper follows some official functionaries’ career paths to explain their concentration in these schools. In contrast to conventional historiography, the aim is to emphasise that out of the political crises, private music schools emerged as a new ground in music. By paying limited attention to musical aspects, the study will mainly address the social roles these schools occupied in Ottoman urban life. They were practically social organizations, whose members pursued common goals. Collective action, such a fundamental shift of mindset on the part of the musicians, facilitated the advancement of the status of musicians in Ottoman urban society and decreased uncertainty about the future of the profession. Moreover, the institutional identity provided by the schools changed the place of women in music by increasing their visibility as music teachers and performers.

scholarly journals The Taming of Matter: Jalmari Finne and the Typewriter

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Veijo Pulkkinen
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Remarkable Feature ◽  
Previous Version ◽  
Genetic Process ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Genetic Examination

This article examines the role of the typewriter in the genetic process of the novel Vuosisatain vaatimus (1918) by the Finnish novelist Jalmari Finne (1874–1939). Finne is a rare example of an early twentieth-century author who mastered touch typing and composed directly on a typewriter. He claimed that he used the typewriter because it enabled him to keep up with his thinking, a claim that challenges Friedrich Kittler’s (1990, 193) thesis that the most remarkable feature of the typewriter is not its speed but its “spatially and discrete signs”. A genetic examination of Finne’s typescripts suggests that he had developed generative typing into a kind of  “blind revision” in that he did not read and correct previous drafts but rather inserted a blank paper in the machine and typed an altogether new version of the text without copying the previous version.  

scholarly journals HYBRID SPACES IN THE MODERN CITY: DUBLIN AND BUCHAREST IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-66
Author(s):  
Adina Ciugureanu
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cognitive Maps ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Local Identity ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Two Cities ◽  
Hybrid Spaces ◽  
A Site ◽  
Fictional Representations ◽  
Historical Periods

This article aims at looking at two centres of modernity, seen in space, time and metaphorical representation, in the early twentieth century as illustrated by the Irish writer James Joyce in Ulysses (1922) and the Romanian novelist Cezar Petrescu in Calea Victoriei [“Victory Avenue”], published in 1929. The analysis is based on recent research that has entangled the representation of space in cultural and fictional texts with the geographic spaces of the respective historical periods, the reason being that, since time and space are not to be severed, nor are history or geography. The theoretical approach to the analysis draws on views on space as a philosophical category and as a trope of modernity (Heidegger, Lefebvre, Foucault, de Certeau) from geocritical perspectives (Westphal, Tally) which focus on fictional representations of urban spaces that lead to the creation of cognitive maps cartographed by human activities. The two cities under scrutiny (Dublin and Bucharest) reveal striking similarities, never discussed before, in envisaging modernity as a site of conflict between a nostalgic, rustic, nineteenth-century and the dynamic process of constructing a local identity of place connected to history and politics. Moreover, one important point that connects the two cities despite the geographical distance between them is the rise of modernity as a paradigm shift from the spiritual to the commercial, from an artisan-minded space to an industrial one, generally, from the feudal system to a capital-based society, which actually means the shift, I argue, from agrarian domination to urbanization.

scholarly journals “It was one’s body feeling, not one’s mind”

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chloe Leung
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Bloomsbury Group ◽  
To The Lighthouse ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Physical Gestures ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Mind

The Russian ballet was celebrated amongst the Bloomsbury group in the early twentieth-century. Throughout 1910s-1930s, Virginia Woolf enjoyed Russian ballets such as Petrushka, Le Spectre de la Rose and Scheherazade staged by Michel Fokine and Sergei Diaghilev. The expressivity of the dancing body rectifies words which, as Woolf delineates in “Craftsmanship,” are dishonest in articulating emotions (Selected Essays 85). This paper thus divulges an oppositional thinking that belies Woolf’s modernist aesthetics – a compulsion to give words to emotions that should be left unsaid. In To the Lighthouse (1928), this “silence” is communicated in the dancing gestures that populate the novel. Juxtaposing the context of Woolf’s attendance at the ballet with her concurrent composition of Lighthouse, I shall argue that the aesthetic convergence between Woolf’s prose and the Russian ballet is not a coincidence – that Woolf very much had the ballet in mind when she wrote. Woolf’s and the Russian ballet’s shared aesthetics however, do not characterise this paper as a study of influence the Russian ballet had on Woolf. Rather, Woolf involuntarily deploys the language of dance/ballet in articulating ineffable emotions. I will offer a close reading that scrutinizes the underexplored physical gestures of Mr and Mrs Ramsay with a perspective of dance. In projecting emotions, Woolf’s novel sketches a reciprocal network between the dancing body and the mind. I conclude by suggesting that the communicational lapses do not sentence the failure of but sustain human kinship. By extension, the Russian balletic presentation of the dancing body will also reanimate the mind-body conundrum that has haunted academia for centuries.

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