The Land of Spices, the Enigmatic Signifier, and the Stylistic Invention of Lesbian (In)Visibility

2013 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margot Backus ◽  
Joseph Valente
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Sexual Identity ◽  
James Joyce ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Irish Society ◽  
Clear Case ◽  
Sexual Representation ◽  
Self Image ◽  
Autobiographical Fiction ◽  
Kate O'brien

The context in which Kate O'Brien came of age created both the necessity and the opportunity for her to fashion her self-image out of indefinite, radically interpretable cues of taboo sexual identity, a process reflected in her coming of age, autobiographical fiction, The Land of Spices. In following the path of her literary hero, James Joyce, whose iconic Bildungsroman her own Land of Spices closely tracks, O'Brien would have recognized how the increased self-reflexivity of the modernist novel was geared to the narrative deployment of indefinite or enigmatic signifiers. O'Brien thus drew upon and developed the modernist style that Joyce pioneered, which constituted the text as a space about as well as of interpretation, a hermeneutical field that interrogates its own limits and possibilities. In Irish society, with its legacy of Jansenist Catholicism, a structure of vigorously buttressed ignorance, undergirded by a strict knowledge of what and where to overlook, has persisted through much of the twentieth century, making it easy to mis-or underinterpret the more subtle literary strategies of cryptic sexual representation. As regards lesbian visibility, the critical reception of The Land of Spices affords a clear case in point

Modernist Life Histories

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Aureliano Newman
Keyword(s):  
Biological Sciences ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
James Joyce ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Life Histories ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Aldous Huxley ◽  
Biological Models ◽  
Two Cultures ◽  
Scientific Ideas

Modernist Life Histories explores how new biological models of embryonic development in the first half of the twentieth century helped inspire new kinds of coming-of-age plots. Focusing on novels by E. M. Forster, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley and Samuel Beckett, the book links narrative experiments with shuffled chronology, repeated beginnings and sex change to new discoveries in the biological sciences. It reveals new connections between the so-called Two Cultures by highlighting how scientific ideas and narratives enter the literary realm.

The Formation of a Budding Man Alone: The God Boy (Murray Reece, 1976)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alistair Fox
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
World War ◽  
Value System ◽  
Feature Films ◽  
The Family

This chapter analyses the earliest of the New Zealand coming-of-age feature films, an adaptation of Ian Cross’s novel The God Boy, to demonstrate how it addresses the destructive impact on a child of the puritanical value-system that had dominated Pākehā (white) society through much of the twentieth century, being particularly strong during the interwar years, and the decade immediately following World War II. The discussion explores how dysfunction within the family and repressive religious beliefs eventuate in pressures that cause Jimmy, the protagonist, to act out transgressively, and then to turn inwards to seek refuge in the form of self-containment that makes him a prototype of the Man Alone figure that is ubiquitous in New Zealand fiction.

The Ancient Prehistory of Modern Adults

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sheila Murnaghan ◽  
Deborah H. Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
James Joyce ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Hilda Doolittle ◽  
Freudian Psychoanalysis ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter considers some of the ways in which the association between childhood and antiquity has been conceptualized and elaborated in works for adults, particularly in the early decades of the twentieth century. Memories of formative encounters by the archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann and the poet and novelist H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) set the stage for a discussion of Freudian psychoanalysis, the scholarly theories of Jane Harrison, and the works of James Joyce, H.D., Mary Butts, Naomi Mitchison, and Virginia Woolf. The practice of archaeology and the knowledge of Greek emerge as key elements in distinctly gendered visions of the relationship between modern lives and the classical past.

Langdell Laughs

1999 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 141-144
Author(s):  
William P. LaPiana
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Teaching Profession ◽  
The Self ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Christopher Columbus ◽  
Self Image ◽  
American Law

The amount of ink spilled in consideration of the life, thought, accomplishments, and legacy of Christopher Columbus Langdell is eloquent testimony to the critical role he plays in the self-image of the American law teaching profession. It is both wonderful and astounding, therefore, to find that critical primary sources remained unread and unused at the very end of the twentieth century. Now that Bruce Kimball has brought them to light, we have a more complete view of the man and his thought, one that, not surprisingly, reveals to us someone quite different from the cruelly and crudely caricatured inventor of those twin devices for stifling young minds, the case and Socratic methods.

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.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Erika Hanna
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Change ◽  
Irish Society ◽  
History Of ◽  
Irish People

The introduction sets up the story which will be told in the following five substantive chapters. It provides an introduction to the history of Irish photography in the twentieth century and explores how it has been understood by historians. It then goes on to lay out the argument which will be developed throughout the rest of the book. That is, over the course of the twentieth century, photography allowed ordinary Irish people to create spaces of self-expression and contest authority in ways which would have a fundamental impact on the nature of Irish society, and that reading photographic sources can provide us with a new way in to stories of social and cultural change from the perspectives of those on the margins of power.

Athens and Jerusalem

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-34
Author(s):  
Vincent P. Pecora
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
James Joyce ◽  
Thomas Hardy ◽  
Stephane Mallarme ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Meister Eckhart ◽  
Promised Land ◽  
Greek Thought ◽  
Medieval Europe

Autochthony is fundamental to ancient Greek notions of belonging to the land. While the motif had a negligible presence in the literature of European Christendom, it returns with some force in modern productions by Stéphane Mallarmé, Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, and James Joyce. Martin Heidegger too draws on pre-Socratic Greek thought on the theme of autochthony. But there is a parallel tradition of belonging to the land that begins in the Pentateuch. In Exodus, God speaks to Moses about a Promised Land. In medieval Europe, Meister Eckhart reads Exodus as providing a special, mystical understanding of God’s soul, one that intertwines promised land with the human soul’s creative capacities, and lays the foundation for theologically infused politics in the German tradition. In Alexander Baumgarten, Immanuel Kant, and J. G. Fichte, nationalism is linked to Eckhart. In the twentieth century, Heidegger phenomenologically reinscribes earth, divinities, and dwelling poetically.

Twentieth-Century Pathological Writers and Their Creativity

2019 ◽  
pp. 277-295
Author(s):  
Suzette Henke
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
James Joyce ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Cultural Factors ◽  
Personal History ◽  
Psychiatric History ◽  
Traumatic Loss ◽  
Experimental Fiction ◽  
Experimental Art ◽  
History Of

Culturally constructed pathologies exhibited by three authors of the modernist period: Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence, reveal an emotional trajectory from paralyzing depressive or obsessive behavior to explosions of creative genius channeled into experimental fiction. Each of these authors struggled with a personal history of psychological distress evinced by genetic, experiential, or cultural factors and exacerbated by traumatic events in childhood or adolescence. All three sought to handle posttraumatic stress through complex gestures of aesthetic reenactment in a process that might be described as scriptotherapy. Woolf epitomizes the tortured artist grappling with so-called madness. Throughout her canon, she self-consciously struggles with irreconcilable issues of gender, abjection, and mourning. What appears to have been bipolar disorder in Woolf’s own psychiatric history might well have engendered a lifetime of creativity punctuated by severe bouts of debilitating depression. Joyce struggled with a pathological fear of erotic betrayal that spurred an obsessional fascination with adultery and with the enigma of spousal complicity, a drama whose erotic perversities were later played out in his twentieth-century epic novel, Ulysses. D. H. Lawrence proved somewhat notorious for his pathological obsessions with sexual desire, homosocial bonding, erotic loss, and conjugal betrayal. These authors worked through pathological symptoms to convert the seeds of incipient madness into burgeoning works of literary genius. They incorporated the pain of traumatic loss into the triumph of aesthetic integration via the creation of radically innovative and experimental art.

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