scholarly journals “Show! Hide! Show!”: High Modernism and the Lure of the Obscene

Miranda ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olivier Hercend
Keyword(s):  
High Modernism

Multisensory Modalities and Modernist Translation

CounterText ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 283-306
Author(s):  
Tamara Brzostowska-Tereszkiewicz
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Reader Response ◽  
Sensory Integration ◽  
Cultural Anthropology ◽  
Sensory Perception ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Artistic Production ◽  
High Modernism ◽  
The Arts

Multisensory and cross-modal perception have been recognised as crucial for shaping modernist epistemology, aesthetics, and art. Illustrative examples of how it might be possible to test equivalences (or mutual translatability) between different sensual modalities can be found in theoretical pronouncements on the arts and in artistic production of both the avant-garde and high modernism. While encouraging multisensory, cross-modal, and multimodal artistic experiments, twentieth-century artists set forth a new language of sensory integration. This article addresses the problem of the literary representation of multisensory and cross-modal experience as a particular challenge for translation, which is not only a linguistic and cross-cultural operation but also cross-sensual, involving the gap between different culture-specific perceptual realities. The problem of sensory perception remains a vast underexplored terrain of modernist translation history and theory, and yet it is one with potentially far-reaching ramifications for both a cultural anthropology of translation and modernism's sensory anthropology. The framework of this study is informed by Douglas Robinson's somatics of translation and Clive Scott's perceptive phenomenology of translation, which help to put forth the notion of sensory equivalence as a pragmatic correspondence between the source and target texts, appealing to a range of somato-sensory (audial, visual, haptic, gestural, articulatory kinaesthetic, proprioceptive) modalities of reader response.

Un/Becoming Claude Cahun: Zigzagging in a Pack

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
renée c. hoogland
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Art History ◽  
Gender Politics ◽  
High Modernism ◽  
Claude Cahun

Considered odd, obscene, a genius nonetheless, at the time she created her best-known works, French photographer and writer Claude Cahun (1894-1950) cuts a particularly unruly figure in literary criticism and art history. Her recalcitrant faux autobiography Aveux non avenus, [Disavowals, or, Cancelled Confessions] (1930), a book of essays and recorded dreams illustrated with photomontages, have encouraged the artist’s association with High Modernism and Surrealism while her photographic self-portraits have been claimed for an affirmative (feminist) gender politics. However, the proliferous and mercurial nature of Cahun’s disavowed confessions and self-stagings defy easy “domestication.” Instead she constructs a continuously shifting configuration of fragments and collages: assemblages of singularities that are always in a multiplicity, in a pack. Escaping dominant forms of expression, Cahun’s work has nothing to do with recognition or imitation, nor does it constitute a relation of representation. The chapter argues instead that Cahun presents us in both her writing and in her photographic work with the successful experience of becoming in the absence of any final term or form. A becoming-animal that moves beyond destruction into the zone of indiscernibility where a work, or, perhaps, an oeuvre comes into view—an oeuvre that nonetheless remains decidedly outlandish.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Chodat
Keyword(s):  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Focused Attention ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
High Modernism ◽  
Normative Concepts ◽  
Unique Experience

Literary works since the rise of high modernism have been intensely hostile to abstract generalization, and have focused attention on the unique experience and singular expression. This nominalist impulse—summed up in the cry “show, don’t tell!”—has encouraged a deep wariness toward broad normative concepts: “good,” “bad,” “courage,” “justice,” etc. More than is often recognized, however, this literary skepticism parallels the skepticism toward such concepts in the natural sciences, which accords no place to such abstract “high words” in a world of matter and calculable motions. Against this dual literary and scientific inheritance, the postwar sage offers a “weak realism” about normative concepts and a “reflective” mode of composition: a movement between the particular and the general, art and argument. Such a literary–intellectual project is risky, and opens the sage to charges of sentimentalism. Closely attending to their works, however, suggests that we should avoid entering this protest too quickly.

scholarly journals Refrain, Again: The Return of the Villanelle

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amanda Lowry French
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Culture Wars ◽  
High Modernism ◽  
Romantic Poet

Poets and scholars are all wrong about the villanelle. While most reference texts teach that the villanelle’s nineteen-line alternating-refrain form was codified in the Renaissance, the scholar Julie Kane has conclusively shown that Jean Passerat’s “Villanelle” (“J’ay perdu ma Tourterelle”), written in 1574 and first published in 1606, is the only Renaissance example of this form. The nineteenth-century “revival” of the villanelle in fact stems from an 1844 treatise by a little-known French Romantic poet-critic named Wilhelm Ténint. This study traces the villanelle first from its highly mythologized origin in the humanism of Renaissance France to its deployment in French post-Romantic and English Parnassian and Decadent verse, then from its bare survival in the period of high modernism to its minor revival by mid-century modernists, concluding with its prominence in the polyvocal culture wars of Anglophone poetry ever since Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” (1976). The villanelle might justly be called the only fixed form of contemporary invention in English; contemporary poets may be attracted to the form because it connotes tradition without bearing the burden of tradition. Poets and scholars have neither wanted nor needed to know that the villanelle is not an archaic, foreign form.

‘How Much of Nothing There Was’: Trying (Not) to Understand Elizabeth Bowen

2019 ◽  
pp. 113-126
Author(s):  
Damian Tarnopolsky
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
World History ◽  
Elizabeth Bowen ◽  
High Modernism ◽  
The World ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
As If

This chapter notes that one of the strangest aspects of Bowen’s novels of the 1930s and 1940s is the prevalence of nothing in these texts. Examples range from sentences including double or triple negatives and words that cancel themselves out, to descriptions of parts of London destroyed by the Blitz, to scenes built around something missing. Her characters complain that they know nothing about each other or their own motives; her plots often resist final explanation, as if the novels are in some sense about nothing. On every page, in sentences, in her characters’ lives, in her sense of the world, Bowen’s novels pursue a paradoxical task: charting the presence of lack, absence and negativity. The chapter argues that Bowen’s obsessive dealing with nothingness is a clue to her sense of her place and time. Exploring Bowen’s ‘nothings’ is a way of understanding the fractured historical moment in which she wrote, and her response to it; it is also a way of placing her responses to late and high modernism, to world history and literary history.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Paul Giles
Keyword(s):  
Backward Trajectory ◽  
High Modernism ◽  
Definition Of

Drawing on theories of temporality and anthropology, and focusing in particular on Paul Ricoeur’s notion of ‘retrodiction,’ this Introduction lays out a framework for understanding antipodean transnationalism. It reconsiders the canonical strains of early or ‘high’ modernism through late modernism’s backward trajectory and thus articulates ways in which modernism was always a more belated phenomenon than has generally been recognized. It argues that modernism systematically incorporated retrograde modes of burlesque and buffoonery whose formal perspectives can be understood intellectually as commensurate with their spherical geographic provenance. By reorganizing the time of modernism according to antipodean coordinates, we come to recognize how antipodean modernism’s twisted, recursive properties are integral to the definition of modernism within a global compass.

Arabian Aesthetics in European Modernism

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 339-355
Author(s):  
Ferial J. Ghazoul
Keyword(s):  
James Joyce ◽  
Marcel Proust ◽  
Western Literature ◽  
Arabian Nights ◽  
High Modernism ◽  
The World ◽  
Global Diffusion ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Second World ◽  
European Modernism

This article focuses on one aspect of the impact of the Arabian Nights on Western literature that has been rarely addressed, namely its impact on modernism. Modernism is almost always viewed as a quintessentially European movement, self-generated between the first and second World Wars. From there it spread to the rest of the world. Despite its global diffusion, the imperial project has remained to be viewed in terms of the impact of the colonial powers over the colonized. My contention is that the cultural traffic was not one-way, but two-way. By considering the cultural traffic as going two ways, we instil an understanding of Modernism as a World Movement and recognize the constitutive part that Arabic poetics played in European Modernism. This article thus detects how the narrative logic of the most famous Arabian tales structured the works of the two pillars of High Modernism, Marcel Proust and James Joyce.

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