Howe, Irving (1920–1993)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Saul Noam Zaritt
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Literary Modernism ◽  
Yiddish Literature ◽  
Democratic Socialism ◽  
Social Critic ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Cultural Innovation ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Irving Howe ◽  
Post War

Irving Howe was an American literary and social critic. Howe was a central figure in the circles of American democratic socialism as well as a prominent voice in post-war American literary criticism. Though he addressed a great number of literary topics and periods in his writing, Howe wrote important reflections on international literary modernism—in what Howe perceived as its last stages. Howe helped facilitate the rise of modernism in the cultural mainstream during the post-war period while remaining critical of the ways in which contemporary ideologies could appropriate the strategies of the literary avant-garde for exploitative and destructive purposes. Howe was particularly active in promoting modern Yiddish literature, initiating the translation and circulation of Yiddish writers who had previously been unknown to English-speaking audiences. Seeking to conserve a disappearing culture, Howe viewed Yiddish modernism as a compelling expression of the tension in modernity between tradition and cultural innovation.

The Sitwells and Sitwellism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deborah Longworth
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Literary Modernism ◽  
Popular Imagination ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Experimental Art ◽  
History Of ◽  
Aesthetic Standard ◽  
Post War

Few figures have been so renowned and yet so critically dismissed within the history of literary modernism as Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell. For a time in the early 1920s they were the leading personalities of London’s immediately post-war modernist haut bohemia, and the embodiment of the modernist avant-garde as it was perceived in the popular imagination. One of the reasons for their disappearance from histories of the emergence of English modernism, is perhaps that the Sitwellian brand of avant-gardism was so distinct from the classicist aesthetic standard by which modernism would subsequently come to be defined. This chapter examines a cult of “ornamental modernism” in the 1920s, of which the Sitwells were the figureheads; an impulse that we find in works that embrace the extravagant, the theatrical, or the eccentric; that turn to the decadent, baroque, and rococo rather than the classical for their models, that foreground artistic celebrity rather than impersonality, and in which performance and façades dominate rather than formalist clean lines or the direct articulation of subjective consciousness. It is an alternative trend in experimental art that overtly positions itself in antagonism with the conservative artistic and cultural tendencies of the period, but that also sits awkwardly in relation to the standard and revisionary histories of avant-garde and modernist experiment, exemplifying instead an ornamental aesthetic that has been all but obliterated from subsequent literary and art history.

X: A Quarterly Review and McGahern’s modernism

John McGahern ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Walker
Keyword(s):  
Literary Modernism ◽  
Archival Research ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Historical Perspectives ◽  
Quarterly Review ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter looks at the interconnected Dublin and London contexts to McGahern’s reception of literary and visual modernism. It does so primarily through the prism of the material and ideas circulating in the magazine X: A Quarterly Review and among the coterie (Patrick Swift, Anthony Cronin and others) involved in its production – with whom McGahern had considerable contact leading up to and following his first appearance in print in the magazine. This context is accessed through fresh archival research, including drawing on some previously un-discussed correspondence between the editors, and their patrons and contributors. This is also aligned to broader theoretical and historical perspectives on the relationship between the abstract and the actual within visual and literary modernism, as well as the post-war fate of modernism and the avant-garde.

scholarly journals How Jewish Refugee Critics Changed British Literary Criticism, 1970–2020

Humanities ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 80
Author(s):  
David Herman
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Paul Celan ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Jewish Refugee ◽  
Huge Impact ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Post War

During the mid- and late 20th century, a small group of Jewish refugee critics changed the way British culture thought about what kind of literature mattered and why. These outsiders went on to have an enormous impact on late 20th-century British literary culture. What was this impact? Why in the last third of the 20th century? Why did British literary culture become so much more receptive to critics like George Steiner, Gabriel Josipovici, Martin Esslin and SS Prawer and to a new canon of continental Jewish writers? The obstacles to Jewish refugee critics were formidable. Yet their work on writers like Kafka, Brecht and Paul Celan, and thinkers like Heidegger and Lukacs had a huge impact. They also broke the post-war silence about the Holocaust and moved the Jewish Bibl from the margins of English-speaking culture.

scholarly journals Digitizing artist periodicals: new methodologies from the Digital Humanities for Analysing Artist Networks

2014 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 6-11
Author(s):  
Thomas Crombez
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
Small Groups ◽  
Digital Humanities ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Digital Archive ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Socially Engaged Art ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
New Methodologies ◽  
Post War

The research project Digital Archive of Belgian Neo-Avant-garde Periodicals (DABNAP) aims to digitize and analyse a large number of artists’ periodicals from the period 1950–1990. The artistic renewal in Belgium since the 1950s, sustained by small groups of artists (such as G58 or De Nevelvlek), led to a first generation of post-war artist periodicals. Such titles proved decisive for the formation of the Belgian neo-avant-garde in literature and the visual arts. During the sixties and the seventies, happening and socially-engaged art took over and gave a new orientation to artist periodicals. In this article, I wish to highlight the challenges and difficulties of this project, for example, in dealing with non-standard formats, types of paper, typography, and non-paper inserts. A fully searchable archive of neo-avant-garde periodicals allows researchers to analyse in much more detail than before how influences from foreign literature and arts took root in the Belgian context.

scholarly journals Drama and world view revisited

Literator ◽  
1983 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-33
Author(s):  
A. L. Combrink
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
World View ◽  
Post War ◽  
Value Judgement

Within the British tradition of literary criticism, and then more specifically the Formalist tradition of the post-war years, the idea of value judgement implied by the appellation Christian (or by the use of the concept of world view within the confines of an essay in literary criticism) would seem to be positively repugnant. The use of any criterion in literary criticism that deals with philosophical concepts has to be very carefully considered.

Ende von Anfang an Wege zu György Ligetis San Francisco Polyphony

2016 ◽  
Vol 57 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 91-104
Author(s):  
Lorenz Luyken
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
The State ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Stylistic Development ◽  
Post War

György Ligeti’s comments on his last large orchestral piece San Francisco Polyphony show a remarkable understatement, if not neglect, of this work. This paper intends to find reasons for this attitude. It analyzes the correlation between title and substance, in particular the description of the work as being polyphonic, showing that the piece is less polyphonic than it is melodic or even thematic, resulting from coherent stylistic development as well as from an innate spatial conception rather than from a switchback to 19th-century procedures. At the end, San Francisco Polyphony proves to be a very personal comment on the state of the post-war musical avant-garde and the discussion about postmodernism in music.

scholarly journals B.S. Johnson’s Liberatic Cityscape in Albert Angelo

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 99-110
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Biela
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
Visual Sensitivity ◽  
Material Object ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Crucial Aspect ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Way

For Bryan Stanley Johnson, a British post-war avant-garde author, space was a crucial aspect of a literary work. Inspired by architects and film makers, he was convinced that “form follows function” (“Introduction” to Aren’t You Rather Young to Be Writing Your Memoirs) and exercised the book as a material object, thus anticipating liberature – a literary genre defined in 1999 by Zenon Fajfer and Katarzyna Bazarnik, which encompasses works whose authors purposefully fuse the content with the form. The goal of this paper is to analyse the cityscape theme in Johnson’s second novel, Albert Angelo (1964), in which London is presented as space that accompanies the character in his everyday life and becomes a witness of the formation of his identity. The protagonist is an architect by profession, so special attention is paid to his visual sensitivity and the way the cityscape is reflected in his memories. Furthermore, Johnson’s formal exploitation of the book as an object and its correspondence to the content is analysed with reference to the metaphor of “[t]he book as an architectural structure” discussed by Bazarnik in Liberature. A Book-bound Genre.

scholarly journals Precision, Honesty and Liveliness: The Newspaper Medium in "The Unfortunates" by B. S. Johnson

2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 63
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Biela
Keyword(s):  
Media Studies ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Post War

The article analyses the representation of the newspaper medium in <em>The Unfortunates</em> – the fourth novel by the post-war British avant-garde author B.S. Johnson. The narrator’s job as a football reporter is discussed with reference to other themes and the unconventional form of the novel. Special attention is paid to the section called “The pitch worn”, which presents the process of writing the report. The aim is to see how the chapter resonates within the whole work and what it reveals as regards Johnson’s views on precision, honesty and liveness. Literary analysis is accompanied by references to journalism and media studies.

‘Making Strange’: Non-Translation in The Waste Land

2019 ◽  
pp. 117-136
Author(s):  
Jason Harding
Keyword(s):  
Collective Trauma ◽  
Poetic Form ◽  
Russian Formalism ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Waste Land ◽  
The Social ◽  
Post War ◽  
Reading Key

This chapter employs concepts and terms drawn from Russian Formalism to assist reading key moments of non-translation in The Waste Land. Treated as avant-garde linguistic ‘shifts’ that disrupt and estrange the poetic form, particular instances of non-translation in the poem—from the epigraph to the wild cacophony of different languages at the end of the poem—are seen as covert and coded expressions of powerful affect. This chapter considers these experimental disruptions of form in the social and political contexts of post-war avant-garde revolt and recognition of individual and collective trauma.

Avant-garde

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Irene Gammel
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Radical Innovation ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Early American ◽  
Dialectical Relationship ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Different Cultures

The term "avant-garde" has a double meaning, denoting first, the historical movements that started in the late nineteenth century and ended in the 1920s and 1930s, and second, the ongoing practices of radical innovation in art, literature, and fashion in the later twentieth century (often inspired by the historical avant-garde and referred to as the neo-avant-garde). Within the context of modernism, historical avant-garde movements (such as Dada, Futurism, Vorticism, Anarchism, and Constructivism) radicalized innovations in aesthetic forms and content, while also engaging viewers and readers in deliberately shocking new ways. Locked in a dialectical relationship between the avant-garde and modernism, as Richard Murphy has written (1999: 3), the historical avant-garde accelerated the advent of modernism, which routinely appropriated and repackaged avant-garde experimentation in tamer forms. As the Latinate term "avant-garde" took root first France and Italy, and later in Germany and English-speaking countries, the trajectory of the avant-garde’s relationship with, or opposition to, modernism has been theorized in a myriad of different, even conflicting, ways across different cultures. Is the avant-garde an extension of, or a synonym for, modernism (as suggested in some early American criticism) or are the two concepts in opposition to each other (as proposed in Italian and Spanish criticism)?

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