Pariah Modernism

2020 ◽  
pp. 87-122
Author(s):  
Amy Feinstein
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Character Study ◽  
Ethical Authorship ◽  
Modern Era ◽  
Final Text ◽  
Indefinite Pronouns ◽  
Character Types

Chapter 4 considers the solely-metaphorical presence of Jews in the final text of The Making of Americans. Paralleling the evolution found in Stein’s notebooks, the novel’s narrator largely abandons storytelling in lieu of character study. Stein replaces the Jewish and Anglo-Saxon character types from the notebooks with a purely behavioral nomenclature and, as a result, the published volume contains no explicit references to Jews. The narrator nonetheless maintains a focus on a categorically Jewish and modern type: the pariah. He introduces several pariah figures, from servant girls and parvenus to avant-garde writers, who join him in a fraternity of what he calls “Brother Singulars.” With an eye to Hannah Arendt’s notion of the modern Jewish visionary or “conscious pariah,” the chapter argues that Stein’s narrator, with the characterological “plot” he is writing for himself and strangers, estranges narration by increasingly abstracting his characterology with indefinite pronouns as the novel progresses. Amidst the formal experimentation of ever-increasing repetition and abstraction, the narrator’s Jewish pariahs recede into textual indistinguishability while still differentiating themselves from others. Through this association, Stein sets the agenda for ethical authorship in the modern era.

The Short Story: A Very Short Introduction

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Kahn
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Popular Fiction ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Short Introduction ◽  
The Press ◽  
Character Study ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Plot Design

The Short Story: A Very Short Introduction charts the rise of the short story from its original appearance in magazines and newspapers. For much of the 19th century, tales were written for the press, and the form’s history is marked by engagement with popular fiction. The short story then earned a reputation for its skilful use of plot design and character study distinct from the novel. This VSI considers the continuity and variation in key structures and techniques such as the beginning, the creation of voice, the ironic turn or plot twist, and how writers manage endings. Throughout, it draws on examples from an international and flourishing corpus of work.

scholarly journals Images of Women and Politics of Domination in Helen Fields’ “Perfect Remains”

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sunmi Miyane
Keyword(s):  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Male Dominance ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Women And Politics ◽  
Women Studies ◽  
The Past ◽  
Gender Education ◽  
Modern Era ◽  
Images Of Women

As feminism evolved and reshaped ideas on womanhood and its politics over the past three centuries, postmodernist writers seem to continuously present discriminated images of women in novels, including spy fiction. Unless it is properly addressed, these misrepresented images of women underlying its gender politics brings about questions on the effectiveness of gender education and its equality. This study problematized images of women in Fields’ Perfect Remains in order to understand the politics of domination between genders that suggest a continuous display of power. The analysis of the novel through the use of Fairclough’s Three-Dimensional Framework, enabled the identifying images of women and ways in which dominance is exerted in the discourse. Analysis revealed that postmodern societies through the novelist’s lens continue to remain remote towards women. In a period, which celebrates women’s achievement and freedom of speech, where they are thought to be strong and independent, men continue to ironically exert different methods of power in the strive to maintain their status quo, which is revealed in this research. This study contributes to the existing body of literature in the field of women studies and literature where it identified the presence of male dominance even in this modern era. On another hand, it also explores aspects of domination which appear in the form of intellect as a new field of study.

scholarly journals Hook to the Chin

2009 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-78
Author(s):  
Lev Kreft
Keyword(s):  
Early Stage ◽  
Bertolt Brecht ◽  
Physical Culture ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
European Continent ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Weimar Germany ◽  
Philosophy Of Sport ◽  
Power And Energy

Hook to the ChinWithin historical avant-garde movements from the beginning of the 20th century, a curious taste and fascination for boxing burst out, and developed later into the claim that art must become more similar to boxing, or to sport in general. This fascination with pugilism in the early stage of its popularity on the continent included such charismatic figures of the Parisian avant-garde as Arthur Cravan, who was Oscar Wilde's nephew, a pretty good boxer and an unpredictable organizer of proto-dada outrages and scandals.After WWI, the zenith of artists' and intellectuals' love for boxing was reached in Weimar Germany. One of the well known examples connecting boxing with art was Bertolt Brecht with his statement that we need more good sport in theatre. His and other German avant-garde artists' admiration for boxing included the German boxing star May Schmeling, who was, at least until he lost his defending championship match against Joe Louis, an icon of the Nazis as well. Quite contrary to some later approaches in philosophy of sport, which compared sport with an elite art institution, Brecht's fascination with boxing took its anti-elitist and anti-institutional capacities as an example for art's renewal.To examine why and how Brecht included boxing in his theatre and his theory of theatre, we have to take into account two pairs of phenomena: sport vs. physical culture, and avant-garde theatre vs. bourgeois drama. At the same time, it is important to notice that sport, as something of Anglo-Saxon origin, and especially boxing, which became popular on the European continent in its American version, were admired by Brecht and by other avant-garde artists for their masculine power and energy. The energy in theatre, however, was needed to disrupt its cheap fictionality and introduce dialectical imagination of Verfremdungseffect (V-effect, or distancing effect). This was "a hook to the chin" of institutionalized art and of collective disciplinary morality of German tradition.

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.

scholarly journals The illustrative concept of the production of “City” by V.Pidmohylnuy

2018 ◽  
pp. 46-54
Author(s):  
N. Ivanova ◽  
А. Mykhailova
Keyword(s):  
Publishing House ◽  
Marketing Strategies ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Modern City ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
New Meanings ◽  
Publishing Policy ◽  
Visual Text ◽  
Publishing Strategy ◽  
The City

The research is devoted to the analysis of the editorial and publishing policy of “Solomiia Pavlychko’s Publishing House “Osnovy”. One of the important tools of “Osnovy” publishing strategy at the present stage is the modernization of its product, which consists of the original visualization of the artistic text. In accordance with the new publishing policy, “Osnovy” launches the “Alternative Series of Ukrainian Classics” with the illustrations of young Ukrainian artists.The scientific novelty of our research is the conceptual comprehension of the publishing project “Alternative Series of Ukrainian Classics”. The visual version of the novel “The City” by V. Pidmohylnyi is of special attention. In the study, we suggest that the name “Alternative Series ...” is a successful marketing technique, as for many readers, classics is related to the official ones, sometimes boring and formalized “school” ideas about literature. So, it was planned that the concept “alternative” would become a modern slogan for the project and expand the audience of potential readers. Thus, the works of Ukrainian classics received an entirely new illustration for a modern Ukrainian.The analysis of the illustrative presentation of novel “The City” by V. Pidmohylnyi, published in “Osnovy” in 2017, affords the ground for the suggestion that the work became a truly alternative in the sense of avant-garde design. The article emphasises the idea that “The City” (2017), which is being investigated by us, is especially distinguished among other reprints of classical Ukrainian literature by the collision and dialogue of the verbal urban text of V. Pidmohylnyi (1927) with the avant-garde, postmodern, comic visual text of modern city by M. Pavliuk (2017). New meanings of the verbal text are born on the collision of two urban discourses. Thus, through the illustrative material, the modern city, described in the novel by V. Pidmohylnyi 90 years ago, becomes relevant and modern for the citizens of 2017. So, we are dealing with the postmodern illustrative design of the classical edition, which through the latest forms of visualization, creates new visions and contexts.The offered study states that “Osnovy” is not only a publishing house, creating a quality publishing product concerning the latest news, but also uses modern marketing strategies to implement its products.

scholarly journals Interweaving Realities: Spoken Language and Moving Images in the Sonne halt!, Experimental Film by Ferry Radax

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luka Bešlagić
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Context ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Spoken Language ◽  
Experimental Film ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Moving Image ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Moving Images ◽  
Narrative Cinema ◽  
Movie Script

This paper analyses the experimental film Sonne halt! by Ferry Radax, an Austrian filmmaker renowned for his unconventional approach to cinematic practice. Filmed and edited between the end of the 1950s and early 1960s, the film at first may appear to be a belated homage to the previous European experiments in avant-garde cinema, already carried out a few decades earlier. However, since there have been no great ‘historical avant-garde’ movements in Vienna in the period between the two world wars – according to the novel argument made by Klaus Kastberger – it was already the middle of the 20th century when the ‘original’ avant-garde strategies were finally acknowledged in Austria, and simultaneously appropriated by the ‘neo-avant-garde’. In this peculiar historico-cultural context Sonne halt!, in its fragmentary non-narrative structure which resembles Dadaist or Surrealist playfulness and openness, innovatively and radically interweaved two disparate film registers: moving image and spoken language. Various sentences arbitrarily enounced throughout the film – which have their origin in Konrad Bayer’s unfinished experimental, pseudo-autobiographical, montage novel der sechste sinn – do not constitute dialogues or narration of a traditional movie script but rather a random collection of fictional and philosophical statements. At certain moments there is a lack of rapport between moving image and speech – an experimental attempt by Ferry Radax to challenge one of the most common principles of sound and narrative cinema. By deconstructing Sonne halt! to its linguistic and cinematic aspects, this article particularly focuses on the role of verbal commentaries within the film. Article received: December 28, 2017; Article accepted: January 10, 2018; Published online: April 15, 2018; Original scholarly paper How to cite this article: Bešlagić, Luka. "Interweaving Realities: Spoken Language and Moving Images in the Sonne halt!, Experimental Film by Ferry Radax." AM Journal of Art and Media Studies 15 (2018): . doi: 10.25038/am.v0i15.228

Are Puns Mere? Christine Brooke-Rose's Amalgamemnon

2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 529-545
Author(s):  
Julia Jordan
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Late Modernism ◽  
Distinctive Character ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Jacques Ranciere ◽  
Jacques Rancière ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Secret Knowledge ◽  
The Relationship

This article will explore the relationship between linguistic puns and knowledge, in particular puns in Christine Brooke-Rose's work, and what they tell us about knowledge: secret knowledge; encoded knowledge; latent knowledge that remains latent; and the refusal of knowledge. My title is an allusion to Frank Kermode's 1967 essay ‘Objects, Jokes, and Art’, where he puzzles away at his own difficulty with distinguishing avant garde writing and art, especially what he calls the ‘neo-avant garde’ of the 60s, from jokes. ‘I myself believe’, he writes anxiously, ‘that there is a difference between art and a joke’, admitting that ‘it has sometimes been difficult to tell.’ Brooke-Rose, whose work Kermode admired, is a perfect example of this. Her texts revolve around the pun, the surprise juxtaposition between semantic poles, the unexpected yoking together of disparate elements. Puns, for Brooke-Rose, sit at the juncture between the accidental and the overdetermined. So what is funny about the pun? Not much, I propose, or rather, it provokes a particular sort of ambivalent laughter which becomes folded into the distinctive character and affective potency of late modernism itself: its deadpan silliness; its proclivity to collision and violence; its excitability and its melancholy. Brooke-Rose's humour is thus of the difficult sort, that is, humour that reveals itself at the moment of its operation to be not all that funny. The unsettling laughter, I propose, that exposes literature's own incommensurability with itself. For Jacques Rancière, the novel must illuminate somehow the ‘punctuation of the encounter with the inconceivable’, in the face of which all is reduced to passivity. The pun, in particular, forces the readers’ passivity, and exposes us to limits of what can be known.

THE CONCEPT OF CHRONOTOPE IN THE NOVEL “MRS DALLOWAY” BY V. WOOLF

2020 ◽  
Vol XIII (XIII) ◽  
pp. 92-101
Author(s):  
E.Yu. Makarova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Social Classes ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Continuous Sampling ◽  
The World ◽  
Spatio Temporal ◽  
Modern Era

This article deals with the concept of chronotope in the text of the novel "Mrs. Dalloway” by Virginia Woolf. Certain characteristics of chronotope exemplifying these concepts were selected and analyzed, the former serving as an integral part of the analysis of works of the modern era. As a result of a continuous sampling and subsequent analysis of the text of the novel, we concluded that despite the contrast of the characters from different social classes, they are united by a single spatio-temporal continuum regulated by the chronotope. Virginia Woolf managed to accurately and truthfully convey the atmosphere of 1923, as she was a direct witness to the events taking place in the country and the world at that time.

The Arabic Novel: New Roots, New Routes

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Holt
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Nile Valley ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Arab Nationalism ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Islamic Empire ◽  
1001 Nights ◽  
The 19Th Century

In the mid-19th century, the Arabic novel emerged as a genre in Ottoman Syria and khedival Egypt. While this emergence has often been narrated as a story of the rise of nation-states and the diffusion of the European novel, the genre’s history and ongoing topography cannot be recovered without indexing the importance of Arabic storytelling and Islamic empire, ethics, and aesthetics to its roots. As the Arabic periodicals of Beirut and the Nile Valley, and soon Tunis and Baghdad, serialized and debated the rise of the novel form from the 19th century onward, historical, romantic, and translated novels found an avid readership throughout the Arab world and its diaspora. Metaphors of the garden confronted the maritime span of European empire in the 19th-century rise of the novel form in Arabic, and the novel’s path would continue to oscillate between the local and the global. British, French, Spanish, and Italian empire and direct colonial rule left a lasting imprint on the landscape of the region, and so too the investment of Cold War powers in its pipelines, oil wells, and cultural battlefields. Whether embracing socialist realism or avant-garde experimentation, the Arabic novel serves as an ongoing register of the stories that can be told in cities, villages, and nations throughout the region—from the committed novels interrogating the years of anticolonial national struggles and Arab nationalism in the 1950s and 1960s, through the ongoing history of war, surveillance, exile, occupation, and resource extraction that dictates the subsequent terrain of narration. The Arabic novel bears, too, an indelible mark left by translators of Arabic tales—from 1001 Nights to Girls of Riyadh—on the stories the region’s novelists tell.

Rushdie and the Art of Modernism

2018 ◽  
pp. 125-143
Author(s):  
Richard Begam
Keyword(s):  
James Joyce ◽  
Salman Rushdie ◽  
Accelerated Aging ◽  
Edward Said ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Aesthetic Autonomy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Political Commitments ◽  
Fredric Jameson

This chapter positions The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995)—the first full-fledged novel Salman Rushdie wrote following the 1989 fatwa—in relation to criticisms of modernism advanced not only by Ayatollah Khomeini but also by scholars such as Fredric Jameson and Edward Said. It is significant that the novel’s subject is modernism itself, represented by Aurora Zogoiby, whose work synthesizes virtually every avant-garde movement, from fauvism, surrealism, and Dadaism to cubism, expressionism, and abstractionism. In offering a history of twentieth-century art, Rushdie explores how modernism can retain its aesthetic autonomy while giving voice to its social and political commitments. The chapter concludes by examining two aspects of the novel that are usually considered postmodern: the figure of the palimpsest and Moraes’s accelerated aging. The former is associated with James Joyce and T. S. Eliot’s mythic method, while the latter—with its sense of accelerated temporality—functions as a metaphor for modernism itself.

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