Introduction

The Introduction situates David Jones’s work as a poet–artist within the broader currents of high and late modernism, particularly within the context of a tradition of medievalism in twentieth-century poetry. It draws on Alexander Nagel’s conception of the medieval modern to show how Jones approaches the culture and history of the early Middle Ages as a form of live material open to play and adaptation. The Introduction also reframes our understanding of David Jones’s perception of himself as Anglo-Welsh in relation to changing attitudes to early medieval Welsh (Celtic) and English (Anglo-Saxon/Teutonic) history over the course of his lifetime. This discussion introduces the monograph’s central argument: as a poet of the medieval modern, Jones plays with and reworks early medieval English histories, narratives, and artefacts in order to challenge the singularity and exceptionalism of an ‘Anglo-Saxon’ canon.

Are Puns Mere? Christine Brooke-Rose's Amalgamemnon

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.

A Qualitative Analysis of Unethical Behaviors in Projects: Insight From Moral Psychology

Ethical aspects of stakeholder behavior can have a wide range of implications for other areas of project management. This research critically reviewed project ethics under the philosophical paradigm change from modernism to late modernism, which led to a flexible and realizable ethical framework based on Levinasian and Nietzschean moral psychologies. A qualitative approach was adopted through a multiple-case study to confront the theoretical framework with the empirical world, evaluate its authenticity, and obtain a better understanding of its challenges. Research results showed that stakeholders’ unconscious desire for existential meaning can provide considerable potential for dealing with ethical challenges.

Fame at Last!

Book review: Jordan, Julia. Late Modernism and the Avant-Garde British Novel: Oblique Strategies. Oxford UP, 2020. 256 pages. ISBN 9780198857280. Hb. $80.00.

Lampedusa: Migrant Tragedy

Tragedies about the suffering of migrants are not a new phenomenon. So this article quickly turns to texts from classical antiquity by Aeschylus and Euripides. It focuses, however, on poetry written over the last decade. Following the routes taken by asylum seekers from Africa and Asia through such transit points as Lampedusa and across Europe to Calais, it looks at depictions of the suffering associated with travel, disaster, and problematic arrival, and at the interaction in tragic writing between old motifs and conventions (tragedy as understood by Aristotle or Hegel) and current issues and resources. Fresh insights are offered into the work of poets from migrant backgrounds (Warsan Shire, Ribkha Sibhatu) and into a range of modes from lyric (James Byrne) through experiments with translation and performance (Caroline Bergvall) into the late modernism of Geraldine Monk, J. H. Prynne, and Jeff Hilson.

Poetry, Publishing, and Visual Culture from Late Modernism to the Twenty-first Century

This book examines why it is important to appreciate cultural artefacts such as poems, sculptures, and buildings not as static, perfected objects, but as meshworks of entangled, mutable, and trans-personal forces. Offering six such case studies across the long twentieth century, the book focuses on how poetic works activate closer appreciation of literature’s hybridity. The book analyses how such texts are collaborative, emergent, and between-categories, and shows why this matters. It focuses, first, on how printed poetry is often produced collaboratively, in dialogue with the visual and plastic arts; and second, how it comes about through entangled and emergent agencies. Both have been overlooked in contemporary scholarship. Although this proposal makes some trouble for established disciplinary modes of reception and literary classification, for this reason, it also paves the way for new critical responses. Chiefly, Fugitive Pieces encourages the development of modes of literary critical engagement which acknowledge their uncertainty, vulnerability, and provisionality. Such reading involves encountering poems as co-constituted through materials that have frequently been treated as extra-literary, and in some cases extra-human. Focusing on works by Djuna Barnes, David Jones, F.T. Prince, Ted Hughes, Denise Riley, and Paul Muldoon, Fugitive Pieces fosters closer attention to how literary works operate beyond the boundaries of artistic categorization and agency. It examines the politics of disciplinary criticism, and the tensions between anthropocentric understandings of value and intra-agential collaborative practices. Its purpose is to stimulate much-needed analysis of printed works as combinatorial and hybrid, passing between published versions and artforms, persons and practices.

Realism, Truth, and Error in the Writing of B. S. Johnson

Over the last decade or so in particular, B. S. Johnson has come to represent an exemplar of the 1960s and early 1970s experimental tendency for readers and scholars alike. His complex relation to realism is here examined, and the chapter shows the connections between this and his writing’s tonal and affective cast, proposing the centrality of anxiety, and preoccupation with the body. This recurs throughout his work as a corporeal proximity that scrambles the distance between subject and object. The errancy identified as so key to the experimental novel of the period is central: Johnson’s texts worry at themselves, both in what they depict and in their ability to depict it at all. This chapter shows how his novels register an emerging aesthetic of failure, whereby the productive potential of error allows the experimental novel to negotiate and to expand the contested categories of realism and late modernism.

Accident as Event

Dealing with a broad sweep of experimental novels of the period that make accident a central concern, this chapter examines writing by Samuel Beckett, Brigid Brophy, Eva Figes, Gabriel Josipovici, Nicholas Mosley, Muriel Spark, and Stefan Themerson. In these the accident emerges as a thematic motif or philosophical principle: as chronological paralysis, traumatic violence, revelatory or epiphanic understanding, or eroticized encounter with technology. In late modernism, the uneasy mingling of the precariousness induced by an awareness of life as threatened by the atomic as well as constituted by it seems contradictory to an understanding of the accident as inevitable. This is prevalent in Beckett’s invocation of the void as much as in the frantic figurations of a writer like Brophy. The accident then emerges as what reveals the late modernist disposition to passivity, non-mastery, dissolution, and silence, pushing at the limits of what can and cannot be known.