Modernist Objects

Noëlle Cuny teaches translation and Anglo-American literature and culture, currently supervising student research on Woolf, Joyce, and on objects in modernism. After extensive work on the body in the novels D. H. Lawrence and on disciplinary hybridity in modernist writing, she became interested in the material conditions of the literary canonization process, namely, the magazines—first Lawrence’s own (very) little magazine, then the later and more ambitious J.M. Murry ventures: the Athenaeum 1919-1921 and the early years of The Adelphi. Xavier Kalck teaches American literature and translation at Sorbonne University in Paris. He specializes in twentieth-century poetry and modernism’s unacknowledged trajectories – second-generation modernists and the post-WWII efforts to revive and rewrite the modernist tradition. His current research projects revolve around the experience of reading as an all-inclusive material practice.

'The coalescent structure that comes out of Cuny and Kalck’s co-editorship maintains busy traffic across the porous disciplinary boundaries of modernist and object studies which fulfils the requisite for the integration of a conceptual compound. [...] The widening scope of objecthood that Douglas Mao [in his chapter on ‘objectionable objects’] continues to define is more than a reiteration of the modernist agenda of destabilising the given sense of the real. It is the explicit, and needed, statement of a distinct trend in the scholarship: the loosening of the human subject from its subjectivity.' Dazheng Gao, The Modernist Review

• Part OneObjecting to Realism 1) Douglas Mao, Objectionable Objects. 2) Martin Schauss, “Such density of furniture defeats imagination”: Beckett’s Post-War Room and the Inheritance of Things3) Pavlina Radia, From Eggbeaters and Alcohol to Gryphons, Dolls, and Puppets: The Affective Mobilities of Djuna Barnes’s Objects4) Rachel Bowlby, Tradition and the Test-Tube BabyPart TwoFashioning the Human5) Sanja Bahun, The Fabric of Home: Cotton Cloth between Ontology and Use-Value in Paul Klee’s, Varvara Stepanova’s and Lyubov Popova’s Artwork6) Louise Kane, Computer Science for (Live) Modernism(s): Magazines as Metaobjects7) Jennifer Kilgore-Caradec, “Twang the lyre and rattle the lexicon”: Harps and Lyres in Modernist Poetry8) Lynn M. Somers, Louise Bourgeois’s Melancholy Objects to be Used.Part ThreePerforming the Ornamental9) Yasna Bozhkova, Limbswish: Baroness Elsa’s “Ready-to-Wear” Poem-Objects10) Maurizia Boscagli, The Furniture of Alter-Modernism: Eileen Gray’s and Le Corbusier’s Two Orientalisms11) Nonia Williams, “LOST! HANSOME GOLE BROOCH.” Broken, Lost and Forgotten Objects in Woolf, Mansfield and Stein12) Justine Baillie, Diasporic Modernism: Memory, the Object and Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight (1939)