George Bornstein – författare

From 1888 to 1892 W.B.Yeats contributed a series of essays on literature and Irish folklore to two American newspapers, the Boston Pilot and Providence Sunday Journal. These important but little-known pieces show his intense engagement with current books, plays, personalities and controversies. They also make major statements about the issues of cultural nationalism and theatrical reform that preoccupied the poet. Newly edited, annotated, and introduced by George Bornstein and Hugh Witemeyer, Letters to the New Island offers a fresh glimpse of Yeats as an active polemicist, critic and all-round man of letters.

Representing Modernist Texts seeks to expose, and then to bridge, the gap between contemporary textual scholarship and the critical and theoretical study of modernist texts. Modernist critics and scholars have for too long consigned textual problems to work from earlier periods and largely ignored them in creating successive waves of avantgarde critical theory designed first to champion, and more recently to challenge, modernist literature itself. And yet, as the controversy around Hans Walter Gabler’s edition of Ulysses has made clear, twentieth-century texts are deeply problematic at the physical as well as the interpretive level.In Representing Modernist Texts, thirteen internationally known scholars provide major explorations of the topic in the work of particular writers. The issues they raise include the construction of a writer’s canon and the effect of newly available “uncanonical” manuscript materials on existing works and orderings; the replacement of the older idea of a fixed, stable text by a more contemporary notion of the text as process; and the interrogation by advanced textual theory of many of the same notions of “author,” “intention,” and “stability of the text” questioned by advanced literary theory.

Over the past decade, Anglo-American notions of textual construction and editorial theory have begun major paradigm shifts. Many of the key emergent issues of Anglo-American debate -- such as theories of versions - -are already familiar in German theory. In other respects, including systematic reflection on the design and function of editorial apparatus, the German debate has already produced paradigms and procedures as yet unformulated in English. Contemporary German Editorial Theory makes available for the first time in English ten major essays by seven German theorists, together with an original introductory meditation by Hans Walter Gabler, editor of the celebrated edition of James Joyce's Ulysses. The volume thus participates in the paradigm shift in editorial theory that has led both to theoretical reconception of the field and to groundbreaking practical results. Topics discussed include the distinction between historical record and editor's interpretation, the display of multiple versions, concepts of authorization and intention, and the relations of textual theory to approaches like deconstruction and semiotics. The book also includes suggestions for further reading in both languages and a glossary of technical terms. Bringing together the heretofore separate Anglo-American and German approaches will strengthen each separately and prepare the way for a new hybrid combining the advantages of both orientations. Contributors are Hans Zeller, Miroslav Červenka, Elisabeth Höpker-Herberg, Gunter Martens, Henning Boetius, Siegfried Scheibe, and Gerhard Seidel.

Material Modernism draws on editorial theory, cultural studies and the history of the book to argue for a freshly historicized reading of modernism. Instead of taking texts as consisting of disembodied words, Bornstein considers their physical bodies as themselves semantically important. He argues that current constructions of literary modernism - like those that regard its achievements and attitudes as favoring the anti-historical over the historical, or product over process - are derived from the fixed, current, material forms of its texts. By studying modernism in its original sites of production and in the continually shifting physicality of its transmissions, an alternative construction emerges that emphasizes historical contingency, multiple versions, and the material features of the text itself. Bornstein recontextualizes works by a range of British, Irish, and American authors, including W. B. Yeats, Emma Lazarus, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, James Joyce, and writers of the Harlem Renaissance, among others.

A major reevaluation of relationships among Blacks, Jews, and Irish in the years between the Irish Famine and the end of World War II, The Colors of Zion argues that the cooperative efforts and sympathies among these three groups, each persecuted and subjugated in its own way, was much greater than often acknowledged today. For the Black, Jewish, and Irish writers, poets, musicians, and politicians at the center of this transatlantic study, a sense of shared wrongs inspired repeated outpourings of sympathy. If what they have to say now surprises us, it is because our current constructions of interracial and ethnic relations have overemphasized conflict and division. As George Bornstein says in his Introduction, he chooses “to let the principals speak for themselves.”While acknowledging past conflicts and tensions, Bornstein insists on recovering the “lost connections” through which these groups frequently defined their plights as well as their aspirations. In doing so, he examines a wide range of materials, including immigration laws, lynching, hostile race theorists, Nazis and Klansmen, discriminatory university practices, and Jewish publishing houses alongside popular plays like The Melting Pot and Abie’s Irish Rose, canonical novels like Ulysses and Daniel Deronda, music from slave spirituals to jazz, poetry, and early films such as The Jazz Singer. The models of brotherhood that extended beyond ethnocentrism a century ago, the author argues, might do so once again today, if only we bear them in mind. He also urges us to move beyond arbitrary and invidious categories of race and ethnicity.