Clemson University Press: Seminal Modernisms – serie

Ebook available to libraries exclusively as part of the JSTOR Path to Open intiative.This volume brings together scholars of English-speaking literary modernism, around the notion of wandering, both as a spatial concept and as a broader notion involving the loss of identity and social, political as well as philosophical questions. It addresses the crucial importance of wandering after the First World War, at a time of acceleration in transports and communication, coupled with a sense of fragmentation and loss, which are posited as a crucial set of experiences for modernist artists. The collected articles encompass the material aspects of wandering lifestyles, the social and cultural institutions of modern travels, from tourism to exile, as well as the politics of localization and displacement in a world dominated by imperialism and caught in nationalist and ideological struggles. They explore the interconnections between these forces, on different scales, and the personal and artistic trajectories of canonical modernist figures likes James Joyce, Virginia Woolf or William Carlos Williams, and others who have received more recent recognition like Jean Rhys or Katherine Mansfield, as well as lesser-known movements like the American “Hobohemia.” The range of concepts and critical perspectives they invoke, and the way in which these theoretical concepts intersect and connect in fruitful exchanges, provides readers with a vast and fascinating insight into the diversity of modernist scholarship and the new trajectories which it is following, especially in the crucible of French academia.

This collection of essays explores Reznikoff’s verse and its contemporary poetic and critical legacy in five movements. The first looks at how history and politics are woven into Reznikoff’s work, namely Reznikoff’s complex relationship with Jewish American identity in the 20th century. The second section turns to documentary poetics and to Reznikoff’s practice of composing from historical as well as legal documents, in the context of modernist concerns over realism as well as contemporary ones over memory and appropriation. The third section delves into the concept of verse—Reznikoff’s word for the lyric—showing how Reznikoff’s rhythms compose an abstract yet accurate vernacular portrait of America. It places Reznikoff among his fellow poets, known as the Objectivists, and in relation to larger issues pertaining to the rhythmic fabric of free verse and the aesthetic vocabularies of the spare and the ordinary. The fourth opens onto issues of translation, and Reznikoff’s work’s journey through Mexican, Polish and French contexts, illustrating Reznikoff’s ongoing transnational relevance. The volume concludes with a foray into some of Reznikoff’s afterlives, in the work of Paul Auster—an early champion of Reznikoff’s method—and through the history of Reznikoff’s complex engagement with the African American experience, the representation of injustice and testimony as a dialogical means of witnessing intended to foster a sense of community.

Ebook available to libraries exclusively as part of the JSTOR Path to Open intiative.This volume brings together scholars of English-speaking literary modernism, around the notion of wandering, both as a spatial concept and as a broader notion involving the loss of identity and social, political as well as philosophical questions. It addresses the crucial importance of wandering after the First World War, at a time of acceleration in transports and communication, coupled with a sense of fragmentation and loss, which are posited as a crucial set of experiences for modernist artists. The collected articles encompass the material aspects of wandering lifestyles, the social and cultural institutions of modern travels, from tourism to exile, as well as the politics of localization and displacement in a world dominated by imperialism and caught in nationalist and ideological struggles. They explore the interconnections between these forces, on different scales, and the personal and artistic trajectories of canonical modernist figures likes James Joyce, Virginia Woolf or William Carlos Williams, and others who have received more recent recognition like Jean Rhys or Katherine Mansfield, as well as lesser-known movements like the American “Hobohemia.” The range of concepts and critical perspectives they invoke, and the way in which these theoretical concepts intersect and connect in fruitful exchanges, provides readers with a vast and fascinating insight into the diversity of modernist scholarship and the new trajectories which it is following, especially in the crucible of French academia.

Modernist Objects: Literature, Art, Culture is a unique mix of cultural studies, literature, and visual arts applied to the discrete materiality of modernist objects. The simultaneously physical and ideological nature of objects has made them remarkably transparent to critical inquiries into their aesthetic, political, social, historical or philosophical uses and meanings. This book identifies three processes at work in the apprehension of objects in poetry, prose, visual arts, culture and crafts. If the first instinct of the modernist novelists and playwrights was to object to the realist tradition of objects as more or less stable inherited signifiers, they felt themselves equally free, we find, to take up humanity as their object. The human body, emotions and mind were endowed with newfound plasticity, and it was now the artist’s and the writer’s task to fashion them after their own image, mobilizing and expanding them through objects seen as relational and connective catalysts for the modernist subject. Finally, the futile and decorative object is explored. From Baroness Elsa performing the commodity fetish to Jean Rhys performing the dissolution of the self in a frenzy of sartorial ornament, the agency of surface detail (misplaced, proliferating, or repurposed) is made manifest and given free play.