Modern Canon Research Articles

A Counterfactual Canon

The article analyzes the relationship between gender and taste at Shakespeare and Company. Using the Shakespeare and Company Project datasets, we discover that the majority of the books in the lending library were by men, and that women were almost twice as likely as men to borrow books by women. We also discover that the female authors with a high ratio of male to female readers are now canonical: Agatha Christie, Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore. In contrast, the female authors with the highest ratio of female to male readers are less well-known: Margaret Kennedy, E. M. Delafield, Rebecca West, Elizabeth von Arnim. These final two discoveries are surprising: they suggest that the reading practices of men determined the canon of female authors, and that the reading practices of women might reveal a counterfactual canon of modernism. We consider how this counterfactual canon of female authors might influence future work in literary history.

A call for open science in forensics

The modern canon of open science consists of five “schools of thought” that justify unfettered access to the fruits of scientific research: i) public engagement, ii) democratic right of access, iii) efficiency of knowledge gain, iv) shared technology, and v) better assessment of impact. Here, we introduce a sixth school: due process. Due process under the law includes a right to “discovery” by a defendant of potentially exculpatory evidence held by the prosecution. When such evidence is scientific, due process becomes a Constitutional mandate for open science. To illustrate the significance of this new school, we present a case study from forensics, which centers on a federally funded investigation that reports summary statistics indicating that identification decisions made by forensic firearms examiners are highly accurate. Because of growing concern about validity of forensic methods, the larger scientific community called for public release of the complete analyzable dataset for independent audit and verification. Those in possession of the data opposed release for three years while summary statistics were used by prosecutors to gain admissibility of evidence in criminal trials. Those statistics paint an incomplete picture and hint at flaws in experimental design and analysis. Under the circumstances, withholding the underlying data in a criminal proceeding violates due process. Following the successful open-science model of drug validity testing through “clinical trials,” which place strict requirements on experimental design and timing of data release, we argue for registered and open “forensic trials” to ensure transparency and accountability.

Perplexity Games: Maoism vs. Literature through the Lens of Cognitive Stylometry

The arrival of large language models (LLMs) has provoked an urgent search for stylistic markers that could differentiate machine text from human text, but while the human-like appearance of machine text has captivated public attention, the reverse phenomenon—human text becoming machine-like—has raised much less concern. This conceptual lag is surprising given the ample historical evidence of state-backed attempts to regulate human thought. The present article proposes a new comparative framework, Perplexity Games, to leverage the predictive power of LLMs and compare the statistical properties of Maospeak, a language style that emerged during the Mao Zedong’s era in China (1949-1976), with the style of canonical modern Chinese writers, such as Eileen Chang (1920-1995) and Mo Yan (1955-). The low perplexity of Maospeak, as computed across different GPT models, suggests that the impact of ideologies on language can be compared to likelihood-maximization text-generation techniques which reduce the scope of valid sequence continuations. These findings have cognitive implications: whereas engineered languages such as Maospeak hijack the predictive mechanisms of human cognition by narrowing the space of linguistic possibilities, literature resists such cognitive constraints by dispersing the probability mass over multiple, equally valid paths. Exposure to diverse language data counters the influences of ideologies on our linguistically mediated perceptions of the world and increases the perplexity of our imaginations.

Voyeurism, Desire, and Narrative Subversion in Colette’s Claudine Novels

ABSTRACT This essay positions the French author Colette’s earliest works, the Claudine novels, at an inflection point in queer feminist discourses of the early 1900s. Combining recent critical explorations of the sexological and literary roots of the lesbian figure at the fin de siècle, queer theories addressing the power and limits of the heteronormative gaze, and an examination of Colette’s development of a queered authorial persona in the course of her career, I argue that the “fluffy”, “commercialized” Claudine novels in fact make use of stylistic innovation in order to subvert contemporary expectations of the lesbian narrative. Colette’s generative denial of the male gaze in her depiction of Claudine’s affair with her woman friend, Rézi, results in the adoption of a deliberately evasive, self-obliterating narrative perspective. In this, Colette anticipates later explorations of subjective desire and authorial persona in the canonically modernist works of Virginia Woolf, Radclyffe Hall, and Natalie Barney. In their exploration of the alternative modes through which an authentic desire experienced between two women might be narrativized in the twentieth century, the Claudine novels’ use of generic subversion, shifting narrative personae, and strategically fragmented prose mark them as key works in a developing sapphic modernist canon.

Beatrix Potter in Cumbria: Pastoral Pleasures, Classic Commodities, Rural Modernity

ABSTRACT This article claims Beatrix Potter, author of the children’s classic The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902), is a woman writer of and for rural modernity whose complex relations to rural and urban places, national and regional identities, fine and commercial arts, raise important questions about the gendering of green places, landscapes, and geographies in constructions of canonical modernism and children’s literature. Analysing research by biographers, rural historians, geographers, art historians, and critics of modernist and children’s literature, it argues that Potter’s acute measurement of the commercial possibilities that lay in the divide between rural real and rural ideal made her one of the most successful women writers of her generation and contributed to the early achievement of classic status of her twenty-three animal Tales (1902–1918). Enlisting close readings of Potter’s words and images in her Tales for an interdisciplinary feminist literary-geographical project, the article situates Beatrix Potter at the centre of studies of rural modernity and rural modernity at the centre of early twentieth-century women’s writing.

Introduction: confronting medieval and early modern canons

ABSTRACT In this introduction, the editors lay out the rationale behind this special issue. The goal of this issue is to identify and disrupt the complacency surrounding the medieval and early modern canon with a view to achieving two things. Firstly, we hope to uncover new approaches to the study of premodern literature that might result in a more accurate and inclusive account of what texts were of greatest significance to readers and writers in medieval and early modern England, even if those texts have typically been excluded from discussions of the medieval and early modern literary canons over the past three centuries. Secondly, we hope to draw attention to some of the problematic roles that medieval and early modern English texts have played as foundation stones of the English literary canon, and how they might equally serve to disrupt some of the assumptions on which that canon has traditionally been founded.

The early modern canon and the construction of women’s writing

ABSTRACT In this essay, I aim to provide an overview of the relationship between women’s writing and the ‘canon’, to suggest some reasons for its continuing marginality to that canon, and to outline briefly the ways in which the particular character and qualities of early modern women’s writing require a rethinking of many of our dominant narratives about the literary history of the period. In this I draw upon the work of many critics whose work has shaped my thinking, and who are mapping out exciting new trajectories for the future direction of this field. The second part of the article focuses on setting out some ways in which early modern women’s writing might provide productive challenges to current orthodoxies about the canon of Renaissance Literature. Finally, I turn to the future, and some ideas about how the category of ‘women’s writing’ itself needs to be repositioned and reconceived.

Abstract States: Modernism in Lebanon, Syria, and Turkey

Abstract A decade after modernist art history's tentative embrace of postcolonial modernisms, a new crop of books are leveraging this disciplinary acceptance to examine hitherto shrouded aspects of the field. Anneka Lenssen's, Beautiful Agitation: Modern Painting and Politics in Syria (2020), Zeina Maasri's, Cosmopolitan Radicalism: The Visual Politics of Beirut's Global Sixties (2020) and Sarah-Neel Smith's, Metrics of Modernity: Art and Development in Postwar Turkey, (2022) offer candid appraisals of postcolonial modernism's exposure to colonial and nationalist institutions, Cold War cultural networks, and the hierarchical effects of canonical modernism. Reviewed together in this article, these books reveal the distinctive orientations of modernism in contiguous Syria, Lebanon and Turkey along with the methodological value of formalist methods to assert artistic agency. Through refractive readings of artworks and other materials, Lenssen, Maasri and Smith invert disciplinary anxieties about postcolonial art's political subjection, making a case for postcolonial art's perceptiveness to the instability and abstraction of the institutional forces to which they are subject.

To Touch Time: U.S. Black Feminist Modernist Sculpture in the 1970s and 1980s

Modernist propositions long have been understood as atemporal—somehow outside of time—or insistently hailing the future. This temporal framework suppresses the contributions of those excluded from modernist canons, particularly Black women. In this article, visual and material analysis of sculptural works produced in the 1970s and 1980s by U.S. Black women artists Beverly Buchanan, Senga Nengudi, and Betye Saar reveal how Black feminists have engaged with modernist protocols in order to redress cultural erasures of Black women. These practices exemplify Black feminist modernisms, or creative practices that unsettle the racist and sexist logics of dominant cultural institutions. Each of these artists utilizes haptic surfaces as a method for defying institutional modernism’s obfuscation of the past. The analysis focuses on Buchanan’s defiance of memorial erasures, Nengudi’s reenactment of labor, including in its historical forms, and Saar’s adaptation of generational memory-making processes. Ultimately, these artists’ rejection of a “timeless” modernism demands that viewers understand the present moment in relationship to a still-evolving past. In this way, Buchanan, Nengudi, and Saar position the present as an accumulation, rather than transcendence, of historical occurrences.

A Minor Subject: Habit and Subjectivity in Modernist Literature and Philosophy


 
 
 In this essay, I intend to investigate some of the aspects of the resurgence of habit at the dawn of the twentieth century by touching upon a series of paradigmatic texts of the modernist canon and by investigating their debts to and consonances with the contemporary philosophies of habit. My thesis is that during those decades – seen as a mere chapter in the longer history of modernity – the philosophical and literary theme of habit served not only as a way to understand and represent the ordinary dimension of life, but also as a means to develop an idea of human subjectivity that could mediate between the centrifugal and the centripetal tendencies that permeated the competing ideologies of the time. The crisis of subjectivity that characterized modernism and which has often been simplistically represented as a disintegration of the subject into irredeemably broken fragments, should rather be seen as the development of a dialectical idea of a “minor subject”, that is, an open, dynamic, multilayered subjectivity still endowed by a certain malleable consistency. Both modernist literature and its philosophical counterparts found in the “minor subject” (here in the sense of “subject matter”) of habit, the opportunity to investigate and represent the porosity between activity and passivity, volition and determinism, individual identity and social structures, that characterize this idea of subjectivity.
 I focus on three different representative – though not exhaustive – facets of the issue. In the first section, relying on Virginia Woolf's work, I highlight how some of the narrative techniques developed by Modernist writers can be seen as an attempt to give a plastic representation to the blurred boundaries of subjectivity as captured in the everyday existence of their characters. I then connect these innovations to the theory of habit of Samuel Butler, whom Woolf identified as one of the harbingers of modernity. In the second section I focus on Marcel Proust to discuss how modernist writers proved to be able to combine two opposed views of habit: on the one hand, the view of habit as purely mechanical and leading to inauthentic life; on the other, the idea of habit as essential to the human being's potential for self-perfecting and creativity. The third section is dedicated to addiction, seen as a form of habit in which the subject is radically torn between opposite forces. Following insights from Sigmund Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle, I interpret Italo Svevo's Zeno's Conscience as a meditation on how such a torn subjectivity manifests the essential incompleteness of the human subject and life's insuppressible nostalgia for the inorganic.
 Virginia Woolf’s blurred boundaries, Marcel Proust’s ambiguous authenticity, and Italo Svevo’s split selfhood are three interconnected facets of the modernists’ interest in the “minor subject” of habit. Investigating the interaction between the philosophical and the literary discourses on habit at the dawn of the twentieth century can contribute to a more nuanced reconstruction of a pivotal moment in the history of thought but also to the contemporary philosophical debate. Almost exactly one century later, the renewed interest in the theme of habit mirrors a situation in part similar to what characterized the ideological landscape of the time, as now too it is concerned with the attempt to reimagine a “minor subject” that mediates between the postmodern pulverization of identity and the temptation of reaffirming anachronistic forms of strong subjectivities.
 
 

Introduction: MoHoA guest editorial

AbstractThis special edition of Curator on Modern Heritage in the Anthropocene draws on the 2nd International MoHoA conference of the same title held from October 26 to 28, 2022, at The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London (UK), in partnership with the University of Liverpool's School of Architecture. As a global collaborative established in 2020, MoHoA is concerned with decentring the theory and practice of modern heritage and joins the wider global effort to decolonize institutional practices that engage with the research, collection, valorization, or transformation of material culture associated with our collective recent past—from museum curators and creative practitioners to academics, and the built environment professions. Founded on the fact that our precarious present reflects an inequitable past and a perilous future, MoHoA asserts that modern heritage—inextricably bound as it is to Western notions of progress, modernization, and modernity—conceptually, practically, and as artifact, uniquely and disproportionately privileges western, invariably white, experiences and values. Unlike other kinds or classifications of heritage, modern heritage also reflects the existential paradox central to MoHoA whereby the cultural legacies of our recent past are simultaneously of modernity and yet threatened by its consequences. Through its workshops, conferences, publications, and website, MoHoA provides a platform for sharing knowledge, methods, and approaches that challenge the modernist canon and support the construction of new epistemologies centered not on race, color, or ethnicity but on humankind and our self‐inflicted precarious position on this planet. This epistemic and canonical reconfiguration has important implications for museums and heritage practice globally as the reconstitution of modern heritage and its associated modes of knowledge production and registers will direct the composition of collections, lists, and archives away from mythologizing hegemonic Western epistemic traditions, to reflect instead decentred planetary experiences, whether human or non‐human. An important outcome of this collective and restitutive endeavor is the publication of The Cape Town Document on Modern Heritage, an equitable and decentering policy proposal presented to UNESCO and its advisory bodies in 2023.

Dispatches from the home front: Violet Hunt as war writer and reluctant modernist

ABSTRACT The life and work of Violet Hunt showcases the tension between modernism's challenges to Victorian and Edwardian literary and social traditions, and the conservatism, particularly with regard to gender norms, of many of the modernist canon's key figures: institutions, writers and critics alike. Although her work was well-regarded during her lifetime, and she was a central figure in London's literary scene in the early-twentieth century, Hunt is now best known for her long, and ultimately disastrous, relationship with Ford Madox Ford. Her copious literary oeuvre, comprising seventeen novels, three collections of short stories, and several works of biography, translation and criticism, is now largely neglected. Hunt's exclusion from the modernist canon mirrors that of many other women writers of the period; however, Hunt's “recovery” remains a difficult case. Her numerous affairs, suffragettism, blending of Victorian, Edwardian and modernist styles, and authorial focus on the lives of women, all challenge conventional cultural and literary categories. Yet Hunt's work, especially during and after World War I, is important, as it offers an alternative not only to the male-centric war canon, but also to more traditional understandings of modernism, which is often presented as a break from the past.

Prefaces to canon law books in Latin Christianity. Selected translations, 500–1317. Second edition. Edited by Robert Somerville and Bruce C. Brasington. (Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Canon Law, 18.) Pp. xvi + 227. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2020 (first publ. 1998). $39.95 (paper). 978 0 8132 3341 3

Prefaces to canon law books in Latin Christianity. Selected translations, 500–1317. Second edition. Edited by Robert Somerville and Bruce C. Brasington. (Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Canon Law, 18.) Pp. xvi + 227. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2020 (first publ. 1998). $39.95 (paper). 978 0 8132 3341 3 - Volume 74 Issue 2

Close, but No Cigar

Close, but No Cigar

Caws, Mary Ann. Mina Loy: Apology of Genius

On reading Loy’s fragmentary poetry, her status as a modernist poet might seem obvious. In Mina Loy: Apology of Genius, Mary Ann Caws argues that the poet was ‘desperately, irretrievably and movingly modern’, a ‘modernist being’ (pp. 1, 166). Yet, as Caws shows, Loy’s position in the modernist canon is still not affirmed. Indeed, Loy’s work only began to gain sustained critical attention in 1982 with the publication of her collected poems, The Last Lunar Baedeker, edited by Roger Conover. More recent critical studies by Carolyn Burke and Tara Prescott, for instance, have gone some way to rectifying this, as Caws highlights, yet Loy has remained a name little known outside of academic circles. In this book, however, Caws succeeds in blending biography, literary and art criticism and even personal reflection to offer an accessible and engaging introduction to Loy’s life and work and, moreover, to celebrate the protean and shifting artistic and literary identities that Loy adopted. Caws intersperses her text with what she terms ‘intervals’, chapters in which she introduces figures who greatly influenced Loy, such as her second husband, Arthur Cravan, who disappeared under mysterious circumstances, or the Futurist poet and theorist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. One of Caws’s main arguments is that Loy’s ‘Futurist past’ not only ‘left its traces everywhere, or almost [everywhere]’ in her work (p. 145), but evolved as a practice distinct from its founders: Loy ‘appropriate[d] Futurist vocabulary to mock Futurism’s […] chief ideologue’, Marinetti, employing satire to address themes such as ‘male posturing, female dependency, marital appearance, sexual repression, romantic love’ (p. 49). Although Caws highlights Loy’s feminism, she does not engage with the more problematic elements of her Futurism, such as her endorsement of eugenics.

Beyond taxonomies: Vagrantly “inhabiting” the modernist classroom

AbstractThis article takes the current transnational turn in modernist studies as entry point to probe how that plays out in the classroom in non‐Western locations that are often also the “locales” of that disciplinary shift. I propose a waylaying of the energies of dispersion and diffusion that currently animate the modernist field to decolonize the modernist classroom through a parallel vagrancy, but one focused on recovering the local from these compelling taxonomic shifts. It is quite easy to be sucked under by the adrenaline rush of these expansions of new modernist studies that mirror modernism's own self–mythologies. To resist that, we need to be vagrants inside the classroom, to bring into it the choice pickings from our wider reading and research. Our fealty to the modernist archive and the professional competence incumbent on us notwithstanding, our ability to bring tentative new findings from our own research and readings, can potentially dynamize our teaching spaces, as also our commitment to a more decenterd approach. Ready embraces of belatedly discovered writers into the modernist corpus might make our taxonomies look suitably plural and fashionable but subsume the writers' own demonstrated recalcitrance to those taxonomies. Teaching modernism as a core course with a fixed, prescribed, syllabi comprising largely of the Anglo‐American presences such as Virginia Woolf and Joseph Conrad has in some ways released the itinerant in me. Through carefully culled examples from my own teaching of the modernist canon, I argue that a genuine opening of modernist studies within the classroom can come from a tempering of the ‘professional’ by itinerant interludes.

Constructing a Modern Canon for The Federalist

Constructing a Modern Canon for The Federalist

New Books across the Disciplines

New Books across the Disciplines

ΒΙΚΤΩΡΙΑ ΦΕΡΕΝΤΙΝΟΥ, Τα συγκοινωνούντα δοχεία μιας υβριδικής ποιητικής: Ο μύθος ως διακαλλιτεχνική και διαπολιτισμική ώσμωση στο έργο του Νίκου Εγγονόπουλου

The Communicating Vessels of a Hybrid Poetics: Myth as Intermedial and Intercultural Osmosis in the Oeuvre of Nikos Engonopoulos In 1938, the year of the International Exhibition of Surrealism at the Gallery Beaux-Arts in Paris, the poet and painter Nikos Engonopoulos created Birth of Orpheus and Genesis of Myth. The depiction of the birth of young Orpheus as emblematic of the construction of myth recalls the mythopoetic process as articulated in the anthology of the poet, psychoanalyst and photographer Andreas Embeirikos, Writings or Personal Mythology (1936-1946): “Each myth’s becoming is a child who grows up.” This reception of myth should be situated in the context of the French surrealists’ endeavour to formulate a new collective mythology that would respond to the political and social environment of the interwar years. This collective mythology resorted to cultural topoi that were deemed countercultural, marginalised or anti-Enlightenment, ranging from primitive, prehistoric and Gothic art to magic, alchemy and mythological traditions of archaic or non-European cultures. In this framework, surrealist myth was reconfigured as a new poetic language in constant metamorphosis that could articulate through diverse media and cultural traditions the surrealist vision for the radical transformation of the world. In Greece the appropriations of classical myth were central to the modernist canon. However, the Greek surrealists transformed myth in subversive ways initiating a dialogue with the present in the light of anthropology, ethnography, history of religions and psychoanalysis. Recent research has shown that Embeirikos and Engonopoulos conversed with French Surrealism and their colleagues’ engagement with alternative epistemologies and comparative religion and mythology, participating to a fecund renegotiation of the past. This paper aims at contributing to the revision of the history of Surrealism in Greece by exploring the function of myth, both as intermedial language and discursive practice, in Engonopoulos’s work. Most specifically, it purports to investigate the poetic anthologies Do not Speak to the Driver (1938) and The Clavichords of Silence (1939) alongside visual works he created at the end of the 1930s, such as the drawing SO4H2 (1937), and the engraving Vierge inviolable, métaphysique et surréaliste-sonore (1930s). The subtitles given initially to the aforementioned anthologies allude to the comparison of the arts and the equation of poetry and painting in an alchemical fusion pursued by the historical avant-gardes and Surrealism. Engonopoulos’s work and his experimentations with image-making should be revisited within this context and seen as a paradigm of the formulation of a new myth that sought to interweave the visual arts, poetry and alternative epistemologies into a revolutionary, hybrid form of expression that could effect the individual and society.

Kunst, keskkond ja keskkonnaliikumine Eestis 1960.–1980. aastatel / Art, Environment, and Environmentalism in Estonia in the 1960s–1980s

Kunst, keskkond ja keskkonnaliikumine Eestis 1960.–1980. aastatel / Art, Environment, and Environmentalism in Estonia in the 1960s–1980s