Context Of European Modernism Research Articles

Karen Bixen reads the Olaf Tryggvason saga: Reseption of the saga and narrative strategies in “The Bear and the Kiss”

The article analyses the reception of the Norse sagas in Karen Blixen’s short story “The Bear and the Kiss” written in 1958 with the main focus on the “saga of Olaf Tryggvason”. Drawing on Wolfgang Iser’s reception theory, the article explores the hierarchy of the pre-texts that are traceable in the text of the considered story and suggests a system of markers that are meant to include interaction with the precedent texts. The typology of markers includes the characters’ names, metaphorical use of mythological or historical personas, the identified cited texts or stories, identical attributes (in this particular text — a glove thrown into a person’s face), the characters’ appearance, and similarity or contrast with the storyline of the other unidentified text. The analysis shows that there are two possible effects of the use of references: semantic compression and, conversely, symbolist and Neoplatonic circling around the event, which creates a semantic gap. The reader can either find himself aware of a riddle yet being unable to understand how the events or reactions fit into the plot or assume the role of an investigator creating his own interpretation of the storyline. The examined strategy of circling around the truth in order to indicate an idea or a fact by using metaphors, comparisons, and allusions in combination with Walter Benjamin’s and Edward Forster’s philosophy of oral storytelling allows Blixen’s short stories to fit neatly into the context of European modernism.

History Regained: A Modern Artist in Baghdad Encounters a Lost Tradition of Painting

Abstract This essay explores how the re-encounter with a medieval history of manuscript illustration laid a foundation for the practice of modern art in Iraq. It focuses on the artist Jewad Selim (1919–61) and his discovery of Yahya al-Wasiti’s illustrations of the Maqāmāt al-Ḥarīrī, but it also marks the ways in which that discovery was mediated by the enterprise of orientalist scholarship, the context of European modernism, and the broader cultural renewal that occurred with the collapse of the Ottoman empire and the creation of new nation-states in the Middle East.

УИНДЕМ ЛЬЮИС: НАСЛЕДИЕ, КРИТИКА, ПЕРСПЕКТИВЫ ИССЛЕДОВАНИЯ

The article offers a review of the oeuvre of a little-known English writer, artist, and critic Wyndham Lewis; the reasons why disregard for his works has given place to increasing attention from scholars are analyzed; the key trends in the vast criticism concerning Lewis are presented; the most promising directions for future research are proposed. Lewis’s marginal position in literary history, which can be explained by his stance as «the Enemy» of all dominant movements in both popular and highbrow cultures and by a number of compromising political statements, has been reconsidered in recent decades in connection with the expansion of modernist studies and the adequacy of Lewis’s legacy to the interests of «New Modernist Studies». In Lewis studies, attention to the positive content behind the author’s aggressive pose and authoritative beliefs has given way to a renewed interest in the formal features of his style and to posthumanist interpretations. The most promising approaches to Lewis seem to be the intermedial and narratological ones, as well as those which are aimed at further placement of Lewis’s oeuvre into the context of European modernism.

Jews and Cosmopolitanism: An Arc of European Thought

Isaac Deutscher, raised in his youth to be a Talmudic scholar, instead became a communist. In 1958, he addressed the World Jewish Congress on the topic of “The Non-Jewish Jew.” There was a Jewish tradition – Deutscher began, citing Spinoza and Marx, Freud and Luxemburg and Trotsky – of breaking with Jewish tradition. Jews had always been restless and rootless, always lived on the borders of various heritages, languages, and cultures, at once in and apart from society. Victimized by religious intolerance and nationalist sentiments, Jews longed for a universalist Weltanschauung. It is true that “non-Jewish Jews” played a disproportionate role in the history of European Marxism. Yet Jews’ contributions to Marxism might be understood in a larger context: namely, that “non-Jewish Jews” have played a disproportionate role in the intellectual history of modern Europe much more broadly. This essay is an attempt to place the relationship between Jews and Marxism in a larger context – less the larger sociological context than the larger intellectual context of European modernity.

Metres and the Pound: Taking the Measure of British Modernism

Seen in the broader context of European modernism, British modernist literature stands out through the limited role of collective avant-gardes and the conservative or reactionary politics of the writers who make up the canon of modernist poetry. This article explores how these peculiarities are replicated in the use of traditional poetic forms (metres in particular) in the works of W.B. Yeats (1865–1939), Ezra Pound (1885–1972) and T.S. Eliot (1888–1965). As modernist (rather than avant-garde) writers, those poets rejected or backed away from free verse and simultaneously cultivated forms that harked back to older and less insular poetic traditions than the ones that dominated mainstream English poetry in the Victorian period.

Writing as Mortification: Allegories of History in Konstantin Vaginovʼs Trudy i Dni Svistonova

The article proposes examining Konstantin Vaginovʼs best-known novel as an experiment in the allegorical reading of Soviet modernity. Analysed to date mainly as a work of metafiction, Trudy i dni Svistonova can be profitably approached in the light of what Walter Benjamin saw as a radical revalorization of allegory in modernism. It is the allegorical mode that denies death and time by mortifying its object. Such a form of writing is well formulated in Baudelaireʼs “spleen et idéal” from Fleurs du mal, the book which, by Vaginovʼs own admission, gave him the strongest push to start writing poetry of his own. The article argues that the allegorical mode informs much of Vaginovʼs poetry and even more so, his prose which is still understudied, particularly when it comes to situating it within the context of European modernism. According to Walter Benjamin, Baudelaireʼs allegory had the powerful ability to unmask the bourgeois order, with its illusion of totality and organic wholeness. Vaginovʼs weapon of preference against the newly minted façade of the Stalinist order, complete with its metaphysics of time and history, is exactly the same one that both Baudelaire and Benjamin directed against the façades of their own worlds. To Vaginov, writing historically means writing allegorically; it means petrifying trembling actuality which then becomes a tomb that writes and to which the writing subject is also sacrificed.

„Drugi! Bratstvennyj sonm!“ Marina Cvetaevas Zyklus „Derev'ja“ im Kontext ihrer französischen Lektüre

Article „Drugi! Bratstvennyj sonm!“ Marina Cvetaevas Zyklus „Derev'ja“ im Kontext ihrer französischen Lektüre was published on March 1, 2005 in the journal Zeitschrift für Slawistik (volume 50, issue 1).