Field Of Modernist Studies Research Articles

5Religion and Representation

AbstractIn recent years, the relationship between religion and representation has been examined with particular intensity in the field of modernist studies, to which all books reviewed in this chapter have contributed. It is telling that three of them are devoted to Virginia Woolf, whose firm rejection of patriarchal Christianity and the established church has for years been considered a prime example of modernism’s hostility to religion. New scholarship on Woolf, religion, and spirituality offers a much more nuanced view of her engagement with Christian culture and illustrates the wealth of new methodological developments in the field of modernist studies. The review opens with a discussion of the recent religious turn in modernist studies, situating it within the expansion of the field connected to the emergence of the new modernist studies. Subsequently, it examines four new books that contribute to scholarship on modernism and religion. The chapter is divided into five sections: 1. The New Modernist Studies and Religion; 2. Jane de Gay, Virginia Woolf and Christian Culture; 3. Stephanie Paulsell, Religion Around Virginia Woolf; 4. Religion, Secularism, and the Spiritual Paths of Virginia Woolf, edited by Kristina K. Groover; 5. Martin Lockerd, Decadent Catholicism and the Making of Modernism. The books reviewed illustrate the scope and depth of new research into modernism and religion, offering a fresh critical perspective that challenges the widely accepted view of modernism as a purely secular movement.

Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity across Time by Susan Stanford Friedman

Reviewed by: Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity across Time by Susan Stanford Friedman Christopher Bush Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity across Time. Susan Stanford Friedman. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Pp. 472. $55.00 (cloth). $54.99 (eBook). The assertion of a thirteenth- to fourteenth-century Mongol modernity vividly captures the shock if not awe of Planetary Modernisms’s agenda to liberate the world and its pasts for “modernism” and “modernity.” Despite being only recently published, Planetary Modernisms needs little introduction for readers of Modernism/modernity, for it brings together more than a decade of influential polemics and provocations concerning the globalization of modernist studies. Several of the chapters are revisions of articles that are already among the most cited in the field. Friedman’s arguments are therefore something about which many if not most in modernist studies already have an opinion, but their collective arrival in book form provides a valuable occasion to revisit, reflect, and reassess. However complex in implications, the book’s central thesis is relatively easy to summarize. For Friedman, the field of modernist studies has, despite its numerous recent geographic expansions, remained trapped in profoundly Eurocentric categories. No matter how flexible and inclusive the aesthetic criteria for modernism become, as long as its periodization remains centered around the early part of the twentieth century, the field remains necessarily Eurocentric. Such a periodization, the argument continues, is based on an understanding of modernity as a singular event whose defining criteria are all derived from European and thus Eurocentric history. Even if the historical horizon is stretched back to the Enlightenment, the Reformation, or Columbus’s arrival in the Americas, the frame of reference remains essentially European. Similarly, modifiers such as “alternative,” “minor,” and so on “do not effectively challenge the metanarrative of Western modernity. They maintain it; indeed, they need it to make any sense whatsoever” (149). The problem, as Friedman formulates it, is that “generalizations about historical periods typically contain covert assumptions about space that privilege one location over others,” a claim that does not strike me as especially controversial (87). She adds to this, however, the claim that in effect any periodization of modernity “reinforces the ideological construction of ‘the West’ and ‘Western society and culture’ as the defining center of world history” (85). Periodization is not the only topic this sprawling and ambitious book addresses, but it is central both to its other arguments and to understanding its contribution to the field. Friedman calls for a reconceptualization of modernisms and modernities (both emphatically plural) such that they might, at least potentially, be found anywhere on the planet and at any moment in human history. The latter claim is distinctive if not unique to Friedman. I imagine many in the field today would agree that “[i]f modernist studies develops out of an entirely Western archive or out of a diffusionist model of Western expansionism, the danger of parochialism and false universalisms is palpable” and that it therefore makes sense “that we stop using this particular modernism as the default position for modernism per se, that we stop universalizing it to stand in for modernism itself and as the measure of all other modernisms” (313, 186). Taken in isolation, such an assertion represents a truth widely if not quite universally acknowledged. Few readers will be scandalized by Friedman’s inclusion, under the rubric of modernism, of the turn of the century Bengal Renaissance or even Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée (1982), much less Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North (1966). The impassioned case for a Mongol modernism, however, makes clear that her ambition ranges far beyond the now familiar canon-stretching implied by critiques of belatedness, imitativeness, and peripherality. Friedman’s goal is “to break away from periodization altogether” (7, my emphases). [End Page 686] This raises more than a few questions, questions Friedman has been asked, more but sometimes less politely, since around the turn of our century. As Friedman herself writes, and as her subtitle suggests, her “intent has been to provoke more debate, not close it off” (311). In this the project has already succeeded and no doubt will continue to. The book’s style...

Giorgio de Chirico and the Metaphysical City: Nietzsche, Modernism, Paris

In a letter to Fritz Gartz written in 1910, Giorgio de Chirico declared: ‘I am the only man to have truly understood Nietzsche — all of my work demonstrates this’ (p. 16). It is this profound affinity that Ara H. Merjian examines in his handsomely produced study of de Chirico's metaphysical painting, a term that encompasses the artist's enigmatic cityscapes produced primarily in Paris between 1911 and 1915. Merjian undertakes the ambitious task of showing how de Chirico's painting not merely illustrates philosophical ideas, but, rather, enacts them through a series of innovative compositional experiments. Architecture is identified as both the means and the metaphor through which the artist gave visual form to certain ideas in Nietzsche's late writings. The central argument is structured around four paintings produced in 1914: Gare Montparnasse (Museum of Modern Art, New York), The Enigma of Fatality (Kunstmuseum, Basel), The Evil Genius of a King (Museum of Modern Art, New York), and The Seer (Museum of Modern Art, New York). Through detailed readings of these works and their placement within de Chirico's broader œuvre and the cultural milieu of pre-war Paris, Merjian examines facets of a Nietzschean ‘performance’ that is propelled as much by silence, omission, and displacement, as by the representation of objects and persons. He argues that the architectural impulse of the works consists less in picturing the built environment than in drawing attention to gaps and spaces that are left behind. While de Chirico's cityscapes could sometimes find physical counterparts in Paris, so too they resisted analogy, projecting a ‘desiccated alchemy of overdetermination and underrepresentation’ (p. 118) in their sources and references. Merjian acknowledges that ‘there have been as many different “Nietzsches” as readers of his work’ (p. 3) and that, in consequence, de Chirico's interpretation of the philosopher's writings is necessarily idiosyncratic. However, this poses certain problems for an elucidation of the philosophical ideas found within de Chirico's paintings. The ‘Nietzschean method’ that Merjian identifies in the artist's works is described as ‘a mode of vision rather than an inventory of objects’ (p. 6), a style of art production in which ‘the painter's point of view merges […] with that of the philosopher’ (p. 24). The difficulty of identifying and examining the pictorial expression of this imaginative bond means that the discussion remains, at times, allusive. This is, perhaps, an attendant difficulty of showing how painting can perform ‘philosophically’; it also derives from the fact that de Chirico's response to Nietzsche's work was not a systematic one. Yet there are points in the argument where a more detailed exegesis and contextualization of specific ideas within Nietzsche's works would have been helpful, particularly in light of the substantial secondary literature on the philosopher's late writings. Despite these reservations, the book is a valuable contribution to studies of de Chirico's works and offers many avenues for further exploration in the field of modernist studies.

Expert/Crowd-Sourcing for the Linked Modernisms Project

Though “Building Partnerships to Transform Scholarly Publishing” has never officially been part of the mandate of either the Modernist Versions Project (MVP) or Linked Modernisms (LiMo), upon reflection, it has turned out to be among their key functions. Advancing new ways of doing scholarship within the field of modernist studies has driven us to explore novel approaches to publishing, and demonstrated the utter necessity of partnerships to make those approaches effective. In what follows we will provide a quick introduction to the Modernist Versions Project and some of the tools we use, consider what sort of inquiries appear at scale, and give an overview of the Linked Modernisms Project. We will attend in particular to how this suite of projects has led us to rethink traditional scholarly publishing practices, and how partnerships have become indispensable to mobilizing our research.

Virginia Woolf and the Materiality of Theory: Sex, Animal, Life by Derek Ryan (review)

Reviewed by: Virginia Woolf and the Materiality of Theory: Sex, Animal, Life by Derek Ryan Lauren Elkin Virginia Woolf and the Materiality of Theory: Sex, Animal, Life. Derek Ryan. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013. Pp. vii + 221. $115.00 (cloth). In recent years, critical theory has been somewhat marginalized in the field of modernist studies, which has been “made new” by recent engagements with the archive and a reconstructed historical materialism. In his study, Virginia Woolf and the Materiality of Theory: Sex, Animal, Life, Derek Ryan provides a model whereby the new modernist studies may give rise to a “new modernist theory,” as we might call it. Woolf herself lays the foundation for this theorizing, Ryan claims, offering “conceptualisations of the material world where the immanent and intimate entanglements of human and non-human agencies are brought to the fore” (4). Reading not only Woolf through theory but theory “in and through Woolf,” Ryan blends the material with the theoretical, giving us Woolf as a theorist of materiality. In her skepticism of “the philosophical, ethical, and political pitfalls of individualism, binary oppositions, and transcendence,” Ryan shows that Woolf in many ways anticipates the theories of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, Jane Bennett, Rosi Braidotti, Donna Haraway, and Karen Barad, and even, in some cases, surpasses them (4). The question of objects and materiality in Woolf’s work is one that has received much attention from scholars, yet Ryan’s study points to new ways of considering these issues, and will certainly inspire further research in its wake. Ryan offers a series of nuanced, sensitive readings (attentive even down to the level of punctuation) of materialities and animalities in Woolf’s writing. The first chapter takes up the twin motifs of granite and rainbow, famously correlated to truth and fiction in biography in Woolf’s 1927 essay on that subject. Combing through Woolf’s oeuvre for references to these two substances, Ryan provides a wonderful account of Woolf’s transpositions of them, making granite illusory and the rainbow concrete. Granite and rainbow, as he shows, uncouple and recouple throughout Woolf’s writing, “expos[ing] the limits of binary, and totalising, models of language and thought that are often upheld by symbolic understandings” (31). Moving from their role in biography to the memorializing function of granite, Ryan shows how Woolf “subtly twists the conventional symbolic associations of granite monuments erected in the name of patriarchy, war, and empire” (33), specifically through a reading of the obelisks in The Voyage Out and Night and Day, and then by zooming in on the granite of Cornwall as recalled in “A Sketch of the Past” and Woolf’s letters. Turning to the scientific research of our own day, Ryan points out that geologists and physicists are themselves convinced of a certain “solid intangibility” of the rainbow and the mysterious and ephemeral origins of concrete. Meanwhile, an investigation of granite and rainbow in art and mythology, particularly with regard to those works of art and mythological stories of which Woolf was aware, turns up a similarly rich transposing of their otherwise evident qualities. The next two chapters take up Woolf’s treatment of sexual difference and creativity. Beginning with a consideration of the paradox of androgyny in A Room of One’s Own, Ryan aims to move beyond the concerns with language and subjectivity, which have predominated in the field of feminist criticism. Ryan takes up Braidotti’s conception of the “nomadic subject” to argue, via To the Lighthouse, that Woolf is more interested in the “multiplicity inherent in the androgynous subject” and less in the philosophically limited oppositions of sexual difference. Ryan turns [End Page 859] to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “minor literature” to theorize Woolf’s attitude to sexual difference and introduces the concepts which will be so key to the remaining readings in his study: deterritorialization and the becoming-woman of writing, which, Ryan notes, bears an affinity with Woolf’s subversive concept of androgyny in their shared rejection of patriarchy and phallogocentrism. Drawing on these concepts, Ryan coins the neologism “tri-s,” pronounced tries, which he defines as a reading strategy emerging from Woolf’s refusal to allow...

Two Paths for Writing by Women in Modernist Studies

AbstractIn its turn to transnational and interdisciplinary methods and subjects, the field of modernist studies has moved decisively away from gender‐based analyses of literary texts. Because feminist and gender‐focused scholarship played a crucial role in claiming a place for literature by women in the research and teaching of modernism, this expansionist trend raises concerns about the future of women’s literature in modernist studies. This paper argues that this path changes the questions we ask, but energizes more than sidelines the study of writing by women. Not only have expansionist tendencies in modernist studies historically been good for the inclusion of literature by women, but interdisciplinary methodologies and transnational inquiry has both invigorated work on canonical figures and provided new approaches to understudied writers. I follow a brief review of recent contributions to the study of women’s writing that take part in these developments with a more focused treatment of Dorothy Richardson studies, which have blossomed under transnational and interdisciplinary inquiry.This paper also explores another development, the significance of which for modernist studies (and the humanities more broadly) has hardly begun to be recognized: the increasing availability of digital texts and development of computational methods. We are poised to take advantage of the new accessibility of lesser‐known works, many of which have fallen out of print, in our research and teaching. Further, new technologies promise to revolutionize the ways we study literature. The digitization of literary corpora and the development of methods to mine the digitized texts for information allow us to ask new questions of literature. It remains only for scholars of modernist writing by women to continue asking new questions.

Mourning Dove's Cogewea: Writing Her Way into Modernity

This is the trouble, thefate of the average breed of today. They are encouraged to tryforget their Indian ancestry, after they once learn the white man's books and ways. They banish the idea of old tribal customs and laugh to scorn that which was sacred to the generations past. Some of the Indian system is bad, much of it is good; but it must all give place to that of the Shoyahpee [white man], who arrogantly proclaims that of philosophies, his alone is worthy of emulation. -Mourning Dove, Cogewea (242) Written in the era of the modernist movement, Mourning Dove's Cogewea, The Half-Blood (1927) provides a compelling discursive site in which to explore the central dynamics of the transformational moment called modernity. To speak of this melodramatic Western romance in the same breath as Modernism (with a capital 'M') seems a slippery and questionable endeavor. In terms of its formal elements, this text fits none of the many paradigmatic definitions of modernism in the field of modernist studies. But in terms of this text's project to map out a crucial transitional moment for Native Americans, I suggest that it plays a pivotal role in our understanding of the modern moment while it simultaneously works to redefine our perception of modernity. Through Mourning Dove's Cogewea, I seek to explore the central question of how the notion of modernity would change if we were to examine it from a Native American writer's point of view. The field of modernist studies has become a locus of contested