Modernist Generation Research Articles

The modern portrait poem: from Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Ezra Pound

In The Modern Portrait Poem, Frances Dickey recovers the portrait as a poetic genre from the 1860s through the 1920s. Combining literary and art history, she examines the ways Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Swinburne, and J. M. Whistler transformed the genre of portraiture in both painting and poetry. She then shows how their new ways of looking at and thinking about the portrait subject migrated across the Atlantic to influence Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Amy Lowell, E. E. Cummings, and other poets. These poets creatively exposed the Victorian portrait to new influences ranging from Manet's realism to modern dance, Futurism, and American avant-garde art. They also condensed, expanded, and combined the genre with other literary modes including epitaph, pastoral, and Bildungsroman. Dickey challenges the tendency to view Modernism as a break with the past and as a transition from aural to visual orientation. She argues that the Victorian poets and painters inspired the new generation of Modernists to test their vision of Aestheticism against their perception of modernity and the relationship between image and text. In bridging historical periods, national boundaries, and disciplinary distinctions, Dickey makes a case for the continuity of this genre over the Victorian/Modernist divide and from Britain to the United States in a time of rapid change in the arts.

Marginal Modernity: The Aesthetics of Dependency from Kierkegaard to Joyce by Leonardo F. Lisi (review)

Reviewed by: Marginal Modernity: The Aesthetics of Dependency from Kierkegaard to Joyce by Leonardo F. Lisi Andrew Goldstone (bio) MARGINAL MODERNITY: THE AESTHETICS OF DEPENDENCY FROM KIERKEGAARD TO JOYCE, by Leonardo F. Lisi. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013. xvi + 336 pp. $45.00. What does literary modernism look like when seen from unaccustomed places? In the last decade, scholars have sought to expand “modernism” to cover an ever-wider geographical, linguistic, and cultural terrain.1 Leonardo F. Lisi’s wide-ranging book joins this effort to reorient modernism, operating from a base in Scandinavian studies; it covers writings in Danish, Norwegian, German, and English. Lisi argues that the aesthetics of major European modernist pioneers draw on Scandinavian models. His work reminds us that, though recent modernist studies have been global in ambition, tending to compare Europe and the United States to the postcolonial world, European modernism is itself by no means uniform; it has its centers and peripheries too. In the new modernist studies as in the old, the “big” languages threaten to eclipse the “small” ones, with “global modernism” turning into a shorthand for global English [End Page 539] modernism. Marginal Modernity builds a convincing case for widespread Scandinavian influence on the first generation of modernists, above all via Henrik Ibsen. Joyce’s early reverence for Ibsen is only one example among many. For Lisi, the contribution of the nineteenth-century Danish and Norwegian literary vanguards to modernism has not been understood. Scandinavia, he claims, developed a distinctive philosophical aesthetics, the “aesthetics of dependency.” This aesthetics contrasts with two better-known modernist tendencies: the aspiration to the unified, autonomous work and the embrace of formal fragmentation.2 The aesthetics of dependency emerges in Søren Kierkegaard and Ibsen and then, Lisi claims, makes itself felt in the signal early modernisms of Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove, Joyce’s “The Dead,” Hugo von Hoffmannsthal’s Lord Chandos Letter, and Rainer Maria Rilke’s Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.3 Readers expecting an analysis of political, economic, or cultural dependency will be disappointed. Lisi brackets these concerns to focus on “aesthetic” problems, by which he means the “organization of text-immanent elements” (8). A text exemplifies the aesthetics of dependency when “the purposeful relation of its parts depend[s] on an interpretative perspective not coextensive with the logic of those parts themselves” (6). The interrelations of aesthetic parts matter, says Lisi, because they are “the artistic enactment or representation of fundamental forms of knowledge and experience” (8). Lisi’s philosophical themes make for some difficult reading, especially in the book’s dense first part, which traces debates in epistemology from Immanuel Kant, by way of Friedrich Schiller and Friedrich Hölderlin, to Kierkegaard. The latter is the hero of the book; Lisi presents his theology as a novel and enduring answer to the questions raised by Kant. Lisi’s approach will appeal most to scholars working on the intersection of literature and philosophy, especially Continental philosophy from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel to Martin Heidegger. Those who do not count themselves among those specialists will be more interested in the literary interpretations Lisi derives. His interpretive method is, as he says, “close readings” (18)—that is, detailed textual interpretations that mostly remain within the boundaries of individual texts, with occasional excursions to other writings by the author under consideration. Social and cultural contexts make only brief appearances, principally in the fascinating pages that interpret the nineteenth-century Danish playwright Johan Ludvig Heiberg in terms of Denmark’s political and economic development in the epoch after the Congress of Vienna (81–86). According to Lisi, all the protomodernist works he examines share a “fourfold structure” that characterizes the aesthetics of dependency [End Page 540] (53). In each text, Lisi identifies a basic opposition at the level of theme or form; argues that the ending of the text promises to transcend the opposition; and claims that this ending is nonetheless not motivated from within the text but rather sends us searching for a fourth element to make sense of the links among the other three. Thus, The Wings of the Dove opposes the opacity of Jamesian late style to the...

Materiality and Meaning in Recent Projection Performance

The Velvet Light Trap, Number 70, Fall 2012 DOI: 10.7560/VLT7003 ©2012 by the University of Texas Press, PO Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713-7819 nyone paying attention to experimental cinema in the past fifteen years or so will have noticed that an aesthetic of materiality and medium specificity has returned. Despite (perhaps even because of) the everdecreasing availability of analog film brought about by digital media, film’s unique properties and possibilities have become the central subjects of experimental cinema to an extent not seen since the 1960s and 1970s. This development is particularly evident in the spate of films produced using nontraditional production methods that leave visible traces of themselves in the finished work, thereby reflexively calling a viewer’s attention to film’s distinct physical properties. These methods tend to involve a more direct, tactile involvement with film stock on the part of the maker, hence an increasing number of handmade films—films scratched, drawn upon, sewn, punctured, buried in earth, covered with foreign objects, and hand-processed using unpredictable alternative chemicals and methods. Also predominant are flicker effects, filmstrips displayed as objects, worked-over found footage, and “mistakes” arising from the contingencies of mechanical filmmaking at such a grass-roots, artisanal level—flares, chemical burns, and inconsistencies of color and exposure caused by hand-processing. All these features signal a renewed obsession with the stuff of analog, “celluloid” film and a celebration of its special qualities.1 But if medium specificity is back with a vengeance, it is also back with a difference. This difference—the nature of contemporary manifestations of medium specificity in experimental cinema—is what I shall explore here. As a case study, I will examine recent film projection performance, which involves the live manipulation of film projectors. The use of film projection in live performance can be traced back to the first generation of European modernists, including the surrealists and the artists afMateriality and Meaning in Recent Projection Performance jonaThan waLLey

Modernism and Japanese culture

Acknowledgements Introduction: Modernity and Modernism in a Japanese Context PART I: CONSTRUCTING 'MODERNITY' AND 'TRADITION': MODERNISM AND ANTI-MODERNISM IN MEIJI JAPAN, 1868-1912 Constructing Meiji Modernity The Anti-Modernist Backlash: Constructing Meiji Tradition The Novel as Modernist Medium: Modernity and Anti-Modernity in Meiji Fiction PART II: HIGH MODERNISM AND THE FASCIST BACKLASH, 1912-1945 The Japanese Modernist Generation, 1912-1931 The Historical Context of Japanese Modernism The Legacy of Japonisme in Japan Itself Kawabata as Modernist and Anti-modernist PART III: THE RIVAL MODERNISMS OF POSTWAR JAPAN, 1945-1970 Modernist Missionaries: The Americans in Japan, 1945-1952 Japanese Responses to American Missionary Modernism The Occupation in Fiction French as an Alternative to American Modernism ?e Kenzabur?'s 'Ambiguous' Utopianism Responses from the Right: The Empire Strikes Back The Reactionary Modernism of Mishima Yukio PART IV: EMPTY AND MARVELLOUS: JAPAN IN THE 'POSTMODERN AGE', 1970-2010 Defining the 'Postmodern Condition' 'Postmodernity' in Japan National Culture and Identity in a 'Postmodern' Age A Goethean Conclusion Afterword: Japanese Modernism Today

Unoriginal Genius/Conceptual Writing

Only the copied text commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened up by the text.--W. Benjamin (1) poem which is absolutely original is absolutely bad--T. S. Eliot (2) In her recent book Unoriginal Genius, Marjorie Perloff questions the establishment tradition in which authenticity is given the highest value and inauthenticity is given the lowest. The mainstream (Anglo-American) tradition rarely asks what can be being original of unoriginal. tries to keep on pretending to be original in the age of mechanical reproduction of everything. Perloff argues that it is still possible to be genius in the age of simulacra, but one cannot be original in the way romantics wanted to be--to tell something ever unthought and unsaid in their lyric--but rather by way of (re) making different assemblages of inter-texts. By avoiding dependence on earlier poetic models (3) what we can do is give semantic density and verbal to the poem to be original. In the eighteen century enlightenment humanist tradition (4), genius was defined as the most immediate individual that underlies beneath the language and culture. conceives an individual's mind as an origin of genius. Genius is understood as original, authentic, rare and extraordinary. The history of ideas barely asks about genius. In other words, it has rarely been asked if there can be genius? What can be the nature of genius, and can genius contribute to the history of idea? The question of authenticity/original genius was started to be an issue beginning with the first generation of modernists writing, for example T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Ezra Pound's The Cantos (an extended translation from Homer, Picasso), Marcel Duchamp's ready-mades (the urinal turned upside down and titled Fountain) and Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project (unfinished collections of quotations). These modernists are important precursors to the contemporary unoriginal like of language poets whose writing further radicalizes the question of the originality theory of genius. For example, Charles Bernstein's libretto to the opera Shadowtime recasts Benjamin's own texts into strict forms posing tension with the originality theory. In this scenario, Perloff's book Unoriginal Genius is an attempt to fuse avant-garde sensibilities of the past and the present with the new technologies and media of recent days. In other words, she is trying to recover the avant-garde practice of writing in new emerging context of information revolution. The explosion of new medias and digital technologies has not only taken a new lease on [our] life but also has influenced the way we think, feel and communicate: It is common place that in the world of digital discourse, of the internet, email, cell phone, and Facebook, communication has been radically transformed both temporally and spatially. (5) Everything we thought today is already thought and is passed to us through different copied mediums in several ways. This transformation also has significant impact on poetic agency, nature and function of poetry and poetics subverting the romantic's claim for personal voices in lyric poetry. Christian Bok aptly describes the contemporary situation: Recent trends in technologies of communication (such as digitized sampling and networked exchange) have already begun to subvert the romantic bastions of creativity and authorship, calling into question the propriety of copyright through strategies of plagiaristic appropriation, computerized reduplication, and programmatic collaboration. Such developments have caused poets to theorize an innovative aesthetics of conceptual literature that has begun to question, if not to abandon, the lyrical mandate of originality in order to explore the potentials of the uncreative be it automatic, mannerist, aleatoric, or readymade, in its literary practice. …

Women, Trauma, and Late Modernity: Sontag, Duras, and Silence in Cinema, 1960–1980

Women, Trauma, and Late Modernity:Sontag, Duras, and Silence in Cinema, 1960–1980 E. Ann Kaplan (bio) Absolute Subjectivity is achieved only in a state, an effort of silence (Shutting your eyes is to make the image speak in silence). Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida My interest in late modernism has to do with it being the end of an era that, especially in post–World War II Europe, spawned a generation of artists reflecting a new sensibility touched by trauma—as experienced through devastating events such as the Holocaust, Hiroshima, and colonialism. The deaths of Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman in 2007 and that of Alain Robbe-Grillet in February 2008 ( Jacques Rivette marked his eightieth birthday at the same time) underscore the passing of a late modernist generation that greatly influenced Susan Sontag and to which Marguerite Duras belonged. Since her death, Sontag has gained a focus and attention from leading women critics and academics hitherto lacking (and I include myself here). If Sontag was not a particularly easy person, she did not deserve the memoir (touched by envy) that Terry Castle wrote in 2005, nor did she deserve the well-known critique by Susan Wiseman that was, I argue, mistaken.1 In general there is now a renewed interest in understanding Sontag's life and work—this especially in light of her last years when she lived with Annie Leibovitz, and of Leibovitz's extraordinary photos of Sontag dying. I want to bring attention to Sontag's little-known 1970s films, and to situate her in her sociocultural context as a case study along with Duras. The two women, now dead, represent a particular historical 1970s feminist moment in regard to women in film and to a particular set of differing interests relating to silence and its aesthetics (still relevant today), both of which warrant study. Both [End Page 158] women were writers and filmmakers and both share Sontag's notion (as illuminated, among other ideas, in her long essay, "The Aesthetics of Silence") that "modern art . . . transmits in full the alienation produced by historical consciousness." Where traditional art, Sontag notes, invites a look, "art that is silent engenders a stare."2 My focus here is this very silence, used as a strategy by these two artists (Duras from France, Sontag from the United States, and each aware of the other), to achieve specific ends and specific responses relevant to late modernism. Their confluence and their juxtaposition in this period reveal provocative aspects of their work not necessarily otherwise visible. The contrast also reminds us of what we too readily forget, namely that on the cusp of the woman's movement, different theorizations of woman in patriarchy prevailed on each side of the Atlantic due to the contrasting intellectual traditions and methods of analysis in the United States and France. I choose the issues relating to an aesthetics of silence because silence, along with anti-narrative strategies, was a pervasive trope in late modernism, as can be seen in artists like Samuel Beckett, Antonioni, and Bergman, to name only the most obvious. However, both Duras and Sontag utilize this aesthetic in ways different from their male peers—ways that reveal their concerns specifically as women in patriarchal society. If my glance back to the 1970s has a nostalgic tinge to it, so be it. In a sense this essay is dedicated to remembering what we have lost in the deaths of two female pioneers. It also aims to resituate aspects of their art through the contemporary lens of "affect" and trauma theory. Duras used silence as an element of darkness and saw darkness as an inevitable metaphor for women. Her conception of the darkness from which women wrote was related to a position that saw signs of society's death everywhere. Women's way of writing, she argued, exploded the terrifying emptiness and illusion of bourgeois consciousness and male language. As Xavière Gauthier puts it, Duras's books "do the work of mining; they mine from below."3 For the Duras of this period (she later abandoned her somewhat utopian position), silence and passivity were the only ways in which women could be themselves. She did not...

Looking into Walt Whitman: American Art, 1850–1920 (review)

Reviewed by: Looking into Walt Whitman: American Art, 1850–1920 Yelizaveta P. Renfro Looking into Walt Whitman: American Art, 1850–1920. By Ruth L. Bohan. University Park: Penn State Univ. Press, 2006. 261 pp.Cloth, $50.00. In her introduction to Looking into Walt Whitman, Ruth L. Bohan sets out to provide "an enlarged understanding of Whitman's place in history"—and she does just that. This book convincingly positions Whitman within American visual culture, deftly bridging several disciplines, including art history, cultural history, biography, and literary studies. While Whitman's connection to photography, the new technology of his day, is often stressed and has been well-documented by critics, Bohan persuasively argues that Whitman also had a deep appreciation for and interest in other visual arts, including painting, sculpture, and printmaking. Writing in lucid, accessible prose, Bohan provides extended analyses of the multiple connections between Whitman and the visual arts both during his life and in the three decades following his death. In addition to being meticulously researched, the book is beautiful, with glossy pages richly embellished with color and black-and-white illustrations. Part 1, "Imaging Whitman: The Nineteenth Century," is largely biographical in nature, examining the place of art in Whitman's life and his poetic vision and his relationships with artists of his time. Bohan analyzes the visual representations of Whitman made during the poet's lifetime, from the 1855 frontispiece of Leaves of Grass to works by Charles Hine, Stephen Alonzo Schoff, G. Frank Pearsall, William J. Linton, George C. Potter, Herbert Gilchrist, Frank Henry Temple Bellew, Edward Carpenter, Gabriel Harrison, George W. Waters, Percy Ives, Frank Hill Smith, Dora Wheeler, John White Alexander, Sidney Morse, Frederick Gutekunst, Thomas Eakins, and Samuel Murray. Bohan also offers some provocative readings of Whitman's work based on his experiences with art. For example, in chapter 1 Bohan explores the connection between Whitman's experiences of salon-style art exhibitions in New York and his development of the catalogue technique in his poetry. Chapter 2 offers a thorough analysis of the various portraits that Whitman used in different editions of Leaves of Grass and how his shifting [End Page 89] poetic persona was embodied in those images. Chapters 3 and 4 focus on Whitman's relationship with artists in the years following the centennial through the 1880s; Bohan presents an aging poet who established in his Camden home a studio for artists who came to paint, sketch, and sculpt the poet's likeness. The painter Thomas Eakins is the focus of the final chapter of Part 1; in particular, Bohan's analysis of his painting The Concert Singer is thorough and astute. Though ostensibly a portrait of female Camden vocalist Weda Cook, the painting, according to Bohan, "foregoes conventional notions of referentiality, the foundation of the portrait tradition. It interrogates Whitman's presence without explicit reference to his person." Bohan goes on to make multiple connections between the painting and the poet and then places the work in "a pivotal position within the nexus of visual and verbal responses that circulated around Whitman during the poet's last years." In fact, Bohan sees in Eakins' painting the beginnings of the shift to modernism: "The painting mediates the cultural and artistic space between the conservative practices of Eakins' nineteenth-century colleagues and the diverse and vastly expanded representational strategies in the arsenal of the first generation of visual modernists." The focus of her study thus shifted, in Part 2, "Whitman and the Modernists: The Twentieth Century," Bohan takes up Whitman's influence on early modernist artists, fleshing out a claim she makes in the introduction: "Whitman became a catalyst for a modernism grounded in American cultural experience." Rather than an overview of Whitman's influence on visual art in the first decades of the twentieth century, the three chapters that make up Part 2 are narrowly focused studies in Whitman's reception history. In chapter 6, Bohan examines the work of painter Marsden Hartley, focusing on his early landscapes and the ways in which these works relate to Whitman's idea of "manly comradeship." Chapter 7 analyzes Robert Coady's journal The Soil as a composite work of art...

Doughty’s The Dawn in Britain and the Modernist Eclipse of the Victorian

Although the Modernist repudiation of things Victorian was a perfectly understandable response to postwar trauma, it is one that we still understand imperfectly at best. As the oldest and highest literary vindication to which a culture in postwar crisis could aspire, epic enjoyed an undiminished prestige that attracted some of Modernism’s best energies; but seeing Ulysses or the Cantos for what they are means affiliating them with their recent generic antecedents. A case in point, The Dawn in Britain (1906) anticipated, in its own key as a distinctly Victorian poet’s strange Edwardian epic, several problems and solutions that would engross its successors. For Doughty too meant to purify the dialect of the tribe – no matter what peculiarities of vocabulary and syntax the purge might entail – in the interest of a fearlessly direct episodic rendition of conquest and migration, always embedded within a patriotic plot of Eurasian scope and endowed with deep classical and biblical resonance. Embracing the site-perspectivism of his generation, and evincing a surprising cultural relativism to match, Doughty won among the Modernist generation who were his epic’s most impressionable first readers a following substantial enough to fund ample skepticism, in our time, about those defensive anti-Victorian slogans of theirs.

O O O O that Ja-hame-sian Rag / It's so elegant / So intelligent: Tracing Appropriations of the Master's Aura in Modernist Critical Discourse

Credit for the twentieth-century recuperation of Henry James's canonical standing largely goes to the Modernist generation that succeeded him. Far from demonstrating symptoms of the anxiety of influence, many of the high Modernists were eager to embrace James's example—none more so than R. P. Blackmur. Blackmur's effort to collect and publish separately the prefaces to the New York Edition marked an irreversible turning point in the construction of the modern canon and cemented James's place in it.

Mother stone: the vitality of modern British sculpture

In Mother Stone Anne Middleton Wagner looks anew at the carvings of the first generation of British modernists, a group centered around Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, and Jacob Epstein. Wagner probes the work of these sculptors, discusses their shared avant-garde materialism, and identifies a common theme that runs through their work and that of other artists of the period: maternity. Why were artists for three turbulent decades after the First World War seemingly preoccupied with representations of pregnant women and the mother and child? Why was this the great new subject, especially for sculpture? Why was the imagery of bodily reproduction at the core of the effort to revitalize what in Britain had become a somnolent art? Wagner finds the answers to these questions at the intersection between the politics of maternity and sculptural innovation. She situates British sculpture fully within the new reality of bio-power--the realm of Marie Stopes, Brave New World, and Melanie Klein. And in a series of brilliant studies of key works, she offers a radical rereading of this sculpture's main concerns and formal language.

Erotic utopia: the decadent imagination in Russia's fin-de-siecle

The first generation of Russian modernists experienced a profound sense of anxiety. What made them unique was their utopian prescription for overcoming the inevitability of decline and death. They theorized their defiance of death by suggesting the immortalization of the body through the power of erotic love. Matich suggests that same-sex desire underlay their most radical proposal of abolishing the traditional procreative family in favor of erotically induced abstinence. She shows how a brilliant group of Russian writers - among them the late Tolstoy, Vladimir Solov'ev, Zinaida Gippius, Alexander Blok, and Vasilii Rozanov - addressed the pressing concerns of a culture in transition, ranging from physical and psychological health, marriage, sexuality, and gender to anti-Semitism and the meaning of history.

Understanding Anthony Powell

Suggesting that the literary world is just beginning to realize the extent of Anthony Powell's achievements, Nicholas Birns provides a fresh examination of the British writer's career and growing reputation in this introduction to his work. Birns takes a global view of Powell's corpus, situating his works in context and explaining his place among Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, and Henry Green, in the second generation of British modernists. Birns adds to the understanding of how Powell and his compatriots pioneered a next wave modernism in which experimentation and traditional narrative combined in a sustainable mode. Birns offers readings of Powell's entire oeuvre, including the novels Afternoon Men, Venusberg, and The Fisher King, and his journals, which appeared in print between 1995 and 1997. Looking especially closely at A Dance to the Music of Time, the twelve-volume sequence of novels that is Powell's masterpiece, Birns sets the series in its social and historical context, emphasizing the role that both world wars and the cold war played in Powell's life and writing. He makes a particular study of the novel's dominating force - the arrogant, opportunistic Widmerpool, a socia

Les Références anglaises de la modernité viennoise. (Série germanique 7) by Silvie ArlaudJournaux intimes viennois. (Perspectives critiques) by Jacques Le Rider

AUSTRIAN STUDIES, II, 2OO3 223 of personal history over thewider cultural matrix, Freud is seen asmissing the trick with Dora. Concerned only with her family situation and relations with men, he overlooks her thwarted lust for emancipation and education. Following Toril Moi, Michael sees a conflict between the liberating potential of psychoanalysis and Freud's application of the technique to return his patients successfully to the marriage market. This is well-trodden ground, but deftlydone. In a tellingquotation here, Freud suggestively compares psychic repression topolitical censorship. If there isa faultwith Michael's chapters on Schnitzler and Freud, it is that she repeatedly invokes the term 'censorship' without defining it.Sometimes she refers to theofficial 'Zensur' of literature, at other times to self-censoring. A brief account of the operation of book censorship would have been helpful. We must deduce that medical publications were exempt from theprocess, enabling Freud to raise sexual issueswith a freedom not permitted to Schnitzler. With Hofmannsthal, the subject of two final chapters, we have an author to whom self-censorship isa way of life.But inElektra he permits himself a rare degree of sexual explicitness, one motive surely being the desire to fit the play intoMax Reinhardt's racy repertoire. The actress Tilla Durieux tells of Reinhardt's stratagems forhoodwinking the theatre censor. However, we hear none of thisfrom Michael, forby this stage the theme of censorship has disappeared from her book and the limitations of its scope become apparent. Elektra, a work of 'reactionary gynophobia' advocating 'violence against women and Jews' by the 'misogynist' Hofmannsthal, isa 'socially repressive' play inwhich she detects a nexus familiar to readers of Sander Gilman: an equation linking 'Oriental', 'Jewish', 'hysterical', 'feminine' and 'homosexual'. Her close reading of the play is doggedly sustained but it fails to yield the evidence that she hopes to find of anti-Semitism and homophobia. Ironically, her account confirmswhat a densely imaged text this is,an artefact knowingly manipulating the tropes of the fin de si?cle,perhaps one where we need to separate the author from the authored (a courtesy she ishappy to accord Schnitzler), at any rate a play that does not so easily dissolve under thewithering gaze of political correctness. Wolfson College, Cambridge Philip Ward Les R?f?rencesanglaises de lamodernit?viennoise. By Silvie Arlaud. (S?rie germanique 7). Paris: Editions Suger. 2000. 447 pp. 15,00. isbn 2-912590-16-7. Journaux intimes viennois. By Jacques Le Rider. (Perspectives critiques). Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. 2000. 438 pp. 25,00. isbn 2-13-050566-x. Silvie Arlaud's book is themost thorough and detailed investigation to date of the debt toEnglish literature owed byViennese modernism between 1890 and 1914. It aims to identify the specificity ofmodernist Austrian literature via its response to literature in English: 'la r?f?rence anglaise d?livre les contours du probl?me identitaire viennois, elle permet aux modernes de penser leur identit? esth?tique, leur identit? priv? [. . .] et leur identit? nationale' (p. 16). Writers conscious of the fluidity of theirown Austrian national identity,according toArlaud, were drawn to a Utopian view ofBritain as a strong and confident nation; theverymeans bywhich Austria's modernist generation sought to achieve an equivalent uniqueness were a re-valorization of form and style (inspired by Emerson and theVictorians) and the 224 Reviews development of a self-image that exploited Vienna's ideal position as the interpreter of other cultures bymaking deliberate intertextual reference amark not of epigonal derivativeness but of cultural distinctiveness. English literature was an ideal candidate for such attention above all because itoffered a powerful alternative to German naturalism. 'La r?f?rence n'est donc jamais innocente, et ce d'autant moins que son utilisation est pr?cis?ment consciente et belliqueuse' (p. 14). This thesis is illustrated firstby investigations into thenature of criticalwriting in the early 1890s as itwas inspired by Swinburne, Pater and the English Pre Raphaelites, and into thedebate inVienna surrounding Oscar Wilde's trial in 1895. Arlaud skilfully shows how the issues of homophobia and anti-Semitism became intermingled in the critical responses to Wilde, and to Salom? inparticular. She then spins a sophisticated web to show how the business of translation, reception, transposition...

Anglo-German Interactions in the Literature of the 1890s

Bridgwater, Patrick. Anglo-German Interactions in Literature of 1890s. Oxford: Legends, 1999. xii + 274 pp. 227.50. Out of long experience and profound understanding of era, Patrick Bridgwater has composed comprehensive account of literary relations between fin-de-siecle Britain and Germany/Austria, when Pre-Raphaelites and first generation of modernists rediscovered paganism while Germans awakened to English Romanticism and boldness of artistic autonomy and immoralism -accompanied, to be sure, as Bridgwater repeatedly reminds us, by obbligato of Max Nordau's ominous excoriation of cultural Entartung. The book deals in discriminating detail with aesthetic Germanism of the tutelary spirit of these pages, Walter Pater (3); elaborate and Austrian admiration for somewhat Germanophobic Oscar Wilde, regarded as martyr to English philistinism; belated reception of Keats as a pure poet, poet's poet (123) in Germany and Austria; varying interests of Meredith, Rossetti, Dowson, and Swinburne, along with their varying receptions by such as George and Hofmannsthal; George Moore's partly pretended discipleship to Schopenhauer (a rather long chapter for reader not much interested in Moore); and Pater's often highlighted but superficial affinity with Nietzsche, compared to Wilde's true but unconscious parallels. The most exotic part of story, filling chapters, concerns elaborate fascination with forgotten chronicle novelist Wilhelm Meinhold, whose Maria Sch.weidler, die Bernsteinhexe was translated by Sarah Austin's daughter and Heine's favorite, Lucie Duff-- Gordon, and Sidonia von Bork, die Klosterhexe by Oscar Wilde's mother, Jane Elgee. The long-lived popularity of these books in England is phenomenal, with many sumptuous editions of Sidonia, including two Kelmscott Press editions, one on vellum (98, 100). Sidonia seems to be ancestress of any number of sadistically amoral femmes fatales in literature and art. The joke is that Gothic writer comes to be imported into eminently English genre of German horror. As far as I can see, nothing scholarly has been written about Meinhold in decades, although Yale dissertation completed by Paul Barber in 1968 included him. He belongs to under researched topic of writers whose prestige has been higher at times in countries other than their own, such as Jack London in Soviet Union, Hoffmann or Poe in France, Thornton Wilder or Charles Bukowski in Germany, Heine almost anywhere. From Bridgwater's account one might add German/Austrian reputations of Swinburne and Wilde. Bridgwater's finely discriminated analyses are profoundly concerned with relation or disjunction of and moral as it was threshed over during 1890s. …

An English Objectivist? Basil Bunting's Other England

publication of Bunting's Briggflatts in 1966 was quite simply one of most important events in postwar British poetry. And there was a Chicago connection: whole poem first appeared in pages of Poetry (Chicago) in January of that year and was only published in book form in England some months later. With Bunting's Collected Poems two years later main body of work of one of generation of interwar modernists was finally, and belatedly, made available. for some Bunting was no more than a minor disciple of Ezra Pound, an outdated exotic unassimilable to English cultural environment, for a new generation he provided an important link to American successors of Pound and Eliot. As Alan Brownjohn ruefully commented in 1968: Basil Bunting has come to have, for States-oriented intellectual wing of Sixties avant-garde, English Black Mountain Poets, something of status and influence that William Empson had for Movement.... Though he had developed some of key elements of his own poetics independently, Bunting remained in many ways a man of literary generation of 1920s, a proponent of kind of poetry represented by Eliot's The Waste Land and Pound's early Cantos or Homage to Sextus Propertius. continued throughout his life to praise Pound as master craftsman of modern poetry. He made himself, early in his career, one of most consummate masters of technique of versification that our literature has ever seen, Bunting wrote in 1932.(2) And forty years later, despite their profound political differences, he was still praising him as greatest poet of twentieth century, recalling the rice-pudding poetry on sale before Ezra Pound restored crispness and density to English verse.(3) Bunting's idiosyncratic publishing history testifies to vital supporting role that Pound played in his survival as a poet. His first collection, Redimiculum Matellarum, was privately printed in Milan in 1930 and its impact in Britain was, unsurprisingly, zero. Over next few years his work was generally published under Pound's auspices. was, for instance, generously represented in latter's Active Anthology, published by Faber in 1933. It was also through Pound that he was brought into contact with Louis Zukofsky and William Carlos Williams in New York in summer of 1930. had a poem, The Word, included in special issue of Poetry which Zukofsky edited in February 1931. Here for first time Bunting's work was associated with American contemporaries such as George Oppen, Carl Rakosi and Charles Reznikoff. A year later his writing was represented in Zukofsky's An 'Objectivists' Anthology. And over next few years Poetry under editorship of Marianne Moore was only journal which consistently published Bunting's work. As he noted in preface to his Collected Poems: I am grateful to those who printed my poems from time to time, above all to Poetry, of Chicago, whose editors have been kind to me one after another. By contrast, Bunting was isolated from literary groupings in London and struggled to find any British journal or publisher who would take his poetry seriously. At Faber, despite Pound's pressure, T. S. Eliot rejected proposals to publish a collection of Bunting's verse in 1935 and again in 1950. It was largely through Pound that his Poems 1950 was published by Dallam Flynn in Galveston, Texas. A few of his poems were in circulation via such American anthologies as Hugh Kenner's Art of Poetry and New Directions anthology which Pound co-edited in 1964. Bunting's two major postwar poems, Spoils and Briggflatts, were first published in Poetry in, respectively, 1951 and 1966. In postwar Britain, apart from a few translations in Peter Russell's fugitive magazine Nine, Bunting was unpublished and almost completely unknown. F. R. Leavis pronounced in 1951: If we ask what other poets Pound backed - other, that is, than Robert Frost and T. …

The Correspondence of Kartini's Sisters : Annotations on the Indonesian Nationalist Movement, 1905-1925

Joost Coté This article surveys the unpublished correspondence of the four sisters of Kartini, Roekmini, Kardinah, Kartinah and Soematrie, written to Rosa Abendanon-Mandri, in the period 1905 to 1925. The period covered by this correspondence throws some light on the life of women from this stratum of society in Java at the time. At the same time it contributes to a more adequate contextualisation of the life and correspondence of Raden Ajeng Kartini herself, whose correspondence has been the subject of attention for most of this century. Together the correspondence by the five sisters forms a continuous archive of private correspondence, amounting to almost three hundred letters, stretching over a quarter of a century which is probably unique in Indonesian history. Carefully considered, this represents a significant source for the historical investigation of the 'inner domain' of this stratum of Javanese society. The article represents a preview of the letters currently being translated for publication. The writer argues that these can be read as indicative of an emerging culture of modernity amongst an educated and modernist generation of Javanese elite. The correspondence shows how the strands of feminism and nationalism, apparent in Kartini's writing, are extended in the context of a rapidly changing Java, and how the emerging debates about Indonesian national identity impinged directly on the nascent feminist discourse. While the claims made for the value of this correspondence are modest, and attention is drawn to their focus on continuing the relationship established by Kartini and Roekmini with Rosa Abendanon, the Javanese women writers are shown to inhabit a rapidly changing world within which they continued to negotiate a feminist agenda. At the same time, intrusions into the correspondence by their husbands make clear how an emerging Indonesian nationalism incorporated within it a new patriarchy which demanded that women safeguard the inner domain of the cultural identity upon which the nationalist project was based.

Twentieth-century Latin American poetry: a bilingual anthology

Latin Americans have written some of the world's finest poetry in the twentieth century, as the Nobel Prizes awarded to Gabriela Mistral, Pablo Neruda, and Octavio Paz attest. Yet this rich literary production has never been gathered into a single volume that attempts to represent the full range and the most important writers-until now. Here, under one cover, are the major poets and their major works, which appear both in the original language (Spanish or Portuguese) and in excellent English translations. The poems selected include the most famous representative poems of each poetic tradition, accompanied by other poems that represent the best of that tradition and of each poet's work within it. Tapscott's selections cover the full range, from the Modernist generation though the Mexican Revolutionary post-Moderns and the Vanguardist poets to very contemporary younger writers of political and experimental commitments. In all, eighty-five poets, including Pablo Neruda, Nicanor Parra, Octavio Paz, Gabriela Mistral, Nicolas Guillen, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Carlos Pellicer, Cesar Vallejo, and Cecilia Meireles, and over 400 poems are included, often in translations by some of North America's most esteemed poets.

The occupational orientations of jazz musicians: Some recent findings and a reexamination of the evidence

In contrast to earlier studies which stressed the deviant status of jazz players and their hostility toward conventional society, research appearing in the 1960s reported these musicians accepting middle‐class values and aspirations and expressing concern about the public image of their profession. This paper reports the findings of ethnographic research on jazz practitioners undertaken in St. Louis and New Orleans during the 1970s. Two contrasting occupational orientations, or work ideologies, those of the “artist” and the “craftman” (Becker, 1978), are found to coexist among the contemporary generation of jazz modernists. A historical interpretation that links the artist and craftsman orientations to the origin of jazz among blacks and the pattern of its diffusion into the larger society is offered as an explanation for the divergent findings from past studies.

Small Press Review

Jonathan Williams Jargon must be one of the oldest presses publishing good poetry since the 50's?Denise Levertov, yes; Charles Olson, yes? but if Williams is a Black Mountaineer, he will not hold himself to Black Mountain poets only. Who would expect that Jonathan Williams would print Peter Yates, Thomas A. Clark?or Peyton Houston? author of Argument of Idea is seventy, about to retire as executive of a conglomerate, and published his first poem in 1936. Williams has pub lished two earlier books by Houston, to no great clash of critical cym bals, but Williams is unconcerned with Pulitzers and breakeven points. He is concerned with his poets and continues, indomitably, to publish them. Houston is a poet (a little like William Bronk, a little like C.H. Sisson in England) who consolidates the work of the modernist generation, who does not innovate or expand or react but refines. Or does he merely imitate? When we speak of refiners or consolidators, the candidates who follow the innovators, we always run into this question (which raises theoretical matters I would rather avoid just now; we seldom attack Henry Vaughan for cloning George Herbert). Reading Houston's titles we may be reminded of another businessman-poet: Difficulties of the Conchologist, Old Man Considering It, The Observation of An gels; inspecting his diction we meet late Eliot, Moore, Stevens again; hearing rhythm and line breaks we hear an ancestry. We also meet a mind. Using some of the manners of a great generation, Houston meditates for himself, and becomes conspicuous for thought, arguments of idea, in a poetic climate that finds small use for intelli gence.