Laura Riding Research Articles

Classical Reception for Modernists: An Update

Classical Reception for Modernists:An Update Meryl Altman The Classics in Modernist Translation. Miranda Hickman and Lynn Kozak, eds. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. Pp. 264. $130.00 (cloth); $39.95 (paper); $35.95 (eBook). Virginia Woolf's Greek Tragedy. Nancy Worman. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. Pp. 168. $120.00 (cloth); $40.95 (paper); $36.85 (eBook). Over the last several decades, the field of Classical Studies has seen an exciting renaissance under the rubric of "Classical Reception." The two books I'm reviewing belong to an explosion of work—handbooks, companions, themed conferences, anthologies, book series—which often feature partnerships between classicists and literary scholars (or sometimes historians) who specialize in one or another later period or place. No longer considered a dowdy second-best younger sister, or sidelined as embarrassingly subjective and presentist, "reception" is now taught at Oxford and Cambridge, and is a section of the Society for Classical Studies (formerly the APA). Translation studies forms one important strand within this field of inquiry; another is the study of performance. The movement toward "reception" has been accompanied by an intentional critique of the field's elitist biases—often referred to by the shorthand term "classics so white"—and by a departure from the hegemonic notion of Greece (especially Athens) and Rome as the great Western tradition that later writers struggled to live up to. For classicists who turn their attention to reception, this does not mean abandoning philological rigor. But philology becomes expansive rather than restrictive; having good Greek (and/or Latin) still matters, but it is not the only thing that does. Even the (wildly misconstrued) decision of the Princeton classics faculty to decenter traditional language study could be understood as an echo of this promising openness to new approaches and new ideas. So what might the new(ish) classical reception studies have to offer specifically to the study of twentieth-century literature, and to the subdiscipline (or perhaps I mean "institution") of modernist studies, as represented by this and similar journals? Several essays in Miranda [End Page 901] Hickman and Lynn Kozak's anthology, The Classics in Modernist Literature, pose the question directly; Nancy Worman, a well-respected classicist herself, approaches it more obliquely in Virginia Woolf's Greek Tragedy, with a particular emphasis on feminist developments. My answer is that we can learn quite a bit from classical reception, not just from the particular knowledges it brings forward, but also from its methodology and its ideological stances. While capsule summaries of what "classical reception" now means are provided in Eileen Gregory's "H.D. and Euripides: Ghostly Summoning" and Annett K. Jessop's "'Untranslatable' Women: Laura Riding's Classical Modernist Fiction" in the Hickman and Koszak collection, I would advise readers seeking a general orientation to the field to begin elsewhere. A good introduction to the theory at work is Lorna Hardwick's Reception Studies, and a generous sampling of its best practices is the Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Classical Receptions, edited by Hardwick and Christopher Stray, who describe their eclectic principle of selection as "cheerfully and creatively anarchic."1 A range of thoughtful and deeply researched pieces fulfill the underlying aim: to show us something new about both the ancient and the modern, to shed new light on both. The field's inaugural insight and abiding touchstone—Charles Martindale's observation that "meaning is realized at the point of reception"—ideally leads scholars to reflect on their own affective investments in what they study, rather than seeking to mask them.2 Just as translation studies moves us away from assessing whether translations "correctly" or faithfully represent a source text in a target language—it's more complicated than that, as Walter Benjamin, and then Lawrence Venuti, have explained—reception studies asks us to replace censorious evaluations about "who got it right" with the understanding that all texts speak to and through other writers, in conscious and unconscious ways, always have and always will, and to see what we can see. Reception studies leads classicists to broaden both the methodological toolkit and the textual canon. Hardwick calls for a "broader cultural philology" (Reception Studies, 10) pointing out that hate and love are both forms of reception, and...

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This essay considers William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930/1947) as a text situated within overlapping cultures of editing. Most famously, the book responds to Robert Graves and Laura Riding’s readings of Shakespeare’s “unedited” Sonnet 129, but it also closely reads scholarly footnotes. Empson’s own revisions for the 2nd edition and his prefatory reflections on them then extend an awareness of and willingness to play with mise-en-page unusual in literary criticism of the period, though common in its poetry. Seven Types should also be seen in the context of the Experiment group of writers, artists, and film-makers, for whom editing included montage and the curation of found texts and images. As a highly self-conscious textual environment predicated on editorial intervention read and written as a creative resource and scene of performance, it challenges the prospective editor by focusing attention on the spaces and times of editing. Further questions about textual performance are posed by this article’s form. All academic articles, like editions, are montages: they assemble, in significant sequence, textual elements drawn from different sources. Current conventions of scholarly referencing tend to conceal this, however, in that they persistently shift authority and attention away from the montage as process, the local effects of the selections and juxtapositions it performs, and the reader’s experience of these in the here and now of reading. Whereas the edition’s authority draws a text’s history into the present tense of its utterance, the article’s scholarly apparatus directs us to the past (in the form of those pre-existing and uncut works from which cited material originates) and scripts a future (in which readers will trace and restore this material to its original location). In order to reflect on the edition, this essay removes most of the article’s usual apparatus of reference in order to allow the montage itself and its present tense to predominate; where short quotations are incorporated in the text italics are substituted for quotation marks to indicate the temporary alteration of tone from one voice to another. These departures do not argue for the wholesale elimination of scholarly apparatus; rather, the essay’s wider suggestion would be that creative-critical writing is in a position to question all aspects of the academic text, reclaiming its form and formats for authorial use so that the conventional can re-emerge as an expressive resource.

Modernism and Close Reading ed. by David James

Reviewed by: Modernism and Close Reading ed. by David James Daniel T. O'Hara (bio) modernism and close reading David James, ed. Oxford University Press https://global.oup.com/academic/product/modernism-and-close-reading-9780198749967?q=modernism%20and%20close%20reading&lang=en&cc=us 272 pages; Cloth $77.00 This collection of eleven essays by distinguished scholar-critics is skillfully edited and helpfully introduced by its editor David James, an expert in the new modernist studies, among several other sub-fields in literary and cultural studies. The question the collection raises is whether or not we know what close reading is, has been, or may be in the future. The volume is divided into two parts, the first of which presents different historical case studies of what close reading has been seen to be and whether and how if needed those perspectives should be revised. The second part presents potential futures for close reading of modernism as close reading combines with other kinds of critical approaches, including queer surrealism, stylistic analysis, feminist sexual ethics, hedonic perspectives on contemporary revisions of modernist [End Page 51] novels, cognitive studies of narrative space, and possible ecologies of critical interpretation. Max Saunders argues that rather than the usual simple picture of Richards and Empson inaugurating and perfecting British Practical Criticism and the New Critical Southern Agrarians perfecting the American close reading practice, we must revise our simple picture and incorporate more decidedly the work of Robert Graves and Laura Riding in A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927) as well as the work, literary and editorial, of Thomas Hardy and Ford Maddox Ford. This correction of the origin of close reading allows us now to see that the possibilities inherent in it go beyond the perfection of academic exercises as encouraged by the famous and influential 1939 anthology edited by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, Understanding Poetry. Rather than a critical mode of complex albeit "organic" encapsulation, close reading can be better seen as an opening up of texts to an array of critical responses that are yet still close readings. Saunders is particularly good when discussing Paul De Man's "The Dead-End of Formalist Criticism" in which Empson's seventh type of ambiguity explodes the would-be infinite multiplicity of perspectives supposedly contained by the "organic" form of the text as the perspectives do not simply oppose but contradict one another. This critical slant on close reading gets repeated and enriched throughout the first part of the volume as Peter Howarth plumbs more specifically and comparatively the ground-breaking work of Richards and Empson, Graves and Riding, as reading performances every bit as literary as what they read. Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan do the same for the second generation of closer readers, as explication becomes the name for close reading during and after WWII in America and Britain. Joseph Brooker demonstrates how Hugh Kenner's fast-paced flickering aperçus when reading Joyce and Fritz Senn's slow revelations of this author not only argue for close reading as its own literary art-form or performance but also for including the theory-based new schools soon to emerge across the critical world. Finally, the first part of the collection ends with Jean-Michel Rabaté's close reading of Derrida's critical reading of Foucault in the latter's History of Madness, and Foucault's belated response to Derrida, in which not only can Rabaté find Derrida's case against Foucault to be reinforced but more surprisingly, perhaps, there is new evidence for how Derrida misread Freud on the death-drive [End Page 52] in the course of The Postcard. "[Derrida] bypass[es] the fact that the pages he has quoted state a thesis that Freud rejects explicitly. Indeed … he turns around and exclaims: 'It cannot be so.'" In this nuanced manner, "When Did Close Reading Acquire a Bad Name?" is the highlight of the first part of this collection, and concludes with a brilliant critique, careful, astute, discriminating, of Badiou's reading of Beckett. What Rabaté makes visible is what Paul de Man too often just claimed is the blindness and insight structure of critical or revisionary reading that...

The Afterlife of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Jane Kingsley-Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. vi+286.

<i>The Afterlife of Shakespeare’s Sonnets</i>. Jane Kingsley-Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. vi+286.

“The ever-dissolving image of deceptively tranquil antiquity”: Classical Myth and Literature in the Prose and Poetry of Laura Riding

This essay discusses the poet, critic and novelist Laura (Riding) Jackson (1901-1991), and her engagement with classical myth and literature. The focus is on her poetry and on the novel A Trojan Ending. The aim of the essay is to establish Riding as a significant voice in the reception and interpretation of classical myth and literature during the 1920s and 30s.

Laura (Riding) Jackson's ‘co-operative hostility’

Laura (Riding) Jackson's early collaborations with Robert Graves are well known, as is her renunciation of poetry to embark on a lifelong linguistic project with her second husband, Schuyler B. Jackson. The centrality of collaboration to her theory of language has not, however, been properly expounded. In the later work, especially, she puts forward a notion of intense collective effort in which personalities are to be changed through labour on words and meaning. Collaboration is both the means and the ends of an improved understanding of language and its potential. Critics and biographers have pointed to the ways in which her collaborations tended to involve conflicts of authority, and she is often charged with a desire to dominate. Focusing too much on personality, however, misses the more fundamental contradictions of her work. This paper argues that (Riding) Jackson's gendered notion of ‘co-operative hostility’ offers a sharp critique of masculine domination, cultural capital, and appropriation, as well as a speculative notion of social transformation based on mutual exploration and use. These elements of her work run into conflict, however, with her explicit and absolute commitment to private property.

The Great Final Hash of Moby-Dick

Although celebrated as a masterpiece, this greatest work of American fiction was most truly described by Melville as a “final hash.” The phrase is important because it goes to the heart of Melville’s commitment to a literature whose “topmost” aspiration was, in Beckett’s famous declaration, to “fail better.” Melville’s “quarrels” with God, America, and fiction are all related to this sublime and paradoxical ideal. Moby-Dick is not a final hash by intention but by necessity. It is a realized forecast of Laura Riding Jackson’s late-twentieth-century view of “the common risks of language, where failure stalks in every word.”

Personality, Impersonality, and the Personified Detachment of Wyndham Lewis

Personality, Impersonality, and the Personified Detachment of Wyndham Lewis Heather Arvidson (bio) Few words invoke the pieties of high modernist aesthetics with the force of "impersonality," which, since the early twentieth century, has served as shorthand for the fragmented forms, intellectual detachment, and imperious command of abstraction and allusion conventionally associated with modernism. Even as scholarship of recent decades, and the new modernist studies in particular, has dismantled any notion of a unified modernist aesthetic, privileged statements of the so-called doctrine of impersonality by T. S. Eliot and James Joyce continue to exert a grip on received understandings of modernism's formal investments. Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919) supplies a formidable touchstone, presenting a cryptic "impersonal theory of poetry" imagined with all the austerity of scientific objectivity.1 Eliot claims that in acquiring an "historical sense" of aesthetic tradition, the artist undergoes "a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable," and hence submits to "a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality" ("Tradition," 102, 103). This formulation has come to stand more broadly for modernists' rejection of subjectivity as the expressive basis for art. Its institutionalization is not only a product of the New Criticism that championed Eliot's iconic severance of the artist from the art work but was—importantly for this article—well underway in the 1920s, as may attest Laura Riding's 1928 complaint of the "ritualistic impersonality" of emergent modernist orthodoxy.2 Less well known is that "impersonality" lived an equally vibrant discursive life outside of art in transatlantic print culture. [End Page 791] Coeval with modernism, elaborations on what was "impersonal" about modernity—in culture, science, industry, and human character—proliferated in newspapers, mass and middlebrow magazines, scientific periodicals, and works of sociology and political analysis. Equivocal in valence and remarkably catholic in semantic application, impersonality was both "in the air, part of the 'climate of opinion'" and resolutely in print, grafted to debates about the prospects of the individual within urban industrial life.3 As John Dewey put it, "the invasion of the community by the new and relatively impersonal and mechanical modes of combined human behavior is the outstanding fact of modern life."4 Yet impersonality at times bore a more sanguine aspect, as when Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy proclaimed that "to impersonalize scientifically the material sense of existence—rather than cling to personality—is the lesson of to-day," or when Bertrand Russell pronounced that "the desire for a larger life and wider interests, for an escape from private circumstances … is fulfilled by the impersonal cosmic outlook of science as by nothing else."5 As such examples suggest, impersonality and its cognates accommodated meanings that ranged from a pervasive hazard for personhood, emotion, and intimate connection to an interpersonal or scientific ideal; from urban alienation to collective affiliation; from the machine to mythic consciousness; from subpersonal matter to the transpersonal soul. In short, what cultural historian Warren I. Susman has famously called "the culture of personality" was deeply entangled with a culture of impersonality, and it was within this broader context that modernist impersonality acquired its durable correlation with modernist aesthetics.6 No one was more alert to the enmeshment of personality and impersonality, or more convinced of the debt modernism owed to this discursive background, than Wyndham Lewis. In addition to the roles for which he is best known—novelist, painter, critic, polemicist, and Enemy-at-large—Lewis also served as modernist impersonality's reverse engineer. As part of an impossibly vast project to "lay bare the widely-flung system of cables connecting up this maze-like and destructive system in the midst of which we live," he sought to diagram the ideological workings of the interwar status quo of British and American culture.7 In the process, he seized impersonality as a key hermeneutic. In defense of the allegedly persecuted "Person" of Western culture, Lewis's immense critical output of the second half of the 1920s and early 1930s reiteratively attempted to dismantle the "rationale" that impersonality "possess[es] today."8 Lewis recasts impersonality as a key narrative of the era—and one on...

Riding's poetry in the Theory of Gynocriticism

Laura Riding Jackson is one of the influential poets of the early twentieth century in America. As a matter of fact, it is for her poetry, however, that Riding is best known, and her poems reflect her commitment to write with truth. In the other words, she knows poetry a process of a degree of awareness to recognize the capacity to know selfhood. Further, her accuracy as a writer lies in her extreme seriousness about the act of writing poems, with no attention to the outside. Nevertheless, the critics know her poems as a game, not something valuable to consider. Therefore, in the heart of traditional poetic language of masculinity, she continues her way of 'female phase' of Showalter, toward poetic history. Showalter's gynocritism is a framework for women in which a woman can judge a woman's literature womanly. Present research is looking at Laura Riding Jackson's some poems through Showalter's cultural view of 'female phase' of her gynocriticism.

Riding's poetry in the Theory of Gynocriticism

Laura Riding Jackson is one of the influential poets of the early twentieth century in America. As a matter of fact, it is for her poetry, however, that Riding is best known, and her poems reflect her commitment to write with truth. In the other words, she knows poetry a process of a degree of awareness to recognize the capacity to know selfhood. Further, her accuracy as a writer lies in her extreme seriousness about the act of writing poems, with no attention to the outside. Nevertheless, the critics know her poems as a game, not something valuable to consider. Therefore, in the heart of traditional poetic language of masculinity, she continues her way of 'female phase' of Showalter, toward poetic history. Showalter's gynocritism is a framework for women in which a woman can judge a woman's literature womanly. Present research is looking at Laura Riding Jackson's some poems through Showalter's cultural view of 'female phase' of her gynocriticism.

Strangers in the Country of the Poet

illustration by parée erica ( www . flickr . com / photos / pareeerica / 3561553883 ) 44 WLT JANUARY–FEBRUARY 2017 The Puterbaugh essay “One Foot Wrong” by Parée Erica WORLDLIT.ORG 45 1 “Women are strangers in the country of man,” wrote Laura Riding in the 1930s, as militant, nationalistic sentiments intensified across Europe. I read that sentence, along with Riding’s other writings on womanhood , as a graduate student toiling slowly on a dissertation about this remarkable poet’s work. In the context of turn-of-the century feminist theories’ tendency to complicate the notion of femininity, Riding’s pronouncement sounded a little archaic, if not downright mystical. After all, many women felt perfectly at home in that “country ,” and many men did not. And who were those women, anyway, women in the plural, as opposed to the singularity of “man”? Fifteen years later, in the fall of 2016, as I am sitting down to write this essay, a wave of protests moves across my country in reaction to a proposed new law under discussion in the Polish parliament that would effectively ban abortion. Women of various backgrounds and outlooks experience a powerful moment of solidarity. Even though the sense of female fellowship soon begins to fade as the protests evolve and diversify, with some women formulating more radical demands that other women find impossible to support, feminism, after years of dormancy in the ivory towers of academia, is back in the streets. Women rediscover the shared aspects of their experiences , often connected with humiliation, objectification, and silencing, all linked with male domination, represented in the present situation by the combined forces of right-wing government and the Catholic Church. In spite of all the differences, many women experience a similar sense of alienation in the world where massive antifeminist backlash accompanies a resurgence of aggressive nationalistic feelings. Since the nation-state is by its very nature militant, it must idealize violence. As much of our public discourse, and even some of our highbrow literature, extolls mythologized images of men with guns, women are pushed back to the niches of traditional femininity—to strangeness. Whether this collective experience will form the basis for a sustained and effective twenty-firstcentury women’s movement still remains to be seen, but one thing is certain: something happened in the past few months that caused many of us to (re)awaken. With these turbulent events in the background, I would like to reflect on a particular aspect of women’s strangeness in contemporary Poland, namely, their alienation from highbrow literary culture. This estrangement is especially conspicuous in the case of poetry. European poetry, as the domain of genius, has traditionally been dominated by men, reserving for women, at best, the roles of muses. While the identification of genius with male virility is universal, in the Polish tradition it is combined with an exceptional status of poets as the creators and keepers of national identity or, alternately, as rebels/ revolutionaries. As pointed out by Czesław Miłosz, poetry’s high standing in our corner of Europe is due to the fact that it bears witness to “the extraordinary and lethal events that have been occurring there, comparable only to violent earthquakes” (The Witness of Poetry). Male witnessing is valued more highly than whatever might be reported by women, in keeping with the assumption that the battlefield is more important than the home. Genius, national Strangers in the Country of the Poet by Julia Fiedorczuk Against the background of the Polish parliament’s consideration of a law that would effectively ban abortion and the ensuing protests, Julia Fiedorczuk reflects on a particular aspect of women’s strangeness in contemporary Poland—their alienation from highbrow literary culture— which she finds especially conspicuous in the case of poetry. bard, witness, revolutionary: all these are traditionally masculine roles. In this context the products of female creativity are viewed, a priori, as trivial. As long as they stay within the range of triviality, women writers are free to do what they want and can even become very successful. But only a very few will gain recognition as serious artists and thinkers, as intellectuals and poets whose work makes a real impact...

JAS Round Table on Amitav Ghosh,The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

Amitav Ghosh, perhaps Asia's most prominent living author, moves among many genres and across vast territories. His fiction—The Circle of Reason(1986),The Shadow Lines(1988),The Glass Place(2000),The Hungry Tide(2004), andThe Ibistrilogy—takes us from Calcutta where he was born in 1956 to the Arabian Sea, Paris, London, and back again to the Indian Ocean, the Bay of Bengal, and beyond. His nonfiction—In an Antique Land(1992),Dancing in Cambodia and at Large in Burma(1998), andCountdown(1999)—rests on a PhD in social anthropology from Oxford. He went to Alexandria, Egypt, for his dissertation research. His science fiction,The Calcutta Chromosome, won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1997. His essays—published inThe New Yorker, The New Republic, andThe New York Timesand collected inThe Iman and the Indian(2002)—address major issues such as fundamentalism. Indeed, most of his work addresses big questions, exploring the nature of communal violence, the traces of love and longing across generations, manifold religious manifestations, and the systematic pain of colonial oppression. The deep and abiding theme of many works is anthropogenic environmental damage, now boldly and directly addressed inThe Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable(2016). Married to accomplished fellow author Deborah Baker, whose work traces the Asian peregrinations of Allen Ginsberg, the literary milieu of Laura Riding, and the complexity of Islamic conversion, Ghosh has taught at Harvard, Columbia, Queens College, and Delhi University. He has won more prizes and honorary doctorates, and been a fellow at more famous institutions and a distinguished visitor in more far-flung places, than you can shake a stick at. He even has two homes: Brooklyn and Goa. In short, Ghosh's profile makes you wonder if there might not be more than one of him.

Modernism: Keywords by Melba Cuddy-Keane, Adam Hammond, and Alexandra Peat

Melba Cuddy-Keane, Adam Hammond, and Alexandra Peat. Modernism: Keywords. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2014. xviii, 266. $112.95. Modernism: Keywords opens with a direct gesture to its predecessor, Raymond Williams's 1976 Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, while also marking out its principal differences: the narrower focus on modernism, the integration of digital technologies used in a manner loosely akin to Moretti's distant reading, and a rich hyperlinking (in print) of the thematic nodes of each alphabetized entry. That is, the print book adopts the curatorial and editorial elucidation of each topic that would be expected from a tertiary source while drawing inspiration from the humanities computing scenarios in which alternate relations might emerge through digital technologies. The accomplishment here is akin to the prospects of the Linked Modernisms project that is being developed from the metadata of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism. The comparison is not opportunistic. It points to the most valuable element of Modernism: Keywords: the relational work it is likely to provoke as readers follow its various suggested connections through overlapping keywords across the book. The prospect of a modernist choose your own adventure scenario seems too good to be true, and the invitation to the reader's agency calls back to later works like Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet or Julio Cortazar's Rayuela--again, it is not an opportunistic comparison, pointing as it does to readerly organization of narrative and complex interpretive responsibilities that shape the relations among the texts. The reader may move across the volume or dip into specific keyword entries, but in each entry there are gestures to further work through the specific invitations to follow more deeply into the scholarly references or across to other entries. For example, the keyword entry on Sentimental, Sentimentality points in its closing to other linked entries, most productively to Form, Formalism and Woman, New Woman but also in its references out to other important relationships to the Harlem Renaissance through Alain Locke's Enter the New Negro and the High Modernists via E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, and D.H. Lawrence. An additional benefit of this associative method, or what Henry Miller would have called spiral form (yet again, a purposive gesture), is that it draws in a cast of figures too often sidelined from the New Modernist Studies. While Ezra Pound, H.G. Wells, Woolf, James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, Forster, and T.S. Eliot are ubiquitous across the entries, there are also passing inclusions of the too often overlooked H.D. in Reality, Realism; John Cowper Powys in Queer, Gay and Shock, Shell Shock; and Mulk Raj Anand in Personality, Impersonality. More extensive recuperations across several entries occur for Eugene Jolas, Robert Graves, Zora Neale Hurston, W.E.B. Du Bois, Laura Riding, and Jean Toomer while Rebecca West, Dorothy Richardson, I.A. Richards, and Mina Loy are as extensively integrated across the volume as any of the High Modernists. Cuddy-Keane, Hammond, and Peat describe the method for developing each quasi-encyclopedic keyword entry by recognizing Research on such a grand scale depends on massive (xv) such as online digital repositories of primary texts such as digitized book projects (ranging from Project Gutenberg through Internet Archive), historical periodical collections in proprietary and open access resources (JSTOR to the Modernist Journals Project and beyond), and the expected scholarly resources of bibliographies, repositories of secondary scholarship, and traditional print library holdings. The implications are akin to Moretti's distant reading in that searches across such a large pool of resources can enable connections and understandings unavailable to a single reader in a lifetime of reading, but the forms of distant reading through digital technologies for which Moretti's project has garnered wide attention do not play the same kind of role here. …

Modernism: Keywords by Melba Cuddy-Keane, Adam Hammond, and Alexandra Peat

Reviewed by: Modernism: Keywords by Melba Cuddy-Keane, Adam Hammond, and Alexandra Peat James Gifford Melba Cuddy-Keane, Adam Hammond, and Alexandra Peat. Modernism: Keywords. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2014. xviii, 266. $112.95. Modernism: Keywords opens with a direct gesture to its predecessor, Raymond Williams’s 1976 Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, while also marking out its principal differences: the narrower focus on modernism, the integration of digital technologies used in a manner loosely akin to Moretti’s distant reading, and a rich hyperlinking (in print) of the thematic nodes of each alphabetized entry. That is, the print book adopts the curatorial and editorial elucidation of each topic that would be expected from a tertiary source while drawing inspiration from the humanities computing scenarios in which alternate relations might emerge through digital technologies. The accomplishment here is akin to the prospects of the Linked Modernisms project that is being developed from the metadata of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism. The comparison is not opportunistic. It points to the most valuable element of Modernism: Keywords: the relational work it is likely to provoke as readers follow its various suggested connections through overlapping keywords across the book. The prospect of a modernist “choose your own adventure” scenario seems too good to be true, and the invitation to the reader’s agency calls back to later works like Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet or Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela—again, it is not an opportunistic comparison, pointing as it does to readerly organization of narrative and complex interpretive responsibilities that shape the relations among the texts. The reader may move across the volume or dip into specific keyword entries, but in each entry there are gestures to further work through the specific invitations to follow more deeply into the scholarly references or across to other entries. For example, the keyword entry on “Sentimental, Sentimentality” points in its closing to other linked entries, most productively to “Form, Formalism” and “Woman, New Woman” but also in its references out to other important relationships to the Harlem Renaissance through Alain Locke’s “Enter the New Negro” and the High Modernists via E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, and D.H. Lawrence. An additional benefit of this associative method, or what Henry Miller would have called “spiral form” (yet again, a purposive gesture), is that it draws in a cast of figures too often sidelined from the New Modernist Studies. While Ezra Pound, H.G. Wells, Woolf, James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, Forster, and T.S. Eliot are ubiquitous across the entries, there are also passing inclusions of the too often over-looked [End Page 244] H. D. in “Reality, Realism”; John Cowper Powys in “Queer, Gay” and “Shock, Shell Shock”; and Mulk Raj Anand in “Personality, Impersonality.” More extensive recuperations across several entries occur for Eugene Jolas, Robert Graves, Zora Neale Hurston, W. E. B. Du Bois, Laura Riding, and Jean Toomer while Rebecca West, Dorothy Richardson, I. A. Richards, and Mina Loy are as extensively integrated across the volume as any of the High Modernists. Cuddy-Keane, Hammond, and Peat describe the method for developing each quasi-encyclopedic keyword entry by recognizing “Research on such a grand scale depends on massive resources” (xv) such as online digital repositories of primary texts such as digitized book projects (ranging from Project Gutenberg through Internet Archive), historical periodical collections in proprietary and open access resources (jstor to the Modernist Journals Project and beyond), and the expected scholarly resources of bibliographies, repositories of secondary scholarship, and traditional print library holdings. The implications are akin to Moretti’s distant reading in that searches across such a large pool of resources can enable connections and understandings unavailable to a single reader in a lifetime of reading, but the forms of distant reading through digital technologies for which Moretti’s project has garnered wide attention do not play the same kind of role here. Nevertheless, the curated nature of the volume, reflecting the care and attention of expert readers in the field, means that readers are invited to connect entries in unexpected ways drawn as much from word frequencies as from the interpretive expertise of the project authors. While the entry on...

Where Truth is not Itself: Laura Riding’s Life of the Dead

Laura Riding’s Life of the Dead (1933) is a strange, morbid, bilingual poem in French and English that poetically renders ten engravings by John Aldridge. In this poem, Riding appears to deliberately misdirect the reader, so that this bizarre poem hovers between the comic and the morbid. As a lesson in uncertainties and indetermination, The Life of the Dead represents an example of a poet’s practice in contradiction with her theory. For while Riding identifies poetry with rigorously self-identical Truth, The Life of the Dead seems bent on emphasizing its lack of self-identity, its multiplicity of meaning and impression. Translation – both from image to text, and from French to English – vividly demonstrates this lack of self-identity, so that the poem appears divided against itself. Laura Riding herself occupies an analogous paradoxical position in Anglo-American poetry: while constantly working to distinguish and distance herself from her contemporaries and from critics and exegetes, poems like The Life of the Dead grapple with the same problems of ambiguity and negativity that have been the hallmark of poetic modernity since Mallarmé. Hence, in this bizarre poem, Riding appears to operate at once on the margins and at the center of modernist poetic practice.

Image Text Ithaca

ITHACA COLLEGE ITHACA, NEW YORK JULY 9-10, 2015 The second annual Image Text Ithaca (ITI) symposium brought together thirteen ITI workshop fellows and several invited guests for public presentations on campus of Ithaca College over course of one evening and next day, following a workshop during which this year's fellows worked on new image and text projects. The brief public event began with a talk by Jason Fulford, a fellow from 2014 workshop, and Tamara Shopsin. They shared individually produced works such as Fulford's photo book Hotel Oracle (2013) and Shopsin's illustration work for New York Times, as well as inspirations (which range from semiotics to poetic ambiguity) for joint book projects including absorbing image-only monograph This Equals That (2014). Other invited speakers included Federica Chiocchetti, who spoke about website she founded, The Photocaptionist, on which are paired visual and text-based works (either found or commissioned) to promote the practice of concubinage between photography and literature, images and words. Chiocchetti also shared several projects she has worked on for Victoria and Albert Museum. Maria Damon of Pratt Institute offered a hypnotic essay moving between cross-stitching, alphabetics, and novels of Kathy Acker, weaving a linguistic thread through a rich cultural history. Matvei Yankelevich, another 2014 fellow, utilizing images and found text from throughout twentieth century (from works by poet Laura Riding to writings by philosopher Vilem Flusser), examined foundational space and structure of books and their elements, recommending how they should be read. This year's ITI fellows (five senior fellows and eight junior fellows) participated in a four-day workshop in days preceding symposium. Since most came from either photography or writing backgrounds, this was first time many had worked in image and text combinations. Daniel Augscholl and Anya Jasbar, cofounders of Ahorn Magazine, an online publication dedicated to contemporary photography, presented a photo essay on theme of desire, combining text and landscape photographs. Photographer Ben Alper presented a screening and audio performance of a project he began during this year's workshop session and had wrapped up that very morning (Thursday). Titled In event of misinterpretation or human error, piece uses found text and photographs from decades-old Popular Mechanics magazines to explore meaning within randomness. Writer Christine Hume used same source material, commenting on white privilege by augmenting text, which she read aloud as images she had selected from magazines were projected. On Friday, Hume presented an original spoken text with an underlayer of found audio of a 911 call and supplemental stressed breathing to heighten tension. Photographer Andre Bradley shared a photographic project with a spoken personal narrative about history, memory, learning, and identity. [Ed. note: See Bradley's Portfolio in this issue of Afterimage.] Author John Keene read text from two short projects, one about online dating (with facially redacted profile photographs culled by ITI co-director Nicholas Muellner from gay online dating archives) and other concerning slavery and based on work of Kara Walker. …

CONTEMPORARY MISOGYNY: LAURA RIDING, WILLIAM EMPSON AND THE CRITICS – A SURVEY OF MIS-HISTORY

This essay examines three books: A Survey of Modernist Poetry, by Laura Riding and Robert Graves, Seven Types of Ambiguity by William Empson, and William Empson: Among the Mandarins by John Haffenden. It shows how and why Laura Riding was the original author of the interpretation of Shakespeare's Sonnet 129 in A Survey of Modernist Poetry, which provided the idea for Empson's understanding of ‘ambiguity’ which in turn was highly significant to the subsequent development of ‘New Criticism’. It examines the history of A Survey of Modernist Poetry since its first publication in 1927, its treatment by critics and reviewers, and its mistakenly being described as a book by Robert Graves up to the present day as epitomized in John Haffenden's biography. It also indicates that modernist or post-modernist literary criticism from 1927 onwards would have been significantly different had numerous critics, Empson among them, but other poets and authors, too, given more attention to the work of Laura Riding than to Robert Graves.

Selections from Len Lye and the Problem of Popular Films (1938)

In 1926 the new zealand artist, writer, and budding filmmaker len lye arrived in london by way of sydney, australia.Only twenty-five years old, Lye was still a few years away from his first breakthrough in film: Tusalava (1929), a nine-minute animated film composed of over 4,400 drawings that took nearly two years to complete (Horrocks, Len Lye 91). The artist would spend the next two decades in London, years in which his association with the General Post Office Film Unit would provide him with the resources he needed to create some of his most famous films, such as A Colour Box (1935), Rainbow Dance (1936), and N or NW (1938).In December 1925, a young American poet by the name of Laura Gottschalk—soon to change her name to Laura Riding—followed Robert Graves's advice and moved to London. While she had yet to publish a book of poems, her poetry had appeared in a number of literary journals, most notably the Fugitive (Jacobs xvii). Her first collection, The Close Chaplet, was published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press in October 1926.

The Birth of New Criticism: Conflict and Conciliation in the Early Work of William Empson, I.A. Richards, Laura Riding, and Robert Graves by Donald J. Childs (review)

Reviewed by: The Birth of New Criticism: Conflict and Conciliation in the Early Work of William Empson, I.A. Richards, Laura Riding, and Robert Graves by Donald J. Childs Stephen J. Adams Donald J. Childs. The Birth of New Criticism: Conflict and Conciliation in the Early Work of William Empson, I.A. Richards, Laura Riding, and Robert Graves. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s up, 2013. 406pp. $100.00. When I was asked to review a book entitled The Birth of New Criticism, I accepted with little hesitation. As an erstwhile undergraduate in Allen Tate’s class at the University of Minnesota, I have lived my academic life evolving from what I understand to be the New Criticism ever since, never wholly losing contact with that wholesome root. But when I received this volume and read the subtitle, I knew adjustments were required. This is not a book about the American New Criticism but about its English fore-bears—William Empson, I.A. Richards, and (surprisingly) Robert Graves. Suspecting a bias on my part, I asked several colleagues and was greeted with the same reply: the New Criticism was an American phenomenon. So the title of Professor Childs’s study is misleading. It might more fairly have been called The British Backgrounds of New Criticism or, even more accurately, Robert Graves and English Poetics of the 1920s. For this is essentially a study of Robert Graves’s poetic theory and its immediate influence, and read as such it is a thorough, detailed, and original piece of literary history. [End Page 127] Childs begins his study with a candid self correction: he quotes his own entry written for the The Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory (Toronto 1993), a skilfully condensed summary of the generally accepted sequence of events. But when he wrote that summary twenty years ago, he was unaware of the place of Robert Graves in the earliest phases, and this book corrects that history. The greater half of Childs’s study is devoted to Graves’s presence in Empson’s breakthrough book, Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930). Empson’s book, written at the astonishing age of twenty-two, is one of those rare works of criticism that never loses its value: its reader even today is not merely informed but put through the paces of exercising the Empsonian method, as she sorts through tangled lines of syntax and semantics. It can still be a mind-altering experience. Childs notes the familiar genesis of Empson’s book, as described by his Cambridge tutor Richards: At about his third visit he brought up the games of interpretation which Laura Riding and Robert Graves had been playing [in A Survey of Modernist Poetry 1927] with the unpunctuated form of “The expense of spirit in a waste of shame.” Taking the sonnet as a conjuror takes his hat, he produced an endless swarm of lively rabbits from it and ended by “You could do that with any poetry, couldn’t you?” This was a Godsend to a Director of Studies, so I said, “You’d better go off and do it, hadn’t you?” A week later he said he was still slapping away at it on his typewriter. In a note to his book, Empson duly acknowledged his debt to Graves, but he neglected to include Laura Riding as co-author—in fact “lead author”— of A Survey of Modernist Poetry. Graves, after all, was an established presence, having published four previous books of prose, while the youthful Laura Riding had published nothing. Riding, reasonably enough, protested to Empson in a letter, and Empson apologized, saying that he was thinking primarily of Graves’s earlier books. Not satisfied, she followed with further correspondence that became increasingly nasty. Graves too went on to bad mouth Empson (he is “as clever as a monkey & I do not like monkeys” [56]) and the two persisted in their pestering correspondence, so that Empson, in his second edition of the Seven Types, dropped any mention of the Riding-Graves Survey, referring only in passing to Graves’s notion of “conflict.” Donald Childs properly labels the episode a “silly quarrel,” but it underlines the distance from American-style...

Contemporaries and Snobs by Laura Riding (review)

Contemporaries and Snobs by Laura Riding (review)