Modernist Impulse Research Articles

ENGAGING TRADITION IN MODERN ARAB POETICS

AbstractThe modernist movement in Arabic literature develops its own poetics, especially pertaining to poetry, in dialogue with both the Arab literary legacy and modernity in its Western manifestations. In the face of many challenges after the Second World War, poets felt the need for a poetics of regeneration, a mythical method that could superimpose a totalizing vision on a seemingly dying land and civilization. T. S. Eliot's writings on tradition and his use of myth drew attention to pre-Islamic mythology, especially in its Babylonian and Phoenician manifestations. Tradition was manipulated, as well, in search of its dynamic impulse for innovation and change. Both al-Ma'arrī and al-Mutanabbī were re-discovered beyond their other attributes. Both foreshadow the modernist impulse for change, dissent, thought, reason and morality. Both make high claims for poetry. Although modern poets developed different commemorative strategies, recollection undergoes re-tailoring in view of each poet's commitment at a certain time. This essay discusses these strategies under four headings: Dialogization, Dedications, Exilic Space, Textual Apprenticeship.

Modernity's Abject Space: The Rise and Fall of Durban's Cato Manor

Recent work on the history of urbanization in South Africa suggests that the development of urban apartheid policy was influenced by the broader discourses of modernization and planning which guided the morphology of urban areas in the industrial West. Less attention, however, has been given to the ways in which these discourses of modernization served to define and control certain forms of subjectivity within the urban order. Accordingly, in this paper I examine the relationship between urban policy and public discourses about race and space in the city of Durban in the 1940s. In the first part of the paper I argue that the development of urban apartheid was marked by a modernist impulse to define and control the subjects and spaces of the city. This control was fostered by new circuits of power designed to produce racialized working subjects and the orderly and efficient management of urban space. Despite these attempts, however, Indian and African residents created informal spaces on the outskirts of the city, spaces which posed a challenge to the political and economic hegemony of the white settler population. In the second part of the paper, I draw upon Julia Kristeva's notion of abjection to argue that one such space—an area known as Cato Manor—became a repository of larger fears about the changing nature of identity and alterity within the city. These abject fears burst into public consciousness in 1949, after an Indian–African ‘riot’ in Cato Manor called into question the efficacy of the city's attempts to manage the social and spatial contours of urbanization. In response, the city set about enacting policies of formal residential segregation, policies which can be read as attempts to manage the troubling presence of racialized ‘others’ through spatial control.

The Economist and the Entrepreneur: Modernist Impulses in Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit

The Economist and the Entrepreneur: Modernist Impulses in <i>Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit</i>

Heartlands or neglected geographies? Liminality, power, and the hyperreal rural

This paper attempts to question what is meant by power in recent calls for the study of ‘neglected’ voices in rural studies. As such, there are two principal thoughts being developed here. First, the whole concept of the ‘neglected’ needs to be looked at much more closely. Many are willing to give in to modernist impulses to unearth and discover these other perspectives on life in rural areas without giving adequate consideration to the power relations which not merely repress these voices but indeed encourage them to speak as the neglected. Second, insofar as power can used in this way, to produce populations identifiable as much on the basis of what they lack as on the basis of what they have, scholarship which seeks to contribute to the opportunities people might have to improve their quality of life needs to avoid fixing definitions of who those people are or are not. The roles played by ambivalence and hybridity in everyday life (and particularly our spatial representations of it) need to be valorized and further explored. These thoughts are tracked along four trajectories involving themes of liminality and alienation, simulation and the temporality of communication, the bias of investigation, and the danger of recuperation.

“Church and Age Unite!”: The Modernist Impulse in American Catholicism. By R. Scott Appleby. Notre Dame Studies in American Catholicism. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992. vii + 296 pp. $29.95.

“Church and Age Unite!”: The Modernist Impulse in American Catholicism. By R. Scott Appleby. Notre Dame Studies in American Catholicism. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992. vii + 296 pp. $29.95. - Volume 65 Issue 3

A "Tangled History": Modernism in Europe and the United States

Dorothy Ross and her companions in this volume question the conventional separation of modernism into scientistic and artistic enterprises. They join contemporary efforts reconnect European and American history by looking for links between cognitive modernism in the emerging disciplines called by Michel Foucault the sciences-here physics, sociology, economics, psychology, biology-and aesthetic modernism in the arts, including literary criticism. Within the dynamic transatlantic culture of modernism, Ross notes, all participants moved toward greater subjectivity, but that move was modulated in the human sciences committed scientific rationality and progress, more thoroughgoing in the realm of aesthetic creation and criticism (pp. 8-9). But postmodernism casts the shadow which motivates writers in this stimulating collection. Reminding us that, while some postmodernists define themselves against modernism, . . . others see themselves as bringing central modernist impulses fruition (p. 9), Ross's introduction focuses, like Alan Megill's Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida (1985), on the tendency among postmodernists make language the only possibility for creating self and culture. Postmodern linguistic theory melts the fence between science and art and makes them both into interpretative languages. Whereas modernists attempted achieve tense balance between order and fragmentation, postmodernists have embraced uncertainty, tolerating and sometimes welcoming 'a world seen as random and multiple, even at times absurd' (Megill, cited by Ross, p. 11). Presenting a tangled history, the authors of these essays seek to uncover the ground on which the competing discourses of modern culture continue struggle (p. 25). David Hollinger offers for the third time his witty and engaging piece, The Knower and the Artificer, and addresses postmodernism in a lengthy

‘Church and Age Unite!’ The modernist impulse in American Catholicism. By R. Scott Appleby. (Notre Dame Studies in American Catholicism, 11.) Pp. viii + 296. Notre Dame–London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992. £26.95. 0 268 00782 9

‘Church and Age Unite!’ The modernist impulse in American Catholicism. By R. Scott Appleby. (Notre Dame Studies in American Catholicism, 11.) Pp. viii + 296. Notre Dame–London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992. £26.95. 0 268 00782 9 - Volume 45 Issue 3

Book Review: “Church and Age Unite!”: The Modernist Impulse in American Catholicism

Book Review: “Church and Age Unite!”: The Modernist Impulse in American Catholicism

"Church and Age Unite!" The Modernist Impulse in American Catholicism. R. Scott Appleby

<i>"Church and Age Unite!" The Modernist Impulse in American Catholicism</i>. R. Scott Appleby

“Church and Age Unite!”: The Modernist Impulse in American Catholicism. By R. Scott Appleby. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992. viii + 296 pages. $29.95.

“Church and Age Unite!”: The Modernist Impulse in American Catholicism. By R. Scott Appleby. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992. viii + 296 pages. $29.95.

"Church and Age Unite!" The Modernist Impulse in American Catholicism.

"Church and Age Unite!" The Modernist Impulse in American Catholicism.

Body and Soul: The Modernist Impulse in American Puritanism

Our fascination with New England Puritans is never-ending. Poised on the brink of modernity, this small but determined band of seekers has been placed on the historical cusp between two worlds-the world we have lost (with its gentle agrarian rhythms and communal ethos) and the world we have gained (with its strident individualism and ruthless economic imperatives). From Max Weber to Sacvan Bercovitch, the tortured soul of the Puritan has come to embody the paradoxes of modern man. Driven by the intense desire to labor in God's vineyard, his ambitions mocked by the iron logic of predestinarian doctrine yet fed by the need to demonstrate election, the Puritan saint faced the dawning of the capitalist age with a disciplined will and an entrepreneurial spirit-an unbeatable combination. Now two new studies, the latest offerings from Oxford University Press's acclaimed Religion in America series, join the search for the elusive modernist strain in Puritan culture. Amanda Porterfield's study of the emergence of what she calls religious humanism among the first generation of Puritan emigres and John Corrigan's companion study of the theological legacy of this rhetorical tradition among a group of early-eighteenth-century Congregational ministers provide new insight into the complicated intellectual journey of New Englanders from Puritan to Yankee. Highlighting such classic themes as the shift from piety to moralism, the widening gulf between public and private worlds as the communal ideal disintegrated under the impact of commercial capitalism, and the rise of individualism, Porterfield and Corrigan allow us to test familiar truths about colonial New England from fresh

"Church and Age Unite!" The Modernist Impulse in American Catholicism

Journal Article “Church and Age Unite!” The Modernist Impulse in American Catholicism, by R. Scott Appleby. Notre Dame Studies in American Catholicism, Volume 11. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992, vii + 286 pp. $29.95 Get access David L. Salvaterra David L. Salvaterra Loras College Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Sociology of Religion, Volume 54, Issue 3, Fall 1993, Pages 331–332, https://doi.org/10.2307/3711739 Published: 01 October 1993

Church and age unite!: the modernist impulse in American Catholicism

Church and age unite!: the modernist impulse in American Catholicism

Avant-Gardes and De-Author-Izations: Harlem Gallery and the Cultural Contradictions of Modernism

It be premature to speak of on work of Melvin Tolson; so few academic critics have paid him any attention that it is more accurate to speak of than consensus -unless, indeed, neglect is itself critical consensus. Still, what little attention he has received has nevertheless tended to strike a common chord: most critics who write on Tolson feel compelled to deal with reasons for his consignment to a nearly universal critical oblivion, and most critics tend to explain that consignment same way-by casting Tolson's modernism as an historical anomaly. Thus we hear that Harlem Gallery rolled off presses just as Eliot and New Criticism began to wane as dominant forces in literary fashion, leaving Tolson momentarily of step; or that while Tolson busied himself out-pounding Pound, his fellow poets forgot to send him message that Pound was out; or that, simply, the timing was bad for such a complex piece.' The result so far, twenty-two years after Tolson's death, has been that, in Raymond Nelson's words, Tolson may be most elusive, most endangered of important American poets.2 Yet Tolson is not simply another example of visionary artist overlooked by his contemporaries: we are confronted here with a situation both more complex and more poignant. More poignant, because of manifold ironies of Tolson's position-not least among them irony that he has been disdained by academy even as he has been disdained by black critics precisely for having written academic verse. And more complex, because in an important sense most of Tolson's critics are doubly mistaken: first, in that Tolson's neglect does not hinge entirely on his poetic practice; and second, in that modernism did not simply go out of style. Most complex of all, however, and most overlooked, is fact that Harlem GalleryTolson's magnum opus, and surely work by which his reputation will stand or fall-is itself not so much an artifact, a fossil, of modernist poetry as it is an enactment of contradictory poetic and cultural claims of that poetry. On one hand, this amounts to saying that Tolson's embrace of modernism in Harlem Gallery goes far beyond mere imitation of Eliot's and Pound's difficult techniques of allusion, compression, and ellipsis that Tolson embraced not merely a technique, but an entire ideology; on other hand, it also suggests that, oddly enough, Tolson was right to think that the modern idiom is here to stay3-but that it is here to stay in a way none of Tolson's critics have yet realized. For influence of Eliot and New Critics indeed have waned as a force in literature itself, giving way to, among other things, Beats and Black Aesthetics; but legacy of modernismnamely, an academy which fulfills modernist impulse to create a literature to be

The Decline of American Postmodernism

Postmodernism as a literary movement in the United States is now in its final phase of decadence. Ironically, the authenticity of its birth is still a hotly debated issue. A strong contingent of critics insists that ours is a late-modernist phase filled with minor talents. Anything that is not easily placed in this tradition is dismissed as worthless pop art. However, an increasingly vocal group of critics maintains that postmodernism does exist and make their cases by wielding Heidegger, Nietzsche, Derrida, Barthes, and Lacan' (among others) as their supporters. So deep, in fact, is the contempt of academics for contemporary culture that they have canonized theorists and philosophers rather than the actual literary progenitors of the movement. Postmodernism is being redefined as a nonmovement whose literature consists mostly of translated theory, or else reactionary contemporary writers are being forced into the critical mold with often absurd assertions about their writing. Beyond this arena of contention, American culture moves into an era of postliterature. The term postmodern has found its way into general usage among writers and critics to describe a tendency in writing that follows the modernist impulse toward nonlinear form but abandons the modernist ideology in other social, political, and cultural areas. In their preface to The Postmoderns: The New American Poetry Revised,2 George Butterick and Donald Allen name Charles Olson as the first American to use the term

The Knower and the Artificer

IT IS EASIER TO TALK ABOUT SOMETHING IF YOU HAVE WORDS FOR IT. A LACK OF GOOD terms for talking about has rendered the study of much recent intellectual history a walk through a multisided room of mirrors. Each wall said to be modernist, yet each reflects light differently, and makes it difficult to get a clear view of any object in the room, including the walls themselves. It has long been suspected that this effect derives in large part from the limited language we use to discuss our recent past. One savant after another has called for a richer vocabulary,' but no one seems willing to give up on which, for all its vagueness, continues to confer a unique, almost spiritual authority. To demonstrate that a previously neglected or underappreciated author actually a modernist remains, after several decades of this literary game, the most effective means of bringing such an author to the critical attention of the cogniscenti.2 One can talk about versions of modernism, or variations on modern themes, but the notion of a single, overarching Modernist impulse continues to reign amid admissions that its essence eludes definition. Scholars seem reluctant to remove any thing they really care about from the formidable company of the modern. Where else there to go with any aspect of recent intellectual history that isn't (shudder) Victorian? Certain American political scientists, we are told, have accepted a philosophy of modernism. This philosophy based on the reality and social efficacy of scientific knowledge: once such knowledge is accumulated and gained, modernism holds, conflicts thought to be endemic to modern society could be rationally controlled, mediated and containedjustly, equitably and democratically.3 Could anything be farther from the family of perspectives on modern life normally attributed to Kafka, Eliot, Lawrence or Heidegger? This modernism of a major American academic tradition would remain alien from the canonical literary modernists even if deprived of the complacency here attributed to it, and endowed with a greater sense of contradiction and irony. What defines this peculiar modernism its faith in science, its sense that what our civilization requires in order to be rescued from itself more likely to come from communities of knowers than from a succession of artist-heroes. If Joyce's Stephen Dedalus expected to forge the uncreated conscience of a race in the smithy of his soul, Joyce had plenty of

Book Review: III. Historical — Theological Studies: The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism

Book Review: III. Historical — Theological Studies: The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism

The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism

The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism

The Modernist Impulse in American Protestanism

The Modernist Impulse in American Protestanism