Modernist Preoccupation Research Articles

Hardy, Conrad and the Senses by Hugh Epstein

Reviewed by: Hardy, Conrad and the Senses by Hugh Epstein Yael Levin Hugh Epstein, Hardy, Conrad and the Senses. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019. 312 pp. Hugh Epstein’s Hardy, Conrad and the Senses brings together an impressive array of known and lesser-known Victorian scientists, philosophers, and psychologists to stage a defamiliarizing return to Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad. Testing assumptions of historical periodization that have traditionally separated critical approaches to their work, the book shows that the labels Modernism and Victorian have muffled significant connections between the two authors’ representation of sensory impressions. Epstein uses this new focus to reframe the comparative analysis beyond the critical tendency to read the two authors [End Page 374] together through their shared pessimistic vision of a human existence bereft of providence. A book of criticism can offer no greater reward than allowing us to see works we know and love in a new light. Reading these novels alongside a historically informed conceptualization of the senses, Hardy, Conrad and the Senses does precisely this. The book proceeds as an interrogation of the work of the senses, a preoccupation that Victorian art shared with the physical sciences. Epstein asks that we view what has been deemed a uniquely modernist preoccupation through Victorian discourse and ideas. This is a theoretically simple yet original move. Distinguishing between the literary impressionism associated with modernism and the work of the authors in question, Epstein shows that the focus here is not on the consciousness of the focalizer. Unlike Henry James, Walter Pater, and Virginia Woolf, Hardy and Conrad look to the “vibrations in the ether,” “the relations between things” that we associate with atmosphere. Conrad’s sensationism, he writes, “conceives of receptiveness and understanding as a continual process of exchange rather than as a raid whose haul is secreted within imprisoning walls; and the action of each novel is to disallow their desire to remain onlookers in an unassailed subjectivity” (42). The drama unfolds as a tension between the “vivifying receptiveness of the senses” that threaten “to absorb one into the present moment” and the need to “maintain the self-possession which enables one to negotiate the world” (19). It shuttles from mind to mood, from interiority to exteriority, a “physical involvement in a scenic moment that is also active in producing consciousness” (49). This is a recording of the present that contains consciousness rather than being contained by it. Epstein terms this literary method scenic realism. It is the particular form which marks the contribution of Hardy and Conrad to the swelling of novelistic description in the age of the observation of phenomena. It asks for a responsiveness to atmospheres and vibrations, a bodily cosmic awareness, such that the components of a scene as a whole, including human consciousness, infuse the rendering of moments as they pass. The written scene that results thus belongs neither entirely to a personal inner conception, nor entirely to a visible external social or physical reality, but to the moment in which those two coalesce to realise themselves as an event. (70) Such literary exploration proves significant against the backdrop of a conceptualization of subjectivity that is seen as inherently passive. American historian and diplomat Henry Adams (1903) describes the subject as “a conscious ball of vibrating motions, traversed in every direction by infinite lines of rotations or vibration” (qtd. in Epstein 50). It is precisely the anxiety owing to this passivity that generates the need to re-establish one’s sense of identity and individuality. This is an important qualification to a conceptualization of a passive subjectivity, as current insights on the same speak to the way one becomes with the world [End Page 375] rather than as a separate entity. Epstein compares the two conceptualizations to suggest that though contemporary ideas might recall the scientific and literary Victorian experiments, they cannot be squared with Victorian thought. The immanent conception of self as it is viewed today is often associated with moral development rather than with a threat to our place in the world. Though he highlights this important distinction, Epstein also persuasively shows how Hardy and Conrad anticipate this new way of thinking. ________ While the title suggests an...

The Bible as Holy Scripture

The modern era has brought new elements to bear on the Doctrine of Holy Scripture: the centrality of Revelation and the character of the Bible as narrative. The first and second Vatican Councils exhibit these traits as much as do Karl Barth and Post-liberal theologians. This essay argues that the governing motif for a Doctrine of Scripture should be writing rather than speaking or disclosing, and Instruction rather than story. The pressure exerted by these modernist preoccupations has re-centered and deformed the proper weight and ordering of Scripture, diminishing Torah, elevating the Prophetic (historical) books, and bringing a Messianic reading of Scripture into sole possession of canonical interpretation. Paying close heed to Scripture's own self-identification as writing, as Book, brings the Five Books of Moses (the Pentateuch) to its proper place as head of the Scriptures, and places the New Testament as written text as proper complement to the Old.

The Violence of Autonomy

The Violence of Autonomy Jenny Gunn (bio) Autonomy: The Social Ontology of Art under Capitalism by Nicholas Brown. Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2019. 232 pages. $99.95 cloth, $25.95 paperback. What makes a work of art? How does the work of art resist the status of the mere commodity, one like any other, exchangeable and substitutable? Answering these are key concerns of Nicholas Brown's Autonomy: The Social Ontology of Art under Capitalism. From a certain perspective these questions may seem negligible nearly a half century on from Andy Warhol's Brillo boxes and Campbell's soup cans, which equally insist that art is indeed a commodity like any other (not to mention a century on from Marcel Duchamp's readymades), but Brown revisits them as the thirtieth anniversary of Frederic Jameson's watermark analysis, Post-Modernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Duke University Press, 1991) nears. In the introduction, Brown examines how the supposition of the restricted field of production for the fine arts (both as genus and species) has become increasingly untenable. The high modernist preoccupation with questions of medium specificity marked a crisis point in which to maintain a restricted field, for any aesthetic form, such as painting, necessitates greater and greater limitations on what defines it as a field of production. For Brown, the hemming in of the restricted field nearly to the point of its disappearance is in large part a response to the intensification of commodification and [End Page 464] its fated invasion of the fine arts. Consequently, today, as Brown asserts, the notional exploration of any artistic medium must necessarily address "the commodity character of the work" (22). There are many moments in the history of modern art that would seem to lead to this eventual crisis point and the rise of the art commodity, perhaps particularly the invention of the reproductive arts: lithography, photography, and cinema. As an acolyte of art historian and critic Michael Fried, however, Brown locates the commodification of the visual arts in an aesthetic development parallel to Pop art, that is, Minimalism, or as Fried preferred to call it, literalism. Fried is clearly identifiable as a key interlocutor for Brown's project, invoked directly by name in places but more frequently through the adaptation of his well-worn terminology (e.g., "absorption," "theatricality," and "conviction").1 Whereas Fried's 1967 work of art criticism "Art and Objecthood" reflects an anxiety regarding the infiltration of the visual arts by the literal objects of Minimalism, one of the more interesting observations of Brown's Autonomy is that what Fried was in fact fearfully witnessing was the descent of the fine arts into the status of a commodity like any other. As Brown explains, "Fried's 'formalist' account of the distinction between art and recent nonart is also a historicist one fully derivable from the Marxist problematic of the 'real subsumption of labor under capital" (7). The theatricality that Fried ascribes to the Minimalist art installation asserts a certain confrontational situation involving the spectator. The Minimalist object beckons and thereby for Fried rebounds in an uncomfortable if then novel mode of self-awareness of himself as its audience or, as Brown implies more aptly, its consumer. When revisited through the lens of Brown's study, Minimalist theatricality is indicative of art succumbing to the status of the commodity, a commodity that delivers variable and unstable values (experiences) to its viewers but as such inherently lacks the ability to produce conviction, in other words to assert its autonomy as a work of art (7). Indeed, within the industrial manufactured and serial geometries of Minimalist artworks, such autonomy is explicitly rejected. What Fried, writing in 1967, merely senses as representing a crisis point in the history of the visual arts, Brown fully accepts as a fait accompli, that is, the exacerbation of the art commodity as general condition. In such a context, in which no viable alternative to capitalism exists, he argues the former politics of something like Warhol's Campbell's soup cans is evacuated. Asserting art as commodity in the context of the twenty-first century represents in Brown's view a simple acquiescence to the...

Modernist Physics: Waves, Particles, and Relativities in the Writings of Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence by Rachel Crossland

Reviewed by: Modernist Physics: Waves, Particles, and Relativities in the Writings of Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence by Rachel Crossland Max Chapnick (bio) Rachel Crossland, Modernist Physics: Waves, Particles, and Relativities in the Writings of Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018, 208 pp. $85.00 cloth. When evaluating scholarship on science and literature, should we ask, "'Are sources of influence other than scientific examined and safely dismissed?'" (p. 182). Crossland's trim, well-researched, and persuasive book explicitly writes against Lance Schachterle's premise; writers and scientists, not to mention philosophers, artists, and psychologists, all work with "shared discourse," a term borrowed from Gillian Beer (p. 9). Influence not only flows from science to literature, but exists in culture's common concerns. The same anxieties that sparked Niels Bohr's complementarity may have also inspired Roger Fry's post-impressionism or Orlando's shifting pronouns. The result is a book of cultural history and textual analysis that deftly leverages physics to understand several modernist preoccupations. Crossland's three sections correspond to three "New Physics" concepts, published by Albert Einstein as three papers during his 1905 Annus Mirabilis: the photoelectric effect's dualities, special relativity, and Brownian motion. One by one, Crossland neatly maps these ideas onto the works of Woolf and Lawrence. Though focusing mainly on Woolf and Lawrence may seem to limit the evidence Crossland can muster toward a culture-wide argument—notably, Crossland will expand beyond these two novelists in her final chapter—this relatively narrow scope counterintuitively produces a powerful effect. Instead of a more conventional formula that starts with science before moving to readings, Crossland self-consciously uses a multidisciplinary structure divided chronologically; first she discusses texts from before "a specific chronological moment," then texts from after that moment (p. 13). (In part 1, on Woolf, the moment is Louis de Broglie's 1925 wave-particle dissertation, and in part 2 it is Lawrence's 1921 reading about Einstein's relativity; part 3 reverts to the traditional science-first form.) Crossland's focused, chronological structure demonstrates, often surprisingly, that works by Woolf and Lawrence that come before the relevant science, and that "would be ascribed to influence if they appeared" after, "are in fact more likely to be due to some broader cultural context" (pp. 12–13). In reconceiving the standard structure, Crossland deprivileges science, instead emphasizing how entangled and multidimensional the relationship between literature and science really is. Crossland begins with a usefully succinct theoretical introduction, positioning her research as balanced between the "restrictive idea of influence on the one hand and the somewhat hazy concept of the Zeitgeist . . . on the other" (p. 7). This is not a false promise; for example, in part 2, even as Crossland spends several heavily footnoted pages documenting Lawrence's serious reading in relativity, Crossland then shows how Lawrence may have been more unaccountably swayed by the Zeitgeist's misinterpretations of Einstein's theory. With scaffolding from Beer and N. Katharine Hayles, [End Page 145] Crossland settles on "shared discourse," a middle road between direct influence and amorphous zeitgeist. To use the same example: Lawrence's "theory of human relativity" (p. 74) explicitly references Einstein in its very terminology, but also reveals Lawrence's immersion in mainstream, cultural ideas about relativity. The book succeeds not only because of the admirable coordination between structure and argument, but also because Crossland's attention to physics opens up abiding questions in the careers of these two authors. In the first chapter on Woolf's early work, both Woolf and the scientists struggle to reconcile binaries; the scientists' data proves light is sometimes a wave and sometimes a particle, while Woolf moves between, on the one hand, the indistinguishable "dreams and realities" of Night and Day and on the other hand the "very black-and-white" "either/or" of Jacob's Room (p. 41). Perhaps its no coincidence that once Woolf figures out her "inclusive 'and,'" about the same time Bohr hits on complementarity in 1927, Woolf writes her most famous and most transcendent works: To the Lighthouse, Orlando, and The Waves (p. 42). Crossland describes both physics' and also Woolf's reconciliation with the principle of...

Modernist Doubt in James Hanley’s The Ocean

This paper examines James Hanley’s novel The Ocean (1941). The novel falls into the genre of open-boat stories, of which several modernist examples exist. Hanley interrogates and develops modernist concerns established in previous texts such as Stephen Crane’s ‘The Open Boat’ (1897). Hanley’s working-class context and his reference to the events of World War II are key to understanding how he differs from Crane. Specifically, Hanley includes an incident where a lifeboat is machine-gunned by a submarine. Some historical context is provided for this incident, and this paper suggests its importance in terms of a modernist preoccupation with meaninglessness. This paper pays special attention to Hanley’s use of shifting narrative perspectives in order to examine psychological trauma. In part, this paper argues that Hanley’s radical materialism distinguishes him from other modernist writers of the ocean such as Stephen Crane, and, more generally, Joseph Conrad.

Lifeworld of the Junkyard: Toward a Sensory Politics of Place

Lifeworld of the Junkyard:Toward a Sensory Politics of Place Nicholas Gamso (bio) Sensory Ethnography is a new documentary movement that connects the workings of cinema to the dynamic ontologies of space, labor, and environment.1 Harvard University's Sensory Ethnography Lab, where the movement has found an institutional home, has produced several feature films, including Sweetgrass (Dirs. lucien castaing-taylor and ilisa barbash, 2009) and Leviathan (Dirs. castaing-taylor and véréna paravel, 2012), which have attained widespread critical attention for their "embodied," "digressive," and "open-ended" approaches.2 These projects reflect a concern voiced by lucien castaing-taylor, director of the lab and leading light of the movement, over what he terms "iconophobia"—a fear of the image and corresponding belief that "[t]extuality itself, and textuality alone" is the basis for critical legitimacy.3 castaing-taylor prefers works that proceed through a sharing of sensory environments, what he calls, citing andré bazin, "technical [as opposed to psychological] realism."4 Such films are minimally structured, utilizing a raw formalism to immerse audiences in the flux of sonic and visual effects, thus aiming to "restore to the viewers some of the autonomy they have in [End Page 429] interpreting reality when they are confronted with it as witnesses in real life."5 By inviting the audience into a chapel of pure experience, works of sensory ethnography seek to exhibit and instantiate the real, unmediated by words. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Car parts amassed in Willets Point. Film still from Foreign Parts (2010), dir. Véréna Paravel and J. P. Sniadecki. Image courtesy of the filmmakers. Yet some words cannot be suppressed. Foreign Parts (2010), directed by Véréna Paravel and J. P. Sniadecki, provides an instance of sensory ethnography that embraces language and performance, understanding these forms of expression to produce material reality and thus to create the groundwork for an urban-environmental politics. The object of the film is Willets Point, Queens, a patchwork of junkyards and car lots with a large and vibrant immigrant work force. The space itself is a marvel: ruined and dismembered commodities amass about the neighborhood, anchoring the everyday itineraries of the people who buy them, sell them, and turn them into scrap (Figure 1). But the film's potential as politics comes from the people themselves, who insist on intervening to assert their own agendas. Junkyard workers flood the film with performances, grievances, fabulations, and other creative usurpations of the medium. A garrulous and multilingual ensemble of New Yorkers, they pull the film into their own lives. In doing so, they extract the genre from the confines of normative institutional space and into the living ecologies of the city. The film thus offers a prismatic [End Page 430] juncture between media and materiality, the image and the unfolding world it comes to resemble. Paravel explains: In Foreign Parts, we sought above all to bring to the screen the lifeworld of the junkyard—not just of the human subjects but also the ecology of the auto parts, often in some liminal state between life and death or animate and inanimate—rather than to tell viewers exactly what they should think and feel about the place.6 In charting the automated and performed actions of the workers, surveying their esoteric knowledge and well-honed skills, the film depicts the animacy of matter and its relation to the lived condition of emplaced human communities. Filmmaker and subject are interwoven through action and expression into the spaces, materials, infrastructures, and ecologies that surround them, and not out of an ethic of equivalency, which reduces all things to mere matter, but through an improvisational network of dependencies. When fissures do arise—for example between the filmmakers and the objects of their ethnography—they come to light as structuring features of urban space that might be unworked through discreet tactics of interpretation, detournement, and irony, with varying results. In the process of employing such tactics, the participants go so far as to problematize the film's truth claims, caricaturizing its humanitarian tendencies and subverting its modernist preoccupations with vision, essence, and purity. Foreign Parts, by virtue of its participatory form...

Funny walking: the rise, fall and rise of the Anglo-American comic eccentric dancer

ABSTRACTThis article will attempt to reposition comic eccentric dance as a metamorphic form that still, surprisingly, exists, and is to be found with reasonable ubiquity, in renewed incarnations within twenty-first-century media.Tracing the origins of comic eccentric dance through examples of earlier comedy performance, and drawing from Bergson's comic theory of body misalliance, this article will discuss this particularly ludic fusion of music and comedy. Further changes to the form affected by modernist preoccupations during the new Jazz Age at the turn of the twentieth century will be suggested. Finally, ways in which the formulation lives on in twenty-first-century incarnations in the comedy work of, for instance, Jimmy Fallon and Ricky Gervase, and in popular television shows such as Strictly Come Dancing (BBC 2004–) and Britain's Got Talent (ITV 2006–) will be posited.

Silence in Modern Irish Literature ed. by Michael McAteer

Reviewed by: Silence in Modern Irish Literature ed. by Michael McAteer Ruben Moi Silence in Modern Irish Literature, ed. Michael McAteer, pp. 220. Leiden and Boston: Brill Rodopi, 2017. $134. How do you articulate silence? And silencing? In verbal and visual arts? And why? Silence in Modern Irish Literature demonstrates succinctly the anatomy of silence, and offers a spectrum of perspicacious essays into its treatment in a large number of Irish authors from the twentieth century. The intriguing subject matter McAteer’s book brings to a wider audience comes from a wider sphere of cognitive speculation and creative activity than the sources of Sontag and pop art. 4′33″, John Cage’s pivotal performance of silence from 1952, might epitomize in music, drama, and intellectual activity the modernist preoccupation with soundlessness that also charaterizes much of philosophy, arts, and literature throughout the twentieth century. The points and play of Cage’s probing of silence on the stage of music probably stunned the country famous for kissing the blarney stone as much as other listeners, if it were not for the fact that considerable work of American and European modernism frequently suffered under the moral censorship and political outlook of Ireland at the time: the Irish index is the best guide to modernist literature. Among writers banned between 1929 and the end of the millennium are Marie Stopes, Aldous Huxley, J. D. Salinger, Liam O’Flaherty, Sean O’Faolain, Frank O’Connor, Sam Hanna Bell, and Edna O’Brien. Joyce was not directly banned, but published abroad in order not to be. Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman remained unpublished until after the author’s death in 1966. His An Béal Bocht (1941) operates on the traverse of silence, silencing, and articulation. In philosophy, the anxiety in Heidegger’s existentialism tends to defeat speech, Wittgenstein prefers silence when facing unspeakable matters; Derrida prioritizes writing over speech; and Adorno’s factoid postulated that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. Relations between poetry, stillness. and silence exist in Irish poetry, too. “Whatever you say, say nothing” and “stones of silence,” Heaney’s verses from the controversial North in 1975, captured the moods of and multiple reasons for muteness during the Troubles. The Government of the Tongue, Heaney’s 1988 essay collection, also highlights one of his main preoccupations throughout his creative and critical career. John Goodby observes the theme in his Irish Poetry Since 1950: From Stillness into History (2000). These are some of the coordinates for silence in modern Irish literature, and many of them appear in this book which focuses on such writers as Yeats, Joyce, Bowen, Beckett, Kate O’Brien, and Flann O’Brien, and in more recent times, Derek Mahon, Dermot Healey, Roddy Doyle, Robert McLiam Wilson, and Brian Friel, but also incorporates a number of slightly lesser known writers. In “The Planter’s Daughter” Austin Clarke wrote “Men that had seen her / Drank deep and were silent.” In his presentation of the fifteen essays and in [End Page 155] his continuous sounding of the interpretational amplitude of these two lines from Clarke—a modernist writer who has always remained somewhat in quiescence—McAteer anticipates how well this anthology understands and discusses the subtle signals of silence in a much wider hermeneutic framework than the “psychological, ethical, topographical and spiritual aspects of silence in modern Irish literature” that the introduction indicates. As McAteer’s exposition of the two lines illustrates, these essays dwell on silence as a reservoir of multiple meanings, as a parallel existence to the dead and forgotten, as a field of unexpressed conflict as much as complicity, a means of resistance, a strategy of suppression, an undefined space of historical loss, and an immalleable dam of desire. The complexities of silence are traced and debated across the many taboos: the gender issues, the religious and geographical divides, and the wars and peace that characterize the becoming of Ireland in the course of the twentieth century. Furthermore, by incorporating historical events and references to the history of ideas, and to the Irish canon, the introduction entails a wider and more complex understanding of the key term “modern” than the rather simplistic parameter of the...

Roy Campbell and the Cowboy-Dandies

With reference to Roy Campbell's notion of an nation, this essay argues that the figure of the cowboy in Campbell's poetry should be read in light of a London cultural scene in the early post-First World War period in which two Modernist performative traditions drew together. The first of these is the energetic celebration of declining frontiers in popular culture through Western film, Western fiction, and rodeo performances, while the second tradition is that of Anglo-European dandyism. Thus, while Campbell's vision of an equestrian brotherhood appears to have colonial roots, I argue that it functions as a generalised ideal, abstracted from a real history of colonialism. Campbell's poetic cowboys are hybrid, labile figures who display spectacular, and apparently redemptive, masculine energy. These figures, I suggest, are emblematic of a Modernist preoccupation, shared with the dandy-writers of the nineteenth century, with the place of individual distinction in the face of the levelling effects of bourgeois and democratic social life. I argue that Campbell's hypermasculinist performances, both personal and poetic, should thus be read as dramatising a typically Modernist symbiosis between the figures of the apparently unrefined frontiersman, and the metropolitan sophisticate.

Scratching the surface: the home and the haptic in Lauren Beukes's Zoo city and elsewhere

ABSTRACTThis paper deploys the haptic, and more broadly speaking, notions of multisensory reading and spectatorship to reconfigure perceptions of home. It explores configurations of home in the practice of the late French-Israeli visual artist, Absalon, to draw tropes of “complicity” and “contagion” into an intersection with discourses of moral hygiene arising from the modernist preoccupation with denuded surface in the history of architecture. It then goes on to read a postapartheid South African text, Lauren Beukes's Zoo city (2010), through the lens of these concerns. Beukes's text, it claims, can be made to precipitate the historicity of the white suburban home under apartheid. The novel offers alternative iterations of domesticity, however, as metonymies of contagion shift into metonymies of conviviality. The final section of the paper investigates the vulnerability of the home against the background of the 2014 Israeli war on Gaza and its assault on the built environment. It explores an art exhibition, Postcards for Gaza, staged by the dissident Israeli organization, Zochrot, in the context of a previous military assault on Gaza in 2008. Here the reworking of photographic surface is made to gesture towards the possibility of political reparation in an alternate modality of complicity that Mark Sanders parses as “human-foldedness” (Sanders 2002).

The Modernist Party as Pedagogy

“The Modernist Party” is a 30-minute simulation exercise devised by the author, in which undergraduate English students role-play modernist figures at an imaginary party held in London in 1922. The simulation takes place in the first seminar of a 22-week course on English literary modernism and is preceded by a general discussion about the nature of parties and a more specialized discussion about the functioning of parties in certain modernist texts: James Joyce’s “The Dead” (1914), Katherine Mans field’s “The Garden Party” (1922), and Virginia Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse (1927). The exercise offers the general pedagogical advantages associated with simulation (a type of role-play). It also provides topic-specific benefits: making modernist ideas more accessible to students; offering insights into specific modernist preoccupations and practices (the idea of space / place, the concept of the everyday, and the phenomenon of networking); and providing an experiential model of learning that resonates with modernist texts.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, and the Watch for Spots of Time

F. Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, and the Watch for Spots of Time

Dreiser's Stamping Room: Becoming Media inAn American Tragedy

This essay makes the case for a reconsideration of Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy within the history of the modernist novel and its medial legacies by attending to the complex relationship enacted throughout the text between material forms and structures of interiority and identity. Although the mass media and other representational technologies such as cameras and film are notoriously complicit with the deterministic forces propelling An American Tragedy, I show that what counts as the “medial” in the novel appears instead in very different technologies: the stamping apparatus used in the novel's collar factory and the explicit figuring of architectural interiors as technologies of interiority. Both technologies show the process of identification central to the novel's narrative movement to be one of versioning, a media process encoded in the stamping technology and localized in hall ways that behave like characters. The factory tools and architectural spaces populating An American Tragedy, each rendered as a form of mediation, reveal Dreiser's text to hold a more important place in the formal history of the novel and of the novel's relationship to media than it has previously been afforded, especially as that story involves the blurry edges of the modern subject. It is precisely where the novel's naturalist concern with materiality confronts a modernist preoccupation with interiority that An American Tragedy provides a crucial glimpse into the kinds of persons and kinds of mediations developing in the early twentieth-century novel.

Staging the Modernist Self: The Self-Portraits of William Orpen

One of the most financially successful and honoured painters of the twentieth century, William Orpen’s reputation, now diminished, rests predominantly on his accomplished society portraits and war paintings. Yet Orpen (1873–1931) also produced an extensive body of compelling self-portraits, depicting himself in a variety of guises that mark diverse performances of his ‘self’. I consider Orpen’s self-portraits as the visual equivalent of autobiography and autobiografiction, drawing on modernist literary examples for comparison, with a particular focus on Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier. I also analyse a range of images to investigate how Orpen could engage with, satirize, mask, elaborate and fantasize his identities in these works. While a comparison with historically specific notions of selfhood can illuminate Orpen’s visual autobiography, I also consider the role played by his own biography in the questioning and staging of his own identity. Consistently characterized by critics as a great draughtsman yet frequently condemned for a lack of intellectual curiosity, I argue that, away from his official status, Orpen was intensely engaged in elaborating and examining his identities through self-portraits that connect with a modernist preoccupation with the very process of creating art.

The Shadow of the Object in Peter Pan

The Shadow of the Object in Peter Pan Eyal Amiran (bio) J. M. Barrie, particularly in his fantasy novel Peter Pan, which is the focus here, arrives late on the late-Victorian scene of eroticized childhood.1 Barrie’s work joins a much-discussed line in British literature, which includes such works as Swinburne’s “The Flogging-Bock” and Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, that portrays child beating as erotic (Kincaid, Annoying 235–37) and that, more importantly, sutures mainstream culture to what James Kincaid calls the “long pornographic tradition” of erotic child abuse (236; and see Marcus 60–61). That is not to say that there is anything pornographic about Peter Pan (the play or the book), which always hints ironically instead, if at length. Peter Pan, and Barrie’s earlier works on which [End Page 161] it is based (notably The Little White Bird), share the more knowing and suggestive fascination with perverse sexuality, including the sexualization of children, found in Charles Dodgson’s photography, Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales, and John Everett Millais’s painting “The Woodsman’s Daughter,” to name some usual suspects.2 Barrie is at once knowing about his interest in the sexualization of children—unable to resist puns and allusions to a painful and complex psychological landscape—and elusive about it or is willing to hide from his self-knowledge through dismissal and humour. Barrie’s defensiveness is built in to the subject matter of perverse sexuality. Steven Marcus concludes that the Victorian literature of flagellation in particular “represents a kind of last-ditch compromise with and defense against homosexuality” (260): it expresses a wish, conscious or not, for identification with a boy who is being beaten, “that is, loved—by another man” (260). This wish is strong in Barrie, but behind it lies an even earlier infantile moment, whose construction (and concealment) is one of the objects of Barrie’s work. For one thing that differentiates Barrie’s episteme from that of earlier British writers preoccupied with child sexuality is the rise in late Victorian-modernism’s culture of understanding early childhood psychology and its relation to linguistics. This new understanding of the child mind both allows a new reading of Barrie and opens directions for reconsidering perverse sexuality in late Victorian-modern literature. I argue here that Barrie is concerned with infantile sounds that reflect psychological crises and that he uses material features of written language, such as its shapes, sounds, and stresses, to construct a psychological portrait of the infantile mind. Barrie’s interest in symptomatic language differs from the general modernist preoccupation with psychology and with linguistics. While early modernist literature uses Oedipal paradigms explicitly, as Joseph Conrad does in Nigger of the “Narcissus,” for example, or as Virginia Woolf does in the opening scene of To the Lighthouse, Peter Pan is governed by paradigms that define Barrie psychologically and that reflect preverbal conflicts of early infancy. When Wendy gives Peter a thimble instead of a kiss because he does not know the word “kiss” (Peter Pan 25), their exchange suggests a libidinal reading of the arbitrariness of language, so that when the acorn button Peter gives Wendy in return, and which she wears around her neck on a string, saves her from the Lost Boys’ arrow, we see (the arrow of) eros attracted [End Page 162] to and fended off by the physical object that represents the arbitrariness of language: for Barrie the physical features that make language arbitrary also make it sexual. Modernist literature is also often interested in material qualities of language (as in Guillaume Apollinaire’s calligrammes, Marcel Duchamp’s readymade puns,3 and F. T. Marinetti’s tin books, to name three different kinds), but Barrie’s text develops an idea about the place of sound and shape in infantile consciousness. For many writers of the period, material features of language seem to offer a sanctuary from psychological motivation because they are understood to be mechanical and non-semantic and so are indifferent to psychodynamic logics. But as a line of thought in Freudian and post–Freudian analysis has argued, the indifferent physical properties of language often carry psychological meanings. The visibility of...

Modernism, Brahmin Angst, and Postcolonial Indian Writing in Regional Languages: The Case of U. R. Ananthamurthy's Samskara

European modernism deeply impacted postcolonial Indian literatures in regional languages. This essay looks at the South Indian writer, U. R. Ananthamurthy's, novel Samskara to explore such modernist preoccupations with issues of caste and gender in Kannada writing. Many navya (modernism in Kannada literature) writers like Ananthamurthy critique caste repression in South Indian societies. But they are mainly invested in the idea of the new self-fashioning of the Brahmin in a changing world. Despite Ananthamurthy's “progressive” commitment to social change, the ambivalent textual representation of this Brahmin identity in Samskara leads to reinforcing the asymmetry of caste and gender relations.

Zapadni ideogram i orijentalni egzoticizam: Pol Klodel i Viktor Segalen

China as inspiration plays an important role in the literary work of Paul Claudel and Victor Segalen. The two French authors may be regarded as a missing link between Modernism and the literary traditions that preceded it. In this context, Claudel’s and Segalen’s interest in Chinese literary forms, language and script represents an anticipation of the later modernist preoccupations and experiments based on Chinese influences. Taking Chinese script as a role-model, Claudel attempts to iconize the symbolic system in his own language, thus creating new and authentic poetic forms, whereas Segalen introduces a very personal perception of China enriched with informative sinological observations. With their creative perception of China, both Claudel and Segalen succeeded in exerting a double influence: on one hand, they acquainted the Western reader with various valuable segments of Chinese cultural traditions, and on the other, they also provoked a series of questions concerning the role, freedom and strategies of a writer as an objective interpreter of other cultures.

'Our true north': Walton's First Symphony, Sibelianism, and the Nationalization of Modernism in England

The debt of Walton's First Symphony to Sibelian models of symphonic form is often acknowledged, but the debt's wider implications are seldom considered. The inter-war English idolization of Sibelius may help to explain why Walton should use characteristic Sibelian procedures such as rotational form, heavy dependence on pedal points for structural purposes, and focus on a sound-sheet or Klang —however individually Walton treats these devices—but it does not account for all that is interesting in this moment in British musical history. In this article a richer context is drawn by locating Walton's Sibelianism in a more general contemporary artistic concern with what Michael Saler calls 'the myth of the North': an inter-war emphasis on the industrialized north of England. This 'myth', a development of modernist preoccupations with the relationship between technology and humanity, is reflected both in what Jed Esty calls an 'anthropological turn' in writers such as Eliot and Woolf (a turn to a romantic nationalism), and in Heidegger's philosophy of art—connections that open up a range of ethical and political considerations. After presenting an analysis of the Sibelian technique of Walton's symphony alongside discussion of its thematic treatments of nation, cultural, and geographic environment, and the changing antagonisms of late modernism, this article reconsiders the historical significance of Walton's music, and reads it as a presentation of views on authentic community and the place of England in the twentieth century.

‘Years ago some lived here’: Aboriginal Australians and the production of popular culture, history and identity in 1930s Victoria

This article examines two phenomena of 1930s Victoria: the desire for Aboriginal culture to appear in popular exhibits and centennial celebrations, and visits by members of the public to Lake Tyers Aboriginal Station to view Aboriginal performers and purchase Aboriginal material culture. While different, they are nonetheless connected by a desire to witness the Aborigine as primitive spectacle. They demonstrate that popular interest in Indigenous culture was far more prevalent than has been previously acknowledged. The modernist preoccupation with primitivism, far from being an elitist, intellectual pursuit, was occurring at a very popular level. However, these ideas, while often more sympathetic to Indigenous culture and heritage, still viewed Aboriginal Australians as Other.

The Getaway

The Getaway