Modernist Scholars Research Articles

Mina Loy's Critical Modernism by Laura Scuriatti

 Reviews possession of language. How does one represent the non-human in narrative, and what debates must ensue about the nature and limits of anthropocentrism? Jon Hegglund’s contribution makes claims for the power of narrative in highlighting non-human agency (in horror literature or sci-fi). Mention is also made in the Introduction of children’s fiction, which is so oen about animals, though children’s literature is sadly absent from the main body of essays. () Second is the issue of narrative ethics, the way narratives position or assume their agents and recipients in culturally specific ways, making narratology engage issues of cultural politics beyond the kinds of exclusively technical or formal analysis and classification with which it is still oen identified. () A third key direction for narratology engaged here is a turn towards cognitive science, as in Matthew M. Low’s exploratory paper on how its cognitive modelling through narratives can work as a resource for the actual restoration of the American prairie. e edited collection of essays is a staple form of research publication in the humanities. However, it is probably rare for someone other than a reviewer to read a collection from cover to cover. I would also wager that if a survey were done of citations from this kind of critical anthology, the introduction would oen rank among the most utilized of its essays. is will probably be the case with James and Morel’s fine ‘Introduction: Notes toward New Econarratologies’, which performs well the overall revisionist work ascribed to the whole collection. So many ecocritical essays, including several here, take the limited form of proselytizing for a contemporary text likely to be unknown to a reader. As James and Morel showcase, an introduction has the advantage of needing to be succinct and of being written last, as a summary overview, with less of the air of being a critic’s personal performance. D U T C Mina Loy’s Critical Modernism. By L S. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. . x+ pp. £.. ISBN ––––. is book joins a number of recent monographs that reflect a burgeoning academic interest in the work of long-neglected but quintessential modernist Mina Loy, notably Tara Prescott’s Poetic Salvage: Reading Mina Loy (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, ) and Sarah Hayden’s Curious Disciplines: Mina Loy and Avant-Garde Artisthood (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, ). Laura Scuriatti makes an original contribution to the field by exploring some of the less familiar material reprinted in Mina Loy: Stories and Essays, ed. by Sara Crangle (McLean, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, ): work such as the ‘Mi & Lo’ fragments, and the essays ‘History of Religion and Eros’ and ‘e Library of the Sphinx’, the latter an imagined dialogue with Havelock Ellis that contains a characteristically piquant Loy observation: ‘the whole of our psychological literature written by men might be lumped together as the unwitting analysis of the unsatisfied woman’ (p. ). Scuriatti also delves into the archive of unpublished material held at Yale, MLR, .,   commenting, for example, on the ‘Geronimo’ fragment, a portrayal of Giovanni Papini intended for the unfinished prose work ‘Esau Penfold’, and (more extensively ) on ‘Goy Israels’, a prose account of the family dysfunctions that Loy also explored in her long poem ‘Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose’. Rather than being consigned to the ‘marginal corner of modernist scholarship, reserved for those eccentric authors (mostly women) who did not fit the criteria of high modernism’, Scuriatti suggests that Loy should be seen as projecting a ‘critical gaze into the very heart of the modernist and avant-garde canon’ (p. ). She identifies Loy’s work as being informed by a tension between, on the one hand, the early modernist conception of ‘the artwork as a product of genius’ with its creator ‘endowed with a quasi-divine power of insight into reality’ and, on the other, a more ‘critical modernist conception, which destabilizes the categories of artwork, artist, and art as part of a broader critique of normative notions of gender, identity, and subjectivity’ (ibid.). Chapters are devoted to Loy’s interaction with radical Italian writing before the First World War, as influenced by Otto Weininger...

Viral Modernism: The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature by Elizabeth Outka

<i>Viral Modernism: The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature</i> by Elizabeth Outka

#MeToo and Modernism: #MeToo, Eliot, and Modernist Scholarship

#MeToo and Modernism: #MeToo, Eliot, and Modernist Scholarship

No place for ‘Kashmiri’ in Kashmiri nationalism*

AbstractLanguage is often taken as a primary differentiating factor between people as it functions as a vehicle of cultural expression, thus becoming one of the primary markers of identity. In the history of nationalism, language has always enjoyed a privileged position. Not only had the German Romantics such as Herder and Fichte held language as the fundamental characteristic of a nation, but modernist scholars such as Anderson, too, have given language a central place in their respective assessments of nationalism. In Anderson's analysis, ‘languages of power’ enable an imagined community to become real. However, are all nationalisms glotto‐centric? If not, why not? This article takes the case of Kashmiri nationalism, or the Tehreek, to demonstrate that language and nationalism are not necessarily codependent. The paper will first explain why Kashmiri never came to become a language of power in the region and how the disadvantaged position of the Kashmiri language precludes/d it from having any significant role in Kashmiri nationalism. Second, the paper argues that the multilingualism of Kashmiris has turned out to be a blessing in disguise for the Tehreek and allowed Kashmiri nationalism to assert its civic character.

Modernist Communities across Cultures and Media. Edited by Caroline Pollentier and Sarah Wilson Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2019. Pp. vii+289.

<i>Modernist Communities across Cultures and Media</i>. Edited by Caroline Pollentier and Sarah Wilson Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2019. Pp. vii+289.

Post-Kantian Historicism as American Theology

I am grateful for this rich and sumptuously detailed book by Elizabeth A. Clark on a neglected subject. Her splendid book is a reminder that although the early twentieth-century liberal and modernist scholars of early Christian history are largely forgotten—and tend to be derided when remembered—they strove with integrity and intelligence to be good historicists. I appreciate that the liberals of this period wanted Christianity to play a constructive role in society and tried to secure a place in the academy for the study of early Christian history. Still, they believed so intently in the superiority of their white middle-class culture that they could not see this belief as a form of prejudice.

Mina Loy’s Critical Modernism by Laura Scuriatti

Reviewed by: Mina Loy’s Critical Modernism by Laura Scuriatti Tara Prescott-Johnson MINA LOY’S CRITICAL MODERNISM, by Laura Scuriatti. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2019. 314 pp. $85.00 cloth. Both Mina Loy and her complex and compelling oeuvre simply will not stay put—she delightfully defies categorization at every turn, despite increasing numbers of critics who insist on trying to pin her down, to fix her location, genre, style, beliefs, ethnicity, and cultural and national [End Page 359] identity. Loy has been claimed by both British and American critics, but she was fluent in several languages and, although born in London, spent formative years of her life in Italy, France, Germany, Mexico, and the United States. Academia’s lingering insistence on classifying works of literature by time period and nationality minimizes two important motives of her work: the resistance to labeling and the critique of social, political, and artistic movements. Laura Scuriatti’s Mina Loy’s Critical Modernism seeks to release Loy’s work from the constricting confines of literary time periods and fields and argues that Loy’s “critical modernism,” her tendency to explore lots of affiliations without claiming any of them, is an essential trait of her work deserving much further exploration. Scuriatti grounds her study in archival work, particularly Loy’s manuscripts in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale, as well as the Fondazione Primo Conti in Fiesole and the Harold Acton Library at the British Institute in Florence. As she notes, “Part of the work of rediscovering Loy has been that of assembling a corpus, of creating an oeuvre out of a large quantity of unpublished and unedited material” (p. 4). Scuriatti continues the recent work of Sara Crangle and others in attending to the unpublished and lesser-known works in addition to the popular poems published by Loy’s editor and literary executor, Roger Conover, in The Lost Lunar Baedeker (1996). Mina Loy’s Critical Modernism provides easy-to-follow and succinct summaries and analyses of Loy’s poems, short prose works, plays, novel, and unpublished fragments to substantiate Scuriatti’s claim that it is Loy’s “eccentric” form of modernism, not just her personal or artistic “eccentricity,” that deserves attention. Instead of relegating Loy to the “marginal corner of modernist scholarship” that has been reserved for “eccentrics” (who, unsurprisingly, tend to be women), Scuriatti argues for considering Loy’s work a “critical gaze into the very heart of the modernist and avant-garde canon” (p. 16). To support the reevaluation of Loy, Scuriatti delves into the historical, cultural, and literary contexts of Loy’s work, including in-depth explorations of the avant-garde, Futurism, Surrealism, feminism, and modernism. She also provides insightful forays into Loy’s conceptions of genius, autobiography, and self-reflexivity. Scuriatti’s strongest contribution, both to Loy studies and to modernist studies, is her attention to the Italian contexts of Loy’s work—especially Italian feminism and avant-garde magazines like Lacerba. Loy was fluent in Italian, and though critics have delved into her poetic integration of Italian and other languages, many have neglected the influence of Italian writers. Scuriatti argues that editors who have collected and published works by Loy, who titled an autobiographical poem “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose,” have shaped our understanding of her by emphasizing the “Anglo” nature of her work at the expense of the “Mongrel.” In looking at [End Page 360] the texts Loy was writing toward and against during her Florentine years, critics often focus on manifestoes that are available in English translation. This narrow selection, of course, Scuriatti notes, leaves a lot out. Scuriatti delves into some probable influences from Italian texts and provides her own translations, which are unfortunately buried at the back of the book in the endnotes. Readers who lack Loy’s familiarity with Italian may easily miss some of the most striking examples, such as Scuriatti’s translation of Giovanni Papini’s “Il massacre delle donne” (The massacre of women), published in 1914 in Lacerba. The misogyny of Loy’s lover is often mentioned in biographies or in close readings of the many works where Papini appears as a character or foil, but...

Modernism and Latin America: Transnational Networks of Literary Exchange by Patricia Novillo-Corvalán

Reviewed by: Modernism and Latin America: Transnational Networks of Literary Exchange by Patricia Novillo-Corvalán Vanessa Marie Fernández (bio) MODERNISM AND LATIN AMERICA: TRANSNATIONAL NETWORKS OF LITERARY EXCHANGE, by Patricia Novillo-Corvalán. New York: Routledge Publishers, 2018. 190 pp. $140.00 cloth, $54.95 ebook. Patricia Novillo-Corvalán's Modernism and Latin America: Transnational Networks of Literary Exchange adds to the increasing scholarship that seeks to re-articulate Anglo-Modernism by pointing to its connections with other cultural networks. In five loosely connected chapters, Novillo-Corvalán examines Latin America as an overlooked modernist geography. Each chapter explores a unique avenue in which Latin America's impact on modernism has been overlooked. Novillo-Corvalán's exhaustive research offers new readings of canonical modernist texts such as Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out, D. H. Lawrence's The Plumed Serpent, and Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano alongside new perspectives on Latin American writings by the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges and Chileans Pablo Neruda and Roberto Bolaño.1 On the one hand, her work explores Latin America's influence on canonical Anglo-Modernist writers such as Argentina's importance for Woolf and Mexico's impact on Lawrence and Lowry. On the other, Novillo-Corvalán studies Latin America's relationship with Anglo-Modernism by offering examples such as Borges's and Bolaño's appreciation of a Joycean aesthetic and its presence in their work. A line of inquiry that permeates Novillo-Corvalán's study is attention to empire's role in shaping modernism. Exploring anti-imperialism in Woolf and Neruda in her first two chapters, for instance, offers two perspectives on the topic, the former from an insider, and the latter from an outsider. In chapter 1, "Empire and Commerce in Latin America: Historicising Woolf's The Voyage Out," she points out "that Virginia Woolf puts the complex issue of Great Britain's neocolonial domination in Latin America squarely on the cultural agenda of The Voyage Out" (10). Novillo-Corvalán's analysis in this chapter is an admittedly "intertwined reading" of Woolf's novel because it relies heavily on notes taken by the novelist two years after The Voyage Out was published (21). An engrossing read nevertheless, this first chapter offers an interesting discussion of topics such as Argentina's beef export industry, the country's relationship with Britain, and the novel's critique of British economic imperialism. Novillo-Corvalán [End Page 199] makes it plain that "the prevailing view that [Woolf's] knowledge of the continent was vague, deficient, and, at its worst, non-existent" is false (23). Questioning empire's role in modernist scholarship, NovilloCorvalán's second chapter, "Anti-imperialist Commitments: Mapping Neruda's Transnational Modernist Networks," offers Neruda as an example that "challenges the notion that aesthetic innovation is the product of the West" (51). She bases her argument on the Nobel Laureate's non-Eurocentric "complex émigré status" as a diplomat assigned to South Asia and Buenos Aires (51). In Novillo-Corvalán's estimation, having bypassed "a long-standing Latin American tradition" that required "the pilgrimage to Paris" as a rite of passage for an "aesthetic journey of initiation," "Neruda 'decentres' modernism by underscoring the aesthetic production of alternative cultural centres such as Colombo and Buenos Aires" (51, 52). Juxtaposing Neruda's perspective with Leonard Woolf's "reluctant insider" opposition to British imperialism in Ceylon, this chapter further underscores Neruda's own anti-imperialist position as a "self-conscious outsider" (59). While Novillo-Corvalán's appraisal of Virginia Woolf's and Neruda's negotiation of modernism and empire is thought-provoking, her most engaging examination of the topic surfaces in chapter 3, "The Cultural Politics of World Literature: Beckett, Paz, and UNESCO." This section provides a captivating account of the publication of UNESCO's An Anthology of Mexican Poetry, edited and translated by two Nobel Laureates, the Mexican poet Octavio Paz and the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett, respectively.2 Foregrounding UNESCO's narrow, imperialistic attitude towards Latin America, this chapter first delves into Paz's initial misgivings about the project and the contentious episodes surrounding the "Mexicanness" of the anthology that ensued with his...

Kafka and Noise: The Discovery of Cinematic Sound in Literary Modernism by Kata Gellen

Reviewed by: Kafka and Noise: The Discovery of Cinematic Sound in Literary Modernism by Kata Gellen Holly Yanacek Kafka and Noise: The Discovery of Cinematic Sound in Literary Modernism. By Kata Gellen. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2019. Pp. xi + 250. Paper $34.95. ISBN 978-0810138933. With Kafka and Noise: The Discovery of Cinematic Sound in Literary Modernism, Kata Gellen makes an important contribution to modernist scholarship and the interdisciplinary field of sound studies through her analysis of noise in Kafka's oeuvre. The book participates in the recent turn in scholarship to define "modernist epistemologies"—that is, to examine "the ways in which modernist art and literature produce new modes of perception and knowledge" (199). Gellen aims to show how Kafka responds to two central crises of modernism—the crisis of narration and the crisis of knowledge—through the treatment of noise in his collected stories, notebooks, and letters. A central premise of this book is that noise is a "productive obstacle" in modernist literary narration in general and in Kafka's works in particular (3). Gellen's interpretations reveal that Kafka never settled on a single, unified approach to sound. Instead, she emphasizes that each one of Kafka's texts that deals with sound presents a different attempt to explore the productive tension between noise and writing (33). Noise puts a strain on many of the characters in Kafka's stories, and Gellen's book examines the literary significance of these disruptive, persistent, and enigmatic noises. Kafka and Noise is noteworthy as the first sustained English-language study of sound in Kafka's collected works. Jürgen Daiber's Kafka und der Lärm: Klanglandschaften der frühen Moderne (2015) demonstrates a similar interest in sound in Kafka's writings; however, the book primarily focuses on Kafka's own frustrations with noise that disrupted his writing. Gellen adds to the scholarship on Kafka and sound through her innovative application of film theory and her focus not on Kafka's biographical writings, but on the literary significance of noise in his narration. Her approach yields fresh interpretations of Kafka's stories, including "Großer Lärm" (1912), "Die Verwandlung" (1915), "Das Schweigen der Sirenen" (1917), "Forschungen eines Hundes" (1922), "Der Bau" (1923), and "Josefine, die Sängerin oder das Volk der Mäuse" (1924). Although the use of film theory to analyze sound in Kafka's works is new, the study of the connection between Kafka and cinema has a long history, which Gellen traces back to Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno's debates about gesture in Kafka's writing in the 1930s. Inspired also by Gilles Deleuze and [End Page 613] Félix Guattari's interpretation of noise in Kafka in their theory of a minor literature, Gellen picks up where these critics left off and offers sustained close readings of the problem of sound in Kafka's works. Gellen's justification for her approach to analyze Kafka's literary works and silent film together in Kafka and Noise is persuasive. Concepts from film theory, such as acoustic close-up and acousmatic sound, provide the language necessary to analyze noise in literature, a silent medium. Gellen's application of these concepts offers new insights into Kafka's works that would not be possible with literary concepts and narrative theory alone. In addition, the interpretation of literary sound with film terminology illuminates what literature (and cinema) can do and what it cannot do, and thus this book makes a significant contribution to genre studies. There is another reason why concepts from film theory, rather than concepts in the field of sound studies, form the methodological underpinning of Kafka and Noise. According to Gellen, sound studies has "has, to a large extent, ignored literary sound" because literature is a medium that does not directly produce actual sounds (203). However, she argues that sound studies would have much to gain by focusing on literary sound as an object of analysis, and her book makes a strong case for that assertion. In each of the book's four chapters, Gellen introduces concepts from film theory and applies them in her close readings of Kafka's letters and stories, which she interprets...

Ezra Pound in the Present: Essays on Pound's Contemporaneity by Paul Stasi Josephine Park

MLR, .,   from traditional modernist scholarship and that are figured by their fragmented, serial form. Each chapter of the book takes on a major work by an American modernist writer—ree Lives by Gertrude Stein, Cane by Jean Toomer, Manhattan Transfer and ‘Cosmopolitan’ by John Dos Passos, and e Last Tycoon by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Beeston understands these works as exemplars of composite modernist writing, which indicates a formal structure of repetition and reiteration and the representation of what Beeston calls ‘woman in series’ (p. ). Here, the critical purchase of her argument clearly snaps into focus on the way that gender and its representational politics emerge within seriality. ere is a palpable urgency to Beeston’s claims about gender, race, and seriality, which reflects a deep desire on the part of the author to modernize modernist studies. However, it would be a mistake simply to assume that this book merely operates under the moniker of the ‘New Modernist Studies’ (now, of course, a decade old). roughout, Beeston is less interested in moving away from the canon for the sake of the mandates of expansive politics or a desire to be relevant. Instead, she burrows into forgotten spaces of the established archive to remind us that the unseen is right beneath our noses. I would like to remark on the methodology of In and Out of Sight, which is unabashedly and refreshingly heuristic. Rather than charting direct lines of influence between word and image, Beeston relies on an associative model of ‘combination and accrual’ (p. ), which is a necessary and powerful approach to interdisciplinary analysis and literary criticism. Juxtaposition and its attendant gaps appeal to Beeston in both photographic and analytical form: she draws together Stein and surrealist photography, Toomer and lynching photographs, Dos Passos and the use of photography in advertising, and Fitzgerald and cinema’s investment in seriality. e myriad works considered, however, extend far beyond this schematic summary; indeed, the strength and ambition of this densely layered book lie in its capacious reach through literary and photographic forms and genres. More than due diligence, Beeston carefully establishes a body of criticism into which her own book might be situated and forges an exciting direction for future work in modernist studies, photography and literature, still-moving studies, and feminist studies. U  C, L A L H Ezra Pound in the Present: Essays on Pound’s Contemporaneity. Ed. by P S and J P. London: Bloomsbury Academic. . xiii+ pp.£ (pbk £). ISBN –––– (pbk ––––). ‘What can we learn from Pound?’ (p. ). is is the question that Christopher Bush poses at the start of his contribution to Paul Stasi and Josephine Park’s rewarding co-edited collection. Bush’s question is surely excellent, though not easily answered. As to why that might be so, there are a number of competing factors that need to be kept in mind. Some of these have to do with aesthetic theory  Reviews and historical understanding, while others concern matters more overtly social, economic, and even geopolitical. All of these things come to the fore in the eight chapters comprising Stasi and Park’s at times revelatory multiauthored undertaking pertaining to the Idaho-born writer thought by some critics to be in equal measure the most serious and the most difficult of modernist characters. ‘e seeds of [the] book began in ,’ Stasi and Park note, when we each found ourselves teaching e Cantos. Noting the number of Poundian themes that seemed ‘in the air’—from the recognition of the sins of finance capital, to a renewed interest in China, and a fetishized investment in the founding fathers— we found ourselves rethinking many of our assumptions about his work. In light of contemporary events, Pound seemed different—and relevant all over again. (p. vii) I quote at length from Stasi and Park here not only because this extract usefully signposts some of the guiding thematic preoccupations of the volume itself, but because it draws attention to how a sustained interrogation of those self-same preoccupations might serve initially to remind and then subsequently transform some of the preconceived understandings, opinions, and critical myths that have built up around Ezra Pound over the decades. But this is...

Editors' Note

Editors' Note

History of a Shiver: The Sublime Impudence of Modernism by Jed Rasula

<i>History of a Shiver: The Sublime Impudence of Modernism</i> by Jed Rasula

Apollinaire’s Trench Journalism and the Affective Public Sphere

This essay aims to make a critical contribution to the related fields of modernist studies and First World War studies by engaging with affect theory and print culture. It argues that material documents help us understand how an affective public sphere was created during the First World War. Print materials such as periodicals and small poetry volumes circulated between the front and the home front. They documented everyday experiences and gave expression to the affective circumstances of the war through their content and materiality. Guillaume Apollinaire’s war writings serve as a case in point. The Polish-born French poet contributed to the general, avant-garde, and soldiers’ press, bridging the traditional divide between the front and the home front. He commented on everyday life in his chronicle “La Vie anecdotique” in the Mercure de France, submitted poems to avant-garde journals from the frontline, and was involved with various trench publications. By linking affect theory with Apollinaire’s avant-garde writings, this essay shows how modernists’ responses to the war were not just ironic or romantic, but also affective. It further asks how visceral experiences were generated on and off the page, thus establishing a link between the recent material and affective turns in modernist scholarship.

Toward a feminist modernist digital humanities

ABSTRACTThough the digital humanities (DH) has offered feminist scholars new opportunities for publishing neglected authors, the rhetoric of science and quantification that accompanies it runs counter to core insights of feminist modernist scholarship, which have questioned the possibility and desirability of scientific virtues of empiricism and neutrality. By applying Donna Haraway’s situated knowledges – and its renewal in the digital humanities through intersectional feminist scholars such as Roopika Risam and Moya Bailey – this article explores the costs that sexism within DH has already levied on modernist studies. Further, it argues that the future of modernist DH scholarship must be explicitly feminist in nature, translating key insights from feminist theory into concrete practices for digital modernist scholarship. Collaboration emerges as an overarching ethos and an essential method for feminist modernist studies.

H. D., &lt;span class="strike"&gt;Imagiste&lt;/span&gt; Synesthete

H. D., Imagiste Synesthete Allyson Demaagd In 1895, German physician Max Nordau published Degeneration, a book containing scathing remarks about the prevalence of smell, taste, and touch in literature. These senses, Nordau proclaimed, belonged to an "epoch anterior to man" and were the purview of beasts, not of respectable writers (503).1 Nordau found synesthesia, or "joint perception," equally worthy of condemnation ("synaesthesis").2 Writing that featured synesthesia—such as plays where lines were paired with perfumes, colored lights, or musical notes—was evidence of social decline, of "moral insanity, imbecility, and dementia" among writers and their audiences (Nordau viii). While Degeneration predicts that the valorization of synesthesia and the lower senses will end with the advent of the twentieth century, sensory experimentation in writing persisted.3 This article concerns itself with one such sensory-rich, twentieth-century novel, H. D.'s roman à clef HERmione. In HERmione, H. D. confronts and contests the sensory norms upon which Nordau, and society at large, rest their biases and aversions. In HERmione, synesthesia is not reductive but productive: through it, H. D. destabilizes distinctions between high and low, normal and abnormal, human and nonhuman. Similarly, in HERmione the lower senses are not degenerative but generative: they offer new ways of sensing and new modes of being through which H. D. subverts the sensory status quo. To understand how HERmione troubles sensory norms, we must first understand traditional sensory classifications. Cultural historian Constance Classen, who specializes in the history of the senses, explains that in the West the senses have long been gendered, typically to the detriment of women. Traditional sensory narratives divide the senses by gender and afford men privileges that women are denied. Such narratives associate men, for instance, with the privileged senses of sight and sound, which are in turn associated with reason. These "distance" senses have been perceived to enable men to engage in [End Page 166] "'distance activities,' such as traveling and governing" (66). In contrast, smell, taste, and touch, the "proximity" senses, have been imagined to confine women to the home, since these so-called lower senses are inherent in household duties (66). Smell, taste, and touch are often conceived of as being more embodied than sight or sound and, in this way, more befitting women, whose minds have long been considered less developed than men's. Heteronormative narratives, by reinforcing gender binaries, reinforce these so-called sensory norms. Such narratives suggest that coupling men with women results in the perfect balance of reason and emotion, pragmatism and sensuality. In the twentieth century, women's increasing social mobility and political agency put pressure on these narratives. Once-contained female bodies—with their smells and sounds, and the threat of their touch—were more public, more visible, and more contaminating.4 As twentieth-century women transgressed traditional sensory categories, they demanded new sensory identifications. Modernist writers played a central role in rethinking sensory paradigms and reimagining the senses. In Modernism: A Cultural History, Tim Armstrong acknowledges the work of H. D. and Virginia Woolf as evidence that "a heightened sensitivity to sensation is central to modern experience" (90). Likewise, Ralf Hertel, who studies literary depictions of the senses, notes that "[i]n the modern period, with its technical extensions of the senses and its overflow of stimuli, perception itself becomes the focus of literary investigation" (176). Such investigations are the subject of modernist criticism, much of which fruitfully attends to the privileged senses of sight and sound.5 More recently, however, modernist scholarship, such as Abbie Garrington's Haptic Modernism: Touch and the Tactile in Modernist Writing, reflects an interest in the less-studied, lower senses. Garrington examines how "modernist texts—literary, scientific, philosophical and journalistic—return with unprecedented alacrity to the haptic experiences of the human body" (50). Touch, Garrington claims, is central to the modernist experience, an integral means by which modernist subjects come to know themselves and their worlds. In reclaiming touch's centrality, Garrington refashions the "base sense," as Aristotle called it, as a foundational sensory modality, "a scaffold on which the other senses are built" (18).6 " To study touch," she proclaims, "is to study the whole body in its carnal, fleshly reality" (19...

C. D. Blanton, Epic Negation: The Dialectical Poetics of Late Modernism

C. D. Blanton centres his book around Ezra Pound’s simple yet challenging statement that ‘[a]n epic is a poem including history’ (3). Far from drawing expected connections between classical epic and modernist poetry, Blanton’s book aims ‘to account for the emergence of the modernist epic as the central formal problem of an apparently postepic age’ (3). Can a ‘modernist epic’ be thus detected as a distinct genre? And is this indeed the best way to describe works by such modernist poets as T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, and H.D.? Blanton identifies a modernist epic in a variety of textual units. Most strikingly, he labels Eliot’s review The Criterion, MacNeice’s Autumn Journal (1939), and H.D.’s Trilogy (1946) as modernist epics, encouraging modernist scholars to reconsider these works in a new, rather unexpected light. According to Blanton, the late modernist poem’s ‘laconic force, its ambition to make history a part of poetry’s domain’ was not entirely comprehended by scholars (12). With Lukács’s argument about the impossibility of a modern epic in mind, and based on the genre’s problematic ‘ultimate principle of totality’, Blanton argues for a late modernist epic which asserts itself by using the ‘paradoxically totalizing force of negation’ which he feels is ‘at the formal heart of … modernism’ (6).

The Politics of the Corpse: President Levy Mwanawasa’s Death, Funeral and Political Contestation in Post-Colonial Zambia

Informed by recent scholarship that underscores the centrality of death, corpses and funerals in contemporary African politics, this article explores the ways in which political actors in the ruling Movement for Multiparty Democracy (MMD) and the opposition Patriotic Front (PF) in Zambia appropriated the corpse and legacy of President Levy Mwanawasa to mobilise political support in 2008. The article insists that in order to secure support indispensable to winning the presidential by-election necessitated by his death, leaders in the MMD and PF deployed the president’s corpse in their conflicting bids to retain power and to construct an alternative political order, respectively. In placing Mwanawasa’s death, corpse and funeral and resultant rival discourses at the centre of its analysis, this article distances itself from secularist and modernist scholarship that disconnects death and mortuary ceremonies from contemporary African politics.

New Modernist Autonomies

New Modernist Autonomies Christopher Langlois Aesthetics of Negativity: Blanchot, Adorno, and Autonomy William S. Allen. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016. xvi + 322. $65.00 (cloth). The Work of Difference: Modernism, Romanticism, and the Production of Literary Form. Audrey Wasser. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016. Pp. vi + 208. $85.00 (cloth); $28.00 (paper). In his 2011 article for the minnesota review, "The New Modernist Studies: What's Left of Political Formalism?," Max Brzezinski implicates Rebecca Walkowitz, Douglas Mao, and Martin Puchner in the instigation of a methodological turn in contemporary modernist studies that has so far betrayed no signs of reversing course.1 This turn, Brzezinski worries, is notable less for having expanded what Mao and Walkowitz describe in their now-canonical 2008 co-authored PMLA article as the "vertical" and "horizontal" vectors directing the future of modernist studies, than it is for capitulating to the "political flattening" of academic research that characterizes the neoliberal ethos of the twenty-first century university: "the transformation of a critical movement into a marketable intellectual commodity" (109). Puchner's Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes (2005) is paradigmatic, in Brzezinski's view, of how contemporary modernist scholarship performs a depoliticizing function under disingenuous cover of political progressivism, for what Puchner achieved in his award-winning book, Brzezinski continues, is nothing more commendable than having reduced both political and aesthetic "revolutions of the past" into "objects of disinterested theoretical appreciation" (111). So it is that while Puchner makes much of the "manifesto form's ability to make claims on and shape the future," Brzezinski writes, "the 'future' as a critical category seems almost politically contentless," which accords with the demands of new modernist studies (intentionally or otherwise) to capitalize on the aesthetic properties of revolutionary discourse without any substantive allegiance to sociopolitical revolutionary commitments (111). Marx and Engels's The Communist Manifesto has value, in Puchner's hands, only for its invention of an avant-garde aesthetic genre and not, from the depoliticized vantage point of the new modernist studies, for its political investments in utopian reconstructions of the social order under capitalist modes of production. This is, for Brzezinski, perhaps the ultimate betrayal of the Marxist legacy and a testament to the ideological complicity of new modernist studies in the institutional consolidation of neoliberalism: "is the Neo in Neoliberalism the New in New Modernist Studies?" (120; emphasis in original). Puchner responded to Brzezinski's accusations of neoliberal complicity in the 2012 issue of the minnesota review, defending his aestheticization of The Communist Manifesto on the grounds that the best way to resist the siren song of neoliberalism is for "[w]e in literature" to reject being "lured away from our strengths in a misguided attempt to be better economists, political scientists, or historians. If we want to reverse our marginalization," Puchner contends, then we must not be afraid to embrace the fact that literary scholars know more about "how literature works, and I mean this in the broadest sense, from production to reception, how literature is written, how it is received, how it acts in the world and fails to act in the world. … Historians are better at writing a history of revolutions. We are better at writing a history of their 'poetry.'"2 Puchner's defense of the specialized study of literature, and specifically of "how literature works" in his response to Brzezinski, is useful for approaching the two books under review here—William S. Allen's Aesthetics of Negativity: Blanchot, Adorno, and Autonomy and Audrey Wasser's The Work of Difference: Modernism, Romanticism, and the Production of Literary Form—with an eye on their scholarly contribution to some of the most pressing methodological debates in modernist studies today. At first glance, neither Allen's nor Wasser's books would appear to have anything at all to do with either the "vertical" or "horizontal" expansions of the new modernist studies. With their shared emphasis on concepts like "negativity," "autonomy," and the "genuinely new," both Allen and Wasser have risked anachronistic critical interventions into ways of reading literary (and philosophical) texts, and of understanding modernist processes of literary production, through concepts that have all but lost their...

The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition: Apprentice Years, 1905–1918, Volume 1, by T. S. Eliot, The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition: The Perfect Critic, 1919 –1926, Volume 2, by T. S. Eliot

<i>The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition: Apprentice Years, 1905–1918, Volume 1</i>, by T. S. Eliot, <i>The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition: The Perfect Critic, 1919 –1926, Volume 2</i>, by T. S. Eliot

Lynd Ward's Modernist “Novels in Woodcuts”: Graphic Narratives Lost Between Art History and Literature

Lynd Ward’s “novels in woodcuts” — long-form narratives Ward pioneered in America between 1929 and 1937 and composed entirely in the medium of sequential wood engravings — have been widely neglected in both art historical and literary critical scholarship despite engaging crucial questions in American modernism and anticipating the contemporary rise of graphic narrative. Ward’s oeuvre here is viewed through his sustained ambivalence toward the commercialization of the arts, both in his texts and his work as a publisher. His critical erasure is as much a function of modernist scholarship’s continued irresolution toward the relationship between high art and popular culture as it is of the singularly hybrid status of his texts. Seen through the lens of comics studies, author/artists like Ward reside in a place at the intersection of literature and the fine arts, allowing us to reimagine many of the critical commonplaces of modernist scholarship.