Modernist Themes Research Articles

SYMBOLISM IN “A CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON” (1922) BY F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

This paper analyzes the use of symbolism in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (1922), focusing on its employment of allegory, archetypes, and symbols. The study seeks to throw further light on the manner in which Fitzgerald uses literary symbolism as a means to explore the modernist consciousness of the protagonist, Benjamin Button, who serves as an archetype for the alienation experienced by modern man in the Jazz Age. By examining both personal and conventional symbols, the paper not only reveals how the protagonist embodies the tensions of his era, but also highlights how he exemplifies the human representatives of the period. Special attention is given to several underexplored symbols within the story, including: Benjamin's dress suit, the cigars he smokes as an infant, his hair dye, fake whiskers, and the colored paper in kindergarten. These symbols illustrate Fitzgerald's craftsmanship in conveying complex themes such as identity, aging, and societal expectations. Through the juxtaposition of these symbols with Benjamin's unusual aging process, the paper argues that the protagonist becomes a symbolic figure for the disorientation and alienation experienced by individuals in the modernist era. Ultimately, the research provides fresh insights into how Fitzgerald’s symbolism deepens the narrative’s engagement with modernist themes, offering a richer understanding of both the text and its cultural significance.

For love and country: queering nationalism in Kate O’Brien’s Mary Lavelle and Farewell Spain

ABSTRACT Considering Irish writer Kate O’Brien in the context of sapphic modernisms might seem misguided as her fiction is traditional in form. Still, revisiting her writing has illuminated its play with modernist themes, and her radical establishment of transnational feminisms in her juxtaposition of Ireland and Spain. Referencing theories by Nira Yuval-Davis and the work by Jane Garrity that map the intersection of gender, sexuality and citizenship, this article argues that O’Brien presents alternative possibilities for women’s relationship to nationhood in her representations of Spain in her 1936 novel, Mary Lavelle, and her 1937 Farewell Spain. The travelogue, chronicling O’Brien’s sojourn in Spain accompanied by Mary O’Neill, her life partner, is an elegy to her experiences of a country ravaged by Franco’s fascist forces. Tracing the sapphic erotics that course through her love letter to the “femme fatale among countries,” from the language of ecstatic pleasure in her description of bullfights, and her adoring depictions of gendered, anthropomorphized towns, O’Brien presents a love of Spain in sapphic terms that is itself an object of queer devotion. As a result, her relationship with Spain revises perceptions of women’s connection to nationhood, even if temporarily, and opens new spaces for a queer nationalism.

CRITIQUING MODERNITY: A STUDY ON THE POSTCOLONIAL ‘HOMECOMING’ IN R PARTHASARATHY’S ROUGH PASSAGE

R Parthasarathy’s verses have won critical acclaim for their distant yet passionate evocation of the modernist themes in Indian English poetry. Listed among the literary modernists of the post-independent era headed by Nissim Ezekiel, he blended the modernist alienation with postcolonial disillusionment and created a distinctive ‘Indian English idiom’ to express the deep concerns of the postcolonial societies. Drawing heavily from Indian regional cultural resources, his poetry follows the mimicking subjects from the colonies, their disenchantment with the coloniser and the journey home. This enables him to champion the cause of postcolonial cultural assertion without compromising the narrative conventions of literary modernism. Contextualising the poetic collection Rough Passage, the paper analyses the cultural implications of Parthasarathy’s poetry and argues that the culture he presented as Indian are largely high cultural forms and thus his poetry falls prey to the cultural debate in Britain in the early 20th century. Contrasting high and low cultural forms present in the collection, the paper exposes the role colonial cultural thought plays in the formulation of postcolonial discourses.

Wharton, Hemingway, and the Advent of Modernism

Wharton, Hemingway, and the Advent of Modernism

Minds, Mapping Minds, Mapping Minds: Reading the Complex Minds of Richard Powers’s The Echo Maker

ABSTRACT Richard Powers’s The Echo Maker (2006) has often been praised for its psychological realism. In this article, I focus on The Echo Maker’s fictional minds to demonstrate how the novel appropriates several modernist and postmodernist themes: the instability of character, the constructed nature of the self, and a suspicion toward narrative. It does so by grounding its story in cognitive science. My approach is informed by cognitive narratology, in particular by the influential work on character identification and “theory of mind” by Alan Palmer and Lisa Zunshine. Theory of mind, which allows for fictional access to other minds, is an important motif in The Echo Maker, yet nothing in the novel allows for easy mind-reading – not for the characters themselves, and so also not for us readers. I argue that, rather than inviting identification, Powers’s novel narrativizes the cognitive processes by which we create meaning. I briefly refer to similar concerns in Proust, Beckett, Pynchon, and in other Powers novels along the way. The article thus: a) shows how a cognitive narratological approach to The Echo Maker subverts conventional readings of the novel, and b) identifies important continuities between Powers’s work and that of key modernists and postmodernists.

Andersen’s beautifully clueless fairy tales

The article reviews the recently reprinted Czech monograph Slavíci, mořské víly a bolavé zuby: Pohádky H. Ch. Andersena: mezi romantismem a modernitou (Nightingales, Mermaids and Toothaches: Andersen’s Fairy Tales between Romanticism and Modernity) by Helena Březinová. By outlining the Czech context of research in the field of children’s literature and analyzing Březinová’s book, the review shows the substantial contribution of the publication for the Czech speaking audience. Březinová carefully analyzes several examples of Andersen’s work to convincingly show its ambiguous, disturbing potential, which was lost in the vast majority of Czech retellings and adaptations. Consequently, Andersen’s work is commonly perceived as purely children’s literature in the Czech context. Březinová questions this notion by thoroughly uncovering Andersen’s subtle play with genre norms and readers’ expectations on multiple text layers. Březinová’s book is intended not only for literary experts, but also for a wide audience of readers with her eloquent and witty writing. Her primary focus is a narratological analysis, however, she makes good use of translation studies, literary history, linguistics, and philosophy as well. In her close readings, she shows Andersen’s simple, yet highly sophisticated stories as rooted in romanticism but also anticipatory of modernist themes such as the crisis of language and subject.

Early South Korean Modernist Poetry: A Genealogy

Early South Korean Modernist Poetry:A Genealogy Jae Won Edward Chung (bio) In 1948, four months before the Republic of Korea was established, Sinsiron ("new poetics") published their first anthology volume. In it, co-founder Kim Kyŏng-nin (1918–2006) declared that modern poetry began with "the annulment of all promises about language." What did he mean? In the past, language had been but a tool for the explication of concepts and the circulation of ideology. With modern poetry, language became a scientific mode of thought that could produce its own "fusion" of reality. [I] wish to propose an experimental course for a new trajectory of modern poetry. In order to express a new way of thought (sago), we must adopt reality through a scientific perspective, at the right speed, and this reality must be constituted through a new fusion, with a fresh, pictorial imagination (imijineisyŏn). It is poetic thought that regulates this new fusion, and what adds speed to this new form of thought is art's comprehensive action (aeksyŏn).1 [End Page 245] According to Kim, reality is both recreated and contemplated through poetry, and the "pictorial imagination" combined with "speed" allows the poet the opportunity to engage in "action." The promise of autonomous poetic agency and its reliance primarily on the power of the image would become attributes most consistently enshrined by modernist poetics in the coming decade. Almost forty years later, in his publication of the collection Seoul, Wild Horse-like (1987), Kim states that while modernism should not be constrained to a "dictionary concept," underlying its multiplicity through history were the principles of surrealism or imagism that allowed poets to draw from their contemporary contexts to "unfold new movements."2 It is not enough, however, to say modernism allows for multiplicity. We must look at how historical developments set the terms for what kind of multiplicity modernism may hold—that is, how they shaped the outer limits of modernism's constitution as a field of organizational, creative, and discursive activities.3 This is especially true for the cultural politics of South Korea's turbulent early years. At the end of Japanese colonial rule (1910–1945), Korea was divided (the northern zone administered by the Soviet Union and the southern by the United States). Across the South, there was widespread ideological mobilization across virtually all organizational units. If 1930s modernism solidified its position in the cultural field in the wake of the dissolution of KAPF (Korean Artists Proletarian Federation) by the Japanese colonial authority, then jockeying for position in the post-liberation era by various factions unfolded more or less concurrently after Liberation, in a shorter span of time, overlapping with migrations, strikes, [End Page 246] demonstrations, acts of terror, political and economic uncertainty, and eventually, the outbreak of the Korean War. The legacy of this civil war and its decades-long solidification into a sustainable postwar system involved the entrenchment of Cold War ideology and continual disavowal by state and citizenry. Modernism was implicated in this process. As we examine the complexity of this implication, a genealogical method allows us to pay attention to moments of diverging possibilities at an early juncture of South Korean literary history.4 It also allows us to engage in ongoing debates about how aesthetic and discursive borders of modernism in Korea have been constituted. Kim Hansung and Choi Junga, for example, have shown how acts of translating or creatively adapting the works of W.B. Yeats yielded varying possibilities for modernism across generations of Korean poetry.5 While Kim and Choi show how Yeats's oeuvre became a fruitful Rorschach test for Korean modernists of their respective eras, Janet Poole's work on "midcentury modernism" seeks to trace the resilience of modernist themes across discursive boundaries shaped by the Cold War.6 By showing how Ch'oe Myŏng-ik's aesthetics of melancholia and negation persist across the 1945 divide, Poole offers a way of understanding modernism less in "specific formal terms" and more as a questioning of unidirectional progress. [End Page 247] If Kim and Choi privilege variation, and Poole repetition, I attempt to track both in early South Korean modernist poetry. I also...

“Bury Your Heart”: Charlotte Mew and the Limits of Empathy

Charlotte Mew’s strikingly original and passionate poetry remains under-examined by modernist critics, yet it holds great importance in presenting an alternative version of modernism that foregrounds issues surrounding gender, sexuality and otherness. Mew’s work explores key modernist themes such as alienation, fragmentation and psychological disruption from the perspectives of those on the margins of society, and in doing so challenges narrow definitions of the movement by highlighting the multiplicity and plurality of voices and concerns within it. Whilst Mew’s decentred position often informs painful reflections on shame, exclusion and powerlessness, the culmination of so many marginalised voices in the poems and Mew’s overriding compassion for the vulnerable creates a powerful challenge to the centre that contests traditional accounts of modernism as defined by white, European men. This article will explore how female experience informs Mew’s exploration of empathy between the marginalised and how personal experience of gender-based oppression inspires compassion for other vulnerable groups who suffer under similar power dynamics or social prejudices. It will consider how female experience shapes both the content of the poems and her choice of poetic forms that allow for concealment of self against the fear of exposure. It will also draw upon contemporary feminist readings of modernist literature and emotion to examine the ways in which gender informs Charlotte Mew’s treatment of key modernist themes and how this challenges conventional understanding of the movement.

American Literature in Transition, 1910–1920

American Literature in Transition, 1910–1920

Nineteenth-Century Sentimental and Popular Trends and their Transformation in Fin-de-siècle Latvian Literature

In this paper, the role of popular culture in fin-de-siècle Latvian literature has been explored by analysing the mid-nineteenth century Latvian translation of Christoph Schmid’s novel Genoveva (1846) by Ansis Leitāns, and unfinished drama Genoveva (1908) by Rūdolfs Blaumanis. While the first version of the Genoveva story was created according to the patterns of popular literature and played a significant role in the development of the Latvian reading public, the author of the second version attempted to turn the plot of popular fiction into a work of elite literature, elaborating the issue of female agency and adding psychological ambiguity to the plot. The mixture of popular melodramatic imagination and modernist themes, as observed in Blaumanis’s work, provides a deeper insight into fin-de-siècle literary techniques by turning attention to the conscious use of different literary styles and narrative levels and illuminating interactions between popular and elite culture. By comparing both works and interpreting their aesthetic innovations in terms of the relationship between idealism, realism and modernism, this paper traces the ways in which fin-de-siècle Latvian literature appropriated and reworked models of popular culture and developed new aesthetic insights by merging elements of low and high culture.

What titles tell us: The prose poem in the little magazines of early modernism

This essay takes up the question of the prose poem as a marginal genre in British and American modernism and examines its presence in the little magazines during the second decade of the twentieth century through 1920. Employing Gérard Genette’s notion of the ‘paratext’, I look at the function of titles in establishing or suggesting genre. While direct references to the ‘prose poem’ or ‘poem in prose’ are rare, titling practices perform a number of functions that shape possibilities for the genre. Translations of poetry in prose form appear, and their titles, in identifying the source, draw on past literary traditions, thus legitimising poetry in prose. Titles that employ analogies with other art forms assert a status for the texts as art, and suggest ways of reading them. Finally many titles evoke an ontology of the partial, the fleeting, and the fragmented, while the prose poems play out these modernist themes and demonstrate the form’s experimental edge.

Reading for Quiet in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead Novels

ABSTRACTThis essay argues that Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead novels embody a quiet aesthetic of narrative that has emerged as a vibrant trend in the early years of the twenty-first century. Robinson’s fiction is not driven by the narratological “noise” of action, event, and plot but by the internal machinations of consciousness, a reinvention of modernist themes that is also a return. By reading for quiet in Robinson’s work, this essay therefore demonstrates how the Gilead trilogy challenges the dominance of “trauma” narratives in contemporary American fiction and privileges the representation of quiet people, places, and states above the wider noise associated with Western culture.

Grand Theft Auto IV

This article has two goals: one is to establish techniques for content analysis of a virtual environment, Liberty City, as part of a dynamic textual object, Grand Theft Auto IV ( GTA IV). The second is to demonstrate these techniques with an analysis in the narrative of GTA IV as a very modernist, dystopian version of the American Dream. Further, the suitability of the video game as a medium for modernist themes and concerns as exemplified by the work of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and T. S. Eliot will be explored. Liberty City is an interactive city which a player can experience, rather than read about, answering many of the questions modernist writers posed to their frustrating, linear medium.

The Cosmopolitan Absurdity of Ligeti's Late Works

As Esa-Pekka Salonen notes, György Ligeti ‘was the most cosmopolitan of composers, but, paradoxically, remained clearly defined in terms of his roots and language’. As a ‘rooted’ cosmopolitan and survivor of Nazi and Soviet occupations, Ligeti retained an inherent idealism that reached back to Kant's notion of a cosmopolitan, universal future, albeit one tempered by nostalgia and fatalism. In their incorporation of disparate cultural influences, the late works in particular exemplify a form of cultural contestation—distinct from mere pluralism or hybridity—known as the ‘cosmopolitan imagination’. This paper focuses on one manifestation of this cosmopolitan impulse in four vocal and instrumental compositions. Each work manifests a comic absurdity that neither mimics nor merges the music and text which inspire it, and which binds Ligeti's music to larger modernist themes.

Art contribution to cities’ transformation. The role of Public Art management in Italy

Since the mid 80s the evident objective of public art has been to intervene in some infrastructures so that the historical function of a square or of a monument could be re-found with a completely new approach, thus defining a spatial whole as a social whole. Through a qualitative research approach that enlightens artists and commissioning agencies’ points of view, this paper seeks to document the creative processes that characterizes public art and to explore the democratic potential in urban artistic interventions. Although in the past, through instituting public art projects in disadvantaged and fragmented communities, policy makers consciously tried to promote a fallacious sense of shared space, true urban art would not embrace a purely decorative function and would not hesitate to break with the conventions that mark the political use of public art. Even if it is recognized that past expression of public art spoke of universalist and modernist themes, some recent Italian practices of public art are characterized by a strong collaborative effort between the public artist and the community: intended both to design the physical appearance of the city and to rebuild the relationship that underpins urban life. Thus the paper will show how the recognition of the value of public arts can lay the foundations for more integrated urban regeneration strategies driven by cultural policy imperatives.

Anxious Beginnings: Mental Illness, Reproduction and Nation Building in ‘Prelude’ and Prelude to Christopher

This article explores relationships between Katherine Mansfield's ‘Prelude’ (1918) and Eleanor Dark's Prelude to Christopher (1934). Mansfield's presence in Australian literary culture of the interwar period, together with Dark's knowledge of her writing, indicates that Dark was influenced, perhaps directly, by ‘Prelude’ when she wrote Prelude to Christopher. Both texts use modernist literary techniques to explore relationships between mental and physical illness and reproduction in the context of emerging feminist politics. The colonial contexts of ‘Prelude’ and Prelude to Christopher impact the treatment of modernist themes by interrogating the socially-prescribed role of woman as childbearer in the nation-building politics of the new colonial nation and its cultural, economic and scientific ideologies. Investigating links between Mansfield and Australian modernist women writers points to the possibility of a regional response to modernism.

Review

Reviewed by: The Correspondence of Edith Wharton and Macmillan, 1901-1930, and: Edith Wharton and the Conversations of Literary Modernism Sarah Way Sherman The Correspondence of Edith Wharton and Macmillan, 1901–1930. Edited by Shafquat Towheed. New York and Houndmills, England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. xiv + 279 pp. $85.00. Edith Wharton and the Conversations of Literary Modernism. By Jennifer Haytock. New York and Houndmills, England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. x + 208 pp. $80.00. Palgrave Macmillan recently published two slim, information-packed volumes on Edith Wharton. The first is a collection of correspondence between Edith Wharton and her long-time London publisher, Macmillan, particularly with Frederick MacMillan, head of the firm and son of one of its founders. The collection comes with a fine, detailed introduction by its editor, Shafquat Towheed. The second is a well-organized and skillfully argued monograph by Jennifer Haytock on Edith Wharton's engagement with modernity and modernist literature. In her edition of the Wharton-Macmillan correspondence, Towheed offers a compelling archive of letters from both parties with an introduction providing a rich exploration of its significance for Wharton scholars and students of [End Page 209] the history of literary publishing and authorship. Contracted with Scribner's in New York for her American publication, Wharton began essentially republishing her work in London with Macmillan in 1903. This relationship continued until 1923 when she switched to Appleton-Century, an American firm that offered higher financial returns and had an English branch capable of competing with Macmillan. As Towheed's introduction elegantly demonstrates, the relationship between the "gentleman publisher" and the "lady novelist" presents a case study in high-culture literary production. Both came from elite backgrounds and rose to the top of their professions: Macmillan was considered the preeminent man of letters in England, being knighted in 1909 for his service to the nation, and Wharton the preeminent woman of letters in the United States, receiving the Pulitzer Prize in 1921 and an honorary degree from Yale in 1923 (among other honors). Known for its stable of critically acclaimed authors and its backlist of confirmed classics, as well as for its modern marketing and distribution strategies, the Macmillan publishing house was well suited to Wharton's financial, cultural, and social ambitions. For his part, Frederick Macmillan welcomed Wharton into the inner sanctum of the firm; she became one of those favored writers whose manuscripts did not have to pass the scrutiny of the often-feared house readers. In fact, Towheed notes that virtually all of Wharton's submissions were initially read by Frederick Macmillan himself. Significantly, although Wharton used an agent in her dealings with Scribner's in New York, in England she handled submissions and contract terms directly with Macmillan, a testament to their peer relationship and social ease with each other, as well as to Wharton's considerable business acumen. (Later phases of the publishing process, such as marketing, distribution, and remuneration, were handled according to the firm's usual procedures). Towheed uses this information about Wharton's privileged status, a valuation she shared with other Macmillan authors such as Henry James and Rudyard Kipling, to challenge a recent study by Nina Fortin and Gaye Tuchman, who conclude that women novelists during this period were increasingly "edged out" at Macmillan in favor of men (24). The salient preference at Macmillan, Towheed argues, was actually for authors with a proven critical reputation and the promise of longevity over first-time, untried novelists. This debate will no doubt continue. Jennifer Haytock's excellent monograph, Edith Wharton and the Conversations of Literary Modernism, is a small book with large implications. Admitting up front that Wharton did not identify herself as a literary Modernist, Haytock nevertheless explores Wharton's engagement with issues that fueled Modernist themes and literary techniques. Her aim is not only to illuminate Wharton's serious grappling with modernity and its dislocations but also to broaden [End Page 210] our notions of Modernism to include more conservative and more feminine responses. Haytock's exploration is presented in six chapters, each dealing with a central issue. Haytock presents a useful overview of the influence of French Impressionism with its emphasis on the subjectivity of perception and interpretation...

Steadily and Whole: Ford Madox Ford and Modernist Sociology

Social fragmentation and cultural incoherence are conventionally regarded as trademark modernist themes, among the defining processes of modernity. Using Matthew Arnold as a touchstone, this paper frames the anxiety about wholeness as a Victorian inheritance, and anchors the discussion of fragmentation concretely in two early twentieth-century attempts to imagine society: Ford Madox Ford's social criticism and the first meetings of the London Sociological Society. I read Ford's 1905 impressionistic essay The Soul of London and his 1908 supernatural romance Mr. Apollo in light of Edwardian sociology's preoccupation with synthesis. Ford's social criticism supplemented and critiqued scientific sociology by the importance it assigned to the affect of interest, and to pathos.

The comfort of strangers: social work, modernity and late Victorian England—Part I

In these two related articles the history of social work in late Victorian England is understood by aligning it not with self-consciously held ideologies of, say, bourgeois capitalism, patriarchy, evangelical Protestantism, or liberal humanism, but with the complex cultural system of modernity. It is hoped to problematize both the genealogy and the substance of early social work that now so decisively shapes our interpretations of the influences of late Victorian philanthropy. The history of social work has to be treated seriously if we are to properly understand the present day situation in terms of modernity and investigate its orientation more thoroughly. This first paper offers a history of social work which draws attention to the imbrications of a secular modernity and how its governing ideas, texts and discourses of the time influence philanthropy. It examines dominant modernist themes that had a significant impact on the emergence of social work and the important role of the Charity Organization Society. It is suggested that these themes form part of a shared European heritage. Whilst the influences of modernity on social work are likely to have been uneven, there were common conditions faced by people in Europe and shared developments that gave way to the rise of social work in the nineteenth century.

Postmodernism and Criticality in Information Systems Research

This article identifies a gap in the inclusion of the postmodern concept in critical information systems (IS) research. Starting from the three critical tasks, insight, critique, and transformative definition, we argue that the second task of critique has been less commonly addressed. Filling that gap can begin by exploring how critical management studies have used both critical theory and postmodernism. The authors draw on Alvesson and Deetz’s (1996) argumentation that these two bodies of literature can complement each other and cohabit. There is no need for a unitary critical position, but there is currently an imbalance in critical IS research, as Habermassian approaches have remained untouched by a poststructuralist critique. Postmodern approaches are more cautious on transformative definition, and they are well suited to the task of critique. They have also been applied to examine modernist themes such as performativity and managerialism, which relate to underresearched and undercritiqued modernist concepts in IS.