Modernist Themes Research Articles

A Sense of Place: Landscape and Location in the Poetry of John Davidson

John Davidson (1857-1909) is a displaced figure, alienated from his native Scottish context and equally marginalized within literary scene of 1890s London. Yet negative influences can inspire challenging and compelling writing. In Davidson's case displacement helped to shape a proto-modernist sensibility within his poetry and consequently he has been praised by writers such as Hugh MacDiarmid, T. S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf for his ability to introduce working-class, urban, and industrial life into realm of poetry. Hugh MacDiarmid stated emphatically that Davidson was the only Scottish poet to whom I owe anything at all, or to whom I would be pleased to admit any debt. (1) Certainly, Davidson stood out as having a peculiar significance for MacDiarmid in relation to Scottish literary tradition and he clarifies his debt of influence by explaining: What Davidson, alone of Scottish poets, did was to enlarge subject-matter of poetry, assimilate and utilize a great deal of new scientific and contemporary material ... and, above all, to write urban poetry (a development Scots like Alexander Smith and Thomas Hood had heralded, but which subsequent Scots poets failed to carry on). (pp. 50-51) Scottish writers of nineteenth century, like Davidson and James Thomson B.V. (1834-1882), had a distinctive capacity for anticipating modernist themes of alienation and disillusionment, and for presenting these themes in new and experimental ways. In his preface to James Thomson's The City of Dreadful Night Edwin Morgan comments: If Thomson's reputation has been uncertain, it is tempting to relate this to his being an uprooted Scot living in other places.... Similar uncertainties have attended reputations of Carlyle and Stevenson, of John Davidson, of Robert Buchanan and David Gray.... Taken from point of view of writers themselves, question is how easy or difficult it was for a Scottish poet brought up in or migrating to England at that period to write persuasively in English.... The whole change of environment from Scotland to (say) London--the complex of physical, cultural and linguistic changes--may also have forced, under pressure of various kinds, new ways of looking at things, a new awareness of things that an outsider suddenly sees and points out. T. S. Eliot's published tribute to both Thomson and Davidson--perhaps as an incomer himself he was all more receptive--was that they had a particular kind of modernity, a sort of prophetic modern adumbration, deeply incorporating urban experience into poetry, which he did not find in their English contemporaries. The two Scottish poets were alienated, whether psychologically or geographically or both.... [Eliot] saw them as figures of exile and alienation of early-modern artist. (2) Davidson and Thomson used both landscapes and cityscapes to represent modern experience, incorporating subject matter and social effects of urbanization, industry, science, loss of faith, and alienation into their poetry. Because of these priorities Davidson's sense of place extends far beyond mere geographical location. Aspects of environment, urban or rural, and landscapes in general were important elements of his poetry. Through them he mediates and reflects upon issues concerning his own identity and purpose both publicly, as a writer, and in deeply personal terms. These elements constitute an effort on Davidson's part to locate himself in a more than literal way. His life-long interest in nature, landscape, and environment is used to reflect ambivalent views concerning society and place of individual within a changing, increasingly secular, industrial, and competitive world. T. S. Eliot cited Davidson and James Thomson as having a notable influence upon him, particularly Davidson's dramatic monologue of struggling Cockney clerk in Thirty Bob a Week: I am sure that I found inspiration in content of poem, and in complete fitness of content and idiom: for I also had a good many dingy urban images to reveal. …

The Religious Poetry of Ruth Pitter

It is an unfortunate fact that Ruth Pitter (1897-1992)--an important twentieth-century British poet who won Hawthornden Prize 1937 for A Trophy of Arms (1936), William E. Heinemann Award for The Ermine (1953), and Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry 1955--is little known America. When her name is recognized, it is usually context of the woman who should have married C. S. Lewis. (2) Yet Pitter is an accomplished poet, having produced eighteen volumes of new and collected verse her lifetime. (3) Although it is too much call this article an attempt rehabilitate Pitter, it is accurate describe it as an effort expose how Pitter's poetic impulse, desire to express something of secret meanings which haunt life and language places her mainstream of twentieth-century British poetry. (4) Because she was never associated with a literary group or movement, she has not attracted widespread critical notice spite of many poets and writers who admired her work. (5) Pitter, contrast T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and W. H. Auden, is a traditional poet line of George Herbert, Thomas Traherne, Thomas Hardy, A. E. Housman, W. B. Yeats, and Philip Larkin. Unlike modernists, she rarely experiments with meter or verse form, nor does she explore modernist themes or offer critiques of modern English society. Instead, she works with familiar meters and verse forms, and her reluctance alter her voice follow modernist line explains part why critics have overlooked her poetry. She is not trendy, avant-garde, nor, thankfully, impenetrable. (6) As a result, for many years she labored at her craft in comparative but wholly unjustified obscurity (Schlueter). Moreover, when significant literary success came, contemporary critical recognition of her achievements was restrained. I believe failure bring a critical perspective her life and work is a serious aesthetic, intellectual, and literary oversight. The intensity, passion, yet controlled insight about human condition and her mystical reflections on natural world merit sustained scholarly attention and broad exposure. However, of particular importance is her religious poetry because one can chart through it a pilgrimage of faith--a journey beginning with a conciliatory acquiescence a veiled transcendence moving through acceptance of a distant, impersonal deity and ending with commitment orthodox Christianity. This journey of faith is reflected mature poetry of Pitter, most of it written from 1935 1953, a period dominated by growing threat of fascism and very real worry that Western civilization was on verge of destruction. The intent here is offer a broad overview of Pitter's spiritual maturation through her religious poetry as well as an indication of her gifts as a poet. A Trophy of Arms Her first mature volume of poetry, A Trophy of Arms: Poems 1926-1935 (1936) is a collection of poems that explores melancholic reality of human condition; yet, at same time, it is neither depressing nor despairing. Instead, it is a clarion call embrace sorrow, loss, and loneliness through either lens of nature or a veiled, transcendent power. Often, her poems focusing upon spiritual themes are vaguely hopeful. For instance, Sudden Heaven is a powerful affirmation of hope. Pitter combines a clipped, terse style with an incisive eye create a poem of startling power about unexpected, unsolicited joy: All was as it had ever been-- The worn familiar book, The oak beyond hawthorn seen, The misty woodland's look: The starling perched upon tree With his long tress of straw-When suddenly heaven blazed on me, And suddenly I saw: Saw all as it would ever be, In bliss too great tell; For ever safe, for ever free, All bright with miracle: Saw as heaven thorn arrayed, The tree beside door; And I must die--but O my shade Shall dwell there evermore. …

In Search of Knowledge: Voicing the Void in Tash Aw’s The Harmony Silk Factory

In Search of Knowledge: Voicing the Void in Tash Aw’s The Harmony Silk Factory P e t e r I . B a r t a U N I V E R S I T Y O F S U R R E Y , U K Born in 1971, TashAw is Malaysian by nationality, Chinese by origin, and British by education. Abilingual speaker of Chinese and English, he did his undergraduate and postgraduate studies in law at Warwick and Cambridge Universities and, subsequently, studied creative writing at the University of EastAnglia. In the early spring of 2005, he made astriking debut with the publicationofTheHarmonySilkFactory.Thepaperbackversionandrelease in the United States followed in quick succession. By the summer of2005 it was translated and published in Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, and Greek; it is currently being translated into Chinese, French, German, Italian, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish for forthcoming publi¬ cation in 2006. The novel was long-listed for the 2005 Booker Prize and won the prestigious Whitbread First Novel Award for 2005.' Fortunate indeed is a“first novel,” aproduct of “high culture” at that, to enjoy such rapid success and receive instant critical acclaim. The mostly enthusiastic book reviews to date concentrate on the novel’s plot and obedi¬ entlyfollowtheleadofthepersonawhose“Ich-Erzahlung”beginsPartOne inmediasres.Thereviewerssuggestthatthepresumedmainhero,Johnny, occupies the center of attention for the reader who is to decide whether he is acriminal, an innocent victim of events largely outside his control, aloving husband and father, or acynical crook (Gee, Hickling, Mukherjee, and Zaltzmann). This article will conduct its investigation elsewhere.Aw’s novel focuses predominantlyontheimpactofBritishcolonialismontherepresentative charactersofthecolonizingEnglishandthecolonizedMalaysianChinese civilizations.Undoubtedly,readersmayhearechoesofJosephConrad,Ford MadoxFord,andE.M.Foster.Also,perhapslessobviously,thevoicesof other modernist writers of the British Isles such as D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce,andVirginiaWoolfengagewiththistext.TheHarmonySilkFactory, however, is not anostalgic pastiche of modernist themes and techniques, nor does it claim to re-invent the disappearance of the omniscient Instead, it carefully interrogates assumptions, not only about the existence of aunified human subject, but, more importantly, about the very possibility of constructing any unified body of knowledge. For all his questions, howev¬ er, no release fi'om moral responsibility is envisaged, nor are evil and crime relativized in Aw’s world. Hence, even though he avoids many of the exter¬ nal features of philosophically conscious, often highly ornate, contemporary n a r r a t o r . Intertexts, Vol. 9, No. 2©2005 Texas Tech UniversiQ' Press 1 0 6 I N T E R T E X T S v literary prose writing as well as its blurring of the categories of ethics and aesthetics, his novel problematizes the relationship between narrative and epistemology in aprovocative, “post-modern,” manner. Three overdy partial storytelling voices comprise the novel. These three intradiegetic narrators alter, complement, and distort each other even as they provide accounts of the main events of the plot: the murder in the mine; the relationship between Johnny and Tiger; the friendship between Johnny and Peter; the story of the Soong family; the courtship between Johnny and Snow and the history of their marriage; Kunichika Mamoru’s role; the trip of all main characters to the islands called “Seven Maidens”; andfinallyJasper’s,Peter’s,andJohnny’slivesduringthefourdecadesafter Snow’sdeath.Thetimeframeofthenovelisroughlybetween1940andthe mid-1980s.Withinthedifferentnarrativerenderingsofthesameevents,as inJamesJoyce’sUlysses,weexperience“parallax,”thatis,whenthesame happeningorobjectisviewedfromdifferentspatio-temporalanglesbydif¬ ferent individuals in different places at different times. In the first part of the novel, Johnny is described as amurderer, his first de facto murder having been the one of the English factory manager in the mine, well before the events of the plot take place. But then we hear another account of this event wheretheidentityoftheChinesemanreactingagainsthisBritishsupervisor remains obscure. Neither of the other two narrators shares the first, and least knowledgeable,storyteller’scertaintyaboutthisandsubsequentmurders committedbyJohnny.OtherparallaxesrelatetoJohnny’sroleintheaccientandfireinwhichhisfather -in-lawgetsinjured,orthecomplexrelations ^ongSnow;herhusband,Johnny;andSnow’sparents.Butunlikein Joyce,differentpeople’sawarenessofwhathappenedcanbesostrikinglyat vanance in this novel that the “truth” becomes shrouded in complete mys¬ tery. The narrating voices belong to characters central to the novel’s conscmusness : to Jasper, who is Snow’s son, to Snow herself, and to Peter (who mersheisJasper’sfather).Peter’sgeneralunreliabilitymakeshisaccount p^ncularly suspect. Yet it is only his story that provides evidence concerning thecrucialquestionoftheidentityofJasper’sfather.ThestoryPetertells cou erelying on Snow’s diary that...

The twentieth-century world of Henry James: changes in his work after 1900

This study focuses on Henry James's final years, exploring how his work developed and how his ideas changed in response to events in the 20th century. It is Tintner's final volume of five works on Henry James, and it uncovers many of the modernist themes that preoccupied the novelist.

Shakespeare among the Moderns

Modernist writers, critics, and artists sparked a fresh and distinctive interpretation of Shakespeare's plays which has proved remarkably tenacious, as Richard Halpern explains in this lively and provocative book. The preoccupations of such high modernists as T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, and James Joyce set the tone for the critical reception of Shakespeare in the twentieth century. Halpern contends their habits of thought continue to dominate postmodern schools of criticism that claim to have broken with the modernist legacy.Halpern addresses such topics as imperialism and modernism's cult of the primitive, the rise of mass culture, modernist anti-semitism, and the aesthetic of the machine. His discussion considers figures as diverse as Orson Welles and Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Shakespeare critics including Northrop Frye, Cleanth Brooks, Stephen Greenblatt, and Stanley Cavell. Shakespeare's works have been subjected to a continuing process of historical reinterpretation in which every new era has imposed its own cultural and ideological presuppositions on the plays. The most enduring contribution of modernism, Halpern suggests, has been the juxtaposition of an awareness of historical distance and a mapping of Shakespeare's plays onto the present. Using modernist themes and approaches, he constructs new readings of four Shakespeare plays.

A so-called 'fraud': moral modulations in a literary scandal

Physicist Alan Sokal achieved a moment of fame by announcing that he had succeeded in publishing an article in the cultural studies journal Social Text, which was 'sprinkled with nonsense' about developments in quantum gravity physics that supposedly converge with post- modernist themes. Sokal announced his hoax in an article in the liter ary magazine Lingua Franca. This touched off an intense flurry of commentary. Many commentators praised Sokal for exposing shoddy editorial standards in the cultural studies field, while others denounced him for committing scientific fraud. With few exceptions, both Sokal's celebrants and detractors accepted his claim that he did not believe what he said in the Social Text article. Under the circumstances, it is puzzling that they took seriously what he said in Lingua Franca, and did not con sider that he was once again 'successfully pretending to be himself'. In this paper, I suggest that the Lingua Franca article also achieved a parody, and that those who took Sokal seriously were once again taken in by the voice of scientific authority.

The Private Worlds of Marcel Duchamp: Desire, Liberation, and the Self in Modern Culture.

Marcel Duchamp is a founding figure of twentieth-century art and culture, the common source to which many contemporary movements trace their roots. His career has often been celebrated for its contradictions and discontinuities, its disparate parts unified only by their assault on the traditions of art. Jerrold Seigel offers a wholly different view, revealing a web of interrelated themes that unify Duchamp's work and tie it to his life. At the book's center is a reinterpretation of the famous readymades, of which the urinal Fountain and the defaced Mona Lisa were the most shocking. By recovering their history, Seigel shows that their playful and rebellious surface veiled the meanings that linked them to Duchamp's pictures (especially the famous Large Glass, here illuminated by a comprehensive new reading) and to his experiments with language.The result gives the artist's career the unity of a colorful and intricate puzzle. Behind that puzzle were the great modernist themes of isolation, perpetuated desire, and the imagined dissolution of the self. These themes entered Duchamp's mind both from his social and cultural environment and from the shaping experience of his family; around them were woven the patterns of working and loving that Seigel uncovers in his life. Duchamp emerges not just as a coherent, understandable personality, but as an exemplary one, his very eccentricities reflecting essential dimensions of modern experience. A mythic presence in modern culture, a hero whose story we tell for the sake of its valuable lessons, Duchamp opened the floodgates to a sea of questions about the nature and meaning of art. Seigel demands that we think again about these questions, and about the answers that Duchamp's heirs and followers have tried to give to them.

Release from Torment: The Fragmented Double in Bowles's Let It Come down

Paul Bowles, the author of a number of haunting short stories, four novels, the best-known of which is Sheltering Sky (1949), poetry, travel books, and translations from the Arabic, is not as well known in this country as he should be, perhaps because he has lived for many years in Morocco-the alien territory that provides the background for much of his writing. reader of post-World War II literature is familiar with his modernist themes of alienation, loneliness, and anxiety; what remains in the mind after reading much of Bowles's work is the seemingly unmerited harsh fate he metes out to his central characters, who are either self-destructive, like Port Moresby in Sheltering Sky, or destroyed by others in deaths involving mutilation, torture, and madness, as seen, for example, in such stories as A Delicate Prey, A Distant Episode, and The Hours after Noon. In story after story, human frailties of obtuseness or self-indulgence result in calamity and horror. As Theodore Solotaroff writes, Of the writers who devoted themselves to negation and despair, Bowles was probably the most . . . uncompromising.' In this essay I plan to discuss the possible impetus for Bowles's demonic vision and the technical means by which he conveys it in much of his work, using as text his compelling novel Let It Come Down (1952). existential hero of the novel, Nelson Dyar (die-er? dire?), is a disaffected young American and a loner who has come to Morocco to transform himself into a winner instead of the victim he sees

Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Dos Passos: Some Recent Studies

Donald M. Kartinganer. The Fragile Thread: The Meaning of Form in Faulkner's Novels. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1979.206 + xviii pp. Robert Emmet Long. The Achieving of "The Great Gatsby ": F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1920-1925. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1979.226 pp. Bernard Oldsey. Hemingway's Hidden Craft: The Writing of "A Farewell to Arms. " University Park and London : The Pennsyl- vania State University Press, 1979. 123 + x pp. Linda W. Wagner. Dos Passos: Artist as American. Austin and London : University of Texas Press, 1979. 220 + xxiv pp. Judith Bryant Wittenberg. Faulkner: The Trans- figuration of Biography, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979. 264 + viii pp. Other than the fact that they all deal with important American novelists who began to produce during the first half of the 1920s, the five books under examination here have little in common. Even though they were committed to certain common modernist themes, the subjects of these books have attained individualities in the current consciousness, each identified with peculiar, if shifting, subject matter and characteristic form and style. It will no longer do, if it ever did, to refer to these four merely as writers of the twenties: Faulkner reached his peak during the thirties; re-evaluation of Fitzgerald's post-Jazz Age work dispels the myth that he was a one-decade man; Hemingway and Dos Passos produced significant novels well after the Crash. And as for the five critiques themselves, each takes its own stance, focusing on a larger or lesser portion of its subject's work and adopting a unique perspective on it.