Literary and Cultural Alternatives to Modernism

Literary and Cultural Alternatives to Modernism PDF

Author: Kostas Boyiopoulos

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-03-20

Total Pages: 457

ISBN-13: 0429537433

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Our collection of essays re-evaluates the much critically contested term of Modernism that, eventually, came to be used of the dominant, or paradigmatic, strain of literary discourse in early-twentieth-century culture. Modernism as a category is one which is constantly challenged, hybridised, and fractured by voices operating from inside and outside the boundaries it designates. These concerns are reflected by those figures addressed by our contributors’ chapters, which include Rupert Brooke, G. K. Chesterton, E.M. Forster, Thomas Hardy, M. R. James, C.L.R James, Vernon Lee, D.H. Lawrence, Richard La Galliene, Pamela Colman Smith, Arthur Symons, and H.G. Wells. Alert to these disturbing voices or unsettling presences that vex accounts of an emergent Modernism in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century literary cultures predominately between 1890-1939, our volume questions traditional critical mappings, taxonomies, and periodisations of this vital literary cultural moment. Our volume is equally sensitive to how the avant garde felt for those living and writing within the period with a view to offering a renewed sense of the literary and cultural alternatives to Modernism.

The Contemporaneity of Modernism

The Contemporaneity of Modernism PDF

Author: Michael D'Arcy

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-10-23

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 1317423658

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At a juncture in which art and culture are saturated with the forces of commodification, this book argues that problems, forms, and positions that defined modernism are crucially relevant to the condition of contemporary art and culture. The volume is attuned to the central concerns of recent scholarship on modernism and contemporary culture: the problems of aesthetic autonomy and the specific role of art in preserving a critical standpoint for cultural production; the relationship between politics and the category of the aesthetic; the problems of temporality and contemporaneity; literary transnationalism; and the questions of medium and medium specificity. Ranging across art forms, mediums, disciplines, and geographical locations, essays address the foundational questions that fuse modernism and the contemporary moment: What is art? What is the relation between art and the economy? How do art and technology interpenetrate and transform each other? What is modernism’s logic of time and contemporaneity, and how might it speak to the problem of thinking genuine novelty, or the possibility of an alternative to the current stage of neo-liberal capitalism? What is modernism, and what is its history? The book is thus committed to revising our understanding of what modernism was in its earlier instantiations, and in accounting for the current moment, addressing the problems raised by modernism's afterlives and reverberations in the 20th and 21st centuries. The volume includes essays that consider literature, sociology, philosophy, visual art, music, architecture, digital culture, television, and other artistic media. It synthesizes the most recent thinking on modernism and contemporary culture and presents a compelling case for what happens to literature, art, and culture in the wake of the exhaustion of postmodernism. This book will be of interest to those studying literature, visual art, media studies, architecture, literary theory, modernism, and twentieth-century and contemporary culture more generally.

Alternative Modernities

Alternative Modernities PDF

Author: Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 382

ISBN-13: 9780822327141

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A special issue of PUBLIC CULTURE, this volume of essays examines modernity from transnational and transcultural perspectives, holding that within different cultures, there are different starting points of the transition to modernity that lead to differen

Pragmatic Modernism

Pragmatic Modernism PDF

Author: Lisi Schoenbach

Publisher: OUP USA

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 217

ISBN-13: 0195389840

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Pragmatic Modernism traces an alternative strain of modernism influenced by pragmatist philosophy and characterized by its commitment to gradualism, continuity, and habit rather than spectacular events and radical rupture. Through original readings of Gertrude Stein, Henry James, Marcel Proust, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., this study rediscovers an overlooked cultural and social matrix and suggests an expanded range of responses to modernity.

Out of Context

Out of Context PDF

Author: Michaela Bronstein

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 0190655399

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Introduction: Works for other times -- Rescue work: innovation and continuity in modernist fiction -- Character and identity -- What chronology demands of us -- Needing to narrate -- Modernism today, or, The author becomes a character

The Word on the Streets

The Word on the Streets PDF

Author: Brooks E. Hefner

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Published: 2017-10-27

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 0813940427

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From the hard-boiled detective stories of Dashiell Hammett to the novels of Claude McKay, The Word on the Streets examines a group of writers whose experimentation with the vernacular argues for a rethinking of American modernism—one that cuts across traditional boundaries of class, race, and ethnicity. The dawn of the modernist era witnessed a transformation of popular writing that demonstrated an experimental practice rooted in the language of the streets. Emerging alongside more recognized strands of literary modernism, the vernacular modernism these writers exhibited lays bare the aesthetic experiments inherent in American working-class and ethnic language, forging an alternative pathway for American modernist practice. Brooks Hefner shows how writers across a variety of popular genres—from Gertrude Stein and William Faulkner to humorist Anita Loos and ethnic memoirist Anzia Yezierska—employed street slang to mount their own critique of genteel realism and its classist emphasis on dialect hierarchies, the result of which was a form of American experimental writing that resonated powerfully across the American cultural landscape of the 1910s and 1920s.

Modernism à la Mode

Modernism à la Mode PDF

Author: Elizabeth M. Sheehan

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2018-10-15

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 1501728156

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Modernism à la Mode argues that fashion describes why and how literary modernism matters in its own historical moment and ours. Bringing together texts, textiles, and theories of dress, Elizabeth Sheehan shows that writers, including Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, W.E.B. Du Bois, Nella Larsen, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, turned to fashion to understand what their own stylized works could do in the context of global capital, systemic violence, and social transformation. Modernists engage with fashion as a mood, a set of material objects, and a target of critique, and, in doing so, anticipate and address contemporary debates centered on the uses of literature and literary criticism amidst the supposed crisis in the humanities. A modernist affect with a purpose, no less. By engaging modernism à la mode—that is, contingently, contextually, and in light of contemporary concerns—this book offers an alternative to the often-untenable distinctions between strong or weak, suspicious or reparative, and politically activist or quietist approaches to literature, which frame current debates about literary methodology. As fashion helps us to describe what modernist texts do, it enables us to do more with modernism as a form of inquiry, perception, and critique. Fashion and modernism are interwoven forms of inquiry, perception, and critique, writes Sheehan. It is fashion that puts the work of early twentieth-century writers in conversation with twenty-first century theories of emotion, materiality, animality, beauty, and history.

A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism

A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism PDF

Author: Eric Hayot

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2016-11-29

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 0231543069

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Bringing together leading critics and literary scholars, A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism argues for new ways of understanding the nature and development of twentieth-century literature and culture. Scholars have largely understood modernism as an American and European phenomenon. Those parameters have expanded in recent decades, but the incorporation of multiple origins and influences has often been tied to older conceptual frameworks that make it difficult to think of modernism globally. Providing alternative approaches, A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism introduces pathways through global archives and new frameworks that offer a richer, more representative set of concepts for the analysis of literary and cultural works. In separate essays each inspired by a critical term, this collection explores what happens to the foundational concepts of modernism and the methods we bring to modernist studies when we approach the field as a global phenomenon. Their work transforms the intellectual paradigms we have long associated with modernism, such as tradition, antiquity, style, and translation. New paradigms, such as context, slum, copy, pantomime, and puppets emerge as the archive extends beyond its European center. In bringing together and reexamining the familiar as well as the emergent, the contributors to this volume offer an invaluable and original approach to studying the intersection of world literature and modernist studies.

Geographies of Modernism

Geographies of Modernism PDF

Author: Peter Brooker

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2007-05-07

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 1134329113

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This volume explores the interface between modernism and geography in a range of writers, texts and artists across the twentieth century.

Modernism and Time

Modernism and Time PDF

Author: Ronald Schleifer

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2000-02-10

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 113942968X

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In Modernism and Time, Ronald Schleifer analyses the transition from the Enlightenment to post-Enlightenment ways of understanding in Western thought. Schleifer argues that this transition in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century expresses itself centrally in an altered conception of temporality. He examines this period's remarkable breaks with the past in literature, music, and the arts more generally. Whereas Enlightenment thought sees time as a homogenous, neutral medium, in which events and actions take place, post-Enlightenment thought sees time as discontinuous and inexorably bound up with both the subjects and events that seem to inhabit it. This fundamental change of perception, Schleifer argues, takes place across disciplines as varied as physics, economics and philosophy. Schleifer's study engages with the work of writers and thinkers as varied as George Eliot, Walter Benjamin, Einstein and Russell, and offers a powerful reassessment of the politics and culture of modernism.