A Genealogy of Modernism
A Genealogy of Modernism

Author: Michael Harry Levenson

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1986-06-27

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 9780521338004

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A Geneology of Modernism is a study of literary transition in the first two decades of the twentieth-century, a period of extraordinary ferment and great accomplishment, during which the avant-garde gradually consolidated a secure place within English culture. Michael Levenson analyses that complex process by following the successive phases of a literary movement - Impressionist, Imagist, Vorticist, Classicist - as it attempted to formulate the principles on which a new aesthetic might be founded. The emphasis here falls on the ideology of modernism, but throughout the book the ideological question is tied on the one hand to specific literary works and on the other to general movements in philosophy and the fine arts. The major figures under discussion, Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and T. S. Elliot, are placed in relation to thinkers who have been largely neglected in the history of modernism: Max Stirner, Wilhelm Worringer, Pierre Lasserre, Allen Upward, and Hilaire Belloc. Levenson thus situates the emergence of a modernist aesthetic within the context of literary theory, literary practice, and cultural history.

A Genealogy of the Modern Self
A Genealogy of the Modern Self

Author: Alina Clej

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 1995-08-01

Total Pages: 460

ISBN-13: 0804780765

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As this book's title suggests, its main argument is that Thomas De Quincey's literary output, which is both a symptom and an effect of his addictions to opium and writing, plays an important and mostly unacknowledged role in the development of modern and modernist forms of subjectivity. At the same time, the book shows that intoxication, whether in the strict medical sense or in its less technical meaning ("strong excitement," "trance," "ecstasy"), is central to the ways in which modernity, and literary modernity in particular, functions and defines itself. In both its theoretical and practical implications, intoxication symbolizes and often comes to constitute the condition of the alienated artist in the age of the market. The book also offers new readings of the Confessions and some of De Quincey's posthumous writings, as well as an extended analysis of his relatively neglected diary. The discussion of De Quincey's work also elicits new insights into his relationship with William and Dorothy Wordsworth, as well as his imaginary investment in Coleridge.

A History of the Modernist Novel
A History of the Modernist Novel

Author: Gregory Castle

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2015-06-25

Total Pages: 549

ISBN-13: 1107034957

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A History of the Modernist Novel reassesses the modernist canon and produces a wealth of new comparative analyses that radically revise the novel's history. It also considers the novel's global reach while suggesting that the epoch of modernism is not yet finished.

Modernism and the Fate of Individuality
Modernism and the Fate of Individuality

Author: Michael Levenson

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1991-03-07

Total Pages: 251

ISBN-13: 0521394910

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The book is an elaborate and compelling engagement with the problem of individuality in our age.

James Joyce and the Mythology of Modernism
James Joyce and the Mythology of Modernism

Author: Daniel M. Shea

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2006-04-09

Total Pages: 207

ISBN-13: 3838255747

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"James Joyce and the Mythology of Modernism" examines anew how myth exists in Joyce's fiction. Using Joyce's idiosyncratic appropriation of the myths of Catholicism, this study explores how the rejected religion still acts as a foundational aesthetic for a new mythology of the Modern age starting with "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" and maturing within "Ulysses". Like the mythopoets before him -- Homer, Dante, Milton, Blake -- Joyce consciously sets out to encapsulate his vision of a splintered and rapidly changing reality into a new aesthetic which alone is capable of successfully rendering the fullness of life in a meaningful way. Already reeling from the humanistic implications of an impersonal Newtonian universe, the Modern world now faced an Einsteinian one, a re-evaluation which includes Stephen's awakening from the "nightmare" of history, a re-definition of deity, and Bloom's urban identity. Written with both the experienced Joycean and the beginner in mind, this book tells how the Joycean myth is our own conception of the human being, and our place in the universe becomes (re)defined as definitively Modernist, yet still, through Molly Bloom's final affirmation, profoundly human.

Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons
Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons

Author: Lisa Siraganian

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020-11-19

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13: 0192639633

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Winner, Matei Calinescu Prize, Modern Language Association Winner, 2021 Modernist Studies Award, Modernist Studies Association Long before the US Supreme Court announced that corporate persons freely "speak" with money in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), they elaborated the legal fiction of American corporate personhood in Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886). Yet endowing a non-human entity with certain rights exposed a fundamental philosophical question about the possibility of collective intention. That question extended beyond the law and became essential to modern American literature. This volume offers the first multidisciplinary intellectual history of this story of corporate personhood. The possibility that large collective organizations might mean to act like us, like persons, animated a diverse set of American writers, artists, and theorists of the corporation in the first half of the twentieth century, stimulating a revolution of thought on intention. The ambiguous status of corporate intention provoked conflicting theories of meaning—on the relevance (or not) of authorial intention and the interpretation of collective signs or social forms—still debated today. As law struggled with opposing arguments, modernist creative writers and artists grappled with interrelated questions, albeit under different guises and formal procedures. Combining legal analysis of law reviews, treatises, and case law with literary interpretation of short stories, novels, and poems, this volume analyzes legal philosophers including Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Frederic Maitland, Harold Laski, Maurice Wormser, and creative writers such as Theodore Dreiser, Muriel Rukeyser, Gertrude Stein, Charles Reznikoff, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and George Schuyler.

A Handbook of Modernism Studies
A Handbook of Modernism Studies

Author: Jean-Michel Rabaté

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2015-12-21

Total Pages: 485

ISBN-13: 111912140X

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Featuring the latest research findings and exploring the fascinating interplay of modernist authors and intellectual luminaries, from Beckett and Kafka to Derrida and Adorno, this bold new collection of essays gives students a deeper grasp of key texts in modernist literature. Provides a wealth of fresh perspectives on canonical modernist texts, featuring the latest research data Adopts an original and creative thematic approach to the subject, with concepts such as race, law, gender, class, time, and ideology forming the structure of the collection Explores current and ongoing debates on the links between the aesthetics and praxis of authors and modernist theoreticians Reveals the profound ways in which modernist authors have influenced key thinkers, and vice versa

Modernism's Mythic Pose
Modernism's Mythic Pose

Author: Carrie J. Preston

Publisher: OUP USA

Published: 2011-09-05

Total Pages: 372

ISBN-13: 0199766266

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The ancient world served as an unconventional source of inspiration for a generation of modernists. Drawing on examples from literature, dance, photography, and film, Modernism's Mythic Pose argues that a strain of antimodern-classicism permeates modernist celebrations of novelty, shock, and technology.The touchstone of Preston's study is Delsartism--the popular transnational movement which promoted mythic statue--posing, poetic recitation, and other hybrid solo performances for health and spiritual development. Derived from nineteenth-century acting theorist Francois Delsarte and largely organized by women, Delsartism shaped modernist performances, genres, and ideas of gender. Even Ezra Pound, a famous promoter of the "new," made ancient figures speak in the "old" genre of the dramatic monologue and performed public recitations. Recovering precedents in nineteenth-century popular entertainments and Delsartism's hybrid performances, this book considers the canonical modernists Pound and T. S. Eliot, lesser-known poets like Charlotte Mew, the Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov, Isadora Duncan the international dance star, and H.D. as poet and film actor.Preston's interdisciplinary engagement with performance, poetics, modern dance, and silent film demonstrates that studies of modernism often overemphasize breaks with the past. Modernism also posed myth in an ambivalent relationship to modernity, a halt in the march of progress that could function as escapism, skeptical critique, or a figure for the death of gods and civilizations.

My Silver Planet
My Silver Planet

Author: Daniel Tiffany

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 1421411458

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Reveals the hidden origins of kitsch in poetry from the eighteenth century. Taking its title from John Keats, My Silver Planet contends that the problem of elite poetry’s relation to popular culture bears the indelible mark of its turbulent incorporation of vernacular poetry—a legacy shaped by nostalgia, contempt, and fraudulence. Daniel Tiffany reactivates and fundamentally redefines the concept of kitsch, freeing it from modernist misapprehension and ridicule, by tracing its origin to poetry’s alienation from the emergent category of literature. Tiffany excavates the forgotten history of poetry’s relation to kitsch, beginning with the exuberant revival of archaic (and often spurious) ballads in Britain in the early eighteenth century. In these controversial events of poetic imposture, Tiffany identifies a submerged pact—in opposition to the bourgeois values of literature—between elite and vernacular poetries. Tiffany argues that the ballad revival—the earliest explicit formation of what we now call popular culture—sparked a perilous but seemingly irresistible flirtation (among elite audiences) with poetic forgery that endures today in the ambiguity of the kitsch artifact: Is it real or fake, art or kitsch? He goes on to trace the genealogy of kitsch in texts ranging from nursery rhymes and poetic melodrama to the lyric commodities of Baudelaire. He scrutinizes the fascist “paradise” inscribed in Ezra Pound’s Cantos as well as the avant-garde poetry of the New York School and its debt to pop and “plastic” art. By exposing and elaborating the historical poetics of kitsch, My Silver Planet transforms our sense of kitsch as a category of material culture.