Modernist Humanism and the Men of 1914
Modernist Humanism and the Men of 1914

Author: Stephen Sicari

Publisher:

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781570039560

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Modernist Humanism and the Men of 1914 is a defense of literary modernism that recognizes for the first time that the deepest goal of high modernism is to establish a renewed humanism for the twentieth century. Recent critiques of modernism have tended to diminish its literary standing by emphasizing the reactionary politics of the period and connecting the literature to those developments as complicit or at least parallel. In his incisive readings of four pillars of high modernism--James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot--Stephen Sicari returns the focus instead to the rich and complex imaginative texts themselves for a fuller reading that rescues these works from the narrow political contexts of postmodern criticism. Sicari reassesses key modernist writers as important thinkers of their age who, through complex and often experimental art, debunked inherited models for representing the human experience. He employs a formalist approach toward a historicist goal, offering original readings of canonical modernists as responding to the rational, reductive view of humanity espoused by scientists and social scientists such as Darwin, Marx, and Freud. In the work of each of his subjects, Sicari traces the emergence of a new or renewed humanism, often connected to the early modern humanist views of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. He also explores the interconnectivity of religion and literature in these works, not only in the views of the explicitly Christian writer Eliot and the more obliquely Christian writer Joyce, but also, Sicari contends, in the conclusion reached by all of four writers that a renewed humanism in the modern period will be found in a faith-based understanding of humanity and destiny. In mapping the persistence of a humanist tradition throughout modernism, Sicari delineates a path through the movement that ultimately replaces the skepticism and pessimism of modernity with humanist values and virtues. Modernist Humanism and the Men of 1914 offers a valuable new lens through which to view ongoing theoretical and aesthetic debates within modernist studies.

The Cambridge History of Modernism
The Cambridge History of Modernism

Author: Vincent Sherry

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2017-01-11

Total Pages: 1579

ISBN-13: 1316720535

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This Cambridge History of Modernism is the first comprehensive history of modernism in the distinguished Cambridge Histories series. It identifies a distinctive temperament of 'modernism' within the 'modern' period, establishing the circumstances of modernized life as the ground and warrant for an art that becomes 'modernist' by virtue of its demonstrably self-conscious involvement in this modern condition. Following this sensibility from the end of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, tracking its manifestations across pan-European and transatlantic locations, the forty-three chapters offer a remarkable combination of breadth and focus. Prominent scholars of modernism provide analytical narratives of its literature, music, visual arts, architecture, philosophy, and science, offering circumstantial accounts of its diverse personnel in their many settings. These historically informed readings offer definitive accounts of the major work of twentieth-century cultural history and provide a new cornerstone for the study of modernism in the current century.

Modernist Reformations
Modernist Reformations

Author: Stephen Sicari

Publisher: Liverpool University Press

Published: 2022-03-16

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 1638040257

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“Religion” has become suspect in literary studies, often for good reason, as it has become associated with reactionary politics and outdated codified beliefs. In Modernist Reformations: Poetry as Theology in Eliot, Stevens, and Joyce, the author demonstrates how three high modernist writers work to reform religious experience for an age dominated by the extremes of radical skepticism and dogmatic rigidity. The author offers new and provocative readings of these well-studied writers: Joyce and Stevens are usually considered purely secular, and the Eliot in this book is more progressive than reactionary. The readings here provide a fresh approach to their work and to the period. Using studies of religious experience by sociologists and theologians both from the modernist era and from our own contemporary world to frame the argument, the author examines the poetry closely and in detail to demonstrate that the work of these writers does not merely reflect religious themes and issues but does the actual work usually considered theological. Their poetry is theology. Modernist Reformations will renew and deepen appreciation for these writers, and perhaps their efforts at reformation may allow for our own engagement with religion in a secular age.

Reading Texts, Reading Lives
Reading Texts, Reading Lives

Author: Daniel Morris

Publisher: University of Delaware

Published: 2012-06-14

Total Pages: 255

ISBN-13: 1611493455

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Our culture attempts to separate competing ideological factions by denying relationships between multiple perspectives and influences outside of one’s own narrow interpretive community. The distinguished essayists in this volume find Daniel R. Schwarz’s pluralistic, self-questioning approach to what he calls “reading texts and reading lives” quite relevant to the current historical moment and political situation. A legendary scholar of modernist literature, Schwarz’s critical principles are a healthy corrective to cultural hubris. The essayists treat works ranging from fictions by Joyce, Conrad, Morrison, and Woolf to the poetry of Yeats, to Holocaust literature, to the environmental writings of Wendell Berry, to the photographs of Lee Friedlander. The authors focus on different works, but they follow Schwarz in stressing formal elements most often associated with traditional realism while keeping an eye on historical and author-centered approaches. The essayists also follow Schwarz in their emphasis on narrative cohesion and in how they look for signs of agency among characters who possess the will to alter their fate, even in a seemingly random universe such as the one depicted by Conrad. Readers with eyes to ethics and aesthetics, they follow Schwarz in encouraging a values-centered approach that leaves room for the reader to address the ways in which reading a text correlates to the reader’s ability to find meaning and value in experience outside the text. Like Schwarz, the essays look for intentionality of authorial meaning (rather than something called an “author function”) as well as for the relationship between lived experience and the imagined world of the literary work (rather than the endless semiotic play of an ultimately indecipherable text).

Poetry and Theology in the Modernist Period
Poetry and Theology in the Modernist Period

Author: Anthony Domestico

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2017-10-17

Total Pages: 183

ISBN-13: 1421423324

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What if the religious themes and allusions in modernist poetry are not just metaphors? Following the religious turn in other disciplines, literary critics have emphasized how modernists like Woolf and Joyce were haunted by Christianity’s cultural traces despite their own lack of belief. In Poetry and Theology in the Modernist Period, Anthony Domestico takes a different tack, arguing that modern poets such as T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, and David Jones were interested not just in the aesthetic or social implications of religious experience but also in the philosophically rigorous, dogmatic vision put forward by contemporary theology. These poets took seriously the truth claims of Christian theology: for them, religion involved intellectual and emotional assent, doctrinal articulation, and ritual practice. Domestico reveals how an important strand of modern poetry actually understood itself in and through the central theological questions of the modernist era: What is transcendence, and how can we think and write about it? What is the sacramental act, and how does its wedding of the immanent and the transcendent inform the poetic act? How can we relate kairos (holy time) to chronos (clock time)? Seeking answers to these complex questions, Domestico examines both modernist institutions (the Criterion) and specific works of modern poetry (Eliot’s Four Quartets and Jones’s The Anathemata). The book also traces the contours of what it dubs “theological modernism”: a body of poetry that is both theological and modernist. In doing so, this book offers a new literary history of the modernist period, one that attends both to the material circulation of texts and to the broader intellectual currents of the time.

Satirizing Modernism
Satirizing Modernism

Author: Emmett Stinson

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2017-06-01

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 1501329081

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Satirizing Modernism examines 20th-century novels that satirize avant-garde artists and authors while also using experimental techniques associated with literary modernism. These novels-such as Wyndham Lewis's The Apes of God, William Gaddis's The Recognitions, and Gilbert Sorrentino's Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things-were under-recognized and received poor reviews at the time of publication, but have increasingly been acknowledged as both groundbreaking and deeply influential. Satirizing Modernism analyzes these novels in order to present an alternative account of literary modernism, which should be viewed neither as a radical break with the past nor an outmoded set of aesthetics overtaken by a later postmodernism. In self-reflexively critiquing their own aesthetics, these works express an unconventional modernism that both revises literary history and continues to be felt today.

Character and Dystopia
Character and Dystopia

Author: Aaron S. Rosenfeld

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-07-08

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 1000173194

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This is the first extended study to specifically focus on character in dystopia. Through the lens of the "last man" figure, Character and Dystopia: The Last Men examines character development in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Nathanael West’s A Cool Million, David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Lois Lowry’s The Giver, Michel Houellebecq’s Submission, Chan Koonchung’s The Fat Years, and Maggie Shen King’s An Excess Male, showing how in the 20th and 21st centuries dystopian nostalgia shades into reactionary humanism, a last stand mounted in defense of forms of subjectivity no longer supported by modernity. Unlike most work on dystopia that emphasizes dystopia’s politics, this book’s approach grows out of questions of poetics: What are the formal structures by which dystopian character is constructed? How do dystopian characters operate differently than other characters, within texts and upon the reader? What is the relation between this character and other forms of literary character, such as are found in romantic and modernist texts? By reading character as crucial to the dystopian project, the book makes a case for dystopia as a sensitive register of modern anxieties about subjectivity and its portrayal in literary works.

Poems of the American Empire
Poems of the American Empire

Author: Jen Hedler Phillis

Publisher: University of Iowa Press

Published: 2019-11-01

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 1609386612

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Poems of the American Empire argues that careful attention to a particular strain of twentieth-century lyric poetry yields a counter-history of American global power. The period that Phillis covers—from Ezra Pound’s A Draft of XXX Cantos in 1930 to Cathy Park Hong’s Engine Empire in 2012—roughly matches what some consider the ascent and decline of the American empire. The diverse poems that appear in this book are united by their use of epic forms in the lyric poem, a combination that violates a fundamental framework of both genres’ relationship to time. This book makes a groundbreaking intervention by insisting that lyric time is key to understanding the genre. These poems demonstrate the lyric form’s ability to represent the totality of history, making American imperial power visible in its fullness. Neither strictly an empty celebration of American exceptionalism nor a catalog of atrocities, Poems of the American Empire allows us to see both.

Satiric Modernism
Satiric Modernism

Author: Kevin Rulo

Publisher: Liverpool University Press

Published: 2021-04-19

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 1949979903

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In this book, Kevin Rulo reveals the crucial linkages between satire and modernism. He shows how satire enables modernist authors to evaluate modernity critically and to explore their ambivalence about the modern. Through provocative new readings of familiar texts and the introduction of largely unknown works, Satiric Modernism exposes a larger satiric mentality at work in well-known authors like T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, and Ralph Ellison and in less studied figures like G.S. Street, the Sitwells, J.J. Adams, and Herbert Read, as well as in the literature of migration of Sam Selvon and John Agard, in the films of Paolo Sorrentino, and in the drama of Sarah Kane. In so doing, Rulo remaps the last hundred years as an era marked distinctively by a new kind of satiric critique of and aesthetic engagement with the temporal fissures, logics, and regimes of modernity. This ambitious, expansive study reshapes our understanding of modernist literary history and will be of interest to scholars of twentieth century and contemporary literature as well as of satire.