Modernist Studies

The first female architecture student to study under Walter Gropius at the Harvard School of Design in the Post World War II era, Daphne Bugbee Jones was an accomplished architect who brought the principles of the Bauhaus and Modernist architecture to the state of Montana in America's Inland Northwest. Along with her husband, noted environmental philosopher Henry Bugbee, Bugbee Jones merged her commitment to Modernist design, social activism, and the preservation of wilderness in the urban interphase zone around the city of Missoula.

In response to a paper I delivered at the "Institutions and Ireland: Medicine, Health, and Welfare" conference at Trinity College, Dublin in January 2016, I was generously invited to contribute to the "Perceptions of Pregnancy" blog. In this post I offer an account of the political and aesthetic ends to which references to Ireland’s Lock hospitals and the discourses of sexual hygiene with which they were enmeshed are deployed in the writings of James Joyce and Oliver St John Gogarty.

"Perceptions of Pregnancy" is an interdisciplinary and international network for researchers working on fertility, pregnancy and childbirth, which grew out of the "Perceptions of Pregnancy: From the Medieval to the Modern" conference, held at the University of Hertfordshire from 16-18 July 2014. The network and associated blog are run by Dr Jennifer Evans and Dr Ciara Meehan of the School of Humanities, University of Hertfordshire.

The "Perceptions of Pregnancy" site is an extremely valuable and ever-evolving resource for scholars and general readers alike and is well worth a visit.

Updated and illustrated version of PhD thesis, University College London. 1,161 html pages, bibliographical notes for 4,000 works, 1,100 images, 45,578 hyperlinked cross-references. Complete to 2003 with occasional but not systematic notes added since. Not actively updated.

In 1946, after many years in exile, Kurt Schwitters (who had moved to Ambleside in 1945) and Raoul Hausmann (since 1944 based in Limoges) resumed contact. The pair had not corresponded in some time, and they decided to put together a small magazine; they eventually settled on the title PIN for the publication. PIN aimed to offer art and abstract poetry to a new generation. The project was initiated in the autumn of 1946, then found itself in trouble. Schwitters thought he knew just the person to publish their little magazine: E.L.T. Mesens, a Belgian-born Surrealist who had in 1938 settled in London, where he became director of the London Gallery. Mesens was not a major publisher, but he published the London Bulletin and organised exhibitions of Surrealists as well as an exhibition of Schwitters' own work. However, Mesens did not want to publish the work, and this led to its demise. The PIN magazine did not make it to publication, but in 1962 a heavily annotated edition was published by the Gaberbocchus Press, led by Stefan The-merson, and in 1986 a second, bilingual edition was released by Anabas-Verlag.

В статията се разглежда есето „Тайната. Окултни съждения на един непосветен в окултизма“ (1922) – слабо позната и неизследвана до този момент публикация на Гео Милев, която се появява за пръв път в редактирания от Николай Райнов вестник „Анхира“. Целта  е да се подскаже значимостта този текст за българската литературна история не само защото с него се представя по-различно лице на  българския класик, но и защото позволява да поставят в по-широка перспектива окултните основания на българския авангард от началото на 20-те години на ХХ век. „Тайната“ се разглежда в контекста на характерни публикации от „Анхира“, както и в контекста на някои преводни текстове от списанието на Гео Милев „Везни“.

I argue that Woolf's career was shaped by her impression of the conflict between poetry and the novel, a conflict she often figured as one between masculine and feminine, old and new, bound and free. In large part for feminist reasons, Woolf promoted the triumph of the novel over poetry, even as she adapted some of poetry's techniques for the novel in order to portray the inner life. Woolf considered poetry *the* rival form to the novel. A monograph on Woolf's sense of genre rivalry thus offers a thorough reinterpretation of the motivations and aims of her canonical work. Drawing on unpublished archival material and little-known publications, the book combines biography, book history, formal analysis, genetic criticism, source study, and feminist literary history. Woolf's attitude towards poetry is framed within contexts of wide scholarly interest: the decline of the lyric poem, the rise of the novel, the gendered associations with these two genres, elegy in prose and verse, and the history of English Studies. *Virginia Woolf and Poetry* makes three important contributions. It clarifies a major prompt for Woolf's poetic prose. It exposes the genre rivalry that was creatively generative to many modernist writers. And it details how holding an ideology of a genre can shape literary debates and aesthetics.

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/virginia-woolf-and-poetry-9780198850861?cc=us&lang=en&

This chapter examines how and whether Gertrude Stein gives pleasure. Focusing on Stein's experimental writing from 1914 to her lectures of the mid-1930s, it suggests a new model for approaching her work: tickling. It considers tickling as an enduring social and scientific mystery and how its patterns illuminate Stein's methods and her reading effects. It also explores the ways that the gesture of tickling describes both the delights and difficulties of Stein's texts and also accounts for the wide discrepancies in readers' responses to her writing. Tickling, whose mysterious idiosyncrasies have intrigued theorists from Plato to Adam Phillips, characterizes Stein's infantile and erotic impulses, her abstraction and sensuality, and the sliding scale of pleasure to irritation that her work arouses. Stein's texts can be a pleasure machine or a torture machine or both, depending on the reader.

In writing Heart of Darkness, Conrad made a crucial discovery.  Morality does not prevent genocide.  Quite the contrary, genocide occurs because of moral discourses.  It was for this reason that Conrad rejected morality.  To put the matter simply, Conrad rejects morality because he is committed to social justice.  For a more detailed analysis of Conrad's view of the political psychology that makes genocide possible, see chapter five of my book The Modernist God State, which is titled: "Joseph Conrad and Michael Bakunin on the Redemptive Logic of Western Genocide."

Título: Ler Pessoa
Autor: Jerónimo Pizarro
Revisão: Rita Almeida Simões
Cidade: Lisboa
Composição: Tinta‑da‑china (Pedro Serpa)
Capa: Tinta‑da‑china (Vera Tavares)
1.ª edição: Maio de 2018
ISBN 978‑989‑671‑438-3
depósito legal n.º 440392/18
páginas: 170
E‑mail:
info@tintadachina.pt
www.tintadachina.pt

Jerónimo Pizarro ilumina neste livro a galáxia Pessoa: da obra múltipla que constitui o Livro do Desassossego ao labor de Caeiro, o engenho de Campos e a coerência de Reis, passando pelo génio de tantos outros autores fictícios. Pessoa procurou ser «toda uma literatura», e Ler Pessoa é um tributo a esse universo.

«A pluralidade da obra de Pessoa é responsável, em grande medida, pela atracção que desde há décadas vem desencadeando, como se, por meio dela, assomássemos ao abismo do ser. Evocando Pirandello, diria que Pessoa pode ser visto como um, nenhum ou cem mil. Quem tem construído um Pessoa mais indiviso? Quem tem militado a favor de um mais vazio? E quem defende um poeta mais múltiplo? A meu ver, a multiplicidade de Pessoa reside menos na sua multiplicidade real, no facto de ter forjado cento e tal figuras, do que na sua multiplicidade póstuma. Pessoa escapa­-nos a todos. É mais nosso, porque continuamos a construí­-lo. É menos nosso, porque cada vez é de mais pessoas.» —Jerónimo Pizarro

In theorizing the modernist avant-garde, there is a widespread tendency to collapse the distinction between modernity as a set of wider social and historical processes, and modernism as an artistic phenomenon. There is also a tendency to think of the modernist avant-garde as a failed attempt to erase the distinction between art as an institution and social life. In the Indian context, as the phenomenon of modernity is intrinsically connected to colonialism and the ' influence of the West', modernism and the avant-garde is often understood, not just as Eurocentric but also as an inauthentic , derivative and superficial phenomenon. Underneath these established ways of understanding the modernist avant-garde and its social context is the reductive Marxist belief that there is a deterministic causality between 'superstructure' (the avant-garde) and base (social and historical condition of modernity). In the current article, I argue in the context of B.S Mardhekar's Marathi poetry, that using the framework of semiotics of culture as developed by the Tartu-Moscow school of cultural semiotics, we can attempt to theorize the avant-gardes afresh, especially in the Indian context and it can yield some significant insights into semiotic mechanisms underlying the phenomenon. According to this approach as the cultural mechanism underlying all communication as well as all generation of new information (including the modernist agenda of 'making it new' anywhere in the world at any time) involves translational exchange between two non-identical semiotic systems, thus we can understand the modernist avant-gardes as intrinsically a cross-cultural dialogic phenomenon instead of being merely a Eurocentric one. The dark surreal imagery of Mardhekar's poetry, accordingly, can be read as translation of the language of western avant-gardes into the language of traditional Marathi lyrical poetry that was sentimental and clichéd, and in the process compensating the continuous process of " aging " of the various means of meaning-generation in Marathi culture by the introduction and use of new, previously forbidden, meaning-generating structures. The pervasive and decisive presence of the urban life in the avant-gardes across the world can also be understood in cultural semiotics terms as the city is seen as a complex and powerful polyglot system of meaning generation. As the languages of the new hybrid avant-gardes were unfamiliar in the Indian context in the late nineteen-forties, one can understand the function of the texts like ' Skeletons Laugh' as ' text-codes' that seek to codify this avant-garde poetic idiom in Indian languages, thus opening up spaces for later postmodern avant-garde literatures to emerge. Using this framework, one can understand Modernism, an umbrella term for various avant-gardes, as the one which deliberately models the languages of art on the everyday semiotic heterogeneity of the contemporary semiosphere and deliberately introduces 'explosive' processes, the elements of chance and unpredictability, in the languages of art.

Shortlisted for Modernist Studies Association First Book Prize (2017)
Reviewed in CAA.reviews; Critique d'art; Cross-currents; History of Photography; Journal of Asian Studies

During the early twentieth century, Shanghai was the center of China's new media culture. Described by the modernist writer Mu Shiying as "transplanted from Europe" and “paved with shadows,” for many of its residents Shanghai was a city without a past paradoxically haunted by the absent past’s traces. In Shadow Modernism William Schaefer traces how photographic practices in Shanghai provided a forum within which to debate culture, ethnicity, history, and the very nature of images. The central modernist form in China, photography was neither understood nor practiced as primarily a medium for realist representation; rather, photo layouts, shadow photography, and photomontage rearranged and recomposed time and space, cutting apart and stitching places, people, and periods together in novel and surreal ways. Analyzing unknown and overlooked photographs, photomontages, cartoons, paintings, and experimental fiction and poetry, Schaefer shows how artists and writers used such fragmentation and juxtaposition to make visible the shadows of modernity in Shanghai: the violence, the past, the ethnic and cultural multiplicity excluded and repressed by the prevailing cultural politics of the era and yet hidden in plain sight.
More information: https://www.dukeupress.edu/shadow-modernism

Georges Seurat’s fascinating work The Gleaner is an ambiguous abstraction of an important figure in nineteenth-century French culture, which pushes the motif of the bending subject in Seurat’s work to a dramatically curved extreme. Yet in spite of being included in several major exhibitions and available in the British Museum’s public collection, the drawing, also known as A Man Gleaning, remains barely documented and demands further research.

To dwell in detail upon the specificities of a single drawing throughout the form of an extended essay is an uncommon approach in the Anglophone literature on Seurat’s work on paper. This study will address the imbalance in the field by offering a sustained critical account of this one early-1880s drawing by the Neo-Impressionist artist.

With reference to contemporary optical theory and comparative approaches, this piece argues that Seurat’s plant-like gleaner fathoms the surface of visual anatomy; intervenes as an entoptical phenomenon; blurs the bounds of legality; enacts a metaphor for information and evokes vitality. The drawing is a troubling, multivalent assessment of what it might mean to glean: to gather what reapers have left behind.

21 Sept. 2014 note: anyone looking at this should be aware that Empson scholarship has moved a long way since 1995; new critical edition of his Collected Poems, John Haffenden’s two-volume biography, which contains some small errors in regard to the Japanese material but nothing of intrinsic importance, Peter Robinson unearthing who C. Hatakeyama was and her photograph gracing the full front cover of TLS (18 July 2003), and the finding of what long had been believed irretrievably lost, The Face of the Buddha, which will appear from Oxford University Press late in 2014 or early 2015, edited and with what promises to be a sharply insightful introduction by Rupert Arrowsmith.

Aggregating, annotating, and synthesizing more than one-hundred years of scholarship on T. S. Eliot's life and work, this Oxford Bibliographies entry for T. S. Eliot was the result of a year-long team effort. I contributed entries for scholarship on The Waste Land and Ash Wednesday and Ariel Poems, in addition to advising and contributing to other sections of the bibliography.

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From the Oxford Bibliographies website:
"Oxford Bibliographies provides faculty and students alike with a seamless pathway to the most accurate and reliable resources for a variety of academic topics. Written and reviewed by academic experts, every article in our database is an authoritative guide to the current scholarship, containing original commentary and annotations."
https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/

In this article, I engage with scholarly debates on cinematic slowness, and argue that slow cinema’s apparent recuperation of modernism has not been subject to the level of scholarly scrutiny that could reveal the politics of this anachronism. I then clarify the historical significance of slow cinema’s belated style using contemporary films from the World Cinema canon as a lens with which to view the political implications of their modernist belatedness and their recovery of the modernist critique of liberalism. In the second part of the essay I focus on two films – Pedro Costa’s Ossos (1997) and Angela Schanelec’s Marseille (2004) – whose study can expand our understanding of the slow cinema movement as a reactivation of the modernist impulse to encounter the real and to make material realities visible.

Salvador Dalí's autobiography confesses that "Hitler turned me on in the highest," while Sylvia Plath maintains that "every woman adores a Fascist." Susan Sontag's famous observation that art reveals the seamier side of fascism in bondage, discipline, and sexual deviance would certainly appear to be true in modernist and postwar literary texts. How do we account for eroticized representations of fascism in anti-fascist literature, for sexual desire that escapes the bounds of politics?
Laura Frost advances a compelling reading of works by D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Jean Genet, Georges Bataille, Marguerite Duras, and Sylvia Plath, paying special attention to undercurrents of enthrallment with tyrants, uniforms, and domination. She argues that the first generation of writers raised within psychoanalytic discourse found in fascism the libidinal unconscious through which to fantasize acts—including sadomasochism and homosexuality—not permitted in a democratic conception of sexuality without power relations. By delineating democracy's investment in a sexually transgressive fascism, an investment that persists to this day, Frost demonstrates how politics enters into fantasy. This provocative and closely-argued book offers both a fresh contribution to modernist literature and a theorization of fantasy.

Panelists: Bertrand Clavez (“Maciunas' ‘Rear-garde’: Paths Towards a Non
Rearguard Postmodernism”), Peter van der Meijden (“Permission to Rummage in Knud Pedersen’s Pockets”) and Henar Rivière (“Ripping Up the Present: Wolf Vostell’s magazine dé-coll/age”)

In this paper, I offer a review of three papers that deal with noha in Shi'a communities from different perspectives, using different approaches in ethnomusicology. In culmination, the three papers make use of a wide range of methodologies from historical ethnomusicology to modernist studies and psychology, as well as others. I claim that a holistic understanding of noha is only possible by taking into account all these different perspectives and approaches.

Abstract: Michel Foucault’s legacy in shaping understanding of the museum and its ideological operations is well established in the field of museum studies. Tony Bennett’s adaptation of the ‘disciplinary complex’ in his ‘exhibitionary complex’ essay of 1988 marshalled Foucauldian theory into the field’s mainstream, and contributed to the subsequent methodological shift known as ‘the new museology’ or ‘critical museum studies.’ Less recognised are Foucault’s contributions to theorisations of the museum by modernist art history. Focusing on a passage from his essay ‘Fantasia of the Library’ and its reception by Douglas Crimp, Rosalind Krauss, and others, this article reflects on Foucault’s outsized impact on recent modernist art history. It concludes that Foucault’s commentary stimulated art history to engage with the museum, but at the same time, constrained the field’s conception of modernism’s geographies, protagonists, and institutional formations.

https://arthistoriography.files.wordpress.com/2020/05/kauffman.pdf

Introduction



My dissertation investigates the relationship between experimental writing, bodies, and ecology in the work of modernist women writers. Specifically, I propose that the stylistic experiments of Gertrude Stein, H.D., and Virginia Woolf are inseparable from these authors' theorizations on the body and material environments. They examine how questions of language and the body are ecologically inflected. By "ecology," I do not simply refer to traditional representations of "green ecologies" that explore the human agent's place within balanced ecosystems consisting of plants and animals. Ecocritical readings of these modernist writers' works typically promote Stein's, H.D.'s, and Woolf's interest in restoring harmonious environments by emphasizing a return to serene and stable environments. As a result, the nonhuman world is cast as a pastoral, romantic, or distinctly feminine space of tranquility and restoration. In contrast, I examine precarious environments of which the body is not simply an integral component but indiscernible from the material composition of the nonhuman world. My dissertation builds upon but fundamentally reconceptualises a standard account of feminist modernisms' return to the body in light of the recent turn in both modernist scholarship and feminist studies towards ecocritical models of reading. My critique aligns with emerging conversations on the trans-corporeal body and agential materialism. Both Stacy Alaimo and Karen Barad reconsider how the body, materiality, and discursive processes are bound up in a material recreation of the world. These ideas are part of a larger conversation on the "narratives of matter" investigated by new material ecocriticism. I argue that as Stein, H.D., and Woolf examine the tension between the nonhuman world and socially constructed ideas of what is "natural," they suggest that nature is not a restorative space separate from cultural locales, but an unpredictable, volatile force central to their artistic projects. This rethinking of reductive readings of nature reveals how women writers and literary modernism move beyond discussions that focus on linguistic, historical, and cultural reconstructions of the self and the world, and instead considers how these discussions are imbricated in the ongoing performance of human and nonhuman matter.