Download or read book Optical Impersonality written by Christina Walter and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2014-07-08 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Christina Walter brings the next offering to the Hopkins Studies in Modernism series. Her work looks at the influence of the modern science of visual perception a variety of modernist writers. Walter focuses in particular on the way in which writers like H.D., Virgina Woolf, Walter Pater, and T.S. Eliot developed an alternative conception of the self in light of the developing neuro-scientific account of our inner workings. Critics have long seen modernist writers as being concerned with an 'impersonal' form of writing that rejects the earlier Romantic notion that literature was a direct expression of an author's subjective personality. Walter argues that the charge of impersonality has been overblown and that the modernists did not want to entirely evacuate the self from writing. Rather, she argues, modernist writers embraced the kind of material and embodied notion of the self that resulted from the then-emerging physiological sciences. This work will appeal to scholars and advanced students of modernist literature, as well as scholars interested in the influence of science on literature."--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book Literature and the Rise of the Interview written by Rebecca Roach and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-11-15 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today interviews proliferate everywhere: in newspapers, on television, and in anthologies; as a method they are a major tool of medicine, the law, the social sciences, oral history projects, and journalism; and in the book trade interviews with authors are a major promotional device. We live in an 'interview society'. How did this happen? What is it about the interview form that we find so appealing and horrifying? Are we all just gossips or is there something more to it? What are the implications of our reliance on this bizarre dynamic for publicity, subjectivity, and democracy? Literature and the Rise of the Interview addresses these questions from the perspective of literary culture. The book traces the ways in which the interview form has been conceived and deployed by writers, and interviewing has been understood as a literary-critical practice. It excavates what we might call a 'poetics' of the interview form and practice. In so doing it covers 150 years and four continents. It includes a diverse rostrum of well-known writers, such as Henry James, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Djuna Barnes, William Burroughs, Philip Roth, J. M. Coetzee and Toni Morrison, while reintroducing some individuals that history has forgotten, such as Betty Ross, 'Queen of Interviewers', and Julian Hawthorne, Nathaniel's profligate son. Together these stories expose the interview's position in the literary imagination and consider what this might tell us about conceptions of literature, authorship, and reading communities in modernity.
Download or read book The New Ezra Pound Studies written by Mark Byron and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays on recent developments in Pound scholarship and research, including newly available primary sources and methodological advances in cognate fields.
Download or read book Strange Likeness written by Dora Zhang and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-11-10 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The modern novel, so the story goes, thinks poorly of mere description—what Virginia Woolf called “that ugly, that clumsy, that incongruous tool.” As a result, critics have largely neglected description as a feature of novelistic innovation during the twentieth century. Dora Zhang argues that descriptive practices were in fact a crucial site of attention and experimentation for a number of early modernist writers, centrally Woolf, Henry James, and Marcel Proust. Description is the novelistic technique charged with establishing a common world, but in the early twentieth century, there was little agreement about how a common world could be known and represented. Zhang argues that the protagonists in her study responded by shifting description away from visualizing objects to revealing relations—social, formal, and experiential—between disparate phenomena. In addition to shedding new light on some of the best-known works of modernism, Zhang opens up new ways of thinking about description more broadly. She moves us beyond the classic binary of narrate-or-describe and reinvigorates our thinking about the novel. Strange Likeness will enliven conversations around narrative theory, affect theory, philosophy and literature, and reading practices in the academy.
Download or read book How Close Reading Made Us written by Yael Segalovitz and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2024-09-01 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Does reading shape who we are? What happens to the relationship between reading and subject-formation as methods of interpretation travel globally? Yael Segalovitz probes these questions by tracing the transnational journey of the New Critical practice of close reading from the United States to Brazil and Israel in the mid-twentieth century. Challenging the traditional view of New Criticism as a purely aesthetic project, Segalovitz illustrates its underlying pedagogical objective: to cultivate close readers capable of momentarily suspending subjectivity through focused attention. How Close Reading Made Us shows that close reading, as a technique of the self, exerted a far-reaching influence on international modernist literary production, impacting writers such as Clarice Lispector, Yehuda Amichai, William Faulkner, João Guimarães Rosa, and A. B. Yehoshua. To appreciate close reading's enduring vitality in literary studies and effectively adapt this method to the present, Segalovitz argues, we must comprehend its many legacies beyond the confines of the Anglophone tradition.
Download or read book The New Physiognomy written by Rochelle Rives and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2024-04-09 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating new study of the face, form, and history of expression. Advances in facial recognition, artificial intelligence, and other technologies provoke urgent ethical questions about facial expressivity and how we interpret it. In The New Physiognomy, Rochelle Rives roots contemporary facial dilemmas in a more expansive timeline of modernist engagements with the face to argue that facial ambiguity is essential to how we value other people. Beginning with nineteenth-century caricatures of Oscar Wilde's face, Rives reasons that modernist modes of reading the face perceived it as a manifestation of both biologically determined traits and scripted forms of personality. Considering faces such as sculptures of great poets, portraits of facially wounded World War I soldiers, W. H. Auden's aging face, and Cindy Sherman's recent photographic self-portraits, Rives reframes how to read modernist works by Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, Jean Rhys, Joseph Conrad, Mina Loy, Henry Tonks, and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska.
Download or read book Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons written by Lisa Siraganian and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-11-19 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Modernism la Mode written by Elizabeth M. Sheehan and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-15 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Crafting Feminism from Literary Modernism to the Multimedia Present written by Amy E. Elkins and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-10 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Crafting Feminism develops a dynamic study of craft and art-making in modern and contemporary feminist writing. In evocative readings of literary works from Virginia Woolf to Zadie Smith, this book expands our sense of transartistic modernist scholarship to encompass process-oriented and medium-specific analyses of textile arts, digital design, collage, photography, painting, and sculpture in literary culture. By integrating these craft practices into the book's enlightening archive, Elkins's theoretical argument extends a reading of craft metaphors into the material present. Crafting Feminism demonstrates how writers have engaged with handiwork across generations and have undertaken the crafting of a new modernity, one that is queer and feminist-threaded, messy, shattered, cut-up, pasted together, preserved, repaired, reflected, and spun out. An avant-garde work of scholarship, this book interweaves queer research methods and interdisciplinary rigor with a series of surprising archival discoveries. Making visible the collaborative, creative features of craft, Elkins captivates readers with generous illustrations and a series of "Techne" interchapters-interludes between longer chapters, which powerfully convey the symbiosis between feminist theory and method, and detail the network of archival influences that underpin this volume's hybrid approach. Foregrounding the work of decentering patriarchal and Eurocentric legacies of artistic authority, Elkins champions the diverse, intergenerational history of craft as a way to reposition intersectional makers at the heart of literary culture. An original and compelling study, Crafting Feminism breaks new ground in modernist and visual studies, digital humanities, and feminist, queer, and critical race theory.
Download or read book Animal Subjects Volume 1 written by Caroline Hovanec and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-06 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Animal Subjects identifies a new understanding of animals in modernist literature and science. Drawing on Darwin's evolutionary theory, British writers and scientists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries began to think of animals as subjects dwelling in their own animal worlds. Both science and literature aimed to capture the complexity of animal life, and their shared attention to animals pulled the two disciplines closer together. It led scientists to borrow the literary techniques of fiction and poetry, and writers to borrow the observational methods of zoology. Animal Subjects tracks the coevolution of literature and zoology in works by H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and modern scientists including Julian Huxley, Charles Elton, and J. B. S. Haldane. Examining the rise of ecology, ethology, and animal psychology, this book shows how new, subject-centered approaches to the study of animals transformed literature and science in the modernist period.
Download or read book The T S Eliot Studies Annual written by John D. Morgenstern and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-10 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual features the year’s best scholarship on this major literary figure.
Download or read book Dissensuous Modernism written by Allyson C. DeMaagd and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2022-02-22 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Placing women writers at the center of the sensory and technological experimentation that characterized the modernist movement, this book shows how women of the era challenged gendered narratives that limited their power and agency and waged dissent through their radical sensuous writing.
Download or read book Curious Disciplines written by Sarah Hayden and published by University of New Mexico Press. This book was released on 2018-04-15 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The transnational modernist Mina Loy (1882–1966) embodied the avant-garde in many literary and artistic media. This book positions her as a theorist of the avant-garde and of what it means to be an artist. Foregrounding Loy’s critical interrogation of Futurist, Dadaist, Surrealist, and “Degenerate” artisthood, and exploring her poetic legacies today, Curious Disciplines reveals Loy’s importance in an entirely novel way. Examining the primary texts produced by those movements themselves—their manifestos, magazines, pamphlets, catalogues, and speeches—Sarah Hayden uses close readings of Loy’s poetry, prose, polemics, and unpublished writings to trace her response to how these movements wrote themselves, collectively, into being.
Download or read book Impersonal Enunciation or the Place of Film written by Christian Metz and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2016-02-02 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christian Metz is best known for applying Saussurean theories of semiology to film analysis. In the 1970s, he used Sigmund Freud's psychology and Jacques Lacan's mirror theory to explain the popularity of cinema. In this final book, Metz uses the concept of enunciation to articulate how films "speak" and explore where this communication occurs, offering critical direction for theorists who struggle with the phenomena of new media. If a film frame contains another frame, which frame do we emphasize? And should we consider this staging an impersonal act of enunciation? Consulting a range of genres and national trends, Metz builds a novel theory around the placement and subjectivity of screens within screens, which pulls in—and forces him to reassess—his work on authorship, film language, and the position of the spectator. Metz again takes up the linguistic and theoretical work of Benveniste, Genette, Casetti, and Bordwell, drawing surprising conclusions that presage current writings on digital media. Metz's analysis enriches work on cybernetic emergence, self-assembly, self-reference, hypertext, and texts that self-produce in such a way that the human element disappears. A critical introduction by Cormac Deane bolsters the connection between Metz's findings and nascent digital-media theory, emphasizing Metz's keen awareness of the methodological and philosophical concerns we wrestle with today.
Download or read book Modernism and the Machinery of Madness written by Andrew Gaedtke and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-26 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book shows that a distinct form of technological madness emerged within modernist culture, transforming much of the period's experimental fiction.
Download or read book Being Modern written by Robert Bud and published by UCL Press. This book was released on 2018-10-10 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early decades of the twentieth century, engagement with science was commonly used as an emblem of modernity. This phenomenon is now attracting increasing attention in different historical specialties. Being Modern builds on this recent scholarly interest to explore engagement with science across culture from the end of the nineteenth century to approximately 1940. Addressing the breadth of cultural forms in Britain and the western world from the architecture of Le Corbusier to working class British science fiction, Being Modern paints a rich picture. Seventeen distinguished contributors from a range of fields including the cultural study of science and technology, art and architecture, English culture and literature examine the issues involved. The book will be a valuable resource for students, and a spur to scholars to further examination of culture as an interconnected web of which science is a critical part, and to supersede such tired formulations as 'Science and culture'.
