Modernist Form and the Myth of Jewification

Modernist Form and the Myth of Jewification
Author: Neil Levi
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2013-11-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0823255077

Why were modernist works of art, literature, and music that were neither by nor about Jews nevertheless interpreted as Jewish? In this book, Neil Levi explores how the antisemitic fantasy of a mobile, dangerous, contagious Jewish spirit unfolds in the antimodernist polemics of Richard Wagner, Max Nordau, Wyndham Lewis, and Louis-Ferdinand Celine, reaching its apotheosis in the notorious 1937 Nazi exhibition “Degenerate Art.” Levi then turns to James Joyce, Theodor W. Adorno, and Samuel Beckett, offering radical new interpretations of these modernist authors to show how each presents his own poetics as a self-conscious departure from the modern antisemitic imaginary. Levi claims that, just as antisemites once feared their own contamination by a mobile, polluting Jewish spirit, so too much of postwar thought remains governed by the fear that it might be contaminated by the spirit of antisemitism. Thus he argues for the need to confront and work through our own fantasies and projections—not only about the figure of the Jew but also about that of the antisemite.

Modernist Form

Modernist Form
Author: John Steven Childs
Publisher: Susquehanna University Press
Total Pages: 206
Release: 1986
Genre: Literary form
ISBN: 9780941664158

Demonstrating the use of practical semiotics, this book illuminates the mystifying work, The Cantos, by Ezra Pound. This first definitive anatomy of Modernism carefully establishes a set of structural elements as a basis for approaching the text.

Form & Function

Form & Function
Author: Marbeth Schon
Publisher: Schiffer Publishing
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2008
Genre: Antiques & Collectibles
ISBN: 9780764329760

This book features the work of 96 jewellers, whose jewellery was experimental and inspired originality in successive generations. It includes work by Alexander Calder, Harry Bertoia, Arline Fisch, Albert Paley, and Peter Macchiarini.

Modernist Fiction and Vagueness

Modernist Fiction and Vagueness
Author: Megan Quigley
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2015-02-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 110708959X

Modernist Fiction and Vagueness examines the development of the modernist novel in relation to changing approaches to philosophy. It argues that the puzzle of vagueness challenged the great thinkers of the early twentieth century and led to dramatic changes in both fiction and philosophy. Building on recent interest in the connections among analytic philosophy, pragmatism, and modern literature, this book posits that literary vagueness should be read as a defining quality of modernist fiction.

Farm to Form

Farm to Form
Author: Jessica Martell
Publisher: Cultural Ecologies of Food in
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2020
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9781948908368

In this groundbreaking book, Jessica Martell investigates the relationship between industrial food and the emergence of literary modernisms in Britain and Ireland. By the early twentieth century, the industrialization of the British Empire's food system had rendered many traditional farming operations, and attendant agrarian ways of life, obsolete. Weaving insights from modernist studies, food studies, and ecocriticism, Farm to Form contends that industrial food made nature "modernist," a term used as literary scholars understand it--stylistically disorienting, unfamiliar, and artificial but also exhilarating, excessive, and above all, new. Martell draws in part upon archives in the United Kingdom but also presents imperial foodways as an extended rehearsal for the current era of industrial food supremacy. She analyzes how pastoral mode, anachronism, fragmentation, and polyvocal narration reflect the power of the literary arts to reckon with--and to resist--the new "modernist ecologies" of the twentieth century. Deeply informed by Martell's extensive knowledge of modern British, Irish, American, and World Literatures, this progressive work positions modernism as central to the study of narratives of resistance against social and environmental degradation. Analyzed works include those of Thomas Hardy, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad, George Russell, and James Joyce. In light of climate change, fossil fuel supremacy, nutritional dearth, and other pressing food issues, modernist texts bring to life an era of crisis and anxiety similar to our own. In doing so, Martell summons the past as a way to employ the modernist term of "defamiliarizing" the present so that entrenched perceptions can be challenged. Our current food regime is both new and constantly evolving with the first industrial food trades. Studying earlier cultural responses to them invites us to return to persistent problems with new insights and renewed passion.

The Fact of Resonance

The Fact of Resonance
Author: Julie Beth Napolin
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Total Pages: 326
Release: 2020-06-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0823288188

Shortlisted, 2021 Memory Studies Association First Book Award The Fact of Resonance returns to the colonial and technological contexts in which theories of the novel developed, seeking in sound an alternative premise for theorizing modernist narrative form. Arguing that narrative theory has been founded on an exclusion of sound, the book poses a missing counterpart to modernism’s question “who speaks?” in the hidden acoustical questions “who hears?” and “who listens?” For Napolin, the experience of reading is undergirded by the sonic. The book captures and enhances literature’s ambient sounds, sounds that are clues to heterogeneous experiences secreted within the acoustical unconscious of texts. The book invents an oblique ear, a subtle and lyrical prose style attuned to picking up sounds no longer hearable. “Resonance” opens upon a new genealogy of modernism, tracking from Joseph Conrad to his interlocutors—Sigmund Freud, Frantz Fanon, W. E. B. Du Bois, William Faulkner, and Chantal Akerman—the racialized, gendered, and colonial implications of acoustical figures that “drift” through and are transformed by narrative worlds in writing, film, and music. A major synthesis of resources gleaned from across the theoretical humanities, the book argues for “resonance” as the traversal of acoustical figures across the spaces of colonial and technological modernity, figures registering and transmitting transformations of “voice” and “sound” across languages, culture, and modalities of hearing. We have not yet sufficiently attended to relays between sound, narrative, and the unconscious that are crucial to the ideological entailments and figural strategies of transnational, transatlantic, and transpacific modernism. The breadth of the book’s engagements will make it of interest not only to students and scholars of modernist fiction and sound studies, but to anyone interested in contemporary critical theory.

Bodies of Modernism

Bodies of Modernism
Author: Maren Linett
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2017
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0472053310

Reveals the links, both positive and negative, between disabled bodies and aspects of modernism and modernity through readings of a wide range of literary texts

Feminist Narrative Ethics

Feminist Narrative Ethics
Author: Katherine Saunders Nash
Publisher: Theory Interpretation Narrativ
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2014
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780814212424

Establishes a new theory of narrative ethics by analyzing how rhetorical techniques can prompt readers of novels to reconsider their ethical convictions about women's rights.

Re-Covering Modernism

Re-Covering Modernism
Author: David M Earle
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2016-03-03
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317070127

In the first half of the twentieth century, modernist works appeared not only in obscure little magazines and books published by tiny exclusive presses but also in literary reprint magazines of the 1920s, tawdry pulp magazines of the 1930s, and lurid paperbacks of the 1940s. In his nuanced exploration of the publishing and marketing of modernist works, David M. Earle questions how and why modernist literature came to be viewed as the exclusive purview of a cultural elite given its availability in such popular forums. As he examines sensational and popular manifestations of modernism, as well as their reception by critics and readers, Earle provides a methodology for reconciling formerly separate or contradictory materialist, cultural, visual, and modernist approaches to avant-garde literature. Central to Earle's innovative approach is his consideration of the physical aspects of the books and magazines - covers, dust wrappers, illustrations, cost - which become texts in their own right. Richly illustrated and accessibly written, Earle's study shows that modernism emerged in a publishing ecosystem that was both richer and more complex than has been previously documented.

Dynamic Form

Dynamic Form
Author: Cara L. Lewis
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2020-07-15
Genre: Photography
ISBN: 1501749196

Dynamic Form traces how intermedial experiments shape modernist texts from 1900 to 1950. Considering literature alongside painting, sculpture, photography, and film, Cara Lewis examines how these arts inflect narrative movement, contribute to plot events, and configure poetry and memoir. As forms and formal theories cross from one artistic realm to another and back again, modernism shows its obsession with form—and even at times becomes a formalism itself—but as Lewis writes, that form is far more dynamic than we have given it credit for. Form fulfills such various functions that we cannot characterize it as a mere container for content or matter, nor can we consign it to ignominy opposite historicism or political commitment. As a structure or scheme that enables action, form in modernism can be plastic, protean, or even fragile, and works by Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Mina Loy, Evelyn Waugh, and Gertrude Stein demonstrate the range of form's operations. Revising three major formal paradigms—spatial form, pure form, and formlessness—and recasting the history of modernist form, this book proposes an understanding of form as a verbal category, as a kind of doing. Dynamic Form thus opens new possibilities for conversation between modernist studies and formalist studies and simultaneously promotes a capacious rethinking of the convergence between literary modernism and creative work in other media.