The close relation between modernism and urban life has been evident since the time of modernism itself. Their material links are innumerable, but, as Raymond Williams observes, one central connection stands out: “The most important general element of the innovations in [modernist] form is the fact of immigration to the metropolis.”1 Migrations, elective or otherwise, drove increasing numbers of people to cities, where they found themselves at the heart of modern urban ferment, but also as outsiders. Two recent studies illuminate this connection in highly site-specific ways. Andrew Thacker’s Modernism, Space and the City and Sara Blair’s How the Other Half Looks both make immigrant mobility central to their accounts of modernism. For Thacker, tracing the movement of writers and artists through several iconic European cities reveals how the dynamic circulation of the era’s transportation technologies brings artists together in urban spaces and fuels their formal aesthetic experiments. For Blair, the influx of immigrants to New York City in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries turned one particular neighborhood into an embodiment of modernity, and shaped the representational claims of media trying to capture it. Thacker’s Modernism, Space and the City offers an overview of modernism in four crucial European cities. As one of Edinburgh University Press’s Critical Studies in Modernist Culture series, the book has a daunting charge: to trace major historical and institutional contexts for modernism in each city as well as address a wide range of writers rather than a few exemplary authors. A scholar of modernism and space, as modernism / modernity
{"title":"Street Scene","authors":"T. Katz","doi":"10.1353/mod.2021.0043","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mod.2021.0043","url":null,"abstract":"The close relation between modernism and urban life has been evident since the time of modernism itself. Their material links are innumerable, but, as Raymond Williams observes, one central connection stands out: “The most important general element of the innovations in [modernist] form is the fact of immigration to the metropolis.”1 Migrations, elective or otherwise, drove increasing numbers of people to cities, where they found themselves at the heart of modern urban ferment, but also as outsiders. Two recent studies illuminate this connection in highly site-specific ways. Andrew Thacker’s Modernism, Space and the City and Sara Blair’s How the Other Half Looks both make immigrant mobility central to their accounts of modernism. For Thacker, tracing the movement of writers and artists through several iconic European cities reveals how the dynamic circulation of the era’s transportation technologies brings artists together in urban spaces and fuels their formal aesthetic experiments. For Blair, the influx of immigrants to New York City in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries turned one particular neighborhood into an embodiment of modernity, and shaped the representational claims of media trying to capture it. Thacker’s Modernism, Space and the City offers an overview of modernism in four crucial European cities. As one of Edinburgh University Press’s Critical Studies in Modernist Culture series, the book has a daunting charge: to trace major historical and institutional contexts for modernism in each city as well as address a wide range of writers rather than a few exemplary authors. A scholar of modernism and space, as modernism / modernity","PeriodicalId":18699,"journal":{"name":"Modernism/modernity","volume":"28 1","pages":"579 - 583"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-11-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42154365","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Mishima, Aesthetic Terrorist: An Intellectual Portrait by Andrew Rankin (review)","authors":"Wayne E. Arnold","doi":"10.1353/mod.2021.0045","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mod.2021.0045","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":18699,"journal":{"name":"Modernism/modernity","volume":"28 1","pages":"596 - 598"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-11-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41800807","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Love in the Flesh: Virginia Woolf, Julia Margaret Cameron, and Other Amorous Victorians","authors":"Andrea Zemgulys","doi":"10.1353/mod.2021.0041","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mod.2021.0041","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":18699,"journal":{"name":"Modernism/modernity","volume":"28 1","pages":"447 - 474"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-11-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45401249","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
587 deep history of Léger’s Ballet Mécanique pays off enormously at this point in the book) (65). An especially ludic example is the moment in Mon Oncle where the silhouettes of Monsieur and Madame Arpel looking out the two circular windows of their home at night make the windows look like enormous “eyes with moving pupils” (66). The final chapter turns toward modern architecture and class critique, deepening the historicizing work achieved in chapter one. Here, Turvey shows that Tati’s cinema, which often lampoons postwar modernist architecture, is not resistant to modernity (as is often assumed) but satirical of how the bourgeoisie adopt and impoverish the formal élan of experimental aesthetics. The Arpels’ home in Mon Oncle, for instance, is bad Le Corbusier, and the comedy that ensues from it (e.g., the two enormous windows mentioned above make the house look like a face, the water from the garden fountain sounds like urination) are Tati’s critique of midcentury French bourgeois suburbanization and how the obsession with status makes the middle class, well, ridiculous. It is because Turvey has so effectively gotten us to appreciate the diffuseness of Tati’s comedy—the fact that anyone and anything can be funny if we simply take the time to notice it—that his afterword shines so brightly. Here, Turvey performs an extended reading of the under-studied documentary Parade (1974), which Tati made for Swedish television in Stockholm. Parade is essentially a filmed circus performance, but the distinction between actors and nonactors remains persistently unclear. Turvey shows how Parade’s generic instability extends from Tati’s interest in how humor can permeate any and all situations and people. Under Turvey’s analytic lens, Parade suddenly makes complete sense without losing its inherent (and productive) strangeness. Play Time is a subtle, intelligent—and wonderfully funny—book. It has much to offer both Tati novices and his connoisseurs.
{"title":"Intransitive Encounter : Sino-U.S. Literatures and the Limits of Exchange by Nan Z. Da (review)","authors":"Hsuan L. Hsu","doi":"10.1353/mod.2021.0035","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mod.2021.0035","url":null,"abstract":"587 deep history of Léger’s Ballet Mécanique pays off enormously at this point in the book) (65). An especially ludic example is the moment in Mon Oncle where the silhouettes of Monsieur and Madame Arpel looking out the two circular windows of their home at night make the windows look like enormous “eyes with moving pupils” (66). The final chapter turns toward modern architecture and class critique, deepening the historicizing work achieved in chapter one. Here, Turvey shows that Tati’s cinema, which often lampoons postwar modernist architecture, is not resistant to modernity (as is often assumed) but satirical of how the bourgeoisie adopt and impoverish the formal élan of experimental aesthetics. The Arpels’ home in Mon Oncle, for instance, is bad Le Corbusier, and the comedy that ensues from it (e.g., the two enormous windows mentioned above make the house look like a face, the water from the garden fountain sounds like urination) are Tati’s critique of midcentury French bourgeois suburbanization and how the obsession with status makes the middle class, well, ridiculous. It is because Turvey has so effectively gotten us to appreciate the diffuseness of Tati’s comedy—the fact that anyone and anything can be funny if we simply take the time to notice it—that his afterword shines so brightly. Here, Turvey performs an extended reading of the under-studied documentary Parade (1974), which Tati made for Swedish television in Stockholm. Parade is essentially a filmed circus performance, but the distinction between actors and nonactors remains persistently unclear. Turvey shows how Parade’s generic instability extends from Tati’s interest in how humor can permeate any and all situations and people. Under Turvey’s analytic lens, Parade suddenly makes complete sense without losing its inherent (and productive) strangeness. Play Time is a subtle, intelligent—and wonderfully funny—book. It has much to offer both Tati novices and his connoisseurs.","PeriodicalId":18699,"journal":{"name":"Modernism/modernity","volume":"28 1","pages":"587 - 589"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-11-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48531435","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"John Fante's Ask the Dust: A Joining of Voices and Views ed. by Stephen Cooper and Clorinda Donato (review)","authors":"Mike Docherty","doi":"10.1353/mod.2021.0047","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mod.2021.0047","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":18699,"journal":{"name":"Modernism/modernity","volume":"28 1","pages":"594 - 596"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-11-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49356545","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Meter and Modernist Prose: Verse Fragments in Woolf's The Years","authors":"Chris Townsend","doi":"10.1353/mod.2021.0049","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mod.2021.0049","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":18699,"journal":{"name":"Modernism/modernity","volume":"28 1","pages":"475 - 496"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-11-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44064181","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
591 Shibata suggests that, despite differences between their aesthetic strategies, Resnais aligned himself with Kikkawa’s project by including Kikkawa in Hiroshima Mon Amour. Yet, as she points out, in contrast to Kikkawa’s highly personal, activist performance, Resnais’s strategy of fragmentation and abstraction removed hibakusha from their historical context and deprived atomic bomb survivors of their identity by excluding their voices and stories from the film. Because of these techniques, Hiroshima Mon Amour became a politically ambiguous film that is strongly marked by “ambivalent and antithetical functions of affect—both an indifference to and a strong interest in the ‘colonial’ Other” (76). Taken together, Shibata’s readings offer an incisive critique of the compartmentalized knowledge structure of academia, where divisions between different specializations are drawn according to national/area focus and discipline. As Shibata argues, this division of labor has contributed not only to blind spots but even “a certain structure of indifference to one another across the Pacific” (98). This is what Shibata calls the “connected divide”: texts become lodged in separate discursive spheres, unable to overcome disciplinary walls that are established along the lines of language differences and national boundaries. Scholars become invested in maintaining artificial distinctions between different forms of narrative (e.g., historiography, fiction) and genre or medium (e.g., reportage, documentary film, avant-garde cinema). Shibata shows how Japanese, French, and American representations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in different media are “ostensibly divided but also mutually embedded at the level of texts and contexts,” and argues, “[i]ndeed, what is divided is our recognition, not these texts” (10). If there is any weakness in Shibata’s project, it is that she sometimes pushes her allegorical readings quite far, particularly in her analysis of Hiroshima Mon Amour in chapter one. Some of her more unsubtle claims in chapter one also strain plausibility, detracting from an otherwise nuanced and brilliant analysis. Nevertheless, Shibata’s work raises a powerful challenge to the departmentalization of disciplines, as well as other forms of institutionalized knowledge production, which have resulted in an uneven distribution of scholarship across mutually exclusive sites (e.g., Japanese studies, American literature, film studies). As she notes, emphasis is usually placed on Euro-American texts in North American universities. This separate and unequal division between disciplines in the academy, she asserts, is structurally analogous to colonialism. As she argues, “These paralleled discursive spheres across the Pacific do not stand as equals. Rather, they form a core/peripheral dichotomy within a hierarchically organized epistemological web” (98). Overall, with its trenchant insights, Producing Hiroshima and Nagasaki is a thrilling new addition to the literature
{"title":"Italian Modern Art in the Age of Fascism by Anthony White (review)","authors":"Richard Read","doi":"10.1353/mod.2021.0037","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mod.2021.0037","url":null,"abstract":"591 Shibata suggests that, despite differences between their aesthetic strategies, Resnais aligned himself with Kikkawa’s project by including Kikkawa in Hiroshima Mon Amour. Yet, as she points out, in contrast to Kikkawa’s highly personal, activist performance, Resnais’s strategy of fragmentation and abstraction removed hibakusha from their historical context and deprived atomic bomb survivors of their identity by excluding their voices and stories from the film. Because of these techniques, Hiroshima Mon Amour became a politically ambiguous film that is strongly marked by “ambivalent and antithetical functions of affect—both an indifference to and a strong interest in the ‘colonial’ Other” (76). Taken together, Shibata’s readings offer an incisive critique of the compartmentalized knowledge structure of academia, where divisions between different specializations are drawn according to national/area focus and discipline. As Shibata argues, this division of labor has contributed not only to blind spots but even “a certain structure of indifference to one another across the Pacific” (98). This is what Shibata calls the “connected divide”: texts become lodged in separate discursive spheres, unable to overcome disciplinary walls that are established along the lines of language differences and national boundaries. Scholars become invested in maintaining artificial distinctions between different forms of narrative (e.g., historiography, fiction) and genre or medium (e.g., reportage, documentary film, avant-garde cinema). Shibata shows how Japanese, French, and American representations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in different media are “ostensibly divided but also mutually embedded at the level of texts and contexts,” and argues, “[i]ndeed, what is divided is our recognition, not these texts” (10). If there is any weakness in Shibata’s project, it is that she sometimes pushes her allegorical readings quite far, particularly in her analysis of Hiroshima Mon Amour in chapter one. Some of her more unsubtle claims in chapter one also strain plausibility, detracting from an otherwise nuanced and brilliant analysis. Nevertheless, Shibata’s work raises a powerful challenge to the departmentalization of disciplines, as well as other forms of institutionalized knowledge production, which have resulted in an uneven distribution of scholarship across mutually exclusive sites (e.g., Japanese studies, American literature, film studies). As she notes, emphasis is usually placed on Euro-American texts in North American universities. This separate and unequal division between disciplines in the academy, she asserts, is structurally analogous to colonialism. As she argues, “These paralleled discursive spheres across the Pacific do not stand as equals. Rather, they form a core/peripheral dichotomy within a hierarchically organized epistemological web” (98). Overall, with its trenchant insights, Producing Hiroshima and Nagasaki is a thrilling new addition to the literature","PeriodicalId":18699,"journal":{"name":"Modernism/modernity","volume":"28 1","pages":"591 - 593"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-11-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44320640","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：