Pub Date : 2019-03-01DOI: 10.1215/0041462X-7378817
Jelena Šesnič
Abstract:The article examines the emergence of new post–Cold War geopolitical imaginaries in the creative work of Croatian American writers Josip Novakovich and Neda Miranda Blažević-Krietzman. This work addresses memories of (post)socialism, develops transnationalized images of the wars in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, fictionalizes emigration from these geographies, and imagines new forms of transnationalism between the United States and Croatia. The work of Novakovich and Blažević-Krietzman was enabled by the end of the Cold War, which has shifted US cultural politics and reinscribed the significance of Eastern European geographies into the US imaginary. Novakovich’s and Blažević-Krietzman’s transnational positions have allowed them to create innovative form and content in ways that enhance the global appeal and reception of their work. Furthermore, their dual experience of socialism and capitalism has enabled the two writers to intervene in unique ways in contemporary debates about history and memory. In its choice of themes, protagonists, and locations, their writing strongly advocates for a new transnational literature, while also asking for the development of new critical models for the study of transnationalism in US literature and culture.
{"title":"Geopolitical Imaginaries: Croatian Diasporic Writers in North America","authors":"Jelena Šesnič","doi":"10.1215/0041462X-7378817","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-7378817","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The article examines the emergence of new post–Cold War geopolitical imaginaries in the creative work of Croatian American writers Josip Novakovich and Neda Miranda Blažević-Krietzman. This work addresses memories of (post)socialism, develops transnationalized images of the wars in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, fictionalizes emigration from these geographies, and imagines new forms of transnationalism between the United States and Croatia. The work of Novakovich and Blažević-Krietzman was enabled by the end of the Cold War, which has shifted US cultural politics and reinscribed the significance of Eastern European geographies into the US imaginary. Novakovich’s and Blažević-Krietzman’s transnational positions have allowed them to create innovative form and content in ways that enhance the global appeal and reception of their work. Furthermore, their dual experience of socialism and capitalism has enabled the two writers to intervene in unique ways in contemporary debates about history and memory. In its choice of themes, protagonists, and locations, their writing strongly advocates for a new transnational literature, while also asking for the development of new critical models for the study of transnationalism in US literature and culture.","PeriodicalId":44252,"journal":{"name":"TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":"16 1","pages":"71 - 96"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72977438","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-03-01DOI: 10.1215/0041462X-7378861
Oana Popescu-Sandu
Abstract:In her transnational plays Lenin’s Shoe (2010) and Aliens with Extraordinary Skills (2010), Romanian American playwright Saviana Stănescu explores discourses of capitalist market economies, democracy, postsocialism, and gender that overlie the geographies of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the United States. Staging these discourses predominately by way of the embodied performances of US migrant women from Eastern Europe, Stănescu’s plays raise questions about the relationship between (post)socialist nations and the United States, and about the attendant ideologies of socialism and capitalism in the post-9/11 moment. These female characters drive change as well as navigate it, showing that gender is central to the creation, embodiment, and performance of knowledge. The focus on women protagonists as primary producers of a transnational knowledge—one that bridges US and (post)socialist histories—counters the idea that postsocialism, and especially postsocialist feminism, has remained invisible in the West, where Eastern Europe is assumed to be in the process of becoming like the West rather than representing an inherently different space, with its own set of (post)socialist knowledge.
{"title":"Staging the Postsocialist Woman: Saviana Stănescu’s Alternative Transnations","authors":"Oana Popescu-Sandu","doi":"10.1215/0041462X-7378861","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-7378861","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In her transnational plays Lenin’s Shoe (2010) and Aliens with Extraordinary Skills (2010), Romanian American playwright Saviana Stănescu explores discourses of capitalist market economies, democracy, postsocialism, and gender that overlie the geographies of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the United States. Staging these discourses predominately by way of the embodied performances of US migrant women from Eastern Europe, Stănescu’s plays raise questions about the relationship between (post)socialist nations and the United States, and about the attendant ideologies of socialism and capitalism in the post-9/11 moment. These female characters drive change as well as navigate it, showing that gender is central to the creation, embodiment, and performance of knowledge. The focus on women protagonists as primary producers of a transnational knowledge—one that bridges US and (post)socialist histories—counters the idea that postsocialism, and especially postsocialist feminism, has remained invisible in the West, where Eastern Europe is assumed to be in the process of becoming like the West rather than representing an inherently different space, with its own set of (post)socialist knowledge.","PeriodicalId":44252,"journal":{"name":"TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":"28 1","pages":"167 - 186"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88025353","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-03-01DOI: 10.1215/0041462X-7378839
A. Wanner
Abstract:The city of Odessa has gained prominence in twentieth-century literature as a symbolic hub of sensuality, irreverent humor, and criminal ingenuity. While Odessa’s storied ethnic diversity is now largely reduced to a Russian/Ukrainian binary, the multicultural and Jewish Odessa lives on in the Russian American immigrant literature that has sprung up since the turn of the millennium. The city even has its own New World simulacrum in New York’s “Little Odessa” neighborhood. This article investigates the impact of the “Odessa Text” on the work of two Odessa-born US authors, the poet Ilya Kaminsky (b. 1977) and the novelist Yelena Akhtiorskaya (b. 1985). Akhtiorskaya’s debut novel Panic in a Suitcase (2014) deconstructs the image of the “Odessa poet” proffered by Kaminsky’s volume Dancing in Odessa (2004). While Kaminsky displays a cannily constructed Russian Jewish persona that is comparable to the self-exoticizing mechanisms at play in much contemporary Russian American prose fiction, Akhtiorskaya engages the clichés and mythologies of the “Odessa Text” in order to ironically subvert them. In juxtaposing these two authors, the article examines the ongoing construction of a “Russian Jewish” identity and how it is received by US readers and critics.
{"title":"“There Is No Such City”: The Myth of Odessa in Post-Soviet Immigrant Literature","authors":"A. Wanner","doi":"10.1215/0041462X-7378839","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-7378839","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The city of Odessa has gained prominence in twentieth-century literature as a symbolic hub of sensuality, irreverent humor, and criminal ingenuity. While Odessa’s storied ethnic diversity is now largely reduced to a Russian/Ukrainian binary, the multicultural and Jewish Odessa lives on in the Russian American immigrant literature that has sprung up since the turn of the millennium. The city even has its own New World simulacrum in New York’s “Little Odessa” neighborhood. This article investigates the impact of the “Odessa Text” on the work of two Odessa-born US authors, the poet Ilya Kaminsky (b. 1977) and the novelist Yelena Akhtiorskaya (b. 1985). Akhtiorskaya’s debut novel Panic in a Suitcase (2014) deconstructs the image of the “Odessa poet” proffered by Kaminsky’s volume Dancing in Odessa (2004). While Kaminsky displays a cannily constructed Russian Jewish persona that is comparable to the self-exoticizing mechanisms at play in much contemporary Russian American prose fiction, Akhtiorskaya engages the clichés and mythologies of the “Odessa Text” in order to ironically subvert them. In juxtaposing these two authors, the article examines the ongoing construction of a “Russian Jewish” identity and how it is received by US readers and critics.","PeriodicalId":44252,"journal":{"name":"TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":"43 1","pages":"121 - 144"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81548620","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-03-01DOI: 10.1215/0041462X-7378850
A. Katsnelson
Abstract:This article argues that there are two major strains of transnationalism in works by Russian-speaking North American writers David Bezmozgis, Ellen Litman, and Gary Shteyngart. Bezmozgis and Litman focus on localism, and their short story collections Natasha (2003) and The Last Chicken in America: A Novel in Stories (2007) are set in specific North American immigrant neighborhoods: Bathurst Street and Steeles Avenue in Toronto for Natasha, and the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh in Little Chicken. These stories describe the deterritorialization of Russian culture and the spread of Russian corruption abroad through a focus on immigrants and their visitors. Bezmozgis’s and Litman’s characters are prevented from going back to former Soviet Republics by their intense dislike of the moral corruption in their former homeland. In Absurdistan (2006), by contrast, Shteyngart depicts a transnational, multicultural, and morally ambivalent world in which his protagonists travel between Russia and the United States, bringing US American culture and consumerist artifacts to Russia.
{"title":"Transnationalism in Contemporary Post-Soviet North American Literature","authors":"A. Katsnelson","doi":"10.1215/0041462X-7378850","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-7378850","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article argues that there are two major strains of transnationalism in works by Russian-speaking North American writers David Bezmozgis, Ellen Litman, and Gary Shteyngart. Bezmozgis and Litman focus on localism, and their short story collections Natasha (2003) and The Last Chicken in America: A Novel in Stories (2007) are set in specific North American immigrant neighborhoods: Bathurst Street and Steeles Avenue in Toronto for Natasha, and the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh in Little Chicken. These stories describe the deterritorialization of Russian culture and the spread of Russian corruption abroad through a focus on immigrants and their visitors. Bezmozgis’s and Litman’s characters are prevented from going back to former Soviet Republics by their intense dislike of the moral corruption in their former homeland. In Absurdistan (2006), by contrast, Shteyngart depicts a transnational, multicultural, and morally ambivalent world in which his protagonists travel between Russia and the United States, bringing US American culture and consumerist artifacts to Russia.","PeriodicalId":44252,"journal":{"name":"TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":"7 1","pages":"145 - 166"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82177853","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-03-01DOI: 10.1215/0041462X-7378795
Joseph Benatov
Abstract:The article argues that the transnational turn in American studies was born out of the demise of socialist Eastern Europe. To this day, the region has remained the unacknowledged generative transnational space that enabled the international reorientation of American studies. The article demonstrates that the work of the New Americanists is a distinct product of the first postsocialist decade. Special attention is devoted to the methodological writings of Donald Pease, one of the founders of the new field, and to the formative influence of F. O. Matthiessen’s 1947 journey to Czechoslovakia on his political radicalization. The article concludes that the demise of Eastern Europe, a prototypical transnational realm, has facilitated the transnational turn in American studies toward investigations of US imperial practices in other geographical locales.
{"title":"Transnational American Studies: A Postsocialist Phoenix","authors":"Joseph Benatov","doi":"10.1215/0041462X-7378795","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-7378795","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The article argues that the transnational turn in American studies was born out of the demise of socialist Eastern Europe. To this day, the region has remained the unacknowledged generative transnational space that enabled the international reorientation of American studies. The article demonstrates that the work of the New Americanists is a distinct product of the first postsocialist decade. Special attention is devoted to the methodological writings of Donald Pease, one of the founders of the new field, and to the formative influence of F. O. Matthiessen’s 1947 journey to Czechoslovakia on his political radicalization. The article concludes that the demise of Eastern Europe, a prototypical transnational realm, has facilitated the transnational turn in American studies toward investigations of US imperial practices in other geographical locales.","PeriodicalId":44252,"journal":{"name":"TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":"25 1","pages":"23 - 42"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84203380","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-03-01DOI: 10.1215/0041462X-7378828
Tatjana Bijelić
Abstract:Although massive (post)socialist migration from Eastern Europe to the West is becoming increasingly represented in post-Soviet and post-Yugoslav writing, contemporary novels on women’s experiences of immigration have received scant attention, both in their host countries and in their countries of origin. This essay contributes to emerging research on Eastern European women’s migrant writing by juxtaposing two semiautobiographical novels that belong to post-Yugoslav diasporic women’s literature: Nadja Tesich’s Native Land (1998) and Natasha Radojčić’s You Don’t Have to Live Here (2005). The main protagonists of both novels are transnational mediators whose migrant identities are reshaped at the intersection of Yugoslavia and the United States, and they offer provocative perspectives on women’s interlinked lives in homeland and host communities. While Tesich fictionalizes a postsocialist migrant’s uneasy relationship with transnational feminism in ways that anticipate her later entrapment in neotraditional gender roles, Radojčić illustrates patriarchal gendering under socialism to describe her own resistance to the gender confines of capitalism. The article focuses on the novels’ different representations of transnational exchanges, exploring to what extent women migrants achieve agency in the complex world of multicultural transactions.
{"title":"Between Homeland and Hostland: Women Migrants’ Agency in US Post-Yugoslav Novels","authors":"Tatjana Bijelić","doi":"10.1215/0041462X-7378828","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-7378828","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Although massive (post)socialist migration from Eastern Europe to the West is becoming increasingly represented in post-Soviet and post-Yugoslav writing, contemporary novels on women’s experiences of immigration have received scant attention, both in their host countries and in their countries of origin. This essay contributes to emerging research on Eastern European women’s migrant writing by juxtaposing two semiautobiographical novels that belong to post-Yugoslav diasporic women’s literature: Nadja Tesich’s Native Land (1998) and Natasha Radojčić’s You Don’t Have to Live Here (2005). The main protagonists of both novels are transnational mediators whose migrant identities are reshaped at the intersection of Yugoslavia and the United States, and they offer provocative perspectives on women’s interlinked lives in homeland and host communities. While Tesich fictionalizes a postsocialist migrant’s uneasy relationship with transnational feminism in ways that anticipate her later entrapment in neotraditional gender roles, Radojčić illustrates patriarchal gendering under socialism to describe her own resistance to the gender confines of capitalism. The article focuses on the novels’ different representations of transnational exchanges, exploring to what extent women migrants achieve agency in the complex world of multicultural transactions.","PeriodicalId":44252,"journal":{"name":"TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":"1 1","pages":"120 - 97"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79566498","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-03-01DOI: 10.1215/0041462X-7378806
Ioana Luca
Abstract:The article examines how writers Miroslav Penkov, Lara Vapnyar, and Aleksandar Hemon engage and reconfigure representations of the former Eastern Bloc in US literature, including stereotypes that have been circulating in Western Europe for a long time. These texts transform prevailing Cold War discourses and highlight real or symbolic junctions between postsocialist European and US spaces, thus constituting new publics and developing new frames of interpretation. The three authors relate the socialist past and its immediate aftermath to the United States: Penkov addresses connections between Bulgaria and the United States, Vapnyar develops deterritorialized memories about the Soviet past, and Hemon articulates relational forms of (reverse) mirroring between the United States and the former Yugoslavia. Their texts do not serve as transparent windows, forms of cultural brokerage, or instances of the postcommunist exotic; nor do they present only harsh critiques of US national imaginaries. Instead, the texts function as convex mirrors for multiple encounters and exchanges in ways that render them both object and method for rethinking real and imaginary intersections between the former socialist Europe and the United States.
{"title":"Postsocialist Fiction and Frameworks: Miroslav Penkov, Lara Vapnyar, and Aleksandar Hemon","authors":"Ioana Luca","doi":"10.1215/0041462X-7378806","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-7378806","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The article examines how writers Miroslav Penkov, Lara Vapnyar, and Aleksandar Hemon engage and reconfigure representations of the former Eastern Bloc in US literature, including stereotypes that have been circulating in Western Europe for a long time. These texts transform prevailing Cold War discourses and highlight real or symbolic junctions between postsocialist European and US spaces, thus constituting new publics and developing new frames of interpretation. The three authors relate the socialist past and its immediate aftermath to the United States: Penkov addresses connections between Bulgaria and the United States, Vapnyar develops deterritorialized memories about the Soviet past, and Hemon articulates relational forms of (reverse) mirroring between the United States and the former Yugoslavia. Their texts do not serve as transparent windows, forms of cultural brokerage, or instances of the postcommunist exotic; nor do they present only harsh critiques of US national imaginaries. Instead, the texts function as convex mirrors for multiple encounters and exchanges in ways that render them both object and method for rethinking real and imaginary intersections between the former socialist Europe and the United States.","PeriodicalId":44252,"journal":{"name":"TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":"87 1","pages":"43 - 70"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83771444","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-03-01DOI: 10.1215/0041462X-7378784
Claudia Sadowski-Smith, Ioana Luca
Abstract:This article places an emergent body of cultural productions by US immigrants from former Eastern Bloc nations in dialogue with scholarship on US immigrant and transnational writing. We argue that the collective work by authors of (post-)Soviet and Central/Eastern European background constitutes a new object of inquiry and theory, which we call postsocialist literatures in the United States. The new representations—fiction, poetry, and theater—connect the United States to key events in the former Eastern Bloc. They emphasize the importance of state socialism and its decline for the consolidation of postsocialist diasporas in the United States and for the constitution and maintenance of US Cold War imaginaries, which continue to inform US policy making to this day. The new cultural productions show how experiences of (post)socialism have helped shape new transnational connections and cultural practices, and some link the Cold War and military conflicts in the former Yugoslavia to the ongoing “war on terror,” as well as portray cross-ethnic linkages between immigrants of different national backgrounds. As it creates new transnational imaginaries, this work reconfigures US representations of the former Eastern Bloc, while also contributing to theories of US immigrant writing that bridge American, Slavic, and immigration studies.
{"title":"Introduction: Postsocialist Literatures in the United States","authors":"Claudia Sadowski-Smith, Ioana Luca","doi":"10.1215/0041462X-7378784","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-7378784","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article places an emergent body of cultural productions by US immigrants from former Eastern Bloc nations in dialogue with scholarship on US immigrant and transnational writing. We argue that the collective work by authors of (post-)Soviet and Central/Eastern European background constitutes a new object of inquiry and theory, which we call postsocialist literatures in the United States. The new representations—fiction, poetry, and theater—connect the United States to key events in the former Eastern Bloc. They emphasize the importance of state socialism and its decline for the consolidation of postsocialist diasporas in the United States and for the constitution and maintenance of US Cold War imaginaries, which continue to inform US policy making to this day. The new cultural productions show how experiences of (post)socialism have helped shape new transnational connections and cultural practices, and some link the Cold War and military conflicts in the former Yugoslavia to the ongoing “war on terror,” as well as portray cross-ethnic linkages between immigrants of different national backgrounds. As it creates new transnational imaginaries, this work reconfigures US representations of the former Eastern Bloc, while also contributing to theories of US immigrant writing that bridge American, Slavic, and immigration studies.","PeriodicalId":44252,"journal":{"name":"TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":"113 1","pages":"1 - 22"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90741537","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-12-01DOI: 10.1215/0041462X-7298974
Manya Lempert
Abstract:Although critics have tended to answer the question "Does Woolf write tragedies?" in the negative, Woolf rekindles a Greek perspective in which the universe is devoid of salvation and poetic justice. Woolf follows Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides—a literary, not a philosophical or anthropological, heritage—when she represents characters' undeserved, uncompensated pains. Woolf's thinking aligns her with Charles Darwin in the natural sciences. Like Darwin, Woolf makes tragic chance inseparable from the theater of life. This essay reads Woolf's oft-cited rejection of teleological form and her aesthetics of the momentary as responses to Darwinism and expressions of her tragic philosophy: characters' short-lived "moments of being" stand in insoluble conflict with the expansive time of natural history.
{"title":"Virginia Woolf, Charles Darwin, and the Rebirth of Tragedy","authors":"Manya Lempert","doi":"10.1215/0041462X-7298974","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-7298974","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Although critics have tended to answer the question \"Does Woolf write tragedies?\" in the negative, Woolf rekindles a Greek perspective in which the universe is devoid of salvation and poetic justice. Woolf follows Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides—a literary, not a philosophical or anthropological, heritage—when she represents characters' undeserved, uncompensated pains. Woolf's thinking aligns her with Charles Darwin in the natural sciences. Like Darwin, Woolf makes tragic chance inseparable from the theater of life. This essay reads Woolf's oft-cited rejection of teleological form and her aesthetics of the momentary as responses to Darwinism and expressions of her tragic philosophy: characters' short-lived \"moments of being\" stand in insoluble conflict with the expansive time of natural history.","PeriodicalId":44252,"journal":{"name":"TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":"20 1","pages":"449 - 482"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2018-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72374002","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-12-01DOI: 10.1215/0041462X-7299884
Enda Duffy
{"title":"History of a Shiver: The Sublime Impudence of Modernism by Jed Rasula (review)","authors":"Enda Duffy","doi":"10.1215/0041462X-7299884","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-7299884","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44252,"journal":{"name":"TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":"39 1","pages":"504 - 510"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2018-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78043055","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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