Pub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1215/0041462x-10580784
N. Dolan
Abstract:Because it portrayed Atticus Finch as a racist and a segregationist, when Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman was published it caused much public dismay. But the book’s classism has not yet aroused such dismay. This essay argues that the antiracism of its main character—an adult Jean Louise Finch—is articulated in part by snobbish opposition to what she deems to be “white trash” attitudes. In this way Lee’s critique of a steeply stratified southern society is compromised by her transferring the symbolic rhetoric of defilement from a racial “other” to a class “other” assumed to be racist. Studying the classist premise of Watchman, then, helps attune us to its operation in To Kill a Mockingbird.
{"title":"The Class Dynamics of Antiracism in Go Set a Watchman","authors":"N. Dolan","doi":"10.1215/0041462x-10580784","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462x-10580784","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Because it portrayed Atticus Finch as a racist and a segregationist, when Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman was published it caused much public dismay. But the book’s classism has not yet aroused such dismay. This essay argues that the antiracism of its main character—an adult Jean Louise Finch—is articulated in part by snobbish opposition to what she deems to be “white trash” attitudes. In this way Lee’s critique of a steeply stratified southern society is compromised by her transferring the symbolic rhetoric of defilement from a racial “other” to a class “other” assumed to be racist. Studying the classist premise of Watchman, then, helps attune us to its operation in To Kill a Mockingbird.","PeriodicalId":44252,"journal":{"name":"TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":"72 1","pages":"121 - 146"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85647453","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 : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1215/0041462x-10580797
Taylor Johnston-Levy
Abstract:This article explores how antiracism cultivates happiness among white subjects and how that emotion alienates people of color. It argues that a cohort of twentieth-century African American writers critiqued this happy antiracism in their fiction, examining Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) and Alice Walker’s Meridian (1976) as two representative examples. Both novels portray what Sara Ahmed calls an “affective economy,” specifically the unequal affective economy produced by antiracism’s circulation as a cultural object. Wright considers how antiracism occasions happiness in white subjects by bolstering their sense of their own virtue, and how this happiness alienates African Americans, for whom antiracism is embedded in the experience of ongoing racial violence. Writing in the heyday of second-wave feminism, Walker examines how, even as antiracism shores up happy feeling, it can also compromise the agency of white women, whose activism is mediated by the persistence of nineteenth-century ideals of sentimentalism and domesticity.
{"title":"Whiteness and the Affective Economy of Happy Antiracism in Native Son and Meridian","authors":"Taylor Johnston-Levy","doi":"10.1215/0041462x-10580797","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462x-10580797","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article explores how antiracism cultivates happiness among white subjects and how that emotion alienates people of color. It argues that a cohort of twentieth-century African American writers critiqued this happy antiracism in their fiction, examining Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) and Alice Walker’s Meridian (1976) as two representative examples. Both novels portray what Sara Ahmed calls an “affective economy,” specifically the unequal affective economy produced by antiracism’s circulation as a cultural object. Wright considers how antiracism occasions happiness in white subjects by bolstering their sense of their own virtue, and how this happiness alienates African Americans, for whom antiracism is embedded in the experience of ongoing racial violence. Writing in the heyday of second-wave feminism, Walker examines how, even as antiracism shores up happy feeling, it can also compromise the agency of white women, whose activism is mediated by the persistence of nineteenth-century ideals of sentimentalism and domesticity.","PeriodicalId":44252,"journal":{"name":"TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":"9 1","pages":"147 - 176"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80184663","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 : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1215/0041462x-10580810
Laura Lorhan
Abstract:This article argues that the sculptor May Howard Jackson, a figure overlooked to this point in Toomer studies, played a formative role in Toomer’s development as a thinker and writer. Scrutiny of their relationship sheds new light on the development of Toomer’s modernist sensibilities and aesthetic, despite the paucity of extant materials from his pre-Cane period. Analyzing Jackson’s portrait bust of Jean Toomer, his essay “Art in Washington,” and the unpublished play Natalie Mann demonstrates that Toomer’s racial theorizing owes a considerable debt to Jackson, and that she served as the impetus for many of his experiments with form.
摘要:本文认为，在图默作为思想家和作家的发展过程中，雕塑家梅·霍华德·杰克逊(May Howard Jackson)发挥了重要的塑造作用。对他们之间关系的审视，为图默的现代主义情感和审美的发展提供了新的视角，尽管他在凯恩之前的时期缺乏现存的材料。通过分析杰克逊的琼·图默半身像、他的文章《华盛顿的艺术》(Art in Washington)和未发表的戏剧《娜塔莉·曼恩》(Natalie Mann)，我们可以发现，图默的种族理论在很大程度上要归功于杰克逊，杰克逊推动了他的许多形式实验。
{"title":"May Howard Jackson and the Development of Jean Toomer’s Multiracial Modernism","authors":"Laura Lorhan","doi":"10.1215/0041462x-10580810","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462x-10580810","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article argues that the sculptor May Howard Jackson, a figure overlooked to this point in Toomer studies, played a formative role in Toomer’s development as a thinker and writer. Scrutiny of their relationship sheds new light on the development of Toomer’s modernist sensibilities and aesthetic, despite the paucity of extant materials from his pre-Cane period. Analyzing Jackson’s portrait bust of Jean Toomer, his essay “Art in Washington,” and the unpublished play Natalie Mann demonstrates that Toomer’s racial theorizing owes a considerable debt to Jackson, and that she served as the impetus for many of his experiments with form.","PeriodicalId":44252,"journal":{"name":"TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":"1 1","pages":"177 - 202"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83154514","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 : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1215/0041462x-10404939
Kelly S. Walsh, Yoonjin Choi
Abstract:This essay tracks the circulation and anticolonial reinvention of European modernist epiphanies in Korean modernist prose. The intertextuality of these epiphanies, the authors contend, enables Pak T'aewŏn, Yi Sang, and Yi Hyosŏk to disclose the fraudulence of Japanese cosmopolitanism and imperial modernization, while focalizing the possibilities and limitations of engaging Asian colonial modernity with European forms. In localizing the European epiphany, and ambivalently acknowledging Japanese versions of it, the Korean modernists generate significant irony to interrogate the impulse to wrest concentrated moments of insight, "bliss," or transcendence from the colonial everyday. Perhaps most disquieting is the realization that the exposure of imperialism's "fakeness" lacks the capacity to remedy the material, or literary, conditions of coloniality. Ultimately, Pak, Yi Sang, and Yi Hyosŏk deploy the epiphany to assert the need for a more reflective, neither Japanese nor European, vision; they remain deeply pessimistic, however, about the consummation of one within colonial modernity.
{"title":"Korean Modernism's Transnational Epiphanies","authors":"Kelly S. Walsh, Yoonjin Choi","doi":"10.1215/0041462x-10404939","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462x-10404939","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay tracks the circulation and anticolonial reinvention of European modernist epiphanies in Korean modernist prose. The intertextuality of these epiphanies, the authors contend, enables Pak T'aewŏn, Yi Sang, and Yi Hyosŏk to disclose the fraudulence of Japanese cosmopolitanism and imperial modernization, while focalizing the possibilities and limitations of engaging Asian colonial modernity with European forms. In localizing the European epiphany, and ambivalently acknowledging Japanese versions of it, the Korean modernists generate significant irony to interrogate the impulse to wrest concentrated moments of insight, \"bliss,\" or transcendence from the colonial everyday. Perhaps most disquieting is the realization that the exposure of imperialism's \"fakeness\" lacks the capacity to remedy the material, or literary, conditions of coloniality. Ultimately, Pak, Yi Sang, and Yi Hyosŏk deploy the epiphany to assert the need for a more reflective, neither Japanese nor European, vision; they remain deeply pessimistic, however, about the consummation of one within colonial modernity.","PeriodicalId":44252,"journal":{"name":"TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":"37 1","pages":"53 - 82"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75456006","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 : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1215/0041462x-10404926
Malcolm H. Woodland
Abstract:Working with Thomas Weiskel's definitions of the "positive" and "egotistical" sublimes, this essay traces A. R. Ammons's engagements with these modes from some less read earlier poems to major, later works like "The City Limits" and Sphere. It argues that, despite maintaining an immanentist (meta)physics amenable to the positive and egotistical sublimes, Ammons approaches those modes with caution from the very start. Viewed in this light, Sphere's skepticism about its own "privileged moments" doesn't reject the earlier work so as much it offers a more complete analytical understanding of its caution. Over the course of Ammons's career, then, we see how the imaginative apprehension of an immanent Presence devolves into skeptical awareness of its merely subjective origins.
{"title":"Ammons's Sublimes","authors":"Malcolm H. Woodland","doi":"10.1215/0041462x-10404926","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462x-10404926","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Working with Thomas Weiskel's definitions of the \"positive\" and \"egotistical\" sublimes, this essay traces A. R. Ammons's engagements with these modes from some less read earlier poems to major, later works like \"The City Limits\" and Sphere. It argues that, despite maintaining an immanentist (meta)physics amenable to the positive and egotistical sublimes, Ammons approaches those modes with caution from the very start. Viewed in this light, Sphere's skepticism about its own \"privileged moments\" doesn't reject the earlier work so as much it offers a more complete analytical understanding of its caution. Over the course of Ammons's career, then, we see how the imaginative apprehension of an immanent Presence devolves into skeptical awareness of its merely subjective origins.","PeriodicalId":44252,"journal":{"name":"TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":"30 1","pages":"29 - 52"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76817244","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 : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1215/0041462x-10404952
Chung-hao Ku
Abstract:This article studies how three kinds of trans embodiment—trans-speciation, sartorial metamorphosis, and nonmedical gender transition—in Shani Mootoo's Cereus Blooms at Night (1996) unsettle the anthropocentric idea of nature, the genital view of sex, gender, and sexuality, and the pathological framing of trans people in colonial epistemologies. In a postcolonial novel set in the colonial Caribbean, these kinds of trans embodiment interrogate the nature-culture or human-nonhuman divide, allowing certain characters to feel at home in their trans bodies rather than, as per liberal narratives of progress, seeking a new home elsewhere. Like intersex nonhuman species (particularly the snail and the cereus), some trans embodiments also interrogate the enterprise of sex/gender dimorphism.
{"title":"Trans Bodies and Embodiments in Shani Mootoo's Cereus Blooms at Night","authors":"Chung-hao Ku","doi":"10.1215/0041462x-10404952","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462x-10404952","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article studies how three kinds of trans embodiment—trans-speciation, sartorial metamorphosis, and nonmedical gender transition—in Shani Mootoo's Cereus Blooms at Night (1996) unsettle the anthropocentric idea of nature, the genital view of sex, gender, and sexuality, and the pathological framing of trans people in colonial epistemologies. In a postcolonial novel set in the colonial Caribbean, these kinds of trans embodiment interrogate the nature-culture or human-nonhuman divide, allowing certain characters to feel at home in their trans bodies rather than, as per liberal narratives of progress, seeking a new home elsewhere. Like intersex nonhuman species (particularly the snail and the cereus), some trans embodiments also interrogate the enterprise of sex/gender dimorphism.","PeriodicalId":44252,"journal":{"name":"TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":"16 1","pages":"104 - 83"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88269235","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 : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1215/0041462x-10404965
M. Lundblad
Let’s try a thought experiment. Animal-rights philosopher Peter Singer or disability-studies scholar Rosemarie Garland-Thomson? Are you confused? What if they were both in a burning building and you could save only one of them? How about this one: animal rights or disability rights? You might wonder if those must be the only choices. Maren Tova Linett’s Literary Bioethics: Animality, Disability, and the Human wants us to choose both of them, but not necessarily Peter Singer’s version of animal rights. Singer is notorious for arguing that the lives of certain animals can have more value than certain humans with disabilities. Linett’s new book argues instead that we should value all forms of human and nonhuman life equally, including both humans with disabilities and nonhuman animals. According to Linett, literary texts can function as what she calls “bioethical” thought experiments, dramatizing both problematic and defensible ethical positions. Novels in particular can provide much more complex sites for exploring these issues compared with oversimplified thought experiments that philosophers like Singer often propose. Linett’s aim is to bring together critical disability studies and critical animal studies by evaluating how various novels construct moral issues related to disability and animality. The book engages with moral philosophy, biopolitics, and posthumanism, all of which Linett suggests can be encompassed within a broader definition of bioethics, although some readers might prefer to maintain distinctions between these diverse fields. Linett’s selection of novels for exploring these questions might also raise some questions; she moves from H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), Flannery O’Connor’s The Violent Bear It Away (1960), and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005). Rather than emphasizing these texts in relation to their particular historical and cultural moments, or the generic conventions of either science fiction or speculative fiction, Linett focuses her four chapters on these novels as examples of “textual laboratories,
{"title":"Literary Bioethics: Animality, Disability, and the Human by Maren Tova Linett (review)","authors":"M. Lundblad","doi":"10.1215/0041462x-10404965","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462x-10404965","url":null,"abstract":"Let’s try a thought experiment. Animal-rights philosopher Peter Singer or disability-studies scholar Rosemarie Garland-Thomson? Are you confused? What if they were both in a burning building and you could save only one of them? How about this one: animal rights or disability rights? You might wonder if those must be the only choices. Maren Tova Linett’s Literary Bioethics: Animality, Disability, and the Human wants us to choose both of them, but not necessarily Peter Singer’s version of animal rights. Singer is notorious for arguing that the lives of certain animals can have more value than certain humans with disabilities. Linett’s new book argues instead that we should value all forms of human and nonhuman life equally, including both humans with disabilities and nonhuman animals. According to Linett, literary texts can function as what she calls “bioethical” thought experiments, dramatizing both problematic and defensible ethical positions. Novels in particular can provide much more complex sites for exploring these issues compared with oversimplified thought experiments that philosophers like Singer often propose. Linett’s aim is to bring together critical disability studies and critical animal studies by evaluating how various novels construct moral issues related to disability and animality. The book engages with moral philosophy, biopolitics, and posthumanism, all of which Linett suggests can be encompassed within a broader definition of bioethics, although some readers might prefer to maintain distinctions between these diverse fields. Linett’s selection of novels for exploring these questions might also raise some questions; she moves from H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), Flannery O’Connor’s The Violent Bear It Away (1960), and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005). Rather than emphasizing these texts in relation to their particular historical and cultural moments, or the generic conventions of either science fiction or speculative fiction, Linett focuses her four chapters on these novels as examples of “textual laboratories,","PeriodicalId":44252,"journal":{"name":"TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":"120 1","pages":"105 - 112"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88990039","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 : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1215/0041462x-10404978
Jeffrey Gutierrez
{"title":"The Selected Letters of John Berryman ed. by Philip Coleman and Calista McRae","authors":"Jeffrey Gutierrez","doi":"10.1215/0041462x-10404978","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462x-10404978","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44252,"journal":{"name":"TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":"40 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77717718","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 : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1215/0041462x-10404913
C. Miller
Abstract:Hart Crane's lyrics abound with transient figures who often doubt their intelligibility or viability as persons, and his letters reflect a significant anxiety about his own ability to communicate the problems he experienced in being and remaining intelligible to others. Against that background, this article offers a reading of Crane's transient figures as linguistic performances of such doubtful and tenuous existences. In this, the article puts Crane in dialogue with one of his most admired and mimicked contemporaries, Charlie Chaplin, as well as with theories of transient sociability from language philosophy, urban sociology, and modernist studies.
{"title":"American Tramps: Transient Gesture and Lyric Form in Hart Crane","authors":"C. Miller","doi":"10.1215/0041462x-10404913","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462x-10404913","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Hart Crane's lyrics abound with transient figures who often doubt their intelligibility or viability as persons, and his letters reflect a significant anxiety about his own ability to communicate the problems he experienced in being and remaining intelligible to others. Against that background, this article offers a reading of Crane's transient figures as linguistic performances of such doubtful and tenuous existences. In this, the article puts Crane in dialogue with one of his most admired and mimicked contemporaries, Charlie Chaplin, as well as with theories of transient sociability from language philosophy, urban sociology, and modernist studies.","PeriodicalId":44252,"journal":{"name":"TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":"93 1","pages":"1 - 28"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73852522","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 : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.1215/0041462x-10237821
Brigitte N. McCray
Rachel Murray’s The Modernist Exoskeleton: Insects, War, Literary Form provides a valuable contribution to modernist studies because Murray explains how the field of entomology, which rose in popularity as a result of the First World War, informed modernist aesthetics. The study illustrates the benefits of greening modernism, a recent turn that has moved scholars from studying the city and human psyche in modernist texts to focusing on the intersection of modernism and the natural world. However, Murray’s accessible and fascinating study makes it clear that such a move does not ignore human subjects. Instead, it reveals the complex entanglement of humans with the environment. Murray concentrates on Wyndham Lewis, D. H. Lawrence, H.D., and Samuel Beckett, all of whose experimental work helped to define high Anglomodernism. She claims that “the figure of the exoskeleton (or outer shell) can shed new light on modernism’s linguistic and formal innovations, its engagement with key psychological and socio-political concerns, as well as its questioning of the limits of the human” (3). According to Murray, modernists responded to war, urban modernity, and industrial capitalism by turning to the insect to better understand how humans changed in response to new conditions. Modernists, she claims, began to see humans becoming more and more buglike as they were transformed on the battlefield. In making such an argument, she deftly positions the figure of the insect as integral to understanding not only modernist aesthetics but also the history of modernism in relation to war. Because of the popularity of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1915), and because it has received so much critical attention, it would seem that very little was left to be said about the insect figure in literature. However, Kafka was only one writer in a long line who employed this figure to suggest “the powerlessness of the modern subject amid an increasingly dehumanising social reality” (5). With the destruction of the First World War, that social reality became far more pronounced; the insect figure moved beyond the realm of metaphor into reality, “as soldiers were strapped into bug-like gas masks and disguised beneath camouf lage uniforms” and as they “crawled through the mud in
{"title":"The Modernist Exoskeleton: Insects, War, Literary Form by Rachel Murray (review)","authors":"Brigitte N. McCray","doi":"10.1215/0041462x-10237821","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462x-10237821","url":null,"abstract":"Rachel Murray’s The Modernist Exoskeleton: Insects, War, Literary Form provides a valuable contribution to modernist studies because Murray explains how the field of entomology, which rose in popularity as a result of the First World War, informed modernist aesthetics. The study illustrates the benefits of greening modernism, a recent turn that has moved scholars from studying the city and human psyche in modernist texts to focusing on the intersection of modernism and the natural world. However, Murray’s accessible and fascinating study makes it clear that such a move does not ignore human subjects. Instead, it reveals the complex entanglement of humans with the environment. Murray concentrates on Wyndham Lewis, D. H. Lawrence, H.D., and Samuel Beckett, all of whose experimental work helped to define high Anglomodernism. She claims that “the figure of the exoskeleton (or outer shell) can shed new light on modernism’s linguistic and formal innovations, its engagement with key psychological and socio-political concerns, as well as its questioning of the limits of the human” (3). According to Murray, modernists responded to war, urban modernity, and industrial capitalism by turning to the insect to better understand how humans changed in response to new conditions. Modernists, she claims, began to see humans becoming more and more buglike as they were transformed on the battlefield. In making such an argument, she deftly positions the figure of the insect as integral to understanding not only modernist aesthetics but also the history of modernism in relation to war. Because of the popularity of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1915), and because it has received so much critical attention, it would seem that very little was left to be said about the insect figure in literature. However, Kafka was only one writer in a long line who employed this figure to suggest “the powerlessness of the modern subject amid an increasingly dehumanising social reality” (5). With the destruction of the First World War, that social reality became far more pronounced; the insect figure moved beyond the realm of metaphor into reality, “as soldiers were strapped into bug-like gas masks and disguised beneath camouf lage uniforms” and as they “crawled through the mud in","PeriodicalId":44252,"journal":{"name":"TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":"45 1","pages":"477 - 485"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77630089","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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