Pub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.1215/0041462x-9668897
Francisco E. Robles
Abstract:This essay argues that Tomás Rivera’s seminal Chicano text . . . y no se lo tragó la tierra is a polyvocal and deeply communal work whose formal inventiveness illuminates the imaginative lives of migrant workers. Contesting the dominant critical reading of the book as an allegorical treatment of political consciousness and its development, the essay contends that a close reading of the novel’s narrative framework, as well as its emphasis on listening and memory, suggests that important aesthetic and political considerations need not be precisely tied to allegory in order to create a communal text. Ultimately, the essay argues that the literary can help illuminate the workings of ethnic identity by exploring new forms for imagining community belonging.
摘要:本文认为Tomás里维拉开创性的奇卡诺文本…yno se lo tragó la tierra是一个多声音和深刻的社区作品，其形式的创造性照亮了农民工的想象生活。这篇文章反驳了对这本书的主要批评阅读，认为它是对政治意识及其发展的寓言处理，并认为，仔细阅读小说的叙事框架，以及它对倾听和记忆的强调，表明重要的美学和政治考虑不需要精确地与寓言联系在一起，以创造一个公共文本。最后，本文认为文学可以通过探索想象社区归属的新形式来帮助阐明种族认同的运作。
{"title":"Communal Imagination and the Problem of Allegory in Tomás Rivera’s . . . y no se lo tragó la tierra","authors":"Francisco E. Robles","doi":"10.1215/0041462x-9668897","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462x-9668897","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay argues that Tomás Rivera’s seminal Chicano text . . . y no se lo tragó la tierra is a polyvocal and deeply communal work whose formal inventiveness illuminates the imaginative lives of migrant workers. Contesting the dominant critical reading of the book as an allegorical treatment of political consciousness and its development, the essay contends that a close reading of the novel’s narrative framework, as well as its emphasis on listening and memory, suggests that important aesthetic and political considerations need not be precisely tied to allegory in order to create a communal text. Ultimately, the essay argues that the literary can help illuminate the workings of ethnic identity by exploring new forms for imagining community belonging.","PeriodicalId":44252,"journal":{"name":"TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":"34 1","pages":"53 - 74"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84419005","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 : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.1215/0041462x-9668923
Charles M. Tung
{"title":"Modernist Life Histories: Biological Theory and the Experimental Bildungsroman by Daniel Aureliano Newman (review)","authors":"Charles M. Tung","doi":"10.1215/0041462x-9668923","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462x-9668923","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44252,"journal":{"name":"TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":"12 6 1","pages":"101 - 111"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82920428","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 : 2021-12-01DOI: 10.1215/0041462x-9528829
Jeffrey Blevins
Abstract:Are T. S. Eliot's notes on The Waste Land a scholarly resource or a literary hoax? This oft-repeated question gets to the heart of the poem, which thrives on its allusions, whether seriously or cynically. However, scholars have largely passed over the notes' (and the poem's) numberings, despite their complexity and superabundance—a panoply of quantitative relations running alongside the qualitative references. These numberings, with startling frequency, do not compute, which poses a philosophical dilemma greater than arithmetical errors would seem to imply. As a graduate student at Harvard, Eliot took course notes on mathematical logic and number theory that show him grappling again and again with a concept of numerical irrationality, a dilemma that, for him, seems to threaten the coherence of the world itself, the failures of enumeration auguring broader pandemonium. Under the tutelage of Bertrand Russell, Eliot turns to logic in an attempt to discern a coherent system for numbers (and therefore life), but he grows disenchanted with how logic's paradoxes of self-reference undermines that very possibility. In turn, these paradoxes inform The Waste Land as an irrational subtext, as small miscalculations in the poem and the notes herald impending physical disasters, psychological hazards, and metaphysical perils. In the end, how we count its numbers turns out to have important implications for how we account for The Waste Land's puzzling and even deadly subjects.
{"title":"Setting The Waste Land in Order","authors":"Jeffrey Blevins","doi":"10.1215/0041462x-9528829","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462x-9528829","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Are T. S. Eliot's notes on The Waste Land a scholarly resource or a literary hoax? This oft-repeated question gets to the heart of the poem, which thrives on its allusions, whether seriously or cynically. However, scholars have largely passed over the notes' (and the poem's) numberings, despite their complexity and superabundance—a panoply of quantitative relations running alongside the qualitative references. These numberings, with startling frequency, do not compute, which poses a philosophical dilemma greater than arithmetical errors would seem to imply. As a graduate student at Harvard, Eliot took course notes on mathematical logic and number theory that show him grappling again and again with a concept of numerical irrationality, a dilemma that, for him, seems to threaten the coherence of the world itself, the failures of enumeration auguring broader pandemonium. Under the tutelage of Bertrand Russell, Eliot turns to logic in an attempt to discern a coherent system for numbers (and therefore life), but he grows disenchanted with how logic's paradoxes of self-reference undermines that very possibility. In turn, these paradoxes inform The Waste Land as an irrational subtext, as small miscalculations in the poem and the notes herald impending physical disasters, psychological hazards, and metaphysical perils. In the end, how we count its numbers turns out to have important implications for how we account for The Waste Land's puzzling and even deadly subjects.","PeriodicalId":44252,"journal":{"name":"TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":"2019 1","pages":"431 - 454"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87828996","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 : 2021-12-01DOI: 10.1215/0041462x-9528842
A. Parkes
Abstract:Pairing D. H. Lawrence with Aldous Huxley, this essay explores representations of aristocracy—hereditary and intellectual—in British modernism. Lawrence and Huxley often associate aristocracy with stupidity, satirizing the expertise of the expert as well as the intellectual vacancy of the rich and titled. And they satirize each other. But they do not follow Romantic poetry in idealizing the idiot, the simpleton, or figures of social deprivation, Huxley directly targeting Wordsworthian notions of virtuous simplicity in Those Barren Leaves (1925). Dissolving distinctions between rich and poor, high and low, stupid and intelligent, Lawrence and Huxley undo the hierarchicalism with which they are typically identified in modernist studies.
{"title":"Stupidity, Intellect, and Hierarchy in Lawrence and Huxley","authors":"A. Parkes","doi":"10.1215/0041462x-9528842","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462x-9528842","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Pairing D. H. Lawrence with Aldous Huxley, this essay explores representations of aristocracy—hereditary and intellectual—in British modernism. Lawrence and Huxley often associate aristocracy with stupidity, satirizing the expertise of the expert as well as the intellectual vacancy of the rich and titled. And they satirize each other. But they do not follow Romantic poetry in idealizing the idiot, the simpleton, or figures of social deprivation, Huxley directly targeting Wordsworthian notions of virtuous simplicity in Those Barren Leaves (1925). Dissolving distinctions between rich and poor, high and low, stupid and intelligent, Lawrence and Huxley undo the hierarchicalism with which they are typically identified in modernist studies.","PeriodicalId":44252,"journal":{"name":"TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":"3 1","pages":"455 - 482"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80439764","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 : 2021-12-01DOI: 10.1215/0041462x-9528815
A. Fagan
Abstract:This essay considers Arturo Islas's posthumously published novel, La Mollie and the King of Tears (1996), arguing that an examination of its "archival remains"—its drafted and rejected material found in Islas's archive—offers compelling evidence of the text's anxious resistances to bodily, narrative, and cultural annihilation. Drawing on textual scholarship that prioritizes notions of texts as "fluid" or "in process" as well as on theories of queer and asycnhronous temporalities, I argue for a reading of the novel as haunted by its erasures and absences, and for a reading practice that more purposefully imagines the role of the body—of the author, of the text, and of the reader— in constituting and reconstituting the narrative.
{"title":"Reading the Archival Remains of Arturo Islas's La Mollie and the King of Tears","authors":"A. Fagan","doi":"10.1215/0041462x-9528815","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462x-9528815","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay considers Arturo Islas's posthumously published novel, La Mollie and the King of Tears (1996), arguing that an examination of its \"archival remains\"—its drafted and rejected material found in Islas's archive—offers compelling evidence of the text's anxious resistances to bodily, narrative, and cultural annihilation. Drawing on textual scholarship that prioritizes notions of texts as \"fluid\" or \"in process\" as well as on theories of queer and asycnhronous temporalities, I argue for a reading of the novel as haunted by its erasures and absences, and for a reading practice that more purposefully imagines the role of the body—of the author, of the text, and of the reader— in constituting and reconstituting the narrative.","PeriodicalId":44252,"journal":{"name":"TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":"17 1","pages":"407 - 430"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82534720","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 : 2021-12-01DOI: 10.1215/0041462x-9528787
Madison Priest
Abstract:Helga Crane, the heroine of Nella Larsen's critically acclaimed 1928 novel, Quicksand, is a maddening protagonist. Hysterical, reactive, impulsive, and compulsive, she seems constitutionally incapable of finding any sort of happiness. In accounting for Helga's frustrating and inexplicable choices, critics tend to blame either Helga's psyche or her environment. This essay offers an alternative approach, one that troubles the sharp distinctions between interior and exterior on which these readings implicitly rely by arguing that Helga and recalcitrant subjects like her exhibit "wrong feeling." Wrong feeling is a peculiarly twentieth-century phenomenon—an enactment of the modernist allergy to sentiment that nonetheless takes up modernism's key tropes. Manifesting as affective overflowing, it has no discernible locus in either self or world and yields a series of repetitive, frustrating, and ineffectual choices. In disrupting the divide between interior and exterior, wrong feeling provides an unsettling critique of the world that undoes Helga, even as it implicates Helga in her own undoing. In the end, this essay tells a story of punishment—of the iterative mechanisms and repercussions of feeling the wrong way, about the wrong things and for the wrong reasons—tracing the workings of wrong feeling within Larsen's first novel and beckoning toward the ways the idea might help us recognize the import of recalcitrant subjectivity beyond Quicksand itself.
{"title":"Nella Larsen's Quicksand, Recalcitrant Subjects, and Wrong Feeling","authors":"Madison Priest","doi":"10.1215/0041462x-9528787","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462x-9528787","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Helga Crane, the heroine of Nella Larsen's critically acclaimed 1928 novel, Quicksand, is a maddening protagonist. Hysterical, reactive, impulsive, and compulsive, she seems constitutionally incapable of finding any sort of happiness. In accounting for Helga's frustrating and inexplicable choices, critics tend to blame either Helga's psyche or her environment. This essay offers an alternative approach, one that troubles the sharp distinctions between interior and exterior on which these readings implicitly rely by arguing that Helga and recalcitrant subjects like her exhibit \"wrong feeling.\" Wrong feeling is a peculiarly twentieth-century phenomenon—an enactment of the modernist allergy to sentiment that nonetheless takes up modernism's key tropes. Manifesting as affective overflowing, it has no discernible locus in either self or world and yields a series of repetitive, frustrating, and ineffectual choices. In disrupting the divide between interior and exterior, wrong feeling provides an unsettling critique of the world that undoes Helga, even as it implicates Helga in her own undoing. In the end, this essay tells a story of punishment—of the iterative mechanisms and repercussions of feeling the wrong way, about the wrong things and for the wrong reasons—tracing the workings of wrong feeling within Larsen's first novel and beckoning toward the ways the idea might help us recognize the import of recalcitrant subjectivity beyond Quicksand itself.","PeriodicalId":44252,"journal":{"name":"TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":"33 1","pages":"359 - 384"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85452534","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 : 2021-09-01DOI: 10.1215/0041462x-9373720
Patrick Eichholz
Abstract:Out of the wreckage of the First World War, classicism and dadaism charted two opposing paths forward. While one movement sought to overturn the institutions complicit in prolonging the war, the other sought to buttress these same institutions as a safeguard against the chaos of modern life. This essay studies the peculiar convergence of these contradictory movements in The Waste Land. The article provides a full account of Eliot's postwar engagement with dadaism and classicism before examining the influence of each movement on The Waste Land. Walter Benjamin's theory of baroque allegory will be introduced in the end to address the article's central question: How can any one poem be both classicist and dadaist at the same time?
{"title":"Dadaism and Classicism in The Waste Land","authors":"Patrick Eichholz","doi":"10.1215/0041462x-9373720","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462x-9373720","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Out of the wreckage of the First World War, classicism and dadaism charted two opposing paths forward. While one movement sought to overturn the institutions complicit in prolonging the war, the other sought to buttress these same institutions as a safeguard against the chaos of modern life. This essay studies the peculiar convergence of these contradictory movements in The Waste Land. The article provides a full account of Eliot's postwar engagement with dadaism and classicism before examining the influence of each movement on The Waste Land. Walter Benjamin's theory of baroque allegory will be introduced in the end to address the article's central question: How can any one poem be both classicist and dadaist at the same time?","PeriodicalId":44252,"journal":{"name":"TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":"15 1","pages":"269 - 292"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90176023","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 : 2021-09-01DOI: 10.1215/0041462x-9373759
Daniel A. Newman
{"title":"Midcentury Suspension: Literature and Feeling in the Wake of World War II by Claire Seiler","authors":"Daniel A. Newman","doi":"10.1215/0041462x-9373759","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462x-9373759","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44252,"journal":{"name":"TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":"04 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86106505","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 : 2021-09-01DOI: 10.1215/0041462x-9373707
S. Kunde
Abstract:"The 'Nature' of American Literature" explores how John Crowe Ransom and his less-studied contemporary Elizabeth Madox Roberts advanced a theory of literary objects that emerged from nature itself. This theory formed the basis of Ransom's bid, in "Criticism, Inc.," for disciplinary stratification and productivity. Through a set of representational practices this article gathers under the terms "natural reading" and "natural writing," Roberts and Ransom framed valuable aesthetic objects as the product of a carefully cultivated relationship between human observers and landscape. For both, however, this rarified relationship was grounded in and served to reinforce racial hierarchy. Even as the discipline turns away from the cultural elitism associated with New Criticism, Ransom's understanding of the literary object as natural and thus subject to disciplinary study continues to inform contemporary critical practice. This article thus invites engagement with the often submerged racial politics of the ways we constitute objects and processes of disciplinary literary studies.
{"title":"The \"Nature\" of American Literature: Race, Place, and Textuality in John Crowe Ransom and Elizabeth Madox Roberts","authors":"S. Kunde","doi":"10.1215/0041462x-9373707","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462x-9373707","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:\"The 'Nature' of American Literature\" explores how John Crowe Ransom and his less-studied contemporary Elizabeth Madox Roberts advanced a theory of literary objects that emerged from nature itself. This theory formed the basis of Ransom's bid, in \"Criticism, Inc.,\" for disciplinary stratification and productivity. Through a set of representational practices this article gathers under the terms \"natural reading\" and \"natural writing,\" Roberts and Ransom framed valuable aesthetic objects as the product of a carefully cultivated relationship between human observers and landscape. For both, however, this rarified relationship was grounded in and served to reinforce racial hierarchy. Even as the discipline turns away from the cultural elitism associated with New Criticism, Ransom's understanding of the literary object as natural and thus subject to disciplinary study continues to inform contemporary critical practice. This article thus invites engagement with the often submerged racial politics of the ways we constitute objects and processes of disciplinary literary studies.","PeriodicalId":44252,"journal":{"name":"TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":"13 1","pages":"235 - 268"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81748897","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 : 2021-09-01DOI: 10.1215/0041462x-9373772
C. Eby
{"title":"Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons by Lisa Siraganian","authors":"C. Eby","doi":"10.1215/0041462x-9373772","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462x-9373772","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44252,"journal":{"name":"TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":"20 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76465069","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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