Pub Date : 2020-12-01DOI: 10.1215/0041462x-8770695
H. Earl
Abstract:This article argues that synesthesia exerted a profound influence on the writing of Virginia Woolf. Examining a wide range of works, it establishes that Woolf not only registered synesthesia as a cultural phenomenon by depicting many synesthetes in her fiction but also, from the outset of her writing life, adopted synesthesia as an aesthetic principle. It helped her critique the atomization of the human senses under the technological conditions of modernity, but also to condemn both the militarism of the Great War and the rise of totalitarian politics in the late 1930s. Ultimately, however, Woolf's "synesthetic aesthetic" is as constructive as it is critical—an overlooked but vital element in Woolf's broader project of representing lived experience as subjective, multifarious, and fundamentally unified.
{"title":"Virginia Woolf's Synesthesia","authors":"H. Earl","doi":"10.1215/0041462x-8770695","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462x-8770695","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article argues that synesthesia exerted a profound influence on the writing of Virginia Woolf. Examining a wide range of works, it establishes that Woolf not only registered synesthesia as a cultural phenomenon by depicting many synesthetes in her fiction but also, from the outset of her writing life, adopted synesthesia as an aesthetic principle. It helped her critique the atomization of the human senses under the technological conditions of modernity, but also to condemn both the militarism of the Great War and the rise of totalitarian politics in the late 1930s. Ultimately, however, Woolf's \"synesthetic aesthetic\" is as constructive as it is critical—an overlooked but vital element in Woolf's broader project of representing lived experience as subjective, multifarious, and fundamentally unified.","PeriodicalId":44252,"journal":{"name":"TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":"70 1","pages":"463 - 484"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86313334","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 : 2020-12-01DOI: 10.1215/0041462x-8770673
Annabel Williams
Abstract:This article argues that Rebecca West's sustained scrutiny of imperialism tends to coincide with her theoretical and formalist approaches to fantasy, and from this arises literary innovation significant both to modernist and late modernist contexts. It demonstrates that West's creative achievement in Harriet Hume (1929), which partially adapts the conventions of other middlebrow and modernist fantasy literature of her day, is usefully read in conjunction with her assessment of interwar geopolitics, and especially her interest in the collective, sociopolitical fantasies that gather around contested national spaces. Furthermore, in Harriet Hume West elaborates a rhetoric of fantasy—stylistically whimsical, and ideologically what might be called a fantasia on national themes—that was elevated to new importance a decade later in her archetypal attack on imperialism, the Balkans travelogue Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941).
{"title":"Fantasias on National Themes: Fantasy, Space, and Imperialism in Rebecca West","authors":"Annabel Williams","doi":"10.1215/0041462x-8770673","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462x-8770673","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article argues that Rebecca West's sustained scrutiny of imperialism tends to coincide with her theoretical and formalist approaches to fantasy, and from this arises literary innovation significant both to modernist and late modernist contexts. It demonstrates that West's creative achievement in Harriet Hume (1929), which partially adapts the conventions of other middlebrow and modernist fantasy literature of her day, is usefully read in conjunction with her assessment of interwar geopolitics, and especially her interest in the collective, sociopolitical fantasies that gather around contested national spaces. Furthermore, in Harriet Hume West elaborates a rhetoric of fantasy—stylistically whimsical, and ideologically what might be called a fantasia on national themes—that was elevated to new importance a decade later in her archetypal attack on imperialism, the Balkans travelogue Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941).","PeriodicalId":44252,"journal":{"name":"TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":"112 1","pages":"405 - 430"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81408116","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 : 2020-12-01DOI: 10.1215/0041462x-8770728
E. C. Koch
{"title":"The Moral Worlds of Contemporary Realism by Mary K. Holland","authors":"E. C. Koch","doi":"10.1215/0041462x-8770728","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462x-8770728","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44252,"journal":{"name":"TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":"29 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81798650","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 : 2020-12-01DOI: 10.1215/0041462x-8770706
H. Foley
Abstract:This essay argues that Robert Lowell's poetry demonstrates a critical engagement with the liberal individual that he is not often given credit for. By examining Lowell's handling of the pathetic fallacy, whereby the external landscape is made to match the mood of the observer, the essay reveals a critique of the historical formation of American individualism, visible in how Lowell connects the literary historical tropes he is employing to the history of American "imperial" violence. This is first shown through a close reading of "Mouth of the Hudson." The essay connects Lowell's view to those of his New Critical mentors, such as John Crowe Ransom, for whom the individual of the liberal political order is entwined with the history of Puritan iconoclasm and Romantic views of the poetic subject. It argues that Ransom's critique parallels those of later critics, such as Marjorie Perloff, David Antin, and Maria Damon, who see Lowell's poetic self as both solipsistic and symptomatic of an American liberal ideology. Demonstrating that Lowell's views were formed by a critique of liberal individualism, it then attempts to show how Lowell moved beyond this in his later work, harnessing a depiction of the poetic subject's individual experience to a critique of individualism itself as manifested in the American political worldview of the Cold War era. It reads "Beyond the Alps" as a demonstration of the way Lowell is able to wed both critique and depiction of individuality together through a self-aware handling of the poetic landscape.
{"title":"Robert Lowell, the New Critics, and the \"Unforgivable Landscape\" of Liberalism","authors":"H. Foley","doi":"10.1215/0041462x-8770706","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462x-8770706","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay argues that Robert Lowell's poetry demonstrates a critical engagement with the liberal individual that he is not often given credit for. By examining Lowell's handling of the pathetic fallacy, whereby the external landscape is made to match the mood of the observer, the essay reveals a critique of the historical formation of American individualism, visible in how Lowell connects the literary historical tropes he is employing to the history of American \"imperial\" violence. This is first shown through a close reading of \"Mouth of the Hudson.\" The essay connects Lowell's view to those of his New Critical mentors, such as John Crowe Ransom, for whom the individual of the liberal political order is entwined with the history of Puritan iconoclasm and Romantic views of the poetic subject. It argues that Ransom's critique parallels those of later critics, such as Marjorie Perloff, David Antin, and Maria Damon, who see Lowell's poetic self as both solipsistic and symptomatic of an American liberal ideology. Demonstrating that Lowell's views were formed by a critique of liberal individualism, it then attempts to show how Lowell moved beyond this in his later work, harnessing a depiction of the poetic subject's individual experience to a critique of individualism itself as manifested in the American political worldview of the Cold War era. It reads \"Beyond the Alps\" as a demonstration of the way Lowell is able to wed both critique and depiction of individuality together through a self-aware handling of the poetic landscape.","PeriodicalId":44252,"journal":{"name":"TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":"59 1","pages":"485 - 512"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88640721","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 : 2020-12-01DOI: 10.1215/0041462x-8770662
W. Dimock
Abstract:The winner of this year's prize is Annabel Williams's "Fantasias on National Themes: Fantasy, Space, and Imperialism in Rebecca West." The judge is Wai Chee Dimock, William Lampson Professor of English and American Studies at Yale University and editor of PMLA. Her books include Residues of Justice: Literature, Law, Philosophy (1996), Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time (2006), Shades of the Planet (2007), and a team-edited anthology, American Literature in the World: Anne Bradstreet to Octavia Butler (2017). Other writings have appeared in the New York Times, New Yorker, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Chronicle of Higher Education. Her new book, Weak Planet: Literature and Assisted Survival (2020), was just published.
{"title":"On Twentieth-Century Literature's Andrew J. Kappel Prize in Literary Criticism, 2020","authors":"W. Dimock","doi":"10.1215/0041462x-8770662","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462x-8770662","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The winner of this year's prize is Annabel Williams's \"Fantasias on National Themes: Fantasy, Space, and Imperialism in Rebecca West.\" The judge is Wai Chee Dimock, William Lampson Professor of English and American Studies at Yale University and editor of PMLA. Her books include Residues of Justice: Literature, Law, Philosophy (1996), Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time (2006), Shades of the Planet (2007), and a team-edited anthology, American Literature in the World: Anne Bradstreet to Octavia Butler (2017). Other writings have appeared in the New York Times, New Yorker, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Chronicle of Higher Education. Her new book, Weak Planet: Literature and Assisted Survival (2020), was just published.","PeriodicalId":44252,"journal":{"name":"TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":"8 1","pages":"403 - 404"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87820727","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 : 2020-09-01DOI: 10.1215/0041462x-8646863
Brian Gingrich
Abstract:This article locates the place of Willa Cather’s work in literary history by revealing its relation to a central tradition of aesthetics. If at times her work has seemed to waver between romanticism and realism, if today it seems destined to be associated with modernism, yet another set of terms is more appropriate for defining it: by pursuing the sentimental, Cather’s work produces an advanced form of the naive. These terms emerge from an aesthetic tradition that ranges from Friedrich Schiller through Hegel, Emerson, and Ruskin to Theodor Adorno. Applied across Cather’s work, they reveal a mode of perception in her narration that not only elucidates the dialectical relationship between her romanticism and modernism but also offers a dialectical perspective on the relationship between her elegiac tendencies and her visions of empire..
{"title":"Willa Cather’s Naivete","authors":"Brian Gingrich","doi":"10.1215/0041462x-8646863","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462x-8646863","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article locates the place of Willa Cather’s work in literary history by revealing its relation to a central tradition of aesthetics. If at times her work has seemed to waver between romanticism and realism, if today it seems destined to be associated with modernism, yet another set of terms is more appropriate for defining it: by pursuing the sentimental, Cather’s work produces an advanced form of the naive. These terms emerge from an aesthetic tradition that ranges from Friedrich Schiller through Hegel, Emerson, and Ruskin to Theodor Adorno. Applied across Cather’s work, they reveal a mode of perception in her narration that not only elucidates the dialectical relationship between her romanticism and modernism but also offers a dialectical perspective on the relationship between her elegiac tendencies and her visions of empire..","PeriodicalId":44252,"journal":{"name":"TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":"49 1","pages":"305 - 332"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81163599","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 : 2020-09-01DOI: 10.1215/0041462x-8646896
P. Petrov
{"title":"In Search of Russian Modernism by Leonid Livak (review)","authors":"P. Petrov","doi":"10.1215/0041462x-8646896","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462x-8646896","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44252,"journal":{"name":"TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":"176 1","pages":"385 - 391"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85083183","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 : 2020-09-01DOI: 10.1215/0041462x-8646885
Bryan C. Chitwood
Abstract:This article examines the work of British poet Tom Pickard, taking the publication of his collected poems as an occasion to renew an appreciation of the voice as an analytic category for the study of twentieth-century and contemporary British poetry. Focusing on a range of Pickard’s work, especially Ballad of Jamie Allan, the article suggests that rather than view the recent history of British poetry in terms of a modernist/antimodernist dichotomy, with poets assigned to either side of that divide, scholars might productively attend to how voice, as an analytic category and a textual effect, illuminates poetic histories that transgress the bounds of received aesthetic-political narratives.
{"title":"Tom Pickard and the Voices of Postwar British Poetry","authors":"Bryan C. Chitwood","doi":"10.1215/0041462x-8646885","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462x-8646885","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article examines the work of British poet Tom Pickard, taking the publication of his collected poems as an occasion to renew an appreciation of the voice as an analytic category for the study of twentieth-century and contemporary British poetry. Focusing on a range of Pickard’s work, especially Ballad of Jamie Allan, the article suggests that rather than view the recent history of British poetry in terms of a modernist/antimodernist dichotomy, with poets assigned to either side of that divide, scholars might productively attend to how voice, as an analytic category and a textual effect, illuminates poetic histories that transgress the bounds of received aesthetic-political narratives.","PeriodicalId":44252,"journal":{"name":"TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":"17 1","pages":"361 - 384"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76254848","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 : 2020-09-01DOI: 10.1215/0041462x-8646874
Elizabeth Yukins
Abstract:In the posthumously published Three Days before the Shooting . . . (2010), Ralph Ellison’s protagonist spends years as a film actor and filmmaker, and cinematographic effects appear throughout the narrative. Sharply aware of what he called the “enormous myth-making potential of the film form,” Ellison sought in this second novel both to explore the artistic possibilities of film and to expose the dangers of this potent medium. This essay examines three interrelated ways that movies matter to Ellison’s literary experiments. First, it argues that Ellison’s ambivalence about the American movie industry correlates with both his technological savvy and his sociopolitical conservativism in the latter half of his writing career. Second, it shows how Ellison’s fascinations with cinematic effects shape the aesthetics and themes of his unfinished second novel. Finally, the article demonstrates how Ellison’s specific techniques in representing cinematic experience exemplify, ironically, his primary allegiance to literary narrative.
{"title":"Film in Ralph Ellison’s Three Days Before the Shooting . . .","authors":"Elizabeth Yukins","doi":"10.1215/0041462x-8646874","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462x-8646874","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In the posthumously published Three Days before the Shooting . . . (2010), Ralph Ellison’s protagonist spends years as a film actor and filmmaker, and cinematographic effects appear throughout the narrative. Sharply aware of what he called the “enormous myth-making potential of the film form,” Ellison sought in this second novel both to explore the artistic possibilities of film and to expose the dangers of this potent medium. This essay examines three interrelated ways that movies matter to Ellison’s literary experiments. First, it argues that Ellison’s ambivalence about the American movie industry correlates with both his technological savvy and his sociopolitical conservativism in the latter half of his writing career. Second, it shows how Ellison’s fascinations with cinematic effects shape the aesthetics and themes of his unfinished second novel. Finally, the article demonstrates how Ellison’s specific techniques in representing cinematic experience exemplify, ironically, his primary allegiance to literary narrative.","PeriodicalId":44252,"journal":{"name":"TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":"19 1","pages":"333 - 360"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73806980","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 : 2020-06-01DOI: 10.1215/0041462x-8536165
W. Fogarty
Abstract:Taking up the persistent question of poetry's sociopolitical capacities by considering how Harrison's poems depend on the power of local speech, this article examines how they cast his working-class northern English dialect in meter and rhyme as a way to scrutinize social hierarchies. Marshaling various forms of speech, including his own vernacular, into traditional patterns of poetry, Harrison interrogates classist notions about nonstandard speech and its relation to that tradition while exploring the disturbances produced by class separation. Where poetry scholarship in general and Harrison scholarship in particular often place demotic registers in opposition to traditional verse forms, this article argues that it is precisely the working relationships Harrison finds between verse forms and speech forms that upend hierarchies in his poetry, making new music out of local parlance.
{"title":"The Rhubarbarian's Redress: Tony Harrison and the Politics of Speech","authors":"W. Fogarty","doi":"10.1215/0041462x-8536165","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462x-8536165","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Taking up the persistent question of poetry's sociopolitical capacities by considering how Harrison's poems depend on the power of local speech, this article examines how they cast his working-class northern English dialect in meter and rhyme as a way to scrutinize social hierarchies. Marshaling various forms of speech, including his own vernacular, into traditional patterns of poetry, Harrison interrogates classist notions about nonstandard speech and its relation to that tradition while exploring the disturbances produced by class separation. Where poetry scholarship in general and Harrison scholarship in particular often place demotic registers in opposition to traditional verse forms, this article argues that it is precisely the working relationships Harrison finds between verse forms and speech forms that upend hierarchies in his poetry, making new music out of local parlance.","PeriodicalId":44252,"journal":{"name":"TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":"19 1","pages":"207 - 232"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73525597","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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