Literature Compass最新文献

Magic has served as a source of fascination for early modern scholars throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. While critics continue to debate magic's relationship to religion and science, in recent years the focus has turned to knowledge-making and how magic contributed to a diverse range of discourses during the 16th and 17th centuries. This article first explores some of the significant historical debates on early modern magic before turning to more recent work in literary studies of the Renaissance. While focusing on early modern England and the stage, the article also highlights newer directions for the study of magic that might enfold global contexts and critical methodologies.

From the 1980s onwards, relationality has been a key term in autobiography scholarship and life-writing studies, as it describes how the self in many instances of autobiographical literature emerges in relation to others. Yet, confusion reigns about the exact meaning and applicability of the term relational autobiography. Are all works of autobiographical literature to an extent relational, or only those in which the author's relationships with others form a central theme? Or is relational autobiography a genre on its own; a contemporary genre, clearly distinguished from the traditional genre of the autonomous autobiography? This article casts new light on the history of relationality and autonomy as concepts in autobiography studies, and suggests that contemporary works of relational autobiography ask for an approach of their relationality that does not place it in opposition with autonomy. Adopting the account of relationality developed by Judith Butler and Lauren Berlant's perspective on affective attachments to generic conventions, this article proposes to understand relationality in autobiographical texts as both their “dispossession by” and “working upon” generic norms for autobiographical writing such as depicting oneself as an autonomous being.

The majority of interdisciplinary studies on nineteenth-century Japonisme perpetuate an assumption that most connoisseurs of Japanese art in Victorian Britain were men. Despite recent feminist studies which have restored women to histories of private collecting and curatorship across Europe, there is a lack of consideration of how travelogues by women contributed to public discussions of Japanese art and anthropology in Victorian Britain—including accounts which complement or predate publications by celebrated connoisseurs such as A.W. Franks, James Lord Bowes, and Charles Holme. This article will examine brief passages from travelogues by Anna d’Almeida (1863), Alice Frere (1870), Isabella Bird (1880), and Mary Bickersteth (1893) which chronicle the authors' experiences purchasing ceramics and lacquerware in Japan. The women's careful attention to the history and features which distinguish valuable, antique art pieces from lesser factory productions contradicts the Victorian characterisation of female collectors as indiscriminate participants in commercial or ‘decorative’ trends. Furthermore, the women redress false Victorian conceptions of ‘Japanese’ aesthetics and report on the changing conditions of art production in post-feudal Japan. In context with the popularity of the travel genre across classes and genders in the mid- and late-nineteenth century, d’Almeida, Frere, Bird, and Bickersteth's accounts simultaneously signal their competence as discerning collectors of authentic Japanese art while providing an accessible introduction to Japanese art and aesthetics for aspiring lay-collectors of ‘things Japanese’.

This article interrogates the arbitrary distinctions made between “anti-Judaism” and “anti-Semitism” by contextualizing the treatment of Jews in Roman late antiquity within the broader framework of premodern critical race studies. It illustrates the value of employing models such as racialization and monstrification when reconstructing the various iterations of anti-Jewish prejudice that populate the long history of Christianity. More specifically, it outlines the modes of racialization utilized in two fourth-century Christian writings: Eusebius's two-part apology and the Pseudo-Hegesippus. While Eusebius's work serves as an example of the racialization of Jews through ethnographic mythmaking, the so-called Pseudo-Hegesippus demonstrates the use of monstrification in the service of creating an affective culture of fear and hatred toward Jews. Such examples of Christian race-making in late antiquity contribute to the task of tracing the developments of premodern race beyond the medieval period and disrupts the arbitrary and limiting distinctions made between anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism.

This article takes the current transnational turn in modernist studies as entry point to probe how that plays out in the classroom in non-Western locations that are often also the “locales” of that disciplinary shift. I propose a waylaying of the energies of dispersion and diffusion that currently animate the modernist field to decolonize the modernist classroom through a parallel vagrancy, but one focused on recovering the local from these compelling taxonomic shifts. It is quite easy to be sucked under by the adrenaline rush of these expansions of new modernist studies that mirror modernism's own self–mythologies. To resist that, we need to be vagrants inside the classroom, to bring into it the choice pickings from our wider reading and research. Our fealty to the modernist archive and the professional competence incumbent on us notwithstanding, our ability to bring tentative new findings from our own research and readings, can potentially dynamize our teaching spaces, as also our commitment to a more decenterd approach. Ready embraces of belatedly discovered writers into the modernist corpus might make our taxonomies look suitably plural and fashionable but subsume the writers' own demonstrated recalcitrance to those taxonomies. Teaching modernism as a core course with a fixed, prescribed, syllabi comprising largely of the Anglo-American presences such as Virginia Woolf and Joseph Conrad has in some ways released the itinerant in me. Through carefully culled examples from my own teaching of the modernist canon, I argue that a genuine opening of modernist studies within the classroom can come from a tempering of the ‘professional’ by itinerant interludes.

If Japanese modernists, as Eric Hayot argues, conceived modernism and modernity as originating in the West, colonial Korean artists inevitably apprehended modernism from a double remove, through the mediation of Japanese literature and language. While they self-consciously sought to develop a distinctive Korean modernist poetics (one not prefigured by Japanese modernism), the sense of belatedness remained inescapable among Korean modernist practitioners. With the ‘expansionism’ of the new modernist studies, as is well known, there has been substantial critical work to challenge and reject the belatedness and derivativeness attributed to ‘peripheral’ modernities and modernisms. However, to properly appreciate the singularity of Korean modernism, and its expressive efforts to place its colonial modernity in a global context, it is necessary to confront how these modernists understood, figured, and rearticulated their sense of belatedness. Taking a cue from Michaela Bronstein, I attend to the uses Korean modernists made of Western (and Japanese) modernisms and how these engagements enact the aesthetic and critical force of belatedness. Ultimately, I contend, Korean modernism's self-reflexive, intertextual stagings of belatedness generate stylistic innovation, enabling writers to situate themselves within global modernism and disclose the fraudulence of colonial modernization and its imposition of second-hand forms.

The past decade or so saw a regional turn to modernist studies in Singapore. Numerous projects are mapping out the networks of institutions, artists, and writers that disseminated and reinvented Euro-American modernism in Southeast Asia from the 1930s. While this networked approach enables the recovery of neglected modernists in the non-West, particularly women, it is also too neatly aligned with Singapore's self-branding as a global city and its ongoing accumulation of cultural capital. Related scholarship is circumscribed by a tension between a desire to diversify modernist studies and a narrow fixation on connecting Singapore-based artists and writers to already established modernist networks. In the process, an implicit conception of modernity and modernism that privileges connectivity, mobility, and capital is installed. Consequently, inconvenient facets of regional art and literature, as well as intra-regional connections, are overlooked. I examine how these dynamics play out in projects on the Nanyang artists and writers, a group of diasporic Chinese literati who worked in Southeast Asia following their exposure to Euro-American modernism. In closing, I turn to emergent avenues of research which counteract the nationalist slant to the study of regional modernisms in Singapore.

This essay discusses the pedagogical implications of recent theorizations of new modernisms as ‘planetary’ for Asian contexts such as Hong Kong. It explains how modernist texts lend themselves strongly to the uncanny experience of seeing the self in the other and vice versa in the setting of Hong Kong modernities, which leads to a much deeper understanding of both the self and the other. The essay argues that this quality can be harnessed using a creative writing approach that emphasizes exploring these present modernities in courses on modernism in English departments. One of the conscious goals of modernist studies in Asian settings such as Hong Kong then becomes not only (or even not primarily) the turn outward, but also the turn inward, the defamiliarization and refamiliarization of the ‘home’.

Bringing together a polyphony of voices from Asia, this special issue seeks to contribute to a more nuanced picture of modernist histories and practices during both the heyday of modernism in the arts in the early twentieth century and the present day, when the new modernist studies keeps refreshing conceptions of modernism across multiple spatiotemporal scales. With case studies situated in Korea, Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and India, the issue aims to be illustrative rather than comprehensive in terms of its focus, scope, and approaches. Addressing conceptual, institutional, and pedagogical aspects of modernist practices across various sites of Asia, this cluster of essays offers new data and fresh perspectives, from which we can examine how an internally diverse region like Asia simultaneously uncovers the intricate complexities of global modernist studies and furnishes possibilities to rethink, or even reshape, its ongoing development.

In early modern English drama, black flesh is remarkable. In the Shakespeare canon, the visibly black flesh of the eponymous Moor of Venice in Othello and the villainous Aaron in Titus Andronicus has been the subject of scholarly analysis for centuries. Yet, in a field that has placed so much emphasis on flesh marked by color, unmarked flesh is imbued with assumptions of whiteness that make unremarkable, a privilege that renders it unthought and uncritiqued, processes that contribute to the normativity of whiteness as inextricable from subjectivity. This rhetoric of whiteness as largely unremarkable continues to influence our modern conceptualizations of what Shakespeare looks like both in our minds and on the stage. Too often, modern productions of Shakespeare engage in casting practices that elide important early modern identity distinctions in service of contemporary white supremacy. For instance, national identity—the difference between being English, Irish, Scottish, French, etc—mattered both for character and actor on the Early Modern English stage. Yet, these distinctions fade into the fringes of memory when casting today's productions, allowing directors to include and exclude bodies based on modern conceptions of racial difference and mis-remembering of whiteness as a coherent and stable early modern identity. But whiteness was neither so stable nor so stoic in Shakespeare's day or in the works of Shakespeare as our modern theatrical culture continually mis-remembers and re-performs. This essay engages with the ways in which the modern theatre mis-remembers Shakespeare in relation to whiteness to reinforce white supremacy. This essay uses contemporary theories of Afro-Pessimism and Black Critical Theory to destabilize the mythology of white permanence that undergirds Renaissance history. I argue that the notions of the stable white corporeal whole that scholars and artists assume of the majority of Shakespeare's characters requires an anachronistic reading of whiteness that is the product of chattel slavery and a paradigm that relies on the destruction of black flesh for the unified white body to gain corporeal coherence. The essay concludes with a critique of epistemology arguing that this forgetting of the historical dismemberment of white flesh makes us mis-remember the role of whiteness in our present.