Modernism (Literature)

In this essay I seek to explore the icon of the Fighting Cock movement (Khorus Jangi) and of its Manifesto, " The Slaughterer of the Nightingale, " in order to consider its implications and imagistic allusions. In outlining the background of the Khorus Jangi and associated movements, I discuss the imagery of the khorus both in ancient Iran and globally, and in the context of the ideology of the Khorus Jangi. The Manifesto is discussed and analyzed and it is seen that the khorus prefigured the Manifesto, and heralded the appearance of a new movement in painting, as distinct from what had already happened in surrealist and modernist circles in writing. The manifestation of surrealist and modernist ideology in imagery seems to have been a response to this wake-up call of the Khorus Jangi.

Aida Foroutan, “Why the Fighting Cock? The Significance of the Imagery of the Khorus Jangi and its Manifesto ‘The Slaughterer of the Nightingale,’” Iran Namag, Volume 1, Number 1 (Spring 2016), XXVIII-XLIX.

https://www.irannamag.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/1.1-English-Foroutan-Iran-Namag.pdf

The Review article discusses four new scholarly volumes focused on various problematic issues related to Russian Modernism. The essay debates major points of methodology and research topicality with respect to Russian Symbolism and the Avant-Garde.
- Martha M.F. Kelly, Unorthodox Beauty. Russian Modernism and Its New
Religious Aesthetic. Evanston, 2016.
- Jonathan Stone, The Institutions of Russian Modernism. Conceptualizing, Publishing, and Reading Symbolism. Evanston, 2017.
- Katherine Lahti, The Russian Revival of the Dithyramb. A Modernist Use of Antiquity. Evanston, 2018.
- Reframing Russian Modernism. Edited by Irina Shevelenko. Madison, 2018.

George M. Johnson does a fine analysis of the vital role the Society for Psychical Research played in the making of modernist fiction.  For those interested in psychology, theories of subjectivity, and conceptions of the unconscious, this is essential reading.  Johnson's analysis of individual texts is not as strong as his history of the Society for Psychical Research or his work on psychology more generally.  But the book is very useful nonetheless.

"Chez Beckett, l’écriture articule intimement la dimension esthétique à l’implication subjective du créateur. Dans le premier volume de la Série, nous avons abordé certains aspects de l’impulsion créatrice de Beckett. Dans ce deuxième volume, nous situons des effets esthétiques au sein d’une triangulation structurante. D’abord, la parole, et le silence qui l’excède. Ensuite l’image, avec le regard qui sous-tend le visible. Ces deux faces se nouent enfin à l’endroit où l’écriture s’éprouve dans l’irréductible matérialité du corps.


In Beckett’s work, the aesthetic dimension is intimately bound up with the subjective involvement of the creator. The first volume of the Series dealt with aspects of the creative impulse. This second volume situates aesthetic effects in a structuring triangle. First, speech in relation to silence that exceeds it. Then the image, with the gaze that underlies the visible. These two faces come together in the point where writing is experienced in the fundamentally material nature of the body."

Num texto pertencente ao espólio, Fernando Pessoa começa com a seguinte a frase: «O poeta é essencialmente um místico». Com esta citação como ponto de partida, pretendo, nesta comunicação, olhar para Fernando Pessoa como herdeiro de uma tradição, não só mística como também profética, considerando, em particular, a figura de William Blake. Para isso, e dado que um dos objectivos deste colóquio é a revisão do estado da arte dos estudos pessoanos, tenciono, primeiro, fazer o levantamento e análise da bibliografia que aproxima as obras de Blake e Pessoa e, depois, sugerir outras linhas de leitura a partir do exame do inédito mencionado anteriormente e dos sublinhados de Pessoa nas duas obras referentes a William Blake, que se encontram na sua biblioteca, a primeira, uma edição de Poems of William Blake e, a segunda, um volume, datado de 1906, da correspondência do poeta inglês. Deste modo, irei examinar de que forma é que Fernando Pessoa adoptou e adaptou alguns aspectos da mundividência de Blake, e da sua visão da poesia, para a sua obra, nomeadamente, para a criação de Alberto Caeiro.

Due to the increasing acceptance that we are now living in an age of radical environmental catastrophe, various innovative ecological-philosophical-artistic texts are being published, dispersed and discussed in attempting to transform our consciousness into ecological selves immersed in the ecological thought. In this essay, I present James Joyce's final exasperating work Finnegans Wake as a supreme text of experimentation and dissidence and how it both links and articulates in dazzling new ways the contemporary ecological thought. Joyce's art offers us ways and visions to constantly realign and transform our relationship to each other and all animate and inanimate things, and incorporates and interpenetrates all human and natural history and experience in this "timecoloured place" propelling us into the reality of the present which is the ecological thought. It is without a doubt one of the most difficult and impenetrable 'novels' ever written, but I propose that is only now that we are ready to enter this 'book of the dark' and understand it within a present-orientated Chthulucene (Donna Haraway's neologism) rather than an Anthropocene epoch. I argue that Joyce's 'explosition' demands the reader's participation as an endlessly experimental, dissident, problematic, destabilising and subversively joyous work of art, and as a philosophical vision for multispecies storytelling and entangling encounters. The final part of this essay demonstrates briefly that there is a profound ecological thought at the heart of the book via at least two aspects: i) ‘Wrunes’—in the ruins, recycling and renewal of human history and the natural world; and ii) ‘Explosition’—in the experience of interpenetration and entanglement of language and of animate and inanimate things and beings.

This paper attempts to present Wilde's enchanting play 'The Importance of Being Earnest' as a ridicule on the Victorian society of England which remains a quintessence of the so-called gentlemanliness and mannerisms even today. The play has succeeded in displaying how triviality was valued in the then-England and basic human values and morals were given least importance. The paper extrapolates the Victorian society for its derogatory human values and principles through the text. It highlights the trivialities in the lives of the Victorian people and exposes their showy attitudes. The inferences and findings are supported by using extracts from the text which enlighten the readers about the people of the then

This essay affords the first extensive reading of T.S. Eliot’s marginalia to F. H. Bradley’s ‘Appearance and Reality.’ I draw attention to a shift in Eliot’s way of doing philosophy over the course of his year at Merton College, Oxford, 1914-1915; a shift that had consequences for the ways in which Eliot read or re-read Bradley. Drawing on Heather Jackson’s work on marginalia, I argue that Eliot’s notes on Bradley provide a window on this act of reading. In particular, I suggest that Eliot’s quibble with Bradley’s use of the word “transmute” – evident in the marginalia – opens up an extended conversation between the two authors and within which “Tradition and the Individual Talent” can be located. I offer not so much a new account of Bradley’s influence on Eliot as an enriched picture of the manner in which influence can be said to be exerted.

"Originally presented at the 2010 English Association conference (University of Sydney), and English Teachers' Association (ETA) NSW conference (UTS). It provides a reading of the texts studied in the Year 12 HSC Module A (Advanced English): Texts in Time.

Copyright of this paper belongs exclusively to the author.

Warning to students about plagiarism: Without trying to sound Orwellian, please be aware that everyone (including teachers) uses the same Google search engine as you."

In this dialogue, political theorist William E. Connolly joins forces with Nidesh Lawtoo to bring Conrad studies in the planetary age. They argue that Conrad's fictions of nautical catastrophe can help us not only diagnose but also navigate the unpredictable mimetic, contagious, and spiraling currents that are currently taking us in the age of the planetary age of the Anthropocene: from pandemic crises to (new) fascist crises, cataclysmic typhoons to rapid climate change in the planetary epoch of the Anthropocene.

As the poet's himself testified and as it has been widely proven by critics, William Carlos Williams' In the American Grain is a work largely composed by the technique of montage, joining and stitching together a great number of materials withdrawn from different sources and scraps cut from the author's own texts or someone else's writings. An image of ruins among overgrown weeds, like an untracked forest in the heart of the big city, can be seen as an image of the two poles of the field of tension within which literature creates itself. Besides, that same image can suggest how the new can be made by retrieving, selecting and reassembling the debris of antiquity. Thus William Carlos Williams, with In the American Grain, built his own literary tradition through the technique of montage, like Ezra Pound did with Malatesta Cantos. To identify Williams' sources is indispensable to reconstruct the methods employed by the poet to compose his work. After having identified some previously overlooked sources for «The Discovery of the Indies: Christopher Columbus», as well as for «The Discovery of Kentucky», the primary source of the latter chapter is looked at as an example of the way in which Williams sistematically employs the techniques of montage to compose his text. The complete analysis can be found in the original version of the present essay, published in Bibliomanie: Ricerca filologica, storia delle idee, e orientamento bibliografico, n. 19, ottobre/dicembre 2009, <http://www.bibliomanie.it/ archivio_numero_diciannove.htm>.

In 1929 Nikolas Calas photographed himself in a mirror of a wardrobe, in a room in Tinos with a hand-held camera (ΕΛΙΑ L003.124). The camera is not visible at first sight, as Calas tries to ‘hide’ it, positioning it in front of his tie. This self- portrait is a manifestation of early self- portraying in photography and can be compared to other modernist self-portraits of the time, especially the ones, where the camera is not visible but somehow hidden in the shadow (for e.g. Lotte Jacobi, ‘Autoportrait’, 1937).
When examining Calas’ poetry and prose texts it is noticeable, that mirrors are a constant motive, as I will try to show. Especially interesting is the connection between mirrors and translation, for example in the correspondence with Williams Carlos Williams, regarding the translations of Calas’ french poems ‘Wrested from Mirrors’, ‘The Agony Among the Crowd’, ‘Narcissus in the Desert’ and ‘To Regain the Day Again’ into American. Williams is borrowing the metaphor of the mirror from Calas thematizing the translator as the other, as a reflection of the original. By analyzing the metaphor of the mirror it is possible as well to reconsider the use of the Pseudonyms of Nikolas Calamaris as a reflection of himself.
After this considerations I will end my talk with the portfolio of prints and objects by eleven artists (Vincenzo Agnetti, Arakawa, Joseph Beuys, Marcel Broodthaers, Richard Hamilton, Roy Lichtenstein, Bruce Nauman, Meret Oppenheim, Robert Rauschenberg, Man Ray, James Rosenquist) introduced by Nikolas Calas and edited in 1975 with the title Mirros of the mind.

Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent seriously explores a story of terrorism in the city called London. He projects the harrowing existence of anarchism and terrorism in the novel. It discusses every conceivable angle of a terrorist act. So, the main aim of the study is to analyze the city and terrorism / anarchism in The Secret Agent with its association to London.

Обект на статията са три различни интерпретации на куклата в българската литература от 1920-те години. Те са представени в разказите: "Комедия на куклите" на Владимир Полянов,  "Пантомима" на Светослав Минков и "Балерина" на Владимир Полянов. Куклата е видяна като проекция на човешкото тяло - в неговата виталност и трагична фрагментаризация, но и човешкото тяло като маска, която разкрива различни аспекти на социалната модификация на субекта.

In this thesis I explore the complex nature of James Joyce’s relationship with Giordano Bruno in The Day of the Rabblement, Stephen Hero, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses.  I employ an historicist methodology, and examine Joyce’s encounter with Bruno in the context of the discursive environment of contemporary Roman Catholicism, specifically in relation to the triumph of Ultramontanism within the Church and the emergence and suppression of Roman Catholic Modernism.  I argue that an historicist examination of this relationship provides an extremely effective means of realising some of the urgency and offensiveness of Joyce’s critical engagement with contemporary Catholicism.  I discuss the manner in which Joyce’s encounter with Bruno’s writings and legacy in the 1900s steeled him in his own struggle with Catholic orthodoxy, and I explore the significance of the heretical trace of Bruno’s philosophical and cosmological writings in Joyce’s novels from 1904 to 1922.

The American poet Ezra Pound played a crucial role in establishing a deeper understanding of East Asian art and literature in the Anglophone sphere in the early twentieth century. Pound’s contribution, especially in his translation of Chinese poetry, has long been recognised – T. S. Eliot wrote as early as 1928 that Pound was “the inventor of Chinese poetry for our time.” Scholars have been careful to qualify Pound’s youthful orientalism, and rightly show caution regarding his more strident claims for and uses of Chinese materials. Initially Pound followed the linguistically naive views of Ernest Fenollosa on matters of Chinese language – using Fenollosa’s notebooks as a basis for his 1915 volume Cathay and for the 1919 essay, “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry,” which provided the basis for a theory of the poetic image along “ideogrammic” lines.

Over a lifetime of literary and linguistic study, Pound’s proficiency in and appreciation of Chinese language deepened rather considerably. He was aware of the pitfalls and potentialities of translation / adaptation from the Chinese as early as 1915 in Cathay, but later attention to Chinese history and aesthetics in the China Cantos (first published in 1940) demonstrates a concerted effort to absorb and conceptualise a Chinese aesthetic. For Pound, this aesthetic would reside fundamentally at the juncture between word and image – the “ideogrammic method” attempted a word-image synthesis in the poetic image – shown most vividly in the “Seven Lakes” canto that immediately precedes the China Cantos in his epic poem The Cantos. This short lyric piece was inspired by, and performs a dialogue with, the Sho-Sho Hakkei tekagami in Pound’s possession. This (Japanese) illustrated album of calligraphy provides the poet with the means to pass beyond occidental traditions of ekphrasis and to imagine a transmediatic sensibility, in which word and image perform mutually constituting functions that avowedly depart (for Pound) from Western conventions of the time.

This paper explores the ways in which the “Seven Lakes” canto attempts such a revolutionary gesture, and assesses the context of this poem within Pound’s own aesthetic development, and within his evolving orientalist sensibility. It is my contention that the success of the poem (and by implication, Pound’s mature orientalist aesthetic) stands or falls on the strength of its synthesis of word and image: and more specifically, the relation of words and images from Chinese and Japanese contexts, on the one hand, and Western and Anglophone contexts on the other. It is this east-west nexus in the word-image dialectic that affords Pound such a poetic opportunity, the implications of which have resounded in Anglophone and particularly American poetry since.

Samuel Beckett’s novel Watt is uniquely positioned in his oeuvre: composed in exile in 1941-45 and first published in 1953, it forecasts the transition from English to French as his preferred language of composition, and signifies a shift from the expansive comic mode of the early Beckett so influenced by Joyce to the linguistically austere and ontologically-minded later Beckett. The precarious mode of the text’s composition also sees a profound meditation on the purpose and structure of literary expression, abundantly evident in the six manuscript notebooks and partial typescript. This work engages with a profound rethinking of narrative, discarding any sense of compositional telos from drafts to finished, published work. Instead, a reticulated, imbricated series of narrative episodes trace paths across the surface of the published text, and deep into the archive. By force of circumstance and by force of will, Beckett thought his compositional practices into a radical zone of narrative deformation that was to have a lasting effect on his writing, and upon literary aesthetics in the latter half of the twentieth century.

Many researchers still consider Kafka's work as a monolithic unity. They will quote from an early text to elucidate passages in a late work, they will consider the father-son conflict as crucial for the complete work, etc. The essay suggests that it may be very helpful to realize that Kafka's work has a history in which three or four periods with specific characteristics can be distinguished.

Во македонската книжевна критика и воопшто во современата македонска книжевност значајно место зазема Венко Андоновски – писател, поет, есеист, драмски автор, публицист и универзитетски професор. Овој труд претставува осврт кон книжевно-критичката и книжевно-теориската мисла што Андоновски ја презентира во книгата „Дешифрирања (литературни студии)“. Прво се презентираат општи податоци за творештвото на Андоновски, а потоа се елаборираат суштинските специфики на текстовите што се дел од оваа книга. Во заклучокот од овој труд се нагласува дека во книгата „Дешифрирања (литературни студии)“ се елаборираат суштински прашања од повеќе спознајни дисциплини како што се книжевната теорија со нејзините базни поддисциплини (наратологија, драматургија, теорија на поезијата), книжевната историја, книжевната критика, семиологијата и филозофијата.

Updated and illustrated version of PhD thesis, University College London. 1,161 html pages, bibliographical notes for 4,000 works, 1,100 images, 45,578 hyperlinked cross-references. Complete to 2003 with occasional but not systematic notes added since. Not actively updated.

St. Mawr (written 1924, published 1925) is usually addressed in terms of Lawrence’s encounters with otherness and difference, as well as his broader critique of industrialisation. This article argues for the significance of popular culture in the novella to show how it also participates in the discussion of issues – around the self, culture and society – usually associated with Lawrence’s final period in Europe. By offering a new reading of the Devil’s Chair scene, that explores the importance of a “new dance tune” (SM 75) and extends arguments about Rico as “representative of modern civilized ‘life’” and its damaging effects, I examine how Lawrence critiques popular art, music and film as limiting peoples’ capacities for independent thought. St. Mawr thus anticipates Lawrence’s claims about the effects of mass culture in Pornography and Obscenity (1929) and his exploration of the modern “psychological condition” in his 1927 ‘Review of The Social Basis of Consciousness, by Trigant Burrow’ (IR 332).

In “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”, Wallace Stevens invites the
reader to perceive and consider the blackbird, a common and otherwise insignificant bird which people would probably not notice, in “thirteen ways”. Meanwhile, “In a Station of a Metro” by Ezra Pound conveys a way of looking at an everyday phenomenon, the crowd of faces in a subway, as “petals”. Set in the backdrop of modernity in 20th century, where contemporary living is often equated to a rise in indifference, social alienation and depersonalization, both poems epitomize this social phenomenon through contrasting approaches: Stevens calls the ordinary, unnoticed blackbird into our consciousness, while Pound retreats from reality into a imagined world. ~ BY Charlotte Lai Hong Lan

Die Studie unternimmt den Versuch einer Gesamtdarstellung von Denken und Dichten des vielgestaltigen Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935). Anhand der Leitbegriffe des Bewußtseins und der Erzählungen wird der gegenwärtig wohl bekannteste portugiesische Autor im geistes- und literaturgeschichtlichen Kontext seiner Zeit betrachtet. Dabei werden die literarischen wie auch die bisher wenig bekannten theoretischen Werkteile nicht nur interpretiert, sondern auch beschrieben. Die Betrachtung seiner Faustfragmente schließt einen Abriß der Stoffgeschichte ein, in die Pessoa sowie die modernen Bearbeitungen Thomas Manns und Paul Valérys eingeordnet werden. Die heteronymische und Bewußtseinskunst Pessoas werden sodann mit ausgewählten Texten Carl Einsteins, Luigi Pirandellos und James Joyces verglichen bzw. kontrapunktiert. Ziel der Arbeit ist es, Pessoa als einen Genotyp der Moderne zu etablieren und seine ästhetischen Bewußtseinsstrukturen faßbar zu machen.