XIV Modern Literature SHAWNA ROSS, FRANCESCA BRATTON, CAROLINE KRZAKOWSKI, SOPHIE CORSER, ANDREW KEESE, JOSHUA PHILLIPS, MARK WEST, SAMUEL COOPER, REBECCA D’MONTE, GUSTAVO A. RODRI ´ GUEZ MARTI ´ N, GRAHAM SAUNDERS, NOREEN MASUD, MATTHEW CREASY, ALEX ALONSO, AND KARL O’HANLON This chapter has eight sections 1. General. 2. Fiction Pre-1945; 3. Fiction Post- 1945; 4. Drama Pre-1950; 5. Drama Post-1950; 6. British Poetry 1900–1950; 7 British Poetry Post-1950; 8. Modern Irish Poetry. Section 1 is by Shawna Ross; section 2(a) is by Francesca Bratton; section 2(b) is by Caroline Krzakowski; section 2(c) is by Sophie Corser; section 2(d) is by Andrew Keese; section 2(e) is by Joshua Phillips; section 3(a) is by Mark West; section 3(b) is by Samuel Cooper; section 4(a) is by Rebecca D’Monte; section 4(b) is by Gustavo A. Rodrı ´guez Martı ´n; section 5 is by Graham Saunders; section 6(a) is by Noreen Masud; section 6(b) is by Matthew Creasy; section 7 is by Alex Alonso; section 8 is by Karl O’Hanlon. 1. General For the field of modernist studies, 2018 was a transitional year. Approaches that have felt novel and urgent in the past five years continue to flourish, namely those derived from archival studies, periodical studies, and the digital humanities, but publications adopting them are less likely to be imbued with a sense of self- conscious newness and more likely to be integrated with a variety of more trad- itional methods and engaged with long-established debates. Even more palpably, as scholars become more comfortable with the temporal and spatial expansions of what counts as modernism, the perceived need for bold, defensive, or manifesto-like theoretical justifications of these expansions has relaxed. As the moniker ‘modernism’ continues to be applied to more and more art produced outside Europe and the Americas and for art produced before the 1890s or after The Year’s Work in English Studies, volume 99 (2020) V C The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the English Association. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: [email protected] doi:10.1093/ywes/maaa014 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ywes/article/99/1/865/5983807 by Uppsala Universitetsbibliotek user on 09 June 2022
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OP-YWES200014 865..1012REBECCA D’MONTE, GUSTAVO A. RODRIGUEZ MARTIN,
GRAHAM SAUNDERS, NOREEN MASUD, MATTHEW CREASY,
ALEX ALONSO, AND KARL O’HANLON
This chapter has eight sections 1. General. 2. Fiction Pre-1945; 3. Fiction Post- 1945; 4. Drama Pre-1950; 5. Drama Post-1950; 6. British Poetry 1900–1950; 7 British Poetry Post-1950; 8. Modern Irish Poetry. Section 1 is by Shawna Ross; section 2(a) is by Francesca Bratton; section 2(b) is by Caroline Krzakowski; section 2(c) is by Sophie Corser; section 2(d) is by Andrew Keese; section 2(e) is by Joshua Phillips; section 3(a) is by Mark West; section 3(b) is by Samuel Cooper; section 4(a) is by Rebecca D’Monte; section 4(b) is by Gustavo A. Rodrguez Martn; section 5 is by Graham Saunders; section 6(a) is by Noreen Masud; section 6(b) is by Matthew Creasy; section 7 is by Alex Alonso; section 8 is by Karl O’Hanlon.
1. General
For the field of modernist studies, 2018 was a transitional year. Approaches that have felt novel and urgent in the past five years continue to flourish, namely those derived from archival studies, periodical studies, and the digital humanities, but publications adopting them are less likely to be imbued with a sense of self- conscious newness and more likely to be integrated with a variety of more trad- itional methods and engaged with long-established debates. Even more palpably, as scholars become more comfortable with the temporal and spatial expansions of what counts as modernism, the perceived need for bold, defensive, or manifesto-like theoretical justifications of these expansions has relaxed. As the moniker ‘modernism’ continues to be applied to more and more art produced outside Europe and the Americas and for art produced before the 1890s or after
The Year’s Work in English Studies, volume 99 (2020) VC The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the English Association. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: [email protected] doi:10.1093/ywes/maaa014
D ow
niversitetsbibliotek user on 09 June 2022
the 1940s, attention to modernisms across the globe and across time continues to be framed as a comparative venture. In other words, canonical modernist authors and texts are being juxtaposed with figures and works of art to be brought under the shared umbrella of modernism. One change is that scholarship published in 2018 suggests that comparison is being supplemented by a second, newer method, one that is attempting to re-examine local and national contexts without abandoning the hard-fought transnational framework characteristic of the new modernist studies.
To put it more succinctly, modernist scholars are increasingly absorbed by the question of how to think nationally in a transnational context. In addition, a marked increase in the sciences and social sciences in recent publications on modernism, as well as the mainstreaming of digital humanities tools and other quantitative approaches to analysis, suggests that the historicism of the new mod- ernist studies is being supplemented by more empirical methods and to consider twentieth-century sciences and social sciences as themselves subjects for re- search. With more attention being given to the mechanisms by which bureaucrat- ic and corporate institutions regulate themselves and their populations, the nascent interest in infrastructure studies is another trend to note. At first glance, these trends may seem to threaten to fragment the field into a clutch of niche concerns, but they may be boiled down into two basic strands: first, a renewed investment in non-textual modernisms and their relation to textual production; and second, an interest in the sciences, social sciences, and empirical methodolo- gies particular to those disciplines. Considering the fine arts and the sciences, it seems, can provide modernist studies with new ways of thinking about the affor- dances and limitations of languages and about the specific advantages or disad- vantages of humanist ways of thinking and communicating, especially when compared to other formalized systems of knowledge. Both threads are united by a curiosity about signs that do not signify, about processes that do not end, about structures of knowledge that do not create meaning, and about formal strategies that do not unify works of art. Yet many of the books reviewed here strike a note of optimism in the face of these refusals, finding in them a salutary prefer- ence for revelling in the open-ended aesthetic possibilities of the philosophical and technological, rather than crafting magisterial pronouncements and forcing spurious unities that would sour over the passage of time.
These shifts towards the fine arts and the sciences are evident in the novel structure of The Bloomsbury Companion to Modernist Literature, edited by Ulrika Maude and Mark Nixon. The first major section of the companion com- prises twenty-one essays, sorted into four categories: ‘The Modernist Everyday’, ‘The Arts and Cultures of Modernism’, ‘The Sciences and Technologies of Modernism’, and the ‘Geopolitics and Economics of Modernism’. The first cat- egory is eclectic, featuring essays on everydayness, geography, language scepti- cism, emotion, and myth. Michael Bell’s contribution, ‘Myth and Religion in Modernist Literature’ (pp. 99–116), is the standout chapter in this section, not- able for its comprehensive scope. The second category features essays on music, the visual arts, film, popular culture, magazines, and (interestingly) manuscripts. This includes Dirk Van Hulle’s contribution ‘Minding Manuscripts: Modernism, Genetic Criticism and Intertextual Cognition’ (pp. 211–26), that wisely investi- gates periodical studies as a part of modernism itself and of modernist
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scholarship. The third category enfolds essays on relativity, sexuality, and gender; on psychoanalysis’s roots in neuroscience; on modernism’s many engagements with various psychological theories (psychoanalysis is also covered here); and on technology in general. Einstein, Freud, Heidegger, and other familiar theorists dominate this section, although Laura Salisbury’s ‘Modernism, Psychoanalysis and Other Psychologies’ (pp. 285–306) fascinatingly investigates psychology’s growth as a field, and psychoanalysis as a practice current during modernism, ra- ther than as a set of concepts. The fourth section exhibits the strongest influence of transnational approaches, with Emily Hayman and Pericles Lewis’s ‘Can There Be a Global Modernism?’ (pp. 329–48) offering a perfect first selection for this final section of the handbook’s first major part. After this part are three extremely powerful tools: an ‘A to Z of Key Terms’, an annotated bibliography of modernist criticism, and a timeline of modernism that should be made required reading for new scholars in the field. Prefacing all of these materials is Maude’s wide-ranging yet admirably succinct introduction, ‘Modernism, Experimentation and Form’ (pp. 1–18), which provides numerous close readings to support her claim that modernist stylistic experimentation served to reveal the contingencies of life, which (troublingly for the reader) brutally expose the lack of purposiveness and linear narrative structure that typify modernity. Maude’s se- lection of Joyce, Conrad, Beckett, Woolf, Eliot, and all the other usual suspects for these deftly worked close readings does little to illustrate her explanation that modernist studies is geographically and temporally capacious; the component chapters show a similar preference for canonical modernists. Throughout the handbook, there is a subtle tension between the handbook’s account of the decreasing significance of canonical authors and historical periodization for deter- mining what is modernism, on the one hand, and the undoubted historicism and conservative choice of authors in many of the component chapters on the other. This tension is, perhaps, productive: it allows readers to survey both historical approaches and transnational approaches as potential ways into the field, observe the differences between them, and shuttle back and forth between the insights of both schools of thought, ultimately allowing readers to take advantage of both. Michaela Bronstein’s Out of Context: The Uses of Modernist Fiction, undoubt-
edly one of the most ambitious new monographs of 2018, proposes a solution to circumvent this tension between historicist approaches and transnational expan- sions of modernism’s temporal span. Following Rita Felski’s call to question the hermeneutics of suspicion that typically accompanies historicist approaches, all in the name of an ideological critique whose conclusions are all too knowable in advance, as well as drawing on Paul Armstrong’s suspicion of historical context as the primary methodology of modernist scholarship, Bronstein defines modern- ism not in terms of the past, but in terms of the future readings and rewritings that are opened up by particular stylistic choices. Understanding historicism as a backward-looking, closed operation in which the past provides all answers for critics in the present, Bronstein instead examines the afterlives of modernist fic- tion as particular texts are taken by later writers as salient provocations or cues for responding powerfully to their own cultural and political situations. Formal experimentation emerges as a tool for creating ‘antihistoricist strategies’ that ‘enabled a wide array of later political uses’ (p. 19). This operation can be regarded as a variant of reception theory fashioned for modernists’ expanded
867MODERN LITERATURE
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niversitetsbibliotek user on 09 June 2022
boundaries; the responses of ‘unknowable readers of the future’ are queried by Bronstein as they ‘turn the past to suit new purposes’ (p. 2). It can also be seen as a subversive rereading of T.S. Eliot’s ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, for reading modernism through its legacies is meant not to celebrate another ‘Dead White Man who wrote in an old-fashioned style’ (p. 4), but to identify a ‘recu- perative modernism’ that avoids the ‘negative affect’ associated with modernism (p. 16). Out of Context looks hopefully towards the future by employing ‘revolu- tionary literary forms’ in order to ‘preserve older epistemologies for the future’ (p. 12). Bronstein reads Henry James through James Baldwin’s use of James, Joseph Conrad through Ng~ug wa Thiong’o, and William Faulkner through Ken Kesey, showing the three modernists and the three mid-century writers to be engaged in ‘rescue work’ (p. 28) that forges ethically responsible ways to create order out of modern chaos (chapter 1), to cultivate politically efficacious models of individualism (chapter 2), to structure narratives and knowledge according to rhetorical effect rather than linear chronology (chapter 3), and to uncover failures to communicate without wholly ceding the narrator’s authority or abandoning the pursuit of universal truths (chapter 4). In each chapter, Bronstein incisively yet reflectively meanders among a broad array of texts and authors, with many digressions, returns, and qualifications ensuring that Out of a Context offers a richly peripatetic reading experience that, like the literature it analyses, needs no ‘satisfyingly excerptable conclusions’ but revels in its ‘open-ended’ investment in ‘processes’ over ‘endpoints’, allowing readers to ‘fill in the ends with a variety of political and philosophical commitments’ (p. 220).
This open ending renders Out of Context an appropriately optimistic choice for the final title appearing in Oxford’s Modernist Literature and Culture series, edited by Kevin Dettmar and Mark Wollaeger. The venerable series’ penultimate offering is Tim Watson’s Culture Writing: Literature and Anthropology in the Midcentury Atlantic World, which also adopts a comparative structure to illumin- ate the modernist aspects of a selection of mid-century texts, whose political charge can be better understood through the comparison. In Watson’s case, the comparison reveals under-appreciated but palpable links between literature and anthropology, while the political thrust is to recover dissenting voices within mid-century anthropology during a period of decolonization. Watson’s archive includes literary fiction, genre fiction, Cold War scholarship, manuscripts, and notebooks. This mix reveals writers borrowing images and plots from ethnog- raphy (which he terms ‘the anthropological novel’) and anthropologists con- sciously adopting literary techniques (which he terms ‘literary anthropology’) decades before Clifford Geertz’s thick description inaugurated anthropology’s ‘lit- erary turn’. Culture Writing is a thus a prominent example of the recent escal- ation of interest in modernism’s relationship to the social sciences. Inspired combinations of authors do not revolve around figures or concepts well known by modernist scholars (for example, Bronislaw Malinowski, Margaret Mead, Zora Neale Hurston, Mass Observation, primitivism), but include later writers and developments across the anglophone Atlantic (Barbara Pym, Ursula Le Guin, Laura Bohannan, Saul Bellow, Bessie Head, Mary Douglas), the francophone Atlantic (Edouard Glissant, Michel Leiris, Claude Levi-Strauss), and beyond (Amitov Ghosh, Erna Brodber, Chinua Achebe). Culture Writing is thus an ex- ample of undiminished scholarly investments in charting modernism’s late
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manifestations, global permutations, and interdisciplinary forms. Particularly compelling readings include Watson’s re-evaluation of middlebrow writer Barbara Pym as a critic of the functionalist school of anthropology then domin- ant in Great Britain; his recovery of Saul Bellow’s training in the field; and his extended readings of Glissant as a self-consciously literary writer. Less compre- hensive is Watson’s account of Ursula Le Guin’s extensive knowledge of anthro- pology, her use of fieldwork as a plot device, her adaptation of ethnography as a narrative genre, and her interactions with prominent figures in anthropology (be- ginning with her anthropologist father, Alfred Louis Kroeber) who emphasized the role of language in enculturation. Watson’s conclusion that literary anthropol- ogy and the anthropological novel from 1945 to 1965 enacted a turn back to Victorian novel conventions may seem startling, but in the context of recent re- evaluations of realism’s multiform presence within modernism, Culture Writing’s account of literature and anthropology’s mutual influence provides a compelling explanation for why and how realism persists within modernism. Watson pinpoints interdisciplinary exchanges as a mechanism through which
modernism reaches across time and space and Bronstein posits reader responses as another mechanism, thereby attributing the transnational and transhistorical reach of modernist scholarship to the art itself. In comparison, Aarthi Vadde’s Chimeras of Form: Modernist Internationalism Beyond Europe, 1914–2016 (pub- lished in 2017 but not received in time for consideration last year) straightfor- wardly acknowledges that her century-long set of texts was assembled through a scholarly process of ‘grafting’ (p. 2). This grafting serves ‘to deprovincialize a once exclusively European aesthetic category’, acknowledge the influence of modernist scholarship on our perceptions of modernism, and connect her texts to ‘the intellectual history of globalization’ (p. 2). What unites these texts is the fig- ure of the chimera, which Vadde explores in two veins: first, as a challenging textual vision created by formal strategies that represent the unsayable and think the unthinkable, in a list that boasts the playfulness of Jorge Luis Borges’s ‘Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge’, Vadde specifies ‘autotransla- tions, alternating asymmetry, stories without plots, archival legends, and root canals’ (p. 7); secondly, as a political dream that, if realized, would result in positive international relations, global justice, and autonomy. The latter is made possible, or at least thinkable as an ‘unachieved ideal’ (p. 4), through the former. Like Bronstein, then, Vadde does not regard a narrator’s or character’s failure to communicate clearly or reach a stated goal as a failure of the text or as a wholly negative outcome, but as a deliberate and effective strategy adopted by writers to shape better futures. Vadde tempers this optimism with an explanation that though such optimism ‘can be judged nave and unrealistic’, we should not undervalue the political chimera as a ‘powerful illusion, one with traction over the hearts and minds of people and connectedness to the institutions of state that give it a concrete political apparatus’ (p. 10). What is less persuasive, perhaps, is the sleight of hand that allows Vadde to avoid clarifying the relationship between her definition of internationalism and accounts of globalism and postcolonialism: ‘I am allowing the chimeras of form that populate this study to affect the book’s own methodological self-understanding’, she explains (p. 20). But perhaps inves- ting too much in these long-dominant definitional excursions would have diverted Chimeras of Form from its primary task, that of investigating the formal
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strategies that conjure political chimeras as they appear in the texts themselves. Rabindranath Tagore, James Joyce, Claude McKay, George Lamming, Michael Ondaatje, and Zadie Smith all ‘revisited the principles and practices of the liter- ary form that we call modernist to imagine more interdependent models of na- tionhood and to reflect upon as well as diversify styles of political belonging and internationalist expression’, which include the textual acts of translation, colla- tion, circulation, comparison, reinscription, and demythologization (p. 221). These textual acts show political promise because they make use of social ties of ‘obligation and fellowship” in order to contest ‘isolationist aspects of national cultures and even take narratives of communal cohesion beyond identitarian claims’ (p. 220).
In a similar vein, Anna Teekell explores the textual interrogations of the nation from a transnational perspective in Emergency Writing: Irish Literature, Neutrality, and the Second World War. Distinct from the globe-trotting archives assembled by Bronstein, Watson, and Vaade, Teekell maintains a more intimate focus on one country (the Irish Free State) during a restricted period (the Second World War). However, by exploring the outward-facing performance of neutrality staged by a newly independent Ireland specifically for audiences abroad, Teekell does not abandon the lessons of transnational approaches but instead reveals that adopting the comparative method associated with them is not strictly necessary. Indeed, a clutch of texts written by citizens of one nation can be investigated from a transnational lens, although it must be noted that Teekell engages with Irish studies scholarship more than with transnational scholarship. Notably, the first chapter analyses political rhetoric, rooting Teekell’s history in non-fiction, before the remaining four chapters move on to the poetry and fiction at the heart of Irish studies. The political rhetoric of Eamon de Valera’s Irish government, particularly through constitutional amendments, debate records, and the dis- courses disseminated by the Censorship Board, ‘created a slippage between belli- gerence and neutrality that would trouble daily life in Ireland, where many felt they experienced war and neutrality simultaneously’ (p. 14). Consequently, the Irish government failed to create a genuine alternative to Axis and Allied propa- ganda, leaving room for late Irish modernists to criticize the government’s incon- sistencies, acts of censorship, and unconvincing projections of a communal, cohesive cultural nationalism that had yet to develop. Chapters 2 and 3 focus on poetry: Teekell reveals that Patrick Kavanagh’s and Denis Devlin’s adaptations of the pilgrimage poem satirize the government’s mobilization of Catholic rites of prayer and attitudes towards peace to posit a coherent national position of neu- trality, while Louis MacNeice’s war lyrics interrogate modernist writers’ compli- city with devastating national policies. Chapters 4 and 5 cover fiction, delving deeply into the strained uses of language during the Second World War as fiction and government rhetoric experiment with new tropes to produce or counteract propaganda and to represent trauma adequately. Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day, Samuel Beckett’s Watt, and Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman de- bunk official accounts of Ireland’s isolationism, showing how language itself becomes infected by the inconsistencies of neutrality rhetoric. Like Vaade, Teekell investigates the moments when language fails under the pressures of na- tional identity and international conflict; like Vaade, she ends with a contempor- ary text, the play Improbable Frequency, which debuted in 2004, to reveal how
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the state of linguistic emergency that precipitated artistic production persists today and prompts revisitings of the political cruxes that inspired and frustrated late modernists. For a book about wartime trauma, Emergency Writing is an un- expected pleasure to read. Its untortured prose is beautifully suited to gathering Teekell’s diverse and impressively large archive of non-fiction, fiction, poetry, and drama gently into an orderly, cohesive group without flattening the differen- ces between the various solutions and critiques offered by late Irish modernists. Teekell’s framing of a transnational, transhistorical problem within a tight na-
tional, historical context, though very much unlike the first three books reviewed here, demonstrates that exciting work continues to be possible outside trans- national scholarship’s comparative methodology. In Modernism and the Law, Robert Spoo scrutinizes Anglo-American institutional networks of laws, lawyers, jails, juries, judges, and the writers and publishers whose private and…
GRAHAM SAUNDERS, NOREEN MASUD, MATTHEW CREASY,
ALEX ALONSO, AND KARL O’HANLON
This chapter has eight sections 1. General. 2. Fiction Pre-1945; 3. Fiction Post- 1945; 4. Drama Pre-1950; 5. Drama Post-1950; 6. British Poetry 1900–1950; 7 British Poetry Post-1950; 8. Modern Irish Poetry. Section 1 is by Shawna Ross; section 2(a) is by Francesca Bratton; section 2(b) is by Caroline Krzakowski; section 2(c) is by Sophie Corser; section 2(d) is by Andrew Keese; section 2(e) is by Joshua Phillips; section 3(a) is by Mark West; section 3(b) is by Samuel Cooper; section 4(a) is by Rebecca D’Monte; section 4(b) is by Gustavo A. Rodrguez Martn; section 5 is by Graham Saunders; section 6(a) is by Noreen Masud; section 6(b) is by Matthew Creasy; section 7 is by Alex Alonso; section 8 is by Karl O’Hanlon.
1. General
For the field of modernist studies, 2018 was a transitional year. Approaches that have felt novel and urgent in the past five years continue to flourish, namely those derived from archival studies, periodical studies, and the digital humanities, but publications adopting them are less likely to be imbued with a sense of self- conscious newness and more likely to be integrated with a variety of more trad- itional methods and engaged with long-established debates. Even more palpably, as scholars become more comfortable with the temporal and spatial expansions of what counts as modernism, the perceived need for bold, defensive, or manifesto-like theoretical justifications of these expansions has relaxed. As the moniker ‘modernism’ continues to be applied to more and more art produced outside Europe and the Americas and for art produced before the 1890s or after
The Year’s Work in English Studies, volume 99 (2020) VC The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the English Association. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: [email protected] doi:10.1093/ywes/maaa014
D ow
niversitetsbibliotek user on 09 June 2022
the 1940s, attention to modernisms across the globe and across time continues to be framed as a comparative venture. In other words, canonical modernist authors and texts are being juxtaposed with figures and works of art to be brought under the shared umbrella of modernism. One change is that scholarship published in 2018 suggests that comparison is being supplemented by a second, newer method, one that is attempting to re-examine local and national contexts without abandoning the hard-fought transnational framework characteristic of the new modernist studies.
To put it more succinctly, modernist scholars are increasingly absorbed by the question of how to think nationally in a transnational context. In addition, a marked increase in the sciences and social sciences in recent publications on modernism, as well as the mainstreaming of digital humanities tools and other quantitative approaches to analysis, suggests that the historicism of the new mod- ernist studies is being supplemented by more empirical methods and to consider twentieth-century sciences and social sciences as themselves subjects for re- search. With more attention being given to the mechanisms by which bureaucrat- ic and corporate institutions regulate themselves and their populations, the nascent interest in infrastructure studies is another trend to note. At first glance, these trends may seem to threaten to fragment the field into a clutch of niche concerns, but they may be boiled down into two basic strands: first, a renewed investment in non-textual modernisms and their relation to textual production; and second, an interest in the sciences, social sciences, and empirical methodolo- gies particular to those disciplines. Considering the fine arts and the sciences, it seems, can provide modernist studies with new ways of thinking about the affor- dances and limitations of languages and about the specific advantages or disad- vantages of humanist ways of thinking and communicating, especially when compared to other formalized systems of knowledge. Both threads are united by a curiosity about signs that do not signify, about processes that do not end, about structures of knowledge that do not create meaning, and about formal strategies that do not unify works of art. Yet many of the books reviewed here strike a note of optimism in the face of these refusals, finding in them a salutary prefer- ence for revelling in the open-ended aesthetic possibilities of the philosophical and technological, rather than crafting magisterial pronouncements and forcing spurious unities that would sour over the passage of time.
These shifts towards the fine arts and the sciences are evident in the novel structure of The Bloomsbury Companion to Modernist Literature, edited by Ulrika Maude and Mark Nixon. The first major section of the companion com- prises twenty-one essays, sorted into four categories: ‘The Modernist Everyday’, ‘The Arts and Cultures of Modernism’, ‘The Sciences and Technologies of Modernism’, and the ‘Geopolitics and Economics of Modernism’. The first cat- egory is eclectic, featuring essays on everydayness, geography, language scepti- cism, emotion, and myth. Michael Bell’s contribution, ‘Myth and Religion in Modernist Literature’ (pp. 99–116), is the standout chapter in this section, not- able for its comprehensive scope. The second category features essays on music, the visual arts, film, popular culture, magazines, and (interestingly) manuscripts. This includes Dirk Van Hulle’s contribution ‘Minding Manuscripts: Modernism, Genetic Criticism and Intertextual Cognition’ (pp. 211–26), that wisely investi- gates periodical studies as a part of modernism itself and of modernist
866 MODERN LITERATURE
niversitetsbibliotek user on 09 June 2022
scholarship. The third category enfolds essays on relativity, sexuality, and gender; on psychoanalysis’s roots in neuroscience; on modernism’s many engagements with various psychological theories (psychoanalysis is also covered here); and on technology in general. Einstein, Freud, Heidegger, and other familiar theorists dominate this section, although Laura Salisbury’s ‘Modernism, Psychoanalysis and Other Psychologies’ (pp. 285–306) fascinatingly investigates psychology’s growth as a field, and psychoanalysis as a practice current during modernism, ra- ther than as a set of concepts. The fourth section exhibits the strongest influence of transnational approaches, with Emily Hayman and Pericles Lewis’s ‘Can There Be a Global Modernism?’ (pp. 329–48) offering a perfect first selection for this final section of the handbook’s first major part. After this part are three extremely powerful tools: an ‘A to Z of Key Terms’, an annotated bibliography of modernist criticism, and a timeline of modernism that should be made required reading for new scholars in the field. Prefacing all of these materials is Maude’s wide-ranging yet admirably succinct introduction, ‘Modernism, Experimentation and Form’ (pp. 1–18), which provides numerous close readings to support her claim that modernist stylistic experimentation served to reveal the contingencies of life, which (troublingly for the reader) brutally expose the lack of purposiveness and linear narrative structure that typify modernity. Maude’s se- lection of Joyce, Conrad, Beckett, Woolf, Eliot, and all the other usual suspects for these deftly worked close readings does little to illustrate her explanation that modernist studies is geographically and temporally capacious; the component chapters show a similar preference for canonical modernists. Throughout the handbook, there is a subtle tension between the handbook’s account of the decreasing significance of canonical authors and historical periodization for deter- mining what is modernism, on the one hand, and the undoubted historicism and conservative choice of authors in many of the component chapters on the other. This tension is, perhaps, productive: it allows readers to survey both historical approaches and transnational approaches as potential ways into the field, observe the differences between them, and shuttle back and forth between the insights of both schools of thought, ultimately allowing readers to take advantage of both. Michaela Bronstein’s Out of Context: The Uses of Modernist Fiction, undoubt-
edly one of the most ambitious new monographs of 2018, proposes a solution to circumvent this tension between historicist approaches and transnational expan- sions of modernism’s temporal span. Following Rita Felski’s call to question the hermeneutics of suspicion that typically accompanies historicist approaches, all in the name of an ideological critique whose conclusions are all too knowable in advance, as well as drawing on Paul Armstrong’s suspicion of historical context as the primary methodology of modernist scholarship, Bronstein defines modern- ism not in terms of the past, but in terms of the future readings and rewritings that are opened up by particular stylistic choices. Understanding historicism as a backward-looking, closed operation in which the past provides all answers for critics in the present, Bronstein instead examines the afterlives of modernist fic- tion as particular texts are taken by later writers as salient provocations or cues for responding powerfully to their own cultural and political situations. Formal experimentation emerges as a tool for creating ‘antihistoricist strategies’ that ‘enabled a wide array of later political uses’ (p. 19). This operation can be regarded as a variant of reception theory fashioned for modernists’ expanded
867MODERN LITERATURE
D ow
niversitetsbibliotek user on 09 June 2022
boundaries; the responses of ‘unknowable readers of the future’ are queried by Bronstein as they ‘turn the past to suit new purposes’ (p. 2). It can also be seen as a subversive rereading of T.S. Eliot’s ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, for reading modernism through its legacies is meant not to celebrate another ‘Dead White Man who wrote in an old-fashioned style’ (p. 4), but to identify a ‘recu- perative modernism’ that avoids the ‘negative affect’ associated with modernism (p. 16). Out of Context looks hopefully towards the future by employing ‘revolu- tionary literary forms’ in order to ‘preserve older epistemologies for the future’ (p. 12). Bronstein reads Henry James through James Baldwin’s use of James, Joseph Conrad through Ng~ug wa Thiong’o, and William Faulkner through Ken Kesey, showing the three modernists and the three mid-century writers to be engaged in ‘rescue work’ (p. 28) that forges ethically responsible ways to create order out of modern chaos (chapter 1), to cultivate politically efficacious models of individualism (chapter 2), to structure narratives and knowledge according to rhetorical effect rather than linear chronology (chapter 3), and to uncover failures to communicate without wholly ceding the narrator’s authority or abandoning the pursuit of universal truths (chapter 4). In each chapter, Bronstein incisively yet reflectively meanders among a broad array of texts and authors, with many digressions, returns, and qualifications ensuring that Out of a Context offers a richly peripatetic reading experience that, like the literature it analyses, needs no ‘satisfyingly excerptable conclusions’ but revels in its ‘open-ended’ investment in ‘processes’ over ‘endpoints’, allowing readers to ‘fill in the ends with a variety of political and philosophical commitments’ (p. 220).
This open ending renders Out of Context an appropriately optimistic choice for the final title appearing in Oxford’s Modernist Literature and Culture series, edited by Kevin Dettmar and Mark Wollaeger. The venerable series’ penultimate offering is Tim Watson’s Culture Writing: Literature and Anthropology in the Midcentury Atlantic World, which also adopts a comparative structure to illumin- ate the modernist aspects of a selection of mid-century texts, whose political charge can be better understood through the comparison. In Watson’s case, the comparison reveals under-appreciated but palpable links between literature and anthropology, while the political thrust is to recover dissenting voices within mid-century anthropology during a period of decolonization. Watson’s archive includes literary fiction, genre fiction, Cold War scholarship, manuscripts, and notebooks. This mix reveals writers borrowing images and plots from ethnog- raphy (which he terms ‘the anthropological novel’) and anthropologists con- sciously adopting literary techniques (which he terms ‘literary anthropology’) decades before Clifford Geertz’s thick description inaugurated anthropology’s ‘lit- erary turn’. Culture Writing is a thus a prominent example of the recent escal- ation of interest in modernism’s relationship to the social sciences. Inspired combinations of authors do not revolve around figures or concepts well known by modernist scholars (for example, Bronislaw Malinowski, Margaret Mead, Zora Neale Hurston, Mass Observation, primitivism), but include later writers and developments across the anglophone Atlantic (Barbara Pym, Ursula Le Guin, Laura Bohannan, Saul Bellow, Bessie Head, Mary Douglas), the francophone Atlantic (Edouard Glissant, Michel Leiris, Claude Levi-Strauss), and beyond (Amitov Ghosh, Erna Brodber, Chinua Achebe). Culture Writing is thus an ex- ample of undiminished scholarly investments in charting modernism’s late
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manifestations, global permutations, and interdisciplinary forms. Particularly compelling readings include Watson’s re-evaluation of middlebrow writer Barbara Pym as a critic of the functionalist school of anthropology then domin- ant in Great Britain; his recovery of Saul Bellow’s training in the field; and his extended readings of Glissant as a self-consciously literary writer. Less compre- hensive is Watson’s account of Ursula Le Guin’s extensive knowledge of anthro- pology, her use of fieldwork as a plot device, her adaptation of ethnography as a narrative genre, and her interactions with prominent figures in anthropology (be- ginning with her anthropologist father, Alfred Louis Kroeber) who emphasized the role of language in enculturation. Watson’s conclusion that literary anthropol- ogy and the anthropological novel from 1945 to 1965 enacted a turn back to Victorian novel conventions may seem startling, but in the context of recent re- evaluations of realism’s multiform presence within modernism, Culture Writing’s account of literature and anthropology’s mutual influence provides a compelling explanation for why and how realism persists within modernism. Watson pinpoints interdisciplinary exchanges as a mechanism through which
modernism reaches across time and space and Bronstein posits reader responses as another mechanism, thereby attributing the transnational and transhistorical reach of modernist scholarship to the art itself. In comparison, Aarthi Vadde’s Chimeras of Form: Modernist Internationalism Beyond Europe, 1914–2016 (pub- lished in 2017 but not received in time for consideration last year) straightfor- wardly acknowledges that her century-long set of texts was assembled through a scholarly process of ‘grafting’ (p. 2). This grafting serves ‘to deprovincialize a once exclusively European aesthetic category’, acknowledge the influence of modernist scholarship on our perceptions of modernism, and connect her texts to ‘the intellectual history of globalization’ (p. 2). What unites these texts is the fig- ure of the chimera, which Vadde explores in two veins: first, as a challenging textual vision created by formal strategies that represent the unsayable and think the unthinkable, in a list that boasts the playfulness of Jorge Luis Borges’s ‘Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge’, Vadde specifies ‘autotransla- tions, alternating asymmetry, stories without plots, archival legends, and root canals’ (p. 7); secondly, as a political dream that, if realized, would result in positive international relations, global justice, and autonomy. The latter is made possible, or at least thinkable as an ‘unachieved ideal’ (p. 4), through the former. Like Bronstein, then, Vadde does not regard a narrator’s or character’s failure to communicate clearly or reach a stated goal as a failure of the text or as a wholly negative outcome, but as a deliberate and effective strategy adopted by writers to shape better futures. Vadde tempers this optimism with an explanation that though such optimism ‘can be judged nave and unrealistic’, we should not undervalue the political chimera as a ‘powerful illusion, one with traction over the hearts and minds of people and connectedness to the institutions of state that give it a concrete political apparatus’ (p. 10). What is less persuasive, perhaps, is the sleight of hand that allows Vadde to avoid clarifying the relationship between her definition of internationalism and accounts of globalism and postcolonialism: ‘I am allowing the chimeras of form that populate this study to affect the book’s own methodological self-understanding’, she explains (p. 20). But perhaps inves- ting too much in these long-dominant definitional excursions would have diverted Chimeras of Form from its primary task, that of investigating the formal
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strategies that conjure political chimeras as they appear in the texts themselves. Rabindranath Tagore, James Joyce, Claude McKay, George Lamming, Michael Ondaatje, and Zadie Smith all ‘revisited the principles and practices of the liter- ary form that we call modernist to imagine more interdependent models of na- tionhood and to reflect upon as well as diversify styles of political belonging and internationalist expression’, which include the textual acts of translation, colla- tion, circulation, comparison, reinscription, and demythologization (p. 221). These textual acts show political promise because they make use of social ties of ‘obligation and fellowship” in order to contest ‘isolationist aspects of national cultures and even take narratives of communal cohesion beyond identitarian claims’ (p. 220).
In a similar vein, Anna Teekell explores the textual interrogations of the nation from a transnational perspective in Emergency Writing: Irish Literature, Neutrality, and the Second World War. Distinct from the globe-trotting archives assembled by Bronstein, Watson, and Vaade, Teekell maintains a more intimate focus on one country (the Irish Free State) during a restricted period (the Second World War). However, by exploring the outward-facing performance of neutrality staged by a newly independent Ireland specifically for audiences abroad, Teekell does not abandon the lessons of transnational approaches but instead reveals that adopting the comparative method associated with them is not strictly necessary. Indeed, a clutch of texts written by citizens of one nation can be investigated from a transnational lens, although it must be noted that Teekell engages with Irish studies scholarship more than with transnational scholarship. Notably, the first chapter analyses political rhetoric, rooting Teekell’s history in non-fiction, before the remaining four chapters move on to the poetry and fiction at the heart of Irish studies. The political rhetoric of Eamon de Valera’s Irish government, particularly through constitutional amendments, debate records, and the dis- courses disseminated by the Censorship Board, ‘created a slippage between belli- gerence and neutrality that would trouble daily life in Ireland, where many felt they experienced war and neutrality simultaneously’ (p. 14). Consequently, the Irish government failed to create a genuine alternative to Axis and Allied propa- ganda, leaving room for late Irish modernists to criticize the government’s incon- sistencies, acts of censorship, and unconvincing projections of a communal, cohesive cultural nationalism that had yet to develop. Chapters 2 and 3 focus on poetry: Teekell reveals that Patrick Kavanagh’s and Denis Devlin’s adaptations of the pilgrimage poem satirize the government’s mobilization of Catholic rites of prayer and attitudes towards peace to posit a coherent national position of neu- trality, while Louis MacNeice’s war lyrics interrogate modernist writers’ compli- city with devastating national policies. Chapters 4 and 5 cover fiction, delving deeply into the strained uses of language during the Second World War as fiction and government rhetoric experiment with new tropes to produce or counteract propaganda and to represent trauma adequately. Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day, Samuel Beckett’s Watt, and Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman de- bunk official accounts of Ireland’s isolationism, showing how language itself becomes infected by the inconsistencies of neutrality rhetoric. Like Vaade, Teekell investigates the moments when language fails under the pressures of na- tional identity and international conflict; like Vaade, she ends with a contempor- ary text, the play Improbable Frequency, which debuted in 2004, to reveal how
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the state of linguistic emergency that precipitated artistic production persists today and prompts revisitings of the political cruxes that inspired and frustrated late modernists. For a book about wartime trauma, Emergency Writing is an un- expected pleasure to read. Its untortured prose is beautifully suited to gathering Teekell’s diverse and impressively large archive of non-fiction, fiction, poetry, and drama gently into an orderly, cohesive group without flattening the differen- ces between the various solutions and critiques offered by late Irish modernists. Teekell’s framing of a transnational, transhistorical problem within a tight na-
tional, historical context, though very much unlike the first three books reviewed here, demonstrates that exciting work continues to be possible outside trans- national scholarship’s comparative methodology. In Modernism and the Law, Robert Spoo scrutinizes Anglo-American institutional networks of laws, lawyers, jails, juries, judges, and the writers and publishers whose private and…
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