The Comps Reading Project part 17: THE END!!!

TO QUOTH THE LIZARD KING: THIS IS THE END, MY ONLY FRIEND, THE END!!!  SO ENDS MY SPECIAL TOPIC LIST!!! SUCK ON THAT, ANGLO-MODERNISM!!!

I must now take a break to spend the next-odd month feverishly writing and compiling my comps portfolio, in time to submit it to my committee by Nov. 4th (it will be a most frightening Halloween season indeed!).  I will then spend the ensuing 2 weeks cramming the last half-dozen critical works on my historical list, in prep for my Comps Defense--a fateful date--Nov. 18th.

So ends The Comps Reading Project; thanks for reading, if you were reading at all!  I'd take a nap, but I don't have that luxury right now...

In the meantime, here are the final titles on my Special Topic list, presented as rough drafts for my Annotated Bibliography...

Rhythm and Race in Modernist Poetry and Science, Michael Golston.

The image on the cover of this 2007 is what was once known as a phonoscope, a device designed to track the "natural" speech rhythms of the test subject and record them onto a roller-sheet for "scientific" examination.  The turn of the 20th century, argues Golston, was rife with obsessions over "rhythm," which had obvious ramifications for racism, fascism, and eugenics, as the "Rhythmists" (Golston's invented term for the loose cadre of adherents to this rhythmic pseudo-science) came to believe that 1) a "race's" innate rhythms were genetically predetermined; yet 2) one's rhythm could be "contaminated" by other race's rhythms (hence the fear of contamination from the rhythms of Africans, Indians, and Jews); moreover 3) modern man had lost connection with his own deeply-racinated rhythmic roots, a racial rhythm that had to be both purified of "contaminations" as well re-configured and re-totalized, reuniting body and soul, in order to rejuvenate the race (hence the dramatic, goose-stepping military marches of the fascists).

Golston's literary argument is that much of the poetry of this time period cannot be fully understood without likewise understanding the grand influence of the doctrine of "Rhythm" that permeated public discourse.  His two primary examples are, of course, those arch-fascists Ezra Pound and William Butler Yeats.  Golston spends 2 chapters tracing the influence of this fascist-conception of rhythm in the poetry of Ezra Pound, particularly through close-readings of Canto 77 of the Pisan Cantos (wherein he attempts to rebuild within poetry the lost "ideal" fascist utopic city after the end of WWII), and in his poem "The Return."  In contrast to Pound scholar Hugh Kenner, Golston claims to read in the "Look and see" of Canto 77 not a look up to the gods, but at the roller-sheet of the phonoscope (though I personally found that reading a little specious; Pound may have been a fascist, but his fascism was still rooted in idealism, not obscure inventions).

The next 2 chapters specifically claim to follow the purported eugenics thread running through some of the scattered poems of William Butler Yeats, reading Yeats' stubborn rhythms as an attempt to not lose connection with a distant past, and that his rare turns into Blank Verse coincide with commentary on what happenes when that heritage is briefly lost (though I likewise found his close-reading specious; for what then of "Easter 1916"??).  The abbreviated final chapter focuses upon William Carlos Williams, whom he reads as self-consciously abandoning the doctrine of "Rhythmists" altogether, preferring instead the doctrine of "measure."

Unknowing: The Work of Modernist Fiction, Philip Weinstein.

In this 2005 study, Weinstein contrasts literary Modernism against Realism and Postmodernism like so: Realism imagines life and existence as a clear linear progression, a narrative that progresses from each previous stage, building up to a predetermined conclusion--a very 17th-century Enlightenment formulation; Postmodernism by contrast rejects such formulations as utterly illusory, imaginary, and fictional.  Modernism, then, is what mediates between these two competing approaches towards Western thought.  As Weinstein argues it, Modernism is the first mass movement to interrogate the Enlightenment assumptions of innate progression by engaging in a process of "Unknowing," wherein we must begin to unknow what we thought we knew, to in fact confess that we never knew, and perhaps never know.  Although many of the works of this period appear depressing, Weinstein argues, there is actually an undercurrent of hope threading through it (unlike Postmodernism), as though to diagnose the problem is the first important step towards ending it.  But hope is not the same as optimism, says Weinstein; Modernism, in rejecting Enlightenment ideas of progression, works under no illusions that the problem will be fixed, only that it can.  His primary literary artifacts for illustrating his claims are the works of Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, and William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!--though he also gets heavy into the works of Marquez, Morrison, Levinas, Flaubert, and Beckett.

He also draws Modern and Postmodern comparisons between Faulkner and Pynchon, Rilke and Calvino, Forster and Rushdie.  He leans heavily on the theories of Walter Benjamin and Sigmund Freud.  Intriguingly, his analysis of the Modernists begins a century earlier, with Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, wherein Abraham realizes that the narrative he thought he was following--a progression of righteousness towards God--has actually been radically upset by a completely different narrative, one that more properly situates him within the greater universe, as an element subject to greater forces than he, rather than the primary force within it, when God calls upon him to sacrifice his son Isaac.  Abraham has to unknow what he has known, in other words.

Epic Negation: The Dialectical Poetics of Late Modernism, C.D. Blanton.

This 2015 work highlights and thematizes the possibility that genuine epic unity is no longer available to the modern poet.  Blanton opens by interrogating Ezra Pound's deceptively simple statement that "An epic is a poem including history."  But the problem is that, as Lukács argued, history in the modern era is far too complex (and self-conscious so) to ever be totalized into a poem anymore.  There is a tension, then, between the necessity and the impossibility of history in the modern epic.  The Modernist strategy that arises, then, is to encompass history through negation--that is, what is historical within a Modern epic is precisely that which has been left out, since it's all too big to be included in the first place, as is predicated on the encryption of disarticulated historical content.  Eliot's "Waste Land" and Pound's Cantos are of course his first Exhibits of this attempt to encompass all of history by focusing only on the fragments--which in turn calls attention to all of the fragments that have been left out.  It is in the negation that Modernism thus solves the problem of how to include history in all its unwieldiness. 

Blanton thereby proposes to think about the possibility of a poem that includes history differently--and to reconsider some of the works of the late-Modernist period more properly as epics that accomplish their historical-inclusions through this negation dialectic.  He of course considers T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" (as all Modernist scholars apparently must), but more intriguingly, pares this reading with Eliot's editorship of the journal The Criterion; he also considers WH Auden's poetry collection Another Time, Louis MacNeice's Autumn Journal, and H.D.'s war trilogy (produced in conversation with Sigmund Freud's Moses and Monotheism) all as examples of negated epics. Blaston half-facetiously coins the term "Eliotic Marxism", to describe how Eliot's editorship applied Marxist concepts of historical totalization as defined from a fundamentally conservative perspective. 

The Sacred Wood, TS Eliot.

It is no exaggeration to stress that the influence of this rather modest 1922 essay collection upon English academia has been incalculable.  Among casual chapters on Ben Johnson, Swinburne, Dante, and William Blake, sit two of the most hotly debated and cited essays of the past 100 years: "Tradition and the Individual Talent" and "Hamlet and His Problems."  The former is basically Ground Zero for New Criticism, Formalism, and the professionalization of English literary studies as a recognized research discipline.  In said essay, Eliot makes the claim that all of Western art forms a single, continuous tradition stretching all the way back from Homer and even the cave paintings of France, and all the way up through the Classical, the Medieval, the Renaissance, up to the present; and that when a new work is created, it exists not in isolation, but interacts with all the works that preceded it.  But not only that, all the other works in the Western canon become altered as well; we read and experience them in a new light, for the tradition is living, and works thousands of years old are still being tweaked by those published in the 20th century.

In a round-about way, this essay gave a key to certain determined scholars, who read in this contemporaneous tradition a strategy for interpreting the collage of literary references scattered throughout "The Waste Land", published that same year.  This whole strategy prompted an entire approach to criticism that promoted close-readings of the text, seeking for underlying tensions and paradoxes, an approach that privileged complex works (as giving the critic more to work with), which in turn assisted in the canonization of the most difficult works under the banner of "Modernism."  The essay also promotes the idea of the impersonal author, with the poet but serving as a "bit of platinum" in a mechanical process between his imagination and the Tradition, which chemical reaction creates new poetry.  This approach prompted new terms such as "the intentional fallacy," and promotes readings that privileged mechanics over biographical readings of literary works.

"Hamlet and His Problems" in turn attacks the most sacred cow in English literature, calling Shakespeare's play a "failure," and coining us the term "objective corollary," which is still strenuously debated to this day, both within and without Shakespeare studies.

The Gender of Modernity, Rita Felski.

In this significant 1995 study, Felski begins her analysis of modernity through a "deceptively" simple desire: "to reread the modern through the lens of feminist theory."  Her introduction poses the following questions: How exactly would our understanding of modernity shift if we focused primarily upon texts written by or about women for a change, rather than taking the male experience as emblematic?  (Believe me, after reading so, so many studies on Ulysses and "The Waste Land," such is a refreshing change of pace!)  What if, within the context of cultural modernity analysis, the feminine experience was privileged in its primacy, rather than ascribed secondary and/or marginal status?  "What difference would such a procedure make?" she asks ultimately. She notes that in most texts that self-identify as "modern", the  rationale, autonomous, and independent is usually associated with the male, while the traditional and conservative element is typically feminine.  Her interest, then, is in those texts that interrogate these ascriptions.  Yet she is not content either to simply demonize the modern as intrinsically patriarchal, or assume a simplistic binary opposition between male and female modern experience (indeed, she one of her starting assumptions is that a gendered shift in modern perspective would not in fact result in something totally alien or unrecognizable, given the irreducible entanglements between men and women in that and every moment in history); indeed, she calls into question such narrowly feminist perspectives that deny such entanglements.

Her primary focus is upon texts from the Fin de siècle--that is, in the years immediately preceding the "Modernist" period I have mostly focused upon.  She carefully scrutinizes male and female writers alike: Simmel, Zola, Sacher-Masoch, and Rachilde to Marie Corelli, Wilde, Olive Schreiner--though her argument is that, aesthetics-wise, the end of the last century still closely parallels our own, that many of the same gendered assumptions still inform our debates today, and therefore the lessons of a century ago are still applicable in our contemporary moment.  Her book is as likely to analyze sentimental popular fiction as it is the avant-garde.

Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, Paul Gilroy.

In this famed 1993 study, Paul Gilroy seeks to demonstrate how the centrality of black experience to Western Enlightenment and counter-Enlightenment concerns.  He argues that racial slavery, race doctrines, and white supremacist terror was integral to the West, examines the master/mistress/slave relationship as foundational to black critiques of and defenses for Western modernity alike.  He lobbies hard for black vernacular culture, especially black music, as likewise central to Western civilization (for far longer than the 20th century, even), and analyzes the long history of how Pan-African black nationalism has often repressed its own ambivalence about exile from Africa.  He attempts to address the apparent absence of concern for "race" and "ethnicity" in most contemporary writings about modernity (which I fear is as true in 2015 as it was in 1993).  He likewise strives to demonstrate how the false binary between essentialist and anti-essentialist theories of black identity (especially as it has been viewed through the lens of black music) have both been fundamentally unhelpful, and proposes what he terms an "anti-anti-essentialist" construction of black identity.  As for work directly pertinent to the Modernist literary period, Gilroy examines the "double consciousness" work of WEB Du Bois, which he claims as one of the central organizing them of this book.  He suggests that Du Bois' travels throughout Europe transformed his understanding of race, and examines how Pan-Africanism and anti-imperialism fueled by his belief in African-American exceptionalism.

Likewise relevant to the Modernist era, Gilroy examines the works of Richard Wright and its critical responses, defending Wright in particular against those African-American critics who read Wright's later writings produced in Europe as inferior to his earlier writings, by applauding Wright for connecting the plight of black Americans with the colonized in other countries (which, incidentally, anticipates Malcolm X).  Gilroy concludes with a meditation on the concept of diaspora, which he claims Pan-Africanists imported from unacknowledged Jewish sources; he argues for the importance of black and Jewish exchanges as important for the future of this line of scholarship.

Multimedia Modernism: Literature and the Anglo-American Avant-garde, Julian Murphet.

Oh Murphet, you and New Media will be the death of me.

RANT What's so incredibly frustrating about New Media theory is that, at least on paper, it just sounds so fascinating, and even has the potential to appeal to the general public, renew popular interest in literary studies, reinvigorate the field, and give a much needed shot in the arm to a discipline under siege.  For indeed, neuroscience now confirms that social media, the internet, and touch-screens are literally rewiring the way our brains process data and perceive the world; now along comes New Media theory, to demonstrate that our brains have always been rewired by the introduction of new media technologies--the printing press, the telegraph, cinema, etc--and what's more, we can trace those changes throughout history's greatest works of literature!  

But in practice, New Media theory is afflicted with that same old dull, oppressive, turgid prose, and even exceeds the Post-Structuralists and Neo-Marxists in needless opacity.  Seriously, even Derrida and Althusser are models of pristine clarity compared to Kittler and his ilk.  I mean, my goodness: the humanities are under siege, our budgets are constantly cut, the general public dismiss us as inscrutable and unintelligible, and their brilliant solution is to double down on that?! Screw you New Media theorists, and the filthy whore Discourse Network that bore you!!  /RANT

As for the actual book: This 2009 study picks up where David Trotter Cinema and Modernism and Frederic Jameson's A Singular Modernity leaves off, applying a lens of New Media theory to examine how the rise of photography, cinematography, mechanical print technology, and visual advertising influenced the literary productions of such Modernists as Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Louis Zukofsky (not to mention the Cubist painters)--both in how they incorporated and resisted the rise of these modernizing technologies.  He offers a "media theory of modern poetics" that draws upon Jameson's description of modernism as a product of uneven development.  He describes the media landscape of the early twentieth century as a field of competing forms, a quasi-Darwinian struggle between the ancien regime of beaux arts vs the new media (film, photography, etc) that was invented during what he terms the "second industrial revolution". The new media forms, argues Murphet, tried to legitimate themselves by feeding off of the perceived legitimacy of older forms (he cites for example Virginia Woolf, who bewailed the fact that all the old novels appeared to now exist only to be "turned into movies").

The paradox, then, is that these older types of media art sought to keep themselves relevant by tying themselves to these newer forms (a process which we still see in play today). Murphet claims that literature's response to the assault of new media forms was "an ongoing chiasmic process of 'borrowing' the vestments of materiality from other media" (36). Murphet doesn't just claim that this tension between old and new media forms happened to occur during the modernist period, but is what defines Modernism itself: "this is what the writers and artists we call 'modern' were collectively engaged in: a concerted becoming-media of the arts" (5). 

Modernism and Empire, Ed. Howard J. Booth and Nigel Rigby.

This 2000 anthology is claimed by its editors to be the first sustained exploration of the relationship between literary Modernism and the contemporaneous British Empire.  Although Post-Colonial theory was at least a generation old by the time of this book's publication, the introduction claims that there had been up to that time little conversation between the two fields, a critical vacancy the editors seek to rectify, both by examining the Imperial presumptions underlying the writing theory of so many of these "canonical" writers, as well as including more writers from the nether-regions of the Empire itself.  Nevertheless, there is still an inescapable sense that this book is a little late to the party; for example, two different chapters center upon Joyce and Yeats as colonized subjects after long having been neutralized and absorbed into the English literary canon--as though there wasn't already a half-decade's worth of Post-Colonial Joyce scholarship that had been aggressively making that claim, dating back to Vincent Cheng's 1995 Joyce, Race, and Empire.   Likewise, this book's claim to analyze Britain's own cultural attitudes towards its own colonial subjects--both their fear of this exoticized "Other" contaminating their psychological, cultural, and racial purity, and as a spirited re-invigoration of an exhausted and wary West--as though, again, Edward Sa'id had not written extensively on those very topics clear back in 1978's Orientalism.  The influence of Empire upon Kipling and Orwell are hardly neglected angles, either.

Despite touching upon such oft-trodden ground, this collection does still justify its existence through some still-novel approaches, for example: A discussion of the influence of Imperial imports (Celtic, Chinese, Japanese, etc) upon Imagism and other "neo-primitive" art movements; a discussion of Sylvia Townsend Warner and sexuality in the Pacific; a comparison of Mansfield Park (which was already well-picked by Post-Colonialists) and Maori culture; and analyses of Australia and "Modernism's Empire" (indeed, as Harwood pointed out, Anglo-Modernism never took root in Down Under). 

Modernist Fiction and Vagueness: Philosophy, Form, and Language, Megan Quigley.

Other Modernist scholars have noted Modernism's self-conscious difficulty; Megan Quigley fine-tunes that diagnosis down to self-conscious vagueness specifically.  For Quigley, Modernism's vague definitions are a feature, not a bug, for Modernism's own vagueness aptly reflects the vagueness of its novels, as well as the anxieties of the era's philosophy--as manifested both in the era's desperate attempts to make language more clear and precise (as in the invention of Basic English, and in the early writings of TS Eliot and Bertrand Russel) or more willfully vague (as in the philosophy of Wittgenstein and novels of Woolf, Joyce, and late-period James).  An interdisciplinary work, each chapter of this volume pairs a Modern novelist with a contemporaneous philosopher--Henry James with his brother William and Charles S. Peirce; Virginia Woolf with Bertrand Russell; James Joyce with Ludwig Wittgenstein and C.K. Ogden--in order to explore, not so much how these various writers and thinkers influenced each other, but rather how they expressed similar anxieties and infatuations with the concept of vagueness itself.

She historicizes this Modernist turn towards the vague, noting that it is no coincidence that Modernist novels become far more ambivalent at the same moment that Western philosophy turns towards linguistics and an obsession with the intrinsic vagueness of language itself--as well as in the same moment that Einstein renders physics itself vague by describing light as both a wave and a particle.  The Modernist novelists, likewise, begin to play with the possibilities of words being both waves and particles--vaguely defined but still forces of power.  Quigley concludes by arguing that we have vastly underestimated the influence of Russel upon Eliot's vision of Modernity.  She writes in a lucid prose that is the refreshing opposite of the vagueness that is her primary topic.  (See New Media theorist?!  It's not that hard!)  This text pairs well with Weinstein's Unknowing in perceiving Modernism as a deep-rooted interrogation of many Enlightenment assumptions.

Axel's Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930, Edmund Wilson.

 

As Hugh Kenner notes in the 1981 introduction, at the time this study was first published in 1931, Joyce's Ulysses was still banned in every English speaking country; TS Eliot's reputation was by no means secure, or even finished; Yeats was still known primarily for his 19th-century poems; and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas had yet to make Gertrude Stein rich and famous.  This context is to demonstrate that, although Joyce, Yeats, Eliot, Stein, Proust, and Valery are over-represented in Modernist studies today, in 1931, for a critic like Edmund Wilson to dedicate an entire book to these figures was a radical move indeed.  In fact, this very tome was instrumental in legitimizing these figures into the literary canon in the first place--and moreover doing so contemporaneously, in real time, years before the term "Modernism" even existed.  Hence, if so many of Wilson's claims feel overly familiar to us now--that Romanticism reacted against Classicism, Symbolism against Naturalism; that the French Symbolists (Rimbaud, Mallarme, Flaubert, etc) heavily influenced the Anglo-Modernists; etc--well, that is because Wilson was the one who first asserted these claims in the first place.  The book's title refers to a German drama by Auguste Villiers, about a Byronic hero and a princess who realize their dreams are so fantastic that their real lives will never measure up, and so commit suicide; Wilson sees in the image of "Axel's castle" a unity between the Naturalists and the Symbolists that he hopes the present Modernists will at last accomplish.

Of course, the study has its weaknesses: his chapter on Proust is largely just a plot summary of In Search of Lost Time; his one on Stein is primarily just a summation of her work up to that point; he falls into the trap of trusting Ulysses' unreliable narrator, particularly as to whether Molly Bloom is a serial adulterer or not; many of is dates are off; he utterly elides the colonial context of the Irish authors.  But if the critical conversations have veered in other directions, this is all just another way of saying that Wilson is who first started these conversations, that he is long-range whom all the Modernist scholars are still responding to.  Axel's Castle is basically Ground Zero for all Modernist studies; he is hipster-scholar, studying Modernism before it was cool.

Modernism and the Ordinary, Liesl Olson.

As the title indicates, the focus of this 2009 text is upon Modernist literature's relationship with the ordinary, domestic, and quotidian, which she argues has long been neglected by Modernist scholars who have perceived the "ordinary" to be the province of 19th-century Realism.  Olson, however, argues that there is a different kind of ordinary at play in Modernism, for even the 19th-century Realist novels still had a deep emphasis on plot, that is, on what changes, what is new, what disrupts the quotidian, whereas the Modern is concerned with the ordinary itself.  It is a theory of Modernism that focuses upon the duration of endless moments rather than the moments themselves, upon the habitual repetition of tasks rather than the singularity of any single, and that interrogates a quiet bourgeois satisfaction as opposed to a sublime intensity.  In contrast to the many Modernist acolytes of Viktor Shklovsky who claimed that the purpose of art is to de-familiarize the familiar--that is, to shock the audience awake at the wonder of what we erroneously classified as ordinary all along--Olson presents a theory of ordinariness that emphasizes the ordinary as ordinary, that is, that does not disrupt the ordinary but instead explores the experience of ordinariness itself. 

This theory of the ordinary is not to argue that the Modernists were apolitical or insulated, far from it--in fact, she explores how the ordinary was deployed by the likes of Joyce and Woolf to interrogate the earth-shaking events that surrounded them, to explore how WWI, colonialism, and capitalism infected their very habits.  She also explores how their focus on the ordinary was used to puncture the pretensions war itself, as far from glorious and heroic, but in fact dull, repetitious, and boring.  Her valuing of the ordinary takes on three specific manifestations: 1) The ordinary as affective experience (as in Joyce's Ulysses or Woolf's Mrs Dalloway); 2) the ordinary as a genre, wherein the focus is upon all that quotidian experience that does not ever rise to the level of adventure (as in Proust's In Search of Lost Time and, again, Joyce's Ulysses); and 3) the ordinary as a style (as in the works of Gertrude Stein).  Her primary artifacts are James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Henry James, Wallace Stevens, and Marcel Proust.

The Modernist Novel and the Decline of Empire, John Marx.

In contrast to the conventional wisdom that casts Modernism as in the throes of anxiety about the imminent collapse of the British Empire, John Marx in this 2005 study recasts the era as a period that was already anticipating our current post-Imperial world order, wherein the world is globalized into discrete yet interconnected localities--one that is decentered, yes, but that of course is still managed by a cosmopolitan cast of capitalist English-speaking experts.  Marx argues that in the hands of Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, Ford Maddox Ford, and others, English became exoticized, and therefore something distinct from the British and American empires; but this is not a utopic vision Marx presents, but one that still keeps English privileged above all others--even transposed to the United States, it is still the Victorian Empire, only by other means.  Part of that privileging of the English comes about by the process of professionalization that was also occurring throughout most Western occupations at this time, and Marx reads the Modernist novelists--yes, even the colonized ones--especially the colonized ones--as being complicit in this process of professionalization that would globally privilege the English-speakers in the post-Imperial order.  Rather than mapping the decline of Empire, modernists such as Conrad and Woolf celebrated the shared culture of the English language as more important than the waning imperial structures of Britain.

Part of the need for these language experts arises from the fact that the English language became no longer English in this period--creoles form, as well as new accents and dialects throughout all of England's current and former colonies, and mediation is required between all of them. Marx tracks how England's imperial self-perceptions transformed from an austere us/them binary of the 17th century by which the English could define themselves against, to the more fluid 20th-century variant that perceived the English themselves as taking on the characteristics of their colonized, just as the latter became more English.  Basically, Marx reads in Anglo-Modernism the seeds and roots of contemporary Anglo-centric globalism.