Bad" modernisms and aesthetic complexity in early twentieth-century literature"

Modernism and Cultural Studies: Annotated Bibliography
Bad Modernisms. Eds. Mao, Douglas and Rebecca Walkowitz. Duke University Press, 2006. Print.
This compendium of papers doesn’t extol the ‘badness’ of modernism, aimlessly striking at the political aesthetics’ conflict-filled piñata yet again; rather, it implies, in various contexts right from the vague to the highly recognized, that several ‘bad’ stances or habits of modernism (those maligned in, or by, modernism) are entirely overtaken by the "good" aspects of it. Therefore, the article by Sianne Ngai on Marlene Dietrich and Josephine Baker, teaches us that critical reading which largely focuses on the movie Blonde Venus’s plot elements, thus behaving like a mode of complete aformalistic "badness" that modernism was expected to ‘unteach’, nevertheless uncovers overlooked aspects of aesthetic objects unexpectedly coming to the forefront. This enables one to view old things from a novel standpoint, identifying formerly unimagined modernist examples which could restore some amount of the lost agility of the favored aesthetic forms of modernism (173). In other words, ‘bad’ reading reveals otherwise-overlooked aesthetic complexities. This leads to an expansion of the potential of modernism, reliant on one’s capability of becoming a smarter reader, than before, of disregarded "other" kinds of artistic and literary creations (which include plot) that appear within or in conjunction with modernist classics. The world witnesses several forms of badness, varying from unintentional idiocy to real evilness, and from radical transgressors’ innate goodness to hypocrisy.  At different times, the many forms of modernism have been reproached for the above; with modernism actually being an extensive and complicated phenomenon (ever more now than before), all the aforementioned accusations prove somewhat true. One could relate a tale of the critical fortunes of modernism commencing with the notion of intensely "good" badness (formal dissolution of the unconventional) and ending, following the critical 80s amendments which linked modernism with advertising, governance and patriarchy, on a more conventional, dissatisfying note.
Berman, Jessica Schiff. Modernist Latitudes: Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics, and Transnational Modernism. 1st ed., Columbia University Press, 2012. Print.
This book, which forcefully expands postcolonial and modernist fictional research’s scope, covers topics as widely divergent as India of the early 1900s, corn lands of Depression-Age America, and the Spanish Civil War. The list of authors covered includes household names like Joyce, Woolf, Anand and Rhys, as well as those of less renown, who have authored domestic, wartime, working-class and postcolonial chronicles. This interesting, complex, and obviously well-researched work covers everything from the philosophical to the archival, furthering modernist research’s trans-nationalization, and forcefully revealing the political and moral urgencies entrenched in the modernist narration method. The author explains how the modernist style of narration links moral duties and viewpoints with the active forging of political associations and how justice is envisioned. The gaps between ‘committed’ and ‘modernist’ approaches to writing are challenged, with the author contending that a gamut of political involvement binds modernisms across the globe; additionally, formal experiments reinforce, and not hamper, it. Besides arguing in favor of a transnational modernism approach, the author displays the interaction between modernism and formal affairs, how it encompasses folkways and colloquial speech, how it challenges the margin between fiction and fact, and how it engages with intimacy and personified experience to provide a more extensive description of modernist commitments and writings as well as a fresh means of viewing modernism and what it is capable of. This book is an ideal read for those desiring an explanation of the things transnational criticism within literature of the 20th century is able to achieve, once they cease to hypothesize the global, instead studying the living record of intercultural literature’s history. The author confidently redefines the global modernism issue, pinpointing the shared moral components of distinct modernisms. The book is a confident and outstanding guide explaining the multifaceted linkage between literary politics and narrative ethics, with the author unreservedly and conclusively debunking the illusions of aesthetic individualism and modernist detachment. Readers, whilst closing the book at last, will certainly experience immense appreciation for the writer’s well-structured investigations, enduring learnedness, and flexible critical opinion. One can conclude that the book is certainly a key contribution, tactfully integrating ethicality and politics into a comparative transnational modernism analysis whilst simultaneously offering a fresh direction for global and postcolonial research in the future.
Burstein, Jessica. Cold Modernism: Literature, Fashion, Art. University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012. Print.
The author of this book puts forward her theory of “cold modernism” – a yet-to-be-adequately-studied area of modernism research which underscores the dehumanized components of modernist creations: the cultures of replication, copy, reproduction, prosthesis and imitation. Modernism has, of late, been reshaped, taking into account overlooked elements like geography, sex, post-humanities, colonization, and eccentricity. The subsequent dimension, in the author’s opinion, is temperature; the author visits colder regions and selects examples traversing diverse artistic and literary genres (e.g., dolls, lampshades, fashions, poems, paintings, and novels). The book’s representative promoters of modernist refrigeration devices include: Hans Bellmer (dolls); Balthus; Wyndham Lewis, an individual who gets a whole two chapters; Coco Chanel, who is forever fashionable; and Mina Loy (known for blotter bracelets, lampshades, and poetry). The book is entertaining, and even sometimes flippant, providing satisfactory, careful readings of art as well as literature. The author examines the area of modernist material culture, citing a large number of scholars credited with mining the journals wherein modernist works first surfaced. History contributes significantly (e.g., prosthetics gained immense popularity after the First World War, when they found expression within Snooty Baronet by Lewis as did the subscriber list for Chanel’s French fashion copies). The lustrous book cover draws shoppers’ attention to it. The cover art, in loud orange and black colors, displays a homely antique kitchen counter that bears a couple of arcs, with each comprising of a couple of large doll legs donning Mary Janes and socks, joined disturbingly without the benefit of other parts of the body). It is certainly no relaxing or simple read. Burstein’s work contrasts arcane artistic creations with synthetic works’ appeal in fashion as well as philosophy, delving into how body may form the start as well as end of every examination of particular forms of style and art. These two domains display common economies of replication and replacement wherein divisions between outside and inside become just as indistinct as the margins between the original and the duplicate.
Chabot, C. Barry. Writers for the Nation: American Literary Modernism. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama, 1997. Print.
A relatively straightforward argument underlies this work. The author is of the opinion that the modernists of America weren’t as indifferent to political and social matters as they were accused of, by a majority of lost-generation relators. However, they concurred on the following aspect — they shared a feeling of dissatisfaction when it came to the nation’s culture which formed in the post-First World War era. Led by Van Wyck Brooks, the modernists of the US vehemently criticized American culture, demanding extensive societal transformation. Differences emerged between modernists in terms of solutions recommended and authors’ ideological resources. Willa Cather and similar authors banked on an irretrievable, unrealistic cultural matrix. Meanwhile, T. S. Eliot, Allan Tate and a few others banked on the ambiguous idea of “tradition” imbedded within social institutions. The author of this work proves this tradition of “failure” within every serious US-based literary work. Even today, one will able to witness despair of all things which replace the WWI-discredited belief systems within literature that belongs to the post-modernism era. Chabot’s rough, though, on the whole, fair, summary effectively encompasses every key personality who fits into the author’s highly flexible and banally broad classification of modernism as well as inheritors of modernism. The work’s nature may probably be credited to a figure to whom one of the later chapters in the book is dedicated – Wallace Stevens – whose constant quest for a form of “supreme fiction” clearly conveys the quest attributed by Chabot to modernism in the form of a societal movement. The author reveals that US literary modernists dynamically engaged in sweeping discussions on means of creating or recreating a sense of belongingness between contemporaries who held the belief that life had grown ever more uncompromising, with America unable to provide citizens with a sustainable community feeling any longer. While individual authors recognized the same abovementioned loss, they all used slightly different words to describe it, cited diverse causes for it, and offered different solutions to it. This book reconstructs representative US modernists’ role in this national-level discussion. 
Chibber, Vivek. Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital. London: Verso, 2013. Print.
Contrary to its title, this work does not deal with postcolonial theory; instead, it is more of a work on Subaltern Studies, chiefly focusing on Indian history from 1982 to 2008. To be even more precise, Chibber concentrates on criticizing the following Subaltern Studies researchers’ perspectives: Ranajit Guha, Partha Chatterjee, and Dipesh Chakrabarty. The cause for this focus and debate is: Subaltern Studies functions as an overall synecdoche for research works on the postcolonial era. The author believes a large number of postcolonial theorists reject social sciences which are grounded in universal categories like class, free enterprise, liberalism, impartiality and reasonableness. According to the author, he himself is in favor of Marxism and Enlightenment as opposed to postmodern irrationalism. He contends that key subaltern studies experts fail to comprehend the aspects of capitalism, human psychology and European history. Subaltern Studies has been self-defined against a fairy-tale version of Europe’s history. European conservatives were not exactly in favor of liberal democracy. Instead, their aim was limiting peasant and worker rights, and to this end, they collaborated with the gentry. Thus, lower class struggles ensured sporadic political development. The European continent was a long way from unifying into homogenized countries; it remained divided, with pre-capitalist ways of dominance prevailing and the author holds that India imitates, instead of departing from, this European practice. While the author, in several areas of his work, has taken into careful consideration the disagreement between postmodernism and Marxism, his fundamental forces may be evoked by imperialists, neoliberals and modernization theory supporters as well. An important point to note is the minimalist nature of the aforementioned basic forces and they amount of diversity allowed by them. The author is certainly right in stating that social scientific tools which have mostly been created by Western nations adequately facilitate an understanding of the world’s South. In fact, a sound alternative is yet to be created and it is not evident why the hermeneutical techniques that a few postmodern postcolonialists prefer are deemed to be any less Eurocentric. Experts ought to shun irrationalism, give up preoccupation with diversity and differences, seek the most all-encompassing and experientially conceivable justifications, and strive towards academic and aesthetic clarity. 
Cohen, Paula Marantz. "Raising Questions: Modernism, Genre, Text." Journal of Modern Literature 36.4 (2013): V. Print.
This journal, first published over 40 years ago and co-edited by Cohen, continues to be one of the most popular and principal scholarly journals on the subject of contemporary and modern literature. It focuses mainly on scholarly works of literature penned in every language, in addition to associated cultural objects and artworks, between the year 1900 and the present day. The first collection of articles within this edition poses the following questions: what does modernism comprise of and how do works formerly unrelated to modernism concern or expand one’s grasp of the subject? Matthew Levay examines the significance of Blood on the Dining Room Floor, a detective story by Gertrude Stein. He holds that with the story, Stein has effectively merged popular and experimental aesthetics, thus ensuring modernist ideas reach a wide, conventional reader base. Cecily Swanson’s work challenges modernism’s parameters by taking into consideration the NBC radio program by Muriel Draper titled ‘It’s a Woman’s World’, as well as her 1929 music salon memoir. According to Swanson, Draper’s discussions on music with a largely-female audience improves insights into music and modernism, challenging the theory of music being impersonal as well as integrating female audience responses into an amalgamated written and verbal aesthetic. The subsequent articles expand how individual works are perceived in the context of modernist canon: Syndey Bufkin, in a bid to connect romantic traditions with a utopian novel, re-contextualizes Dark Princess by W.E.B. Du Buois – a work frequently deemed to be propagandist in nature. Lastly, Timothy C. Baker examines A Scots Quair by James Leslie Mitchell, historically regarded closely in Scot literary canon, revealing its applicability to modernist notions of romance and fiction.
Crary, Jonathan. Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999. Print.
This work, which concentrates on the era between 1880 and 1905, explores the links between subjectivity’s modernization and the remarkable growth and development of auditory/visual culture. The crux of this work is contemporary focus’s paradoxical character – a key condition of autonomy, individual experience, and originality, besides being a major component ensuring effective operation of corrective and financial organizations and the emergent areas of mass demonstration and consumption. The author uses numerous examinations of single paintings by Cezanne, Manet and Seurat to tackle such issues. All of the aforementioned artists individually and exceptionally confronted disturbances, differences and vacancies in a perceptual arena and, in their own unique way, uncovered the fact that sustained focus, instead of securing or mending our world, resulted in loss of authority and perceptual breakdown. Lastly, they each utilized the above finding as their basis when it came to reinventing representational practices. The book definitively rearranges the aesthetic observation issue within a wider collective interaction with perception’s instability— in philosophy, photography, early cinema, psychology, and neurology. It is an important historical work in human focus and the volatile part it has to play within the context of contemporary Western culture. The author maintains that how humanity closely scrutinizes or lends an ear to whatever stems from key perceptual modifications dates back to 1850. The author’s emphasis on innumerable popular as well as ignored texts plots an arena of superior value for experts in this art history chronotope as well as those of other disciplines. But a practice of overabundance raises questions regarding inclusion criteria. Extra references don’t essentially advance the author’s thesis; moreover, the citing of certain names and areas of study calls to mind others’ nonappearance. The author includes optics, art and philosophy in vision’s history but fails to take into account parallel advancements within visual theory. He concentrates on perceptual synthesis’s reinvention somewhere around the year 1900 and includes Edmund Husserl’s relief sculpture analysis but fails to address those of Adolf von Hildebrand and Alois Riegl. In the year 1893, the aforementioned two personalities claimed form was the most supreme artistic accomplishment, describing a perceptual creation which was remarkably like the one depicted by Cezanne, in Crary’s view.
Danius, Sara. The Senses of Modernism: Technology, Perception, and Aesthetics. Ithaca, N.Y.; London: Cornell University Press, 2002. Print.
Halfway through reading this interesting work by Danius, one will come across the well-known tale of J. M. W. Turner, a British artist, as narrated in the words of John Ruskin. Turner was once questioned by a navy official on a painting of ships without portholes, to which Turner reportedly answered, "Yes, I know that well enough; but my business is to draw what I see, and not what I know is there." The above narrative neatly captures the author's argument – European modernist literature captures as well as articulates the shift from knowledge to seeing, or in other words, from a conceptual position to one that was aesthetic and founded on human perceptual faculties. But, indeed, underlying this bold claim of mankind’s sensorium are the early-1900s’ major technological extensions. The author, via a careful, conceptually-informed analysis of works by James Joyce, Thomas Mann, and Marcel Proust, attempts at demonstrating the relationship between literary form, perception, and technological evolution (p. 1). This book commences with a lengthy theoretical preamble wherein the main argument of the book is stated. This is no collection of the views authors hold regarding technology, nor does it function in the form of an account of technological ideas and themes within the context of contemporary fiction. Instead, the author aims at establishing the fact that telephony, cinematography, photography, and other novel "technologies of perception" which reproduce auditory and visual experience basically form a part of contemporary literature. But how technology supports contemporary literary sensibility is a typically surprising and subtle element. The author banks on readings of the following three novels: The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann; Ulysses by James Joyce; and Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust. The above three impressive and thought-provoking texts that were published during the 1920s are representative of the peak of modernist fictional works, hence, the astonishing fact that there is no extended comparison of them till date. The author analyzes the novels beautifully and in a conceptually-informed way, paying great attention to understated details, which alone suffices in ensuring the significance of the work. More importantly, the author utilizes the above readings for constructing a sound account of modernism: "a certain progression, an ever-closer relationship between the habits of the senses and technologies of perception. It may usefully be grasped as a gravitation from externality toward internalization" (21).
Detloff, Madelyn. The Persistence of Modernism: Loss and Mourning in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Print.
What is modernism? What is the cause for its persistence in the form of a philosophical and visual system even in the present day? If modernism is considered to be an aesthetic of plaintive mourning and loss demonstrated by the First World War’s traumatic experiences, its ardent reaction to shared melancholia indicates why it remarkably resonates in this contemporary age defined by 9/11 and global terrorist threats. The author of this work relies on Cassandra figures such as Virginia Woolf, Hilda Doolittle, and Gertrude Stein as examples of skeptical resistance when faced with political frenzy. A compelling case is made in the section titled ‘Woolf’s Resilience’, describing Woolf’s prophetic perception of twentieth-century conflict grounded in emotional aversion to unassimilable ‘others.’ In the chapter ‘Stein’s Shame’, the author dons the mantle of literary detective and makes ‘forensic’ methodology out to be a ponderous, present-tense compilation of knowledge defying military myth creation. Stein symbolizes quotidian fortitude when faced with the dehumanizing tactics of war and adopts a forceful egalitarian, anti-war position, refusing to support military sacrifice as she bitterly remarks, ‘dead is dead’ (78). Modernism has generally been considered a reaction to the early 20th-century’s calamitous events; how far, then, may one account for its continuance even in the present day? The author believes modernism is indeed relevant to the current era – an era marked by ever-growing loss, desire, and vengeance. A few social structures which prompted modernist cultural creations – royal hubris and chauvinistic nationalism – continue to this day. Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and similar authors who believed they were outsiders and experienced a shaky feeling of belongingness to the dominant culture can still, in Detloff’s view, help improve our understanding of modern narratives of nation, loss, revival, and recollection. The author’s conceptualization extends to cover present-day authors such as Hanif Kureshi and Pat Barker, who have pursued modernism within their respective works. This has resulted in a grand research work appealing to every modernism expert and student.
Highmore, Ben. Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An Introduction. New York: Routledge, 2002. Print.
This work offers an exceptional historical and critical overview of daily life-related theories. The author tracks the progress of daily life conceptions from Georg Simmel’s cultural sociology, through the 1930s Mass Observation endeavor, to Michel de Certeau and other modern theorists. This work is clearly a result of prolonged sustained contemplation, which will certainly be welcomed in this era of scholarly hyper-production. The author’s zeal when it comes to the topic and the reason behind its significance is evident throughout the book. Discussions within are well flagged and richly detailed, whilst simultaneously being unfailingly stimulating and scholarly. Right from the start, it is obvious that the author concerns himself with a countertradition of cultural and social thought, a collection of critical, practicable, and poetic operations which attempt ‘to make the everyday vivid’ (16). But connecting the specific Marxist theory context, the author makes a broader and compelling argument in favor of the tradition: the pure challenge for every social agent in modernity when it comes to securing broad change processes in an increasingly spectacularised, automated, and organized society. The book functions as a guide to a distinct path among the various avenues implied through linking the concepts of ‘cultural theory’ and ‘everyday life’. This has been addressed through deliberating on theories posited by theorists, which are apparently marked by a far greater focus on the routine as being problematic. They apparently bring the routine into an uncomfortable focus.
Jacobs, Karen. The Eye's Mind: Literary Modernism and Visual Culture. Ithaca, N.Y.; London: Cornell UP, 2001. Print.
Placing literary modernism in the context of early 20th-century visual culture, the author’s work adds to the growing pool of literature examining visual relation representations in fiction. With the growth in critical consensus on the significance of visuality with regard to modernity during the past few decades, the visual cultural studies discipline has continued to be effectively, and even occasionally bafflingly, diverse, marked by an array of methodologies and descriptions of "visual culture." Taking advantage of this explosion of approaches, ranging from wholly historical to exceedingly abstract, Jacobs provides a rich and synthetic description of the visual themes of modernism. This book greatly modifies one’s comprehension of modernist literature through demonstrating the impacts of evolving visual discourses, technologies and process on the fictional works of the age. In analyses which integrate the philosophies of photography, film and vision, in addition to observation techniques employed by social scientific circles, the author pinpoints clearly modernist types of visual relationships and observers. This key modernist re-conception relies on extra-literary and literary matter from the US, France, and Britain, dated between 1900 and 1955. The texts depict a common sense of emergency pertaining to vision's ability to inspire violence, besides its failure to provide reliable information. The author carefully explores how historical insights into gender and race modified visual relationships within modernist novels. She demonstrates how modernist authors, who have gained increased awareness of what lies behind observers’ objective lens, employ diverse approaches for displacing personification onto "others" traditionally considered to be cultural bodies, for reimagining a refined gaze for their characters or themselves. The book deals with works by modernists like Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov, Maurice Blanchot, Ralph Ellison, Henry James, Nathanael West and Zora Neale Hurston (the latter few tentatively categorized as modernist despite forgoing the full-scale experimental methods typically deemed to be tantamount to literary modernism). The author reframes key discussions on modernist aesthetic methods through displaying the degree to which they are beholden to evolving 20th-century visual cultures.
Loesberg, Jonathan. A Return to Aesthetics: Autonomy, Indifference, and Postmodernism. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford UP, 2005. Print.
During the latter part of the last century, heated squabbling across various academic fields became a common element of the debate on modernist aesthetics’ value against that of postmodernism-motivated anti-aesthetics forms. Loesberg’s work addresses one among the most complex conflicts in the already established legacy of "aesthetics", attempting at negotiating a challenging reading of Kantian conventional texts revolving around aesthetics and those encompassing the Enlightenment legacy, in addition to relatively modern abstract works by Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault. This compelling narrative that skilfully connects meticulous historical examinations to the modern debate provides an outlet to, or a means beyond, the philosophical deadlock between aesthetics’ assumed foundationalism and postmodernism’s assumed anti-aesthetics. Most extraordinarily, the author effectively does this without having to renounce his acceptance of Enlightenment facets (i.e., independence and aesthetic value), as well as without relinquishing his support of postmodern political and social critique. In particular, the author reminds readers that ‘the value of aesthetics …is that it offers ways of apprehending and interpreting things in the world’ (p. 74). In other words, this is the ideal form of historical investigation and deconstruction. The author, employing historical reconstructions, does to Bourdieu and Foucault what, in his view, Derrida does to Kant: that is, he actually indifferently tackles their work with respect to its individual ends, for revealing aspects of its functioning which it is unable to realize.
Lewis, Pericles. Modernism, Nationalism, and the Novel. Cambridge, U.K.; New York. NY, USA: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Print.
This short and enlightening read boldly attempts at bringing the concepts of novel, modernism and nationalism to relate to each other. The author attempts to demonstrate how novels (or to be more specific, a collection of distinct novels) penned as part of Modernist literature (or some instantiations of modernism) reacted to as well as aided in shaping a few nationalism-related discussion during the early 20th century. The writers Lewis uses to represent modernism in this work are James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Gabriele D'Annunzio, and Joseph Conrad. The author parenthetically touches upon the subject of gender disproportion as regards his choice of writers, though fails to delve deeper into it than to remark that his discourses are "clearly . . . 'gendered'" (3). All the above authors are represented chiefly through one novel each: À la recherche du temps perdu, Il Notturno, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Heart of Darkness. Broadly speaking, the author’s objective is demonstrating how the aforementioned complex works struggle with linking "the novelist's personal lived experience with the forging of a national consciousness" (3). Key nationality theorists addressed in the book are Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Edmund Burke, Maurice Barrès, Ernest Renan, John Stuart Mill, and, quite surprisingly, Leslie Stephen. To them, the conflict persists, though only at the community level. Does a nation result from repetitive, collective, deliberate acts (daily plebiscite as it is termed by Renan) or does it arise due to expression of rigid character by a specific group of individual, as maintained by Barrès (racialism) and Burke (organicism)? And what part does individual agency play in this context? Is the individual ‘made’ or ‘the maker’?
Miller, Joshua. Accented America: the Cultural Politics of Multilingual Modernism. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Print.
This book explores English-Only Americanism’s extensive history. The concept may be defined as a political argument that the citizens of America have to use only one single, collective American tongue; its action is traced in literature. The book is set in modernism’s halcyon days – i.e., from the 1890s to the 1940s, when modernists dabbled spiritedly, inconsistently and painfully in language politics. Migrant surges of the age contributed to the aesthetic experimentation of writers. Their creations successively revamped ideas surrounding national identity alongside literary form. This book discusses a widely multiethnic collection of authors like Gertrude Stein, Nella Larsen, Jean Toomer, Carlos Bulosan, Henry Roth, Lionel Trilling, John Dos Passos, and Américo Paredes; these authors reflect the significant demographic transitions which occurred in the interwar period and share a critical linguistic standardization awareness, whilst simultaneously sticking to the de-familiarizing power of experimentation with incorrect, made-up literary vernacular. Instead of validating mono-lingualism’s highly appealing subtext that individuals sharing a common language share similar political and moral views, multilingual modernist writers’ works address a nation of singular hybrids, persistent oddity and synthetic syntaxes. The above book argues brilliantly in favor of US modernist works’ multilingual component. Through paying attention to the way writers envision, negotiate, represent and translate languages governing their worlds, the author has effectively enriched current discussion on race, class, and ethnicity within the context of modernist fiction. Furthermore, he has established that concentrating on linguistic approaches, views and policies sharpens focus on politics and poetics. The key aim of this research is exploring literature, or specifically, modernist authors’ linguistic politics and experimentations. Lastly, the book improves readers’ understanding of salient subjects like the attitude of Americans of that age when it came to English and other languages. This analysis intriguingly resonates with the existing debate on culture, language and identity within the US (e.g., the previously-mentioned ‘English-only’ campaign and its roots).
Moglen, Seth. Mourning Modernity: Literary Modernism and the Injuries of American Capitalism. 1st. ed. Stanford University Press, 2007. Print.
The wealth of assumptions, strategies, contexts and works defining current modernist research instantly questions the broad categorization of American modernist literature into a couple of elementary sensibilities or ways of reacting the capitalism-prompted crises (in the author’s words). According to Moglen, individual works as well as the overall canon charts a continuum between sheer aestheticizing of cultural damage and utilizing it to create a fresh societal vision. Against the better judgment of readers, the author has effectively made the above supposition appear feasible as well as convincing. The author contends that central to America’s modernist literature is a bid to lament the damage wrought by contemporary capitalism. Further, he proves that last century’s most distinguished literary movement is defined by a grave disagreement between political despondency and hope, between a desire to create a fairer and more progressive society and fear of mistreatment and alienation. This disagreement is traced within the writings of numerous poets and storywriters, including Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, Tillie Olsen, Faulkner, Hurston, and Hughes. The book may be regarded as an opportune reminder of American literary creations’ complexities during the early twentieth century. The author’s main argument is: “American literary modernism is, at heart, an effort to mourn the destructive effects of modern capitalism – and to mourn, most of all, for the crisis of alienation” (pp xiii–xiv). This sound proposition may have resulted in a somewhat glib work, but the author has, admirably, refused neat categorization. In the end, the author demonstrates “an encounter between melancholia and mourning” (p xiv): a scrutiny of melancholia and sorrow as critical explanations as well as sites traversing and superimposing a politically-motivated psychic scale.
Mu?ller-Funk, Wolfgang. The Architecture of Modern Culture: Towards a Narrative Cultural Theory. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012. Print.
This compilation of articles pertains to key issues that stem from the author’s decade-long efforts in the area of cultural studies and analysis. It encompasses works addressing the linkages between remembering and narration, and narrative accounts’ role in forging group and individual identity. Exploring a more organized cultural theory problem which is closely connected to the alleged performative and spatial “turns”, this work presents the concept of a narrative cultural model not entirely a narratology with regard to standard literary theory any longer. While one may prove that tales have a performative as well as spatial facet, with stories’ characters acting on and in particular places and being, simultaneously, actors, creation of narrative cultural models allows for correcting the asymmetry of modern cultural models grounded in ideas of performance or space. The author believes his time-within-space notion which brings both components together and merges them to make a single novel component continues to be remarkably significant for narrative cultural models, assimilating temporal (modernism, modernity) and spatial (globalization) facets. This work comprises of key contributions to modern cultural models and analyses, besides archetypal interpretations of media forms like film and literature. Dominant present-day cultural studies-related issues are dealt with, namely, cultural narratives, collective memory, post-colonial thought, and cultural identity. This composition covers historic analyses like readings of Musil, Broch, and Canetti, and their legacy. Other articles progress from the 1900s to the present century, tackling issues pertaining to globalization, space, and time, and for instance, reviewing topics like the 9/11 attacks and Walter Benjamin.
North, Michael. The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Print.
End-1996 witnessed US public culture obsessing over African-American’s English dialect like never before. Oakland, California’s school board demanded the acknowledgement of “Ebonics” (combining ‘ebony’ and ‘phonics’) as a separate language, and its implementation using instructional techniques. This sparked varying views, which are addressed by the author of this work, which analyzes the employment of dialect within the following contemporary literary movements – transatlantic modernism and the Harlem Renaissance – through locating their practices relative to simultaneous movements targeting English language standardization. The author demonstrates how the ‘standard English’ concept and practice took shape, thereby tracing the roots of an important term in our present debate. The author studies texts by authors like Gertrude Stein and T.S. Eliot (as removed from the Harlem Renaissance as can be), who re-visualized themselves as blacks, voiced black views and feelings, and transformed their era’s literature. Taking their literary pieces’ racial status seriously, it appears racial pretexts and linguistic imitations weren’t mere superficial whims; rather, they were tactics crucial to the advent of modernism. The author uses historical and biographical analyses, and in-depth readings of key literary pieces, to reveal the inextricable link between these two disparate movements, which cannot be regarded separately from one another. Each influenced the other, whether for bad or good.
Osborne, Thomas. The Structure of Modern Cultural Theory. Manchester, UP. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Print.
This book deals with contemporary cultural theory’s structure and scope, concentrating, chiefly, on literature by Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu and Theodor Adomo. Experts in this area will stumble upon nothing but, potentially, errors, waking them up from all potential epistemological slumbers. Further, Osborne doesn’t attempt at stating all known facts about the three writers or all of their views on culture; rather, the author is selective with regard to the book’s specific argument. The argument is developed through banking on major readings by the three authors. Osborne claims that despite their differences, they held a common and especially progressive understanding of human agency, culture, and inventiveness, founded on ideas of creative thinking and critical independence. Despite all three authors devoting themselves to scholarly experiential studies, to them, cultural theory’s role wasn’t simply describing our world in positivistic terms as it was or is; rather, they attempted at cultivating conditions for moral independence among readers through unlocking means to think out of the box and shedding light on the obstructions and fetishisms hampering the above endeavor. The book’s target audience is learners as well as experts, and the author pleads for a ‘modern’ in the postmodern age. The last chapter of the book compares the ethical modern cultural theory concept with postmodern ones that have, perhaps, adopted a more moralistic as well as positivist form.
Parekh, Bhikhu C. Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity and Political Theory. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2000. Print.
This book embarks on the mission of designing routes for multiculturalism viewed as a political practice basis as well as a political theory. The last ten years saw a wealth of literature on the subjects of multiculturalism, together with how it challenges the idea of self-understanding and society; intercultural relationships and cultural diversity; hybridization processes and cultural integrity; political thinking practices cultivated within academic circles and implied within authority structures created by modern western democracies; and collective identity and social cohesion. This narrative is situated in the highly controversial playfield of debates in the area of liberalism, presenting diverse viewpoints including feminism, post-colonialism, post-Marxism, and race theory, in addition to spanning several areas of study including philosophy, pedagogy, cultural anthropology, political theory, and cultural studies. What sets this book apart instantly is its transparency and consistency. In a scenario where such a large number of critics lament the hopelessness of achieving a consistent analytical language and coherent outlook, when attempting to embrace multiculturalism’s complex nature, Parekh has successfully maintained the order and focus of analysis, besides reading multiculturalism against and from within liberal traditions simultaneously. The above enigmatic agenda is the author’s most significant contribution to multiculturalism. The book deals with theories revolving around cultural respectability, human nature’s character, tolerance, and common supra-particularist principles, within the multiculturalism model. Even if the author hasn’t been able to provide conclusive solutions to the above issues, he has, at least, put forward likely means of practically dealing with them.
Walkowitz, Rebecca. Cosmopolitan Style Modernism beyond the Nation. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. Print.
Cosmopolitanism modernism is marked by an extensive history of disagreements– whether scholarly or bloody and disastrous– pertaining to apparently diametrically opposed values and conflicting imperatives. What other possible outcome could result from a normative venture dependent on Universalist self-aware or altered conceptions of mankind’s mutuality? This book may be deemed to be an intervention within discussions on cosmopolitan politics, aesthetics and morals. The author engages in in-depth reading and addresses individual writers on their respective, and overall cultural, terms. For instance, the minimal commitment by Conrad to "naturalness" conceals more complicated and categorically unnatural forces that compete in his works, including several narrative tricks revealing social perceptional practices, identifying characters' as well as audiences’ potentially oblivious reduction of people to cultural forms. The author’s examination of the approach of modernist literature and the part it plays in novel international engagement forms and means of carrying out political critique is original and inspirational. The author relies on a remarkable set of distinct abstract discussions and theorists to convincingly support the political significance of the emphasis of literary modernism on apparently insignificant events, language, and disorientated thought, and the non-engagement in direct, overt efforts towards progressive global participation when it came to developing cosmopolitan literature in the late-20th century. Critical cosmopolitanism represents a unique form of global engagement opposed to “heroic tones of appropriation and progress” and suspicious of “epistemological privilege” which takes “a consistent distinction between who is seeing and what is being seen” for granted (2). The book highlights 20th-century modernist fictional works’ political uncertainties and clever idiosyncrasies.