Ethnic Modernisms

Ethnic Modernisms PDF Author: D. Konzett
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230107532
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 216

Get Book Here

Book Description
This study explores a new understanding of modernism and ethnicity as put forward in the transnational and diasporic writings of Anzia Yezierska, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Rhys. In its selection of three modernists from apparently different cultural backgrounds, it is meant to make us rethink the role of modernism in terms of ethnicity and displacement. Konzett critiques the traditional understanding of the monocultural 'ethnic identity' often highlighted in the studies of these writers and argues that all three writers are better understood as ironic narrators of diaspora and movement and as avant-garde modernists. As a result, they offer an alternative aesthetics of modernism which is centered around the innovative narration of displacement. Her analysis of the complexities of language and form and impact of the complex and ambiguous formal styles of the three writers on the history of their reception is a model of the effective integration of formalist, historicist, and theoretical perspectives in literary criticism.

Ethnic Modernisms

Ethnic Modernisms PDF Author: D. Konzett
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230107532
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 216

Get Book Here

Book Description
This study explores a new understanding of modernism and ethnicity as put forward in the transnational and diasporic writings of Anzia Yezierska, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Rhys. In its selection of three modernists from apparently different cultural backgrounds, it is meant to make us rethink the role of modernism in terms of ethnicity and displacement. Konzett critiques the traditional understanding of the monocultural 'ethnic identity' often highlighted in the studies of these writers and argues that all three writers are better understood as ironic narrators of diaspora and movement and as avant-garde modernists. As a result, they offer an alternative aesthetics of modernism which is centered around the innovative narration of displacement. Her analysis of the complexities of language and form and impact of the complex and ambiguous formal styles of the three writers on the history of their reception is a model of the effective integration of formalist, historicist, and theoretical perspectives in literary criticism.

Ethnic Modernism

Ethnic Modernism PDF Author: Werner Sollors
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674030916
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 340

Get Book Here

Book Description
Werner Sollors's monograph looks into how African American, European immigrant and other minority writers gave the United States its increasingly multicultural self-awareness, focusing on their use of the strategies opened up by modernism.

Ethnic Modernisms

Ethnic Modernisms PDF Author: D. Konzett
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9781349387465
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 202

Get Book Here

Book Description
This study explores a new understanding of modernism and ethnicity as put forward in the transnational and diasporic writings of Anzia Yezierska, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Rhys. In its selection of three modernists from apparently different cultural backgrounds, it is meant to make us rethink the role of modernism in terms of ethnicity and displacement. Konzett critiques the traditional understanding of the monocultural 'ethnic identity' often highlighted in the studies of these writers and argues that all three writers are better understood as ironic narrators of diaspora and movement and as avant-garde modernists. As a result, they offer an alternative aesthetics of modernism which is centered around the innovative narration of displacement. Her analysis of the complexities of language and form and impact of the complex and ambiguous formal styles of the three writers on the history of their reception is a model of the effective integration of formalist, historicist, and theoretical perspectives in literary criticism.

The Ethnic Avant-Garde

The Ethnic Avant-Garde PDF Author: Steven S. Lee
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231540116
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 300

Get Book Here

Book Description
During the 1920s and 1930s, American minority artists and writers collaborated extensively with the Soviet avant-garde, seeking to build a revolutionary society that would end racial discrimination and advance progressive art. Making what Claude McKay called "the magic pilgrimage" to the Soviet Union, these intellectuals placed themselves at the forefront of modernism, using radical cultural and political experiments to reimagine identity and decenter the West. Shining rare light on these efforts, The Ethnic Avant-Garde makes a unique contribution to interwar literary, political, and art history, drawing extensively on Russian archives, travel narratives, and artistic exchanges to establish the parameters of an undervalued "ethnic avant-garde." These writers and artists cohered around distinct forms that mirrored Soviet techniques of montage, fragment, and interruption. They orbited interwar Moscow, where the international avant-garde converged with the Communist International. The book explores Vladimir Mayakovsky's 1925 visit to New York City via Cuba and Mexico, during which he wrote Russian-language poetry in an "Afro-Cuban" voice; Langston Hughes's translations of these poems while in Moscow, which he visited to assist on a Soviet film about African American life; a futurist play condemning Western imperialism in China, which became Broadway's first major production to feature a predominantly Asian American cast; and efforts to imagine the Bolshevik Revolution as Jewish messianic arrest, followed by the slow political disenchantment of the New York Intellectuals. Through an absorbing collage of cross-ethnic encounters that also include Herbert Biberman, Sergei Eisenstein, Paul Robeson, and Vladimir Tatlin, this work remaps global modernism along minority and Soviet-centered lines, further advancing the avant-garde project of seeing the world anew.

Race and New Modernisms

Race and New Modernisms PDF Author: K. Merinda Simmons
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350030422
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 225

Get Book Here

Book Description
From the Harlem and Southern Renaissances to postcolonial writing in the Caribbean, Race and New Modernisms introduces and critically explores key issues and debates on race and ethnicity in the study of transnational modernism today. Topics covered include: · Key terms and concepts in scholarly discussions of race and ethnicity · European modernism and cultural appropriation · Modernism, colonialism, and empire · Southern and Harlem Renaissances · Social movements and popular cultures in the modernist period Covering writers and artists such as Josephine Baker, W.E.B. Du Bois, T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Marcus Garvey, Édouard Glissant, Ernest Hemingway, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, and Paul Robeson, the book considers the legacy of modernist discussions of race in twenty-first century movements such as Black Lives Matter.

Anti-Imperialist Modernism

Anti-Imperialist Modernism PDF Author: Benjamin Balthaser
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472902555
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Get Book Here

Book Description
Anti-Imperialist Modernism excavates how U.S. cross-border, multi-ethnic anti-imperialist movements at mid-century shaped what we understand as cultural modernism and the historical period of the Great Depression. The book demonstrates how U.S. multiethnic cultural movements, located in political parties, small journals, labor unions, and struggles for racial liberation, helped construct a common sense of international solidarity that critiqued ideas of nationalism and essentialized racial identity. The book thus moves beyond accounts that have tended to view the pre-war “Popular Front” through tropes of national belonging or an abandonment of the cosmopolitanism of previous decades. Impressive archival research brings to light the ways in which a transnational vision of modernism and modernity was fashioned through anti-colonial networks of North/South solidarity. Chapters examine farmworker photographers in California’s central valley, a Nez Perce intellectual traveling to the Soviet Union, imaginations of the Haitian Revolution, the memory of the U.S.–Mexico War, and U.S. radical writers traveling to Cuba. The last chapter examines how the Cold War foreclosed these movements within a nationalist framework, when activists and intellectuals had to suppress the transnational nature of their movements, often rewriting the cultural past to conform to a patriotic narrative of national belonging.

The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms

The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms PDF Author: Mark Wollaeger
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195338901
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 752

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms expands the scope of modernism beyond its traditional focus on English and Irish literature to explore the contributions of artists from countries like the US, Cuba, Spain, the Balkans, China, Japan, India, Vietnam, and Nigeria.

Irish Modernisms

Irish Modernisms PDF Author: Paul Fagan
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350177385
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 457

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book focuses on previously unexplored gaps, limitations and avenues of inquiry within the canon and scholarship of Irish modernism to develop a more attentive and fluid theoretical account of this conceptual field. Foregrounding interfaces between literary, visual, musical, dramatic, cinematic, epistolary and journalistic media, these essays introduce previously peripheral writers, artists and cultural figures to debates about Irish modernism: Hannah Berman, Ethel Colburn Mayne, Mary Devenport O'Neill, Sheila Wingfield, Freda Laughton, Rhoda Coghill, Elizabeth Bowen, Máirtín Ó Cadhain, Joseph Plunkett, Liam O'Flaherty, Edward Martyn, Jane Barlow, Seosamh Ó Torna, Jack B. Yeats and Brian O'Nolan all feature here to interrogate the term's implications. Probing Irish modernism's responsiveness to contemporary theory beyond postcolonial and Irish studies, Irish Modernisms: Gaps, Conjectures, Possibilities uses diverse paradigms, including weak theory, biopolitics, posthumanism and the nonhuman turn, to rethink Irish modernism's organising themes: the material body, language, mediality, canonicity, war, state violence, prostitution, temporality, death, mourning. Across the volume, cutting-edge work from queer theory and gender studies draws urgent attention to the too-often marginalized importance of women's writing and queer expression to the Irish avant-garde, while critical reappraisals of the coordinates of race and national history compel us to ask not only where and when Irish modernism occurred, but also whose modernism it was?

The Word on the Streets

The Word on the Streets PDF Author: Brooks E. Hefner
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813940427
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 371

Get Book Here

Book Description
From the hard-boiled detective stories of Dashiell Hammett to the novels of Claude McKay, The Word on the Streets examines a group of writers whose experimentation with the vernacular argues for a rethinking of American modernism—one that cuts across traditional boundaries of class, race, and ethnicity. The dawn of the modernist era witnessed a transformation of popular writing that demonstrated an experimental practice rooted in the language of the streets. Emerging alongside more recognized strands of literary modernism, the vernacular modernism these writers exhibited lays bare the aesthetic experiments inherent in American working-class and ethnic language, forging an alternative pathway for American modernist practice. Brooks Hefner shows how writers across a variety of popular genres—from Gertrude Stein and William Faulkner to humorist Anita Loos and ethnic memoirist Anzia Yezierska—employed street slang to mount their own critique of genteel realism and its classist emphasis on dialect hierarchies, the result of which was a form of American experimental writing that resonated powerfully across the American cultural landscape of the 1910s and 1920s.

The Cambridge Companion to the American Modernist Novel

The Cambridge Companion to the American Modernist Novel PDF Author: Joshua L. Miller
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107083958
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 303

Get Book Here

Book Description
This Companion offers a comprehensive analysis of U.S. modernism as part of a global literature. Recent writing on U.S. immigration, imperialism, and territorial expansion has generated fresh reasons to read modernist novelists, both prominent and forgotten. Written by a host of leading scholars, this Companion provides unique approaches to modernist texts.