Modernist Impersonalities

Modernist Impersonalities PDF Author: R. Rives
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137021888
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
Rives uncovers a context of aesthetic and social debate that modernist studies has yet to fully articulate, examining what it meant, for various intellectuals working in early twentieth-century Britain and America, to escape from personality.

Modernist Impersonalities

Modernist Impersonalities PDF Author: R. Rives
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137021888
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 203

Get Book Here

Book Description
Rives uncovers a context of aesthetic and social debate that modernist studies has yet to fully articulate, examining what it meant, for various intellectuals working in early twentieth-century Britain and America, to escape from personality.

Modernist Impersonalities

Modernist Impersonalities PDF Author: R. Rives
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137021888
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
Rives uncovers a context of aesthetic and social debate that modernist studies has yet to fully articulate, examining what it meant, for various intellectuals working in early twentieth-century Britain and America, to escape from personality.

Optical Impersonality

Optical Impersonality PDF Author: Christina Walter
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421413647
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
Optical Impersonality will appeal to scholars and advanced students of modernist literature and visual culture and to those interested in the intersections of art, literature, science, and technology.

Impersonality and the Cultural Work of Modernist Aesthetics

Impersonality and the Cultural Work of Modernist Aesthetics PDF Author: Heather Arvidson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Modernism (Aesthetics)
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
This dissertation reanimates the multiple cultural and aesthetic debates that converged on the word impersonality in the first decades of the twentieth century, arguing that the term far exceeds the domain of high modernist aesthetics to which literary studies has consigned it. Although British and American writers of the 1920s and 1930s produced a substantial body of commentary on the unprecedented consolidation of impersonal structures of authority, social organization, and technological mediation of the period, the legacy of impersonality as an emergent cultural concept has been confined to the aesthetic innovations of a narrow set of writers. Impersonality and the Cultural Work of Modernist Aesthetics offers a corrective to this narrative, beginning with the claim that as human individuality seemed to become increasingly abstracted from urban life, the words impersonal and impersonality acquired significant discursive force, appearing in a range of publication types with marked regularity and emphasis but disputed valence and multiple meanings. In this context impersonality came to denote modernism's characteristically dispassionate tone and fragmented or abstract forms, yet it also participated in a broader field of contemporaneous debate about the status of personhood, individualism, personality, and personal life. This dissertation asserts impersonality's conceptual plasticity and makes a case for its paradigmatic importance in literary and cultural discourse of the 1920s and 1930s. Through literary texts that engage impersonality formally and thematically, the dissertation contextualizes narrative experiments in point of view within the broader questions about effaced individuality that the word impersonality condenses. By elaborating specific narrative criteria for impersonal fiction, Impersonality and the Cultural Work of Modernist Aesthetics also addresses a critical gap in formal understandings of impersonality. New readings of canonical as well as less often studied modernists- Virginia Woolf, Wyndham Lewis, Tess Slesinger, Djuna Barnes, and Nathanael West- suggest that modernism is invested in not only performing impersonality but also interrogating it as a contemporary mode of sociality.

Impersonality

Impersonality PDF Author: Sharon Cameron
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226091333
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
Philosophers have long debated the subjects of person and personhood. Sharon Cameron ushers this debate into the literary realm by considering impersonality in the works of major American writers and figures of international modernism—writers for whom personal identity is inconsequential and even imaginary. In essays on William Empson, Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, T. S. Eliot, and Simone Weil, Cameron examines the impulse to hollow out the core of human distinctiveness, to construct a voice that is no one’s voice, to fashion a character without meaningful attributes, a being that is virtually anonymous. “To consent to being anonymous,” Weil wrote, “is to bear witness to the truth. But how is this compatible with social life and its labels?” Throughout these essays Cameron examines the friction, even violence, set in motion from such incompatibility—from a “truth” that has no social foundation. Impersonality investigates the uncompromising nature of writing that suspends, eclipses, and even destroys the person as a social, political, or individual entity, of writing that engages with personal identity at the moment when its usual markers vanish or dissolve.

Impersonality and the Modernist Art of Critique

Impersonality and the Modernist Art of Critique PDF Author: Kevin Matthew Lamb
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description


Willa Cather's Modernism

Willa Cather's Modernism PDF Author: Jo Ann Middleton
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
ISBN: 9780838633854
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
Willa Cather's Modernism challenges the assumption that Cather was an old-fashioned exponent of styles of fiction, demonstrating instead that Cather was clearly aware of the experimentation within the modernist movement. Illustrative chapters deal with three central novels: A Lost Lady, The Professor's House, and My Mortal Enemy.

Freaks in Late Modernist American Culture

Freaks in Late Modernist American Culture PDF Author: Nancy Bombaci
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9780820478326
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description
Freaks in Late Modernist American Culture explores the emergence of what Nancy Bombaci terms «late modernist freakish aesthetics» - a creative fusion of «high» and «low» themes and forms in relation to distorted bodies. Literary and cinematic texts about «freaks» by Nathanael West, Djuna Barnes, Tod Browning, and Carson McCullers subvert and reinvent modern progress narratives in order to challenge high modernist literary and social ideologies. These works are marked by an acceptance of the disteleology, anarchy, and degeneration that racist discourses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries associated with racial and ethnic outsiders, particularly Jews. In a period of American culture beset with increasing pressures for social and political conformity and with the threat of fascism from Europe, these late modernist narratives about «freaks» defy oppressive norms and values as they search for an anarchic and transformational creativity.

Transatlantic Modernism and the US Lecture Tour

Transatlantic Modernism and the US Lecture Tour PDF Author: Robert Volpicelli
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192893386
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
Many Americans' first encounter with international modernism came, not on the page, but in person--through the widespread phenomenon of the US lecture tour. Attending to these encounters, Transatlantic Modernism and the US Lecture Tour reroutes our understanding of modernism away from the magazines and other mass media that have so far characterized its circulation and toward the unique form of cultural distribution that coalesced around the tour. Offering many new and compelling archival insights, this volume works across an admirably broad cultural landscape to reveal the US lecture tour as a primary mover of modernism. The study highlights the role this circuit played in the formation of transatlantic modernism by following a diverse group of authors--Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats, Rabindranath Tagore, Gertrude Stein, and W. H. Auden--on their whistle-stop tours across America, illuminating in the process how this extremely physical form of circulation transformed authors into object-like commodities to be sold in a variety of performance venues. Moreover, it shows how these writers responded to such wide-ranging distribution by stretching their own ideas about modernist authorship. In doing so, Transatlantic Modernism and the US Lecture Tour adds to a critical tradition of exposing those popular dimensions of modernism that far exceeded its standard coterie definition while also uncovering something else: how the circuit's particular diversity of social contexts forced modernists to take on a new authorial flexibility that would allow them to make in-roads with practically any audience--elite, popular, and everything in between.

Modernism's Other Work

Modernism's Other Work PDF Author: Lisa Siraganian
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199796599
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
Modernism's Other Work challenges deeply held critical beliefs about the meaning-in particular the political meaning-of modernism's commitment to the work of art as an object detached from the world. Ranging over works of poetry, fiction, painting, sculpture, and film, it argues that modernism's core aesthetic problem-the artwork's status as an object, and a subject's relation to it-poses fundamental questions of agency, freedom, and politics. With fresh accounts of works by canonical figures such as William Carlos Williams and Marcel Duchamp, and transformative readings of less-studied writers such as William Gaddis and Amiri Baraka, Siraganian reinterprets the relationship between aesthetic autonomy and politics. Through attentive readings, the study reveals how political questions have always been modernism's critical work, even when writers such as Gertrude Stein and Wyndham Lewis boldly assert the art object's immunity from the world's interpretations. Reorienting our understanding of the period, Siraganian demonstrates that the freedom of the art object from the reader's meaning presented a way to imagine an individual's complicated liberty within the state. Offering readers an original encounter with modernism, Modernism's Other Work will interest literary and art historians, literary theorists, critics, and scholars in cultural studies.