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"A remarkable study. . . . The first book of its kind and essential for any future discussion of modernism and its embattled boundaries."—Françoise Meltzer, author of Hot Property "One of the very best books of literary criticism, literary scholarship, or literary theory I have ever read. . . . It illuminates interrelationships between historical studies and theory in any humanist discipline."—Menachim Brinker, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem "A milestone in the study of modern Jewish literature. It seriously engages and recontextualizes all the scholarship that came before, and by so doing sets it on a new course: applying a rigorous definition of modernism yet insistent upon methodological diversity; deeply grounded in Hebrew culture yet unabashedly diaspora-centered. This is not a book that readers will take lightly."—David G. Roskies, author of Against the Apocalypse
This volume represents a rereading of modernism and the modernist canon from a double distance: geographical and temporal. It is a revision not only from the periphery (Spain and Latin America), but from this new fin de si cle as well, a revisiting of modernity and its cultural artifacts from that same postmodernity. Modernism and Its Margins is an attempt at introducing different perspectives and examples in the theoretical debate, redefine dominant assumptions of what modernism-or margins-mean in our historical juncture.
"e;Dube ranges widely and globally - from histories of empires and genealogies of disciplines to recent Dalit artwork from India - to explore and carefully delineate a tension he regards as fundamental to the formation of the modern: the modern subject's inevitable entanglement with those subject to modernity. A tour de force, this book offers a critical, timely and powerful sequel to postcolonial and subaltern studies."e; - Dipesh Chakrabarty, University of Chicago
Zukofsky, Oppen, and Niedecker wrote with a diversity of formal strategies but a singularity of purpose: the crafting of an anticapitalist poetics. Inaugurated in 1931 by Louis Zukofsky, Objectivist poetry gave expression to the complex contours of culture and politics in America during the Great Depression. This study of Zukofsky and two others in the Objectivist constellation, George Oppen and Lorine Niedecker, elaborates the dialectic between the formal experimental features of their poetry and their progressive commitments to the radical potentials of modernity. Mixing textual analysis, archival research, and historiography, Ruth Jennison shows how Zukofsky, Oppen, and Niedecker braided their experiences as working-class Jews, political activists, and feminists into radical, canon-challenging poetic forms. Using the tools of critical geography, Jennison offers an account of the relationship between the uneven spatial landscapes of capitalism in crisis and the Objectivists’ paratactical textscapes. In a rethinking of the overall terms in which poetic modernism is described, she identifies and assesses the key characteristics of the Objectivist avant-garde, including its formal recognition of proliferating commodity cultures, its solidarity with global anticapitalist movements, and its imperative to develop poetics that nurtured revolutionary literacy. The resulting narrative is a historically sensitive, thorough, and innovative account of Objectivism’s Depression-era modernism. A rich analysis of American avant-garde poetic forms and politics, The Zukofsky Era convincingly situates Objectivist poetry as a politically radical movement comprising a crucial chapter in American literary history. Scholars and students of modernism will find much to discuss in Jennison’s theoretical study.
The 'transnational' turn has transformed modernist studies, challenging Western authority over modernism and positioning race and racial theories at the very centre of how we now understand modern literature. Modernism and Race examines relationships between racial typologies and literature in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, drawing on fin de siécle versions of anthropology, sociology, political science, linguistics and biology. Collectively, these essays interrogate the anxieties and desires that are expressed in, or projected onto, racialized figures. They include new outlines of how the critical field has developed, revaluations of canonical modernist figures like James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Ford Madox Ford and Wyndham Lewis, and accounts of writers often positioned at the margins of modernism, such as Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay and the Holocaust writers Solomon Perel and Gisella Perl. This collection by leading scholars of modernism will make an important contribution to a growing field.
This book takes its cue from the annus miabilis for French culture to outline French modernism and to situate it on the map of global modernism. Essays on specific works in various media present the first narrative of French modernism as a critical category and establish its position in the thriving field of modernist studies.
During the early twentieth century, Shanghai was the center of China's new media culture. Described by the modernist writer Mu Shiying as "transplanted from Europe" and “paved with shadows,” for many of its residents Shanghai was a city without a past paradoxically haunted by the absent past’s traces. In Shadow Modernism William Schaefer traces how photographic practices in Shanghai provided a forum within which to debate culture, ethnicity, history, and the very nature of images. The central modernist form in China, photography was neither understood nor practiced as primarily a medium for realist representation; rather, photo layouts, shadow photography, and photomontage rearranged and recomposed time and space, cutting apart and stitching places, people, and periods together in novel and surreal ways. Analyzing unknown and overlooked photographs, photomontages, cartoons, paintings, and experimental fiction and poetry, Schaefer shows how artists and writers used such fragmentation and juxtaposition to make visible the shadows of modernity in Shanghai: the violence, the past, the ethnic and cultural multiplicity excluded and repressed by the prevailing cultural politics of the era and yet hidden in plain sight.
