The Real Modern Hanscom, Christopher P
08/2013, Volume:
357
eBook
"The contentious relationship between modernism and realism has powerfully influenced literary history throughout the twentieth century and into the present. In 1930s Korea, at a formative moment in ...these debates, a "crisis of representation" stemming from the loss of faith in language as a vehicle of meaningful reference to the world became a central concern of literary modernists as they operated under Japanese colonial rule. Christopher P. Hanscom examines the critical and literary production of three prose authors central to 1930s literary circles--Pak T'aewon, Kim Yujong, and Yi T'aejun--whose works confront this crisis by critiquing the concept of transparent or "empiricist" language that formed the basis for both a nationalist literary movement and the legitimizing discourse of assimilatory colonization. Bridging literary and colonial studies, this re-reading of modernist fiction within the imperial context illuminates links between literary practice and colonial discourse and questions anew the relationship between aesthetics and politics. The Real Modern challenges Eurocentric and nativist perspectives on the derivative particularity of non-Western literatures, opens global modernist studies to the similarities and differences of the colonial Korean case, and argues for decolonization of the ways in which non-Western literatures are read in both local and global contexts.".
The literary scholar Alfrun Kliems explores the aesthetic strategies of Eastern European underground literature, art, film and music in the decades before and after the fall of communism, ranging ...from the ‘father’ of Prague Underground, Egon Bondy, to the neo-Dada Club of Polish Losers in Berlin.
The works she considers are underground in the sense that they were produced illegally, or were received as subversive after the regimes had fallen. Her study challenges common notions of ‘underground’ as an umbrella term for nonconformism. Rather, it depicts it as a sociopoetic reflection of modernity, intimately linked to urban settings, with tropes and aesthetic procedures related to Surrealism, Dadaism, Expressionism, and, above all, pop and counterculture.
The author discusses these commonalities and distinctions in Czech, Polish, Slovak, Ukrainian, Russian, and German authors, musicians, and filmmakers. She identifies intertextual relations across languages and generations, and situates her findings in a transatlantic context (including the Beat Generation, Susan Sontag, Neil Young) and the historical framework of Romanticism and modernity (including Baudelaire and Brecht).
Despite this wide brief, the book never loses sight of its core message: Underground is no arbitrary expression of discontent, but rather the result of a fundamental conflict at the socio-philosophical roots of modernity.
Brussels 1900 Vienna examines the complex cultural networks between Austria and Belgium (1880-1930), and situates these interrelations within a wider European context. The collection covers various ...fields, including literature, translation, music, theatre, visual arts, café culture, and architecture.
This book argues that the English Literature of the period can be better understood when it is examined in the context of a more local social and literary history.
This volume enables students and scholars to appreciate Mansfield's central place in various trans-European networks of modernism working in or through translation and translated idioms.
The Eye's Mind significantly alters our understanding of modernist literature by showing how changing visual discourses, techniques, and technologies affected the novels of that period. In readings ...that bring philosophies of vision into dialogue with.
Material Difference: Modernism and the Allegories of Discourse argues that deconstruction can be employed in conjunction with the historically-oriented approach to cultural experience that is favored ...by Critical Theory. The two discourses that inform this comparative study situate Modernism between evolving traditions that begin with Hegel and Nietzsche, leading on to Adorno's commitment to philosophical aesthetics and Derrida's concern for writing (écriture). Interrelated discussions of eight major authors, working in four different languages, are presented to show how allegorical Modernism foreshadows the possibility of cultural history. Joyce, Kafka, Malraux, Rilke, and Stevens are among the authors discussed in this book. The notion of material difference allows literature to be redefined in semiotic terms and demonstrates how the allegorical imagination mediates between art and time.
This study is a theoretical reconsideration of the concept of
the "tragic" combined with detailed analyses of Japanese literary
texts. Inspired by contemporary critical discourse (especially the
...works by such thinkers as Theodor Adorno, Fredric Jameson and
Raymond Williams), the author challenges both exotic and postmodern
representation of Japanese culture as "the other" of the West. By
examining the social backgrounds of artists' endeavors to create
new literary forms, the author unveils a rich tradition of tragic
literature that, unlike the dominant local tradition of naturalism,
has registered the unbridgeable gap between universal ideals and
social values at a particular historical moment.
Upending conventional literary theory, Hefner argues American Modernism did not begin with the political left in the 1930s, but that writers were already experimenting with American language using ...cross-racial, cross ethnic, and cross-class vernacular in the popular writing of the 1920s.
From the hard-boiled detective stories of Dashiell Hammett to the novels of Claude McKay,The Word on the Streetsexamines 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.
