Search

This article connects new modernist studies with memory studies and classical reception studies. It addresses the perennial conundrum about the relation between James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) and the Homeric Odyssey, showing how modernist memories operate backwards and forwards in time. Ulysses had a fundamental—truly game-changing—impact on memories of the Odyssey over the past century. With Ulysses, the imagination of the figure of Odysseus was profoundly altered: from hero to everyman, from seafarer to urban flâneur, from cunning soldier (and merciless suitor-slayer) to an essentially good, contemplative man, from Greek king in search of home to a transcultural traveller. The Odyssey is one of the richest examples of longue durée mnemohistories, and across time, its memory has exerted enormous game-changing agency. Joyce draws on the Odyssey's mnemonic energy, but he redirects it: He turns his Ulysses into a good and a transcultural man. The resonance of these changes can still be felt in present-day discussions of refugees as new Odysseus figures. It is also palpable in contemporary literature, as in Emilie Pine's Ruth & Pen (2022), which inserts female, queer, and neurodivergent experiences into Odyssean memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay tracks the circulation and anticolonial reinvention of European modernist epiphanies in Korean modernist prose. The intertextuality of these epiphanies, the authors contend, enables Pak T'aewŏn, Yi Sang, and Yi Hyosŏk to disclose the fraudulence of Japanese cosmopolitanism and imperial modernization, while focalizing the possibilities and limitations of engaging Asian colonial modernity with European forms. In localizing the European epiphany, and ambivalently acknowledging Japanese versions of it, the Korean modernists generate significant irony to interrogate the impulse to wrest concentrated moments of insight, "bliss," or transcendence from the colonial everyday. Perhaps most disquieting is the realization that the exposure of imperialism's "fakeness" lacks the capacity to remedy the material, or literary, conditions of coloniality. Ultimately, Pak, Yi Sang, and Yi Hyosŏk deploy the epiphany to assert the need for a more reflective, neither Japanese nor European, vision; they remain deeply pessimistic, however, about the consummation of one within colonial modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper looks at the Romanian relationship between modernism and rural imagination in the Romanian 20th century debates. As in other cases of semi-peripheral or emergent literatures (the general framework builds on contributions from Frederic Jameson, Pascale Casanova and Wai Chee Dimock), the hegemonical pressure of the Eurochronology has put an embargo on rural prose, excluding it from the projects of modernist literature. The study asserts that far from being a collateral symptom of modernity, rural imaginary is essential for understanding its contradictory mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay analyzes the mutually influential relationship between literary modernism and tourism as those two interests converged around the US Southwest in the early twentieth century. Modernist writers were drawn to the Southwest's folk and Native American cultures, viewing them as potent sources of artistic inspiration. However, those same modernists had a significant hand in shaping the region's burgeoning tourism industry. These surprising commercial collaborations offer the opportunity for a more nuanced understanding of modernism's relationship to commercial work. The essay focuses on a promotional brochure produced for the Harvey Company's sightseeing "Indian Detour" experience. The brochure, distributed to passengers on the Indian Detour, featured essays and poetry contributed by modernist writers including Witter Bynner, Alice Corbin Henderson, and Harriet Monroe. The essay also brings to light the connections between this promotional brochure and back issues of Monroe's Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, further underscoring the close ties between commercial tourism and literary modernism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

David James's The Legacies of Modernism: Historicising Postwar and Contemporary Fiction collects essays from thirteen literary critics that expand typical classifications of twentieth-century literature by analyzing contemporary texts in relation to modernism. This text participates in a movement within modernist studies of fostering dialogue, rather than locating divisions, between texts written at different historical moments. The authors collected in Legacies seek to convince readers of modernism's continued importance to literature produced later in the century while presenting distinct arguments about its influence on texts as diverse as Ian McEwan's Saturday (2005), B.S. Johnson's Albert Angelo (1964), and Chris Abani's GraceLand (2004). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay challenges the New Modernist Studies by criticizing its reliance on analogies and its claims that modernist work of subversion is its most significant legacy. The essay tries to diagnose the psychological principles that underlie the formation of these beliefs. It provides an alternative account of the continuing value of modernist work – first, in terms of five principles that make possible non-reductive readings of modernism; and then, by means of three philosophical models for close reading, for establishing relations among texts and experiences, and for dialectical thinking that attends to similarities and differences as fundamental to identifying the historical roles of any phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]