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This themed issue of RISE seeks to remap the Irish literary and cultural landscapes in the middle decades of the twentieth century. It defines this period as from the 1930s to the 1970s — roughly coinciding with the conservative years of ‘de Valera’s Ireland’, starting from the ratification of Bunreacht na hÉireann in 1937 supervised by de Valera through Seán Lemass’ programmes of economic expansion which led to Ireland’s European Economic Community membership in 1973. It understands literary and cultural landscapes in the broadest terms: horizontally as a geographic space with borders real and imagined; vertically as a space where high and low cultures clash and commingle. This issue includes six essays by contributors based across the globe. They show us the various forms of border-crossing — geographic, linguistic, generic — that contribute to a fuller map of Irish literature and culture in the mid-twentieth century.

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]

If Japanese modernists, as Eric Hayot argues, conceived modernism and modernity as originating in the West, colonial Korean artists inevitably apprehended modernism from a double remove, through the mediation of Japanese literature and language. While they self‐consciously sought to develop a distinctive Korean modernist poetics (one not prefigured by Japanese modernism), the sense of belatedness remained inescapable among Korean modernist practitioners. With the 'expansionism' of the new modernist studies, as is well known, there has been substantial critical work to challenge and reject the belatedness and derivativeness attributed to 'peripheral' modernities and modernisms. However, to properly appreciate the singularity of Korean modernism, and its expressive efforts to place its colonial modernity in a global context, it is necessary to confront how these modernists understood, figured, and rearticulated their sense of belatedness. Taking a cue from Michaela Bronstein, I attend to the uses Korean modernists made of Western (and Japanese) modernisms and how these engagements enact the aesthetic and critical force of belatedness. Ultimately, I contend, Korean modernism's self‐reflexive, intertextual stagings of belatedness generate stylistic innovation, enabling writers to situate themselves within global modernism and disclose the fraudulence of colonial modernization and its imposition of second‐hand forms. [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]

Academic conferences are events geared to disciplinary specialization, and much of the SoTL literature regarding scholarly gatherings addresses their benefits for graduate student apprenticeship. In our organization of the 22nd Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, we explored other forms of pedagogy to augment an academic professionalization approach. In particular, we created opportunities for cross-disciplinary teaching and learning, which have particular potential for Humanities students who may end up applying their discipline-specific training in non-academic contexts and in unexpected ways. This paper explores the possibilities and limitations of the cross-disciplinary initiatives that we developed for Interdisciplinary / Multidisciplinary Woolf. Inspired by the interdisciplinarity of the early 20th century British author Virginia Woolf and the current critical movement known as the New Modernist Studies, we outline the theories behind our approach to conference pedagogy and reflect upon our intentions and methods. We also assess learning outcomes in relation to both apprenticeship and non-traditional models of conference-based instructional design, and consider the institutional structures and practices that both enable and limit the scope of cross-disciplinary research and its dissemination at the undergraduate, graduate, and faculty levels. By moving away from the field of literary studies and sharing our scholarly teaching perspective in the context of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, we attempt to put into motion the potentially transformative disciplinary boundary-crossings that motivated the 2012 Woolf Conference. Les colloques universitaires sont des événements axés sur la spécialisation des disciplines et une grande partie des publications en ACEA concernant les rencontres savantes traitent de leurs avantages pour l’apprentissage des étudiants de cycles supérieurs. Lors de la préparation de notre XXe Colloque international annuel sur Virginia Woolf, nous avons exploré d’autres formes de pédagogie afin d’élargir l’approche de professionnalisation académique. En particulier, nous avons créé des opportunités d’enseignement et d’apprentissage pluridisciplinaire qui présentent un potentiel particulier pour les étudiants des humanités qui vont peut-être finir par mettre en application leur formation spécifique à leur discipline à des contextes non-académiques et de manières inattendues. Cet article explore les possibilités et les limites des initiatives pluridisciplinaires que nous avons développées pour notre colloque intitulé Woolf Interdisciplinaire / Pluridisciplinaire. Inspirés par l’interdisciplinarité de l’auteure britannique du début du XXe siècle, Virginia Woolf, et par le mouvement critique actuel qu’on appelle Études du nouveau modernisme, nous présentons les théories sous-jacentes à notre approche de la pédagogie des colloques et proposons une réflexion sur nos intentions et nos méthodes. Nous évaluons également les résultats d’apprentissage par rapport à l’apprentissage lui-même et par rapport aux modèles non traditionnels de conception de l’enseignement basé sur les cours magistraux et prenons en considération les structures et les pratiques institutionnelles qui favorisent mais qui limitent également l’étendue de la recherche pluridisciplinaire et sa diffusion aux niveaux du premier cycle, des cycles supérieurs et des professeurs. En nous éloignant du domaine des études littéraires et en partageant notre perspective d’enseignement intellectuel dans le contexte de l’Avancement des connaissances en enseignement et en apprentissage, nous tentons de mettre en mouvement les possibilités de franchissement des limites disciplinaires transformateur qui ont motivé le colloque sur Virginia Woolf de 2012.

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]

Ronan Crowley reviews Flann O’Brien & Modernism (2014), edited by Julian Murphet, Rónán McDonald, and Sascha Morrell.To read the article, click Download or View PDF.

This panel was meant to initiate a series of similar encounters to be organized during the Société d’Études Anglaises Contemporaines’ conferences and workshops to come. This first panel gave the participants the occasion to embrace a broad spectrum of critical issues ranging from New Modernist studies to ‘world literature’. It was meant to be deliberately far-ranging, as a way of laying the general foundations the panels to come and possibly engage with issues relating to world literature and the cultural remit of contemporary “British” literary production.

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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]

We are now at a point in literary studies where the modernist bookshelf is certainly being overhauled, with a scrupulous eye to bleaching it of prejudicial coloring. However, acts of restitution can sometimes be self-fulfilling, especially as guided by the imperatives of creolizing bookshelves. In other words, the line between coloring and uncoloring wears worryingly thin as writers who lend color to the canon are incorporated in the name of an allegedly colorblind academic and intellectual expansionism but where their slippages and departures from the (white) modernist canon become both the criterion and the casualty. This essay takes Jean Rhys's "The Day they Burned the Books" (1960) as entry point to argue that in this later story as in her interwar writings, the writer ironizes processes of circulation and incorporation, and hence offers commentary on academic and literary circuits, and indeed her own resurrected currency within these. If modernism is seen as that originary moment of miscegenated literary and cultural landscapes in the west, and given that new modernist studies continues to draw on that prospect of coloration, then Rhys's story comes back to haunt those claims of color-transcendence, or alternately an active coloration, by locating the debate in the color-fraught colonial Caribbean. This later story approaches changing literary structures via Rhys's brushes with the modernist moment, whether contemporaneous or current and in the process nudges us to think about the curatorial procedures that undergird and 'color' the idealized democratic conception of sites such as libraries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Irmgard Keun's novels of the Weimar Republic (1919-1933), Gilgi: One of Us (1931) and The Artificial Silk Girl (1932), provide evidence for German Modern Girls' desire to cultivate and articulate public, autonomous selves, through the language of fashion and material goods. This article argues that fashion allows Keun to render this female desire visible and that Keun's focus on the material world aligns with the new modernist studies' complication of earlier conceptions of modernism, which emphasized characters' inner lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]