The term “identification” denotes both a social procedure (the act of recognition by which a person is acknowledged, formally or informally, to be a specific individual) and a genre of text (the marks, signs, or documents, such as signets, signatures, passports, ID cards, and birth certificates, which formally record and enable that procedure). Like many forms of literary narrative, the genres of identification are explicitly concerned with questions of the stability—or mutability—of the self. Who is this person? Do people change? If so, what, if anything, remains constant: how can we be confident that this is “the same” person? How much control do individuals have over the recording and representation of their personal characteristics? And how do those objective records relate, or fail to relate, to lived experiences of unique subjectivity? One distinction to be drawn between literary narrative and identification is the different value each has tended to give to temporality. Put simply, an identificatory technique is deemed to be the more effective the more capable it is of excluding from the process of identification those personal characteristics that might alter over time. Fingerprints and DNA, for instance, are among the most valuable identificatory tools because they remain constant from before birth until after death. Photographs, meanwhile, possess some identificatory value, but many factors can cause rapid and drastic changes in an individual’s physical appearance: this is one reason passports and similar documents include expiration dates and must be renewed. Narratives, on the other hand, are by definition temporal structures. They tell us that certain things happened or failed to happen. They frequently register and explore change and transition, and even narratives concerned with stasis and changelessness are obliged to acknowledge and account for the passage of time.
In this sense, identification and narrative would seem to be at odds with one another. Identification exists to formalize the attribution of identity by rendering narrative irrelevant: the border guard who demands a valid passport will not accept an autobiography in its place. Yet several features of identification complicate this apparent antagonism. Firstly, identification documents function not only to record identities, but actively to constitute both individual identities and the broader concept of identity in a given society. They become not just records which diminish the significance of narrative, but constituent parts of the way individuals understand their place in society and by extension their own experience. Identification becomes part of the stories that individuals tell themselves, and tell about themselves. Secondly, because officially ratified forms of identification have a unique probative force, they themselves have become powerful tools in the production of stories and selves. The criminal who wishes to manufacture or steal a new identity must become adept in the deployment of official documents as a way of authenticating a fictitious claim to recognition. Finally—as countless scenes of identification trouble in fictional works suggest—the moment at which citizens are obliged to identify themselves by recourse to the data contained in identity documents frequently generates a reaction in the form of a heightened sense of individuality. The modern citizen is never more conscious of the complexity of their own story than at the moment when they hand over the misleading simplification, printed on passport or ID card, which constitutes their “identity.” Over the 20th century in particular, as modern systems of identity management became ever more technologically complex and bureaucratically stringent, literary works found new ways to describe and explain the effects of such systems on individuals and on the societies they inhabit.
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Article
Alison Shonkwiler
Realism is a historical phenomenon that is not of the past. Its recurrent rises and falls only attest to its persistence as a measure of representational authority. Even as literary history has produced different moments of “realism wars,” over the politics of realist versus antirealist aesthetics, the demand to represent an often strange and changing reality—however contested a term that may be—guarantees realism’s ongoing critical future.
Undoubtedly, realism has held a privileged position in the history of Western literary representation. Its fortunes are closely linked to the development of capitalist modernity, the rise of the novel, the emergence of the bourgeoisie, and the expansion of middle-class readerships with the literacy and leisure to read—and with an interest in reading about themselves as subjects. While many genealogies of realism are closely tied to the history of the rise of the novel—with Don Quixote as a point of departure—it is from its later, 19th-century forms that critical assumptions have emerged about its capacities and limitations. The 19th-century novel—whether its European or slightly later American version—is taken as the apex of the form and is tied to the rise of industrial capitalism, burgeoning ideas of social class, and expansion of empire. Although many of the realist writers of the 19th century were self-reflexive about the form, and often articulated theories of realism as distinct from romance and sentimental fiction, it was not until the mid-20th century, following the canonization of modernism in English departments, that a full-fledged critical analysis of realism as a form or mode would take shape. Our fullest articulations of realism therefore owe a great deal to its negative comparison to later forms—or, conversely, to the effort to resuscitate realism’s reputation against perceived critical oversimplifications. In consequence, there is no single definition of realism—nor even agreement on whether it is a mode, form, or genre—but an extraordinarily heterogenous set of ways of approaching it as a problem of representation.
Standard early genealogies of realism are to be found in historical accounts such as Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel and György Lukács’ Theory of the Novel and The Historical Novel, with a guide to important critiques and modifications to be found in Michael McKeon’s Theory of the Novel. This article does not retrace those critical histories. Nor does it presume to address the full range of realisms in the modern arts, including painting, photography, film, and video and digital arts. It focuses on the changing status of realism in the literary landscape, uses the fault lines of contemporary critical debates about realism to refer back to some of the recurrent terms of realism/antirealism debates, and concludes with a consideration of the “return” to realism in the 21st century.
Article
James Chandler
“Sentiment” is a term that signifies differently in its different English forms (sentiments, sentimental, sentimentality, sentimentalism), and these forms themselves signify differently at different times and in different languages. In French, whence it derives, the verb sentir means “to feel” or “to sense,” and a relatively clear distinction can be made in that language between sentir and penser (“to think”), and likewise between un sentiment and une pensée. In English, however, especially in the 18th century when the notion of the sentiment became central to empiricist moral philosophy, the term tends to straddle thought and feeling. In the accelerated development of the concept in the work of David Hume and his friend Adam Smith, sentiment might best be understood as feeling reflected in thought, which later figured centrally in William Wordsworth’s account of the poetic process. Even before Wordsworth, Laurence Sterne had deployed the recently coined English adjective sentimental, and he exploited this new understanding to develop a new and massively influential mode of ambivalence in fiction. Such an understanding also helped to underwrite the fully elaborated 1795 theoretical intervention of the Anglophile German writer Friedrich Schiller, who had to invent the German adjective sentimentalisch from the Anglo-French term. Schiller distinguished the sentimental mode in poetry from the naive on the dual grounds, already established in British writings on the subject, that the sentimental involved “mixed feelings” born of an act of “reflection.” Even as this more technical understanding of the sentimental mode was being developed, however, critique of “sentimentality” in a strictly pejorative sense was underway. In modernist literary theory, certainly, much energy is mobilized around this critique, as is clear from a foundational work in the institution of “practical criticism” by I. A. Richards at Cambridge, who produced a full taxonomy of the forms of sentimentality, a deviant kind of emotional responsiveness he opposed to another, which he called “inhibition.” The modernist intolerance of what it called “sentimentality” would be taken up as part of a broader and more programmatic critique of commercialized culture under capitalism in later work by Frankfurt School theorists Max Horkheimer and T. W. Adorno and by Jean Baudrillard.
Article
The 20th century in Latin America began, in literary terms, with the emergence of Modernism, which exerted enormous influence over both sides of the Atlantic. From then on, the literature of the region—at least the literature written in Spanish and Portuguese—has been on a long process of assimilation in favor of the best features of the universal tradition enriched with the specificities of Latin American culture and history. Impacted both by competing aesthetic trends and social and political upheaval, the literature of Latin America provides a unique place from which to observe the contradictions of the region, as well as to attempt to answer the major questions that the region poses. Some basic certitudes do not prevent one recurring question from coming up: Does a Latin American literature exist? The answer is more complex than it appears on the surface, but the truth is that the most significant and ambitious moments of that literature—Modernism, the Vanguards, and the celebrated boom of the novel in the 1960s—have been those in which Latin American writers have been recognized as belonging to a common literary space. A journey through fictional narrative, poetry, essays, and even a relatively new genre such as testimony can attest to the way in which Latin Americans see themselves and think of themselves, with their own national and regional specificities and, in contrast with the others, beyond the space of the region. In the last decade of the 20th century, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Latin America was no longer what it had been for thirty years. By then, revolutionary dreams, guerrillas, the long nights of dictatorships, and the recovery of democracy—just to mention a few of its most recognizable aspects—felt like a distant past. In this context, a new generation emerged in order to close out the 20th century, and beyond that, to begin the 21st. To read, even if it is from a bird’s eye view, the interval between the Modernists to the 21st-century generation is the aim of these pages.
Article
The reception of American literature in Japan was radically altered after the Second World War. Before the war, only a handful of works on American literature were published, and the status of American literature was secondary to that of British literature. Unlike in Germany, whose occupation at the end of the war was divided among the Allies, the military occupation of Japan was conducted unilaterally by the United States. Under the U.S. occupation, American literature was introduced as part of a cultural policy aimed at the reorientation and re-education of Japanese society under the umbrella concept of demilitarization and democratization of postwar Japan. Such cultural politics was the product of a 1930s U.S. State Department program carried out at first in South American countries and then through the Office of War Information in war-torn European countries.
American literature was introduced through the program of the Culture, Information and Education (CIE) section of General Headquarters, Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (GHQ/SCAP). In accordance with the transformation of the U.S. literary canon as the cultural Cold War regime developed, the book selections of the CIE changed from reflecting the multicultural, New Deal ideal (including books under the Federal Writers Project) to incorporating the modernist canon. American books were distributed to CIE libraries established in major cities in Japan, and in 1948, the CIE launched a new program to promote translations into Japanese. Beside the official distribution, there was also a trade in American books—including Armed Services Editions, which were not meant for sale—on the Japanese used book market. What was really pivotal for instituting American literary studies and its modernist canon were the summer seminars sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation and held at the University of Tokyo and Kyoto University. The Rockefeller report submitted to Secretary of State John Foster Dulles in 1951 was also instrumental in providing a blueprint for the continued cultural program after the peace treaty of 1951 and the end of military occupation the following year.
The introduction of American literature and its newly reformed canon tuned for modernism occurred within the continuum of the political, the military, and the economic. As such, the cultural program was enmeshed with refashioning Japanese subjectivity, and in this sense, American literature and American studies were part of a general cultural politics that was intertwined with the ways of government.
Article
Heather Bowen-Struyk
Modern Japanese literature emerged as Japan asserted itself as a military-industrial power from the end of the 19th through the early 20th centuries. The subject of modern literature was worthy of a seat at the table of the world’s powers, or so goes the story of a literary canon all too often focused on the legitimacy of elites. But modern literature is not only about a male alienated intellectual failing to have a satisfying relationship. During the international “red decade” (1925–1935), proletarian writers in Japan as elsewhere sought to harness and transform the technology of modern literature in order to represent the hitherto un- or underrepresented women and men, peasants and factory workers, elderly and children in order to bring the masses into consciousness of their collective power. For a decade, nearly every writer in Japan engaged the energetic but often divided proletarian movement as they sought to grasp the challenges of a rapidly modernizing society, transformation in the family and gender, dual economy, worldwide depression, and escalating imperialism.
Largely overlooked during the Cold War, this important decade of modern literature has experienced a well-deserved scholarly and popular revival in a period of 21st-century precarity, protests against privilege, and questioning of media and representation. Two exemplars from proletarian literature—Hayama Yoshiki’s “The Prostitute” (1925) and Miyamoto Yuriko’s “The Breast” (1935)—offer a frame to apprehend the richness of genre, voice, storytelling, experimentation, and ethics in proletarian literature, a vital part of modern literature.
Article
Brett C. Millier
Marianne Moore (1887–1972) is now considered a major Modernist poet, along with her friends Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams. Winner of the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the Bolligen Prize, she was for a time (roughly 1955–1965) the most recognizable American poet (alongside Robert Frost), and her tiny pale face, wrapped by a long braid of white hair, and topped by a black tricorn hat, was known by many more people than knew her poems. The fey charm of her celebrity obscured for a long time her unique contribution to the Modernist poetic enterprise. Moore was an editor, critic, and translator, and edited the modernist journal the Dial from 1925–1929. As a poet, she wrote elaborately structured (she often wrote in syllabics, counting every syllable in every line and stanza) contemplations of the animal world, but with an eye to finding analogies in animal behavior for humanity’s moral struggles. A lifelong resident of New York City, Moore encountered nature in circuses and zoos, and in the pages of the National Geographic magazine, and often made use of lines from that magazine and other prose work in her poems, included in quotation marks. In addition nature and animals, her work is notable for its broad range of somewhat quirky subject matter. The elaborate formal structures of her poems conceal their absolutely correct grammatical construction; Moore claimed that she called them poems because she didn’t know what else to call them. Immune to the influence of literary fashion, she pursued her own goals of “humility, concentration, and gusto” in the composition of rigorously crafted, utterly idiosyncratic art.
Article
Charles Hannon and Ethan King
William Faulkner (1897–1962) is widely considered the most important and influential writer from the US South. Although his novels often depict a provincial region of the Deep South (the fictional Yoknapatawpha County), Faulkner is much more than just a Southern writer. He is at once an American writer and a global one. In addition to documenting the fraught racial histories and consequences of colonialism and slavery, his novels address the economic, cultural, and technological transformations of modernity, elaborating the effects that the rapidly changing modern world had on identity, region, history, race, sex, gender, politics, and temporality. Yet, his professed goal as a writer was simple: to get at the truth of “the human heart in conflict with itself.”
His unorthodox style and experimental narrative structure, not to mention his deep investment in representing human consciousness, positioned him as a writer of high literary modernism alongside other international writers such as James Joyce. His novels The Sound and the Fury (1929) and As I Lay Dying (1930) attempted to represent individual psychology by experimentally collating different narrative sections through different narrators, each providing aspects of and perspectives on the plot. Although these works did not find success initially, Sanctuary (1931), a novel about violence, sex, and crime, attracted considerable attention not only for its sensational plot, but also for its filmic techniques.
After publishing Light in August (1932) and working several stints as a scriptwriter in Hollywood, Faulkner published Absalom, Absalom! (1936), which is thought by many to be his masterpiece. Told and retold from competing perspectives, the story of Thomas Sutpen, the brutal would-be founder of a Southern dynasty, weaves a complex historiographic web, calling into question the ways people create and transmit history and meaning. Absalom retains the artistic and philosophical interests of his earlier novels but shifts from private psychology to the social psychology of the South upon confronting the traumas and racial complexities of its own past and present.
After World War II, Faulkner’s work became slightly less experimental, as he continued to sketch out the people and history of Yoknapatawpha County. During this time, he wrote, among other works, three novels about the social and economic rise of a poor white family named Snopes against the backdrop of the decline of the region’s aristocratic families (The Hamlet [1940], The Town [1957], and The Mansion [1959]); a novelized collection of short stories that offered a composite history of a plantation and its descendants (Go Down, Moses [1942]); and an antiracist novel (Intruder in the Dust [1948]). Although he was well known in international literary spheres, Faulkner’s national reputation only cemented itself upon the publication in 1946 of an anthology of his writings, The Portable Faulkner, put together by Malcolm Cowley. In 1950, Faulkner was the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. He continued writing until his death in 1962, having published nineteen novels and numerous short stories that are still revered today.
Article
John Wharton Lowe
Transnationalism and Global Studies have exploded old notions of artificial cultural boundaries, opening to view the myriad cross currents between the U.S. South and the Caribbean. Thus, the literature produced by the wider region of the circumCaribbean can be considered to reflect this interplay and as an alternative history to chronicles bounded by nationalism. While the age of contact and contest, the Haitian Revolution, and the U.S.–Mexican War were early focal points for interchange, the mutual influences of cultures have been dynamic, ongoing, and intricately connected to immigration, diaspora, racial conflict and mixing, and the creation of new forms of cultural expression. Nowhere is this dynamic more evident than in the literature of the circumCaribbean, especially in the new forms it has taken over the past fifty years.
Article
In the history of modern Japanese literature, the Taishō era (1912–1926) is retrospectively identified as a period characterized by a liberal arts ideology, individualism, a democratic spirit, aestheticism, and anti-naturalism. In the latter half of the Taishō era, the liberal arts ideology was gradually replaced by socialism. After the Great Earthquake of 1923, Japanese literature was enmeshed in a triangular contest between the old-fashioned “‘I’ novel” (or psychological novel), proletarian literature, and modernist literature (especially the neo-sensualists). This structure of the literary world, in parallel with the rise of popular literature, continued into the prewar Shōwa era (1926–1945).
During the Taishō era, Walt Whitman and Edgar Allan Poe were the most influential and respected American writers. Whitman’s writing offered Taishō writers, including Takeo Arishima and poets of the popular poetry school, a model of living that was free and natural and a colloquial-style free verse. But for the modern Japanese literati from the Taishō to the prewar Shōwa era, the most influential American writer was without a doubt Edgar Allan Poe. Poe’s works served as a creative inspiration to Taishō novelists such as Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, Haruo Satō, and Ryūosuke Akutagawa, many of whom shared a creative perspective that was based on a blend of anti-naturalism and aestheticism. Influenced by Poe, they attempted diverse variations on the themes of the fantastic and of doppelgängers and even experimented with detective stories. Needless to say, Poe helped to establish the detective story genre in Japan through Rampo Edogawa and others. For early Shōwa literati, Poe was a forerunner of modern critical theory.
Among Japanese readers, around 1920, American literature ceased to be read as a sub-branch of British literature and began to be read as American literature proper. From the Great Earthquake and up through the prewar Shōwa era, three distinctive periods can be discerned when American literature was energetically translated and introduced. The first period was from the end of Taishō to the start of Shōwa, when American “socialist” literature—in the broad sense of writers like Upton Sinclair—left a deep mark on Japanese proletarian literature. The second period was around 1930–1931, when contemporary modernist American novels were translated and published in various anthology forms. The third peak came around 1935–1938, when bestselling American historical romances or epics such as Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth and Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind were published and gained a large readership.
Article
Lauren Arrington
Although Irish writers were foundational to English-language modernism, Irish Modernism is a new field in literary studies. Embedded imperial frameworks and assumptions about Irish traditionalism have been an obstacle to recognizing Irish Modernism, despite the importance of Irish writing to the development of modernism as a whole. Informed by postcolonial and transnational theory, a reading of Irish Modernism accommodates writers who lived and wrote in and about Ireland, as well as those who were Irish by birth but who lived and worked outside of the country, such as James Joyce; who wrote in languages other than English or Irish, such as Samuel Beckett; or whose political allegiances are at odds with the rise of the separatist nation state, such as Elizabeth Bowen. Irish Modernism has its genesis in the Irish Revival (ca. 1880s–1910s), a popular movement that sought to create a distinctive Irish culture. The little magazines and literary theaters that arose out of the Revival were often aesthetically conservative in themselves; nonetheless, they became venues for literature that was radical in form. Just as early modernist writing arose out of the Revival, high modernist literature was provoked by a rejection of the Revival’s values. These reactions are exemplified in William Butler Yeats’s poetry from The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910), in which he castigates the Irish public for its religious conservatism, and in Joyce’s Dubliners (1914) and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). Late modernism, which is typified by a weakening of the tropes of high modernism to make way for a more politically engaged literature, not only includes well-known Anglophone writers but also the work of Brian Ó Nualláin/Flann O’Brien and Máirtín Ó Cadhain, whose satires were formally and politically radical.
Article
McKenzie Wark
The concepts of spectacle and détournement are closely associated with the Paris-based postwar avant-garde movement known as the Situationist International. Spectacle is meant to work as a concept that critiques not this or that aspect of media culture, but its totality. It reveals the spectacle as the double, in the world of consumption, of capitalist commodity production. Détournement is the practice which opposes spectacle by refusing all forms of private property in the production of cultural works. While the Situationist International expired as a movement in 1972, these concepts were subsequently taken up by others, although most often shorn of the revolutionary impulse their linkage was meant to forge. This is why it is important to stress the origins of these concepts in both Western Marxism and also in the radical avant-garde movements of the prewar period. Guy Debord, a central animating presence in the Situationist International, was drawing on militant Marxist thinkers such as Georg Lukács and Henri Lefebvre, as well as the lesser-known Belgian branch of the Surrealist avant-garde. Understood as keys to a unified critical theory and practice, spectacle and détournement can be retrieved from merely descriptive studies of literature and media, and also from more narrowly formalist avant-garde literary practices.
Article
Woosung Kang
Thing is a categorically indeterminate and comprehensive concept that cannot easily be pinned down to any single or specific meaning. It has a long history of heterogeneous significations, from material objects, through legal issues, to supersensible noumena. For modern philosophies of subjectivity, things are reducible to that which is available for human thinking and acting. Things are represented as objects for the subject in the form of presence-at-hand, and this representational relationship forms the basic structure of the world in modernity. Under the capitalist system of commodity exchanges, moreover, this anthropocentric relationship with things undergoes what is called reification or fetishism, which turns all things human into relations between objects. The objectification of things makes it possible for humans to dominate the world, but fetishism in turn dominates human beings as mere objects. Heidegger’s attempt to deconstruct this objectification reverberates with the Marxist critique of capitalist commodification, and in literature, with the modernist endeavor to overcome reification. These efforts to secure the thingness of the thing are linked to the early 21st century’s efforts to re-establish non-humanistic relations with things and the world. Recently, under the banner of an “ontological turn,” there has been an explosion of interest in things, motivated in particular by growing concerns about anthropocentrism. Indeed, in the face of unprecedented technological change and hyper-digitalization, a new relation between human and nonhuman is desperately required. New ontologies thus try to build a non-hierarchal, object-oriented, monistic universe of hybrids, quasi-objects, and assemblages, such that human beings become only a part of the parliament of things.
Article
David Trotter
The term “medium” has a long and complicated history. In its most general sense, it originally meant an intermediate agency, instrument, or substance. During the 19th century, it acquired two further common meanings, first as the raw material or mode of expression distinguishing a particular artistic practice, and then, in the sense now prevalent, as a channel of mass communication. For much of its history, literature’s primary medium (or “channel”) has been the printed book, which remains an object of theoretical as well as historical enquiry, often in a comparative context. Since around 1850, the proliferation of technical media—from telegraph and telephone through film, radio, and television to the internet and the mobile phone—has piled comparative context upon comparative context for the study of literature to take into account. From its origins in the 1920s, media theory has tended to reverse engineer an understanding of what a “medium” is and does from its description and analysis of specific material technologies in operation. Its original focus, with film, radio, and television in mind, was on the medium as technical and ideological instrument. However, as material technologies have become ever widespread, sophisticated, and diverse, so their function has begun to resemble that of an intervening agency or substance, rather than that of an instrument.
Article
Alisa Ballard Lin
Few theatrical epochs have had the lasting international impact of Russian modernist theater. The two most influential theater directors to emerge from this era, Konstantin Stanislavsky and Vsevolod Meyerhold, continue to provide rich fodder in their acting theories and performance practices for contemporary theater creators worldwide. Meanwhile, the early 20th century in Russian theater was a time of fierce theoretical and practice-based polemics, rapid technological development, and monumental shifts in theatrical practice as actors were trained in specific internal and external (bodily) techniques and directors took on increasingly more importance for the creative design of a production. At the same time, popular theater was a major avenue of theatrical development in the era, with cabaret and other minor forms enjoying great popularity in Russia and on tours abroad, while avant-garde artists like the Russian futurists created shocking street-based performance art that capitalized on the modernist sense of newness and rejection of the past. Points of debate in studies of Russian modernist theater include disagreement over the definition of what counts as modernist and how seriously to take the polarization and polemics that these theater artists themselves espoused. While modernist theater in Europe is known for its emphasis on closet drama, on grand experiments that were ultimately unperformable, and on mistrust of language and representation, performance practice took a related but different path in Russian culture in the first decades of the 20th century. Despite a great diversity of performance styles, venues, and audiences, theater in the age of Russian modernism unifies around a few key points. First, it placed great emphasis on honing and highlighting the various physical and mental skills of the actor. Second, Russian modernist theater generally valued language and the literary tradition, both Russian and global, despite some efforts to break with literature in theater. Third, theater of this era presented a tone of irony, self-consciousness, and theatricalism. In all its manifestations, it was experimental and self-reflexive, interrogating theater’s relationship to the world and boldly devising new forms. Fourth, Russian modernist theater was richly integrated into its artistic, intellectual, and political context, with ties to science, philosophy, psychology, visual arts, music, dance, film, and literature. Theater came to serve the political ends of the young Soviet nation in the 1920s, though politics were not a predominant force in theater throughout Russian modernism. Theater was not immediately strongly affected by the Russian Revolution of 1917, but by the end of the 1920s, theater was forced to bend to the strong will of Soviet censors, and by the mid-1930s, theatrical innovation was greatly diminished under Stalin-era censorship and its insistence on the style of socialist realism, as well as the general threat of the Stalinist Terror.
Article
Writers have always been conscious of the contribution that clothes can make to their work—as material objects, as outward signs of inner character, and as metaphors, especially for language itself. In the early 20th century, however, a time of rapid technological change, as well as of industrialization, globalization, and urbanization, literary interrogations and descriptions of dress evolved to respond to the new ways in which garments were designed, made, marketed, and sold, and to fashion’s increasing pervasiveness in society. Particularly sensitive to these changes were many of the writers associated with modernism, who shared with the nascent fashion industry a preoccupation with questions of novelty and the presentation of the self. Russia was no exception, and there poets, playwrights, and novelists explored and exploited the meanings of clothes and fashion in order to address the urgent questions concerning sex, gender, and race that were thrown up by life in the modern city. Moreover, as elsewhere, these explorations were not limited to the page; rather, writers’ own wardrobes played a part, especially among those who styled themselves as dandies. In other ways, however, Russia diverged from the European norm in its relationship to clothes and fashion and, therefore, in their intersection with literature. First, the habit of appropriating motifs and styles from non-European cultures, which was further galvanized by the modernist turn away from 19th-century culture, had a very different significance in Russia. The long history of ambivalence about Russia’s place in European culture meant that Russians were capable of finding the exotic in their own backyard, leading, for instance, to a vogue for peasant poets. Second, Russia experienced a particularly intense craze for masquerades in the first two decades of the century, which was both reflected in contemporary literature and, in part, a product of an obsession with the connection between inner essences and outer appearances that also manifested itself in modernist poetry. Third, Russian writers of the time were more inclined than most to see their work as part of a wider transformative mission; this often took the form of an attempt to overcome the perceived division between life and art by infusing the everyday with creativity. Clothes, both on the page and in the streets, were an important front in this battle. Finally, the upheaval caused by the revolutions of 1917 and the emergence of the socialist state had profound effects on the organization of fashion as both industry and discourse. Some writers responded by imagining the post-fashion future; others by involving themselves in reconfiguring what socialist commodities might look like; still others by criticizing a surprisingly resilient consumer culture, at least until the Stalin-inspired reorganization of many aspects of society, including fashion and literature, in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
Article
Jordan Carroll
While obscenity is notoriously difficult to define and the test for determining obscenity has shifted over time, typically the term has referred to the crime of publishing prohibited, sexually explicit material. Obscenity has always been a criminal offense in the United States. Citing English common law, judges in the early republic and antebellum periods maintained that obscenity threatened to degrade the nation’s character. Nevertheless, obscenity law was not strongly or consistently enforced throughout the United States until the Comstock Act in 1873. Anthony Comstock, founder of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, targeted Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass along with publications by advocates for feminism, free love, and birth control. American courts adopted the test put forth by Lord Chief Justice Sir Alexander Cockburn in Regina v. Hicklin (1868), which held that obscenity was defined by “the tendency . . . to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences, and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall.” Obscenity became a battleground not only for debates about gender and sexual politics but also about the nature of the public sphere. During the 20th century, American literary presses and magazines became increasingly willing to challenge bans on sexually explicit speech, publishing controversial works including The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall and Ulysses by James Joyce. Modernist authors transgressed the legal bounds of propriety to explore the unconscious, fight for erotic pleasure free from heteronormative restraints, or claim aesthetic autonomy from moral and legal restrictions. United States v. One Book Called “Ulysses” (1933) struck a blow against the Hicklin test. Affirming Judge John M. Woolsey’s not guilty verdict, Judge Augustus Hand proposed a new test for obscenity that anticipated many of the themes that would emerge when the Supreme Court took up this question with Roth v. United States (1957), which defined obscenity as “whether to the average person, applying contemporary community standards, the dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to the prurient [i.e., sexual] interest.” The Court liberalized obscenity law even as it maintained restrictions on pornographic literature, setting off a wave of censorship cases including trials on Howl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg, Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence, Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller, and Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs. After Roth, lawyers defending borderline obscene publishers pushed for courts to hold that a work could not be obscene if it possessed any redeeming literary or social value. Free speech libertarians succeeded with Memoirs v. Massachusetts (1966) and Redrup v. New York (1967). Although Miller v. California (1973) clawed back this ruling by stipulating that a work must possess “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value” to be cleared of obscenity, in the 21st century obscenity convictions for publishing textual media have been limited to a handful of cases concerning pornographic depictions of child sexual abuse. Obscenity remains on the books but largely unenforced for literature.
Article
Michael Levenson
The year 1922 has been known as the annus mirabilis (“miracle year”) of Anglo-American literary modernism, chiefly because of the near-simultaneous publication of T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” James Joyce’s Ulysses, and Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room. The distinctive historical character of 1922 remains an ongoing concern: the year was at once a time of traumatic memory of World War I and a moment of renewed ambition for the radical experiments of modernism. During the war, Eliot, Joyce, and Woolf had enjoyed an unusual opportunity to revise and extend their aesthetic ambitions. Each of their works registers the more defiant provocation of postwar literature, but each confronts the powerful resistance of cultural and political authorities who saw the efforts, especially of Eliot and Joyce, as both meaningless and dangerous. The postwar period also saw the rapid expansion of new technologies (especially in transport and telecommunications) and a consumer society keen to enjoy the availability of freshly circulating material goods. D. H. Lawrence described the end of war as both a relief and a menace. This double valence captures the contrast between searing memories of battlefield death and anticipation of pleasure and plenitude in the Jazz Age. The central figures in this entry are at once newly confident in the adversarial mission of modernism and fully aware of the social complacency and cultural conservatism arrayed against them. The immediate felt disturbance of these works came through their formal challenge, in particular through the intersecting uses of many-voiced and multi-perspectival montage, an assemblage of fragmentary views, and a diversity of speaking tones. This conspicuous technique appears in closely related terms within the early films of Dziga Vertov and the postwar philosophy of logical atoms developed by Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein. But the formal inventiveness exhibited during the year is no more prominent than the social concern. Especially as in 21st century, historical studies of the period have recovered the depth of interest in questions of race, empire, sexual debility, and social failure.
Article
Gabriele Rippl
Ekphrasis is a Greek term whose etymological meaning is “to speak out” or “to show in full.” Debates on ekphrasis go back to classical antiquity and Homer’s lines on Hephaestos making Achilles’ shield in Book 18 of the epic The Iliad (8th century bce). Ekphrasis was considered a mode of speaking capable of bringing absent things before the listener’s inner eye by aiming at enargeia, a vivid quality of language producing evidentia (evidence) and rousing emotions through lively, precise, and detailed verbal descriptions. Over the centuries, the term underwent a considerable narrowing-down of its original meaning and eventually, during the Second Sophistic, came to designate the description of works of art. However, ancient ekphrasis, in the broader sense of detailed and lively description, had a rich afterlife throughout the Middle Ages (e.g., in Geoffrey Chaucer), the Renaissance (e.g., in Shakespeare), Neoclassicism (in Joseph Addison’s essays and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s “Laocoön”), and even into the Romantic Age (e.g., in William Wordsworth and George Gordon Byron). In its narrower sense as verbal representation/evocation of or response to a work of art or visual object, it is a ubiquitous phenomenon in 19th-, 20th-, and 21st-century literature, be it poetry or narrative fiction. Many modernist, postmodernist, and post-postmodernist literary texts are replete with ekphrases, but these ekphrases very often question any mimetic or illusionist aesthetic and no longer exclusively follow the paragonal model: instead of competing with one another, ekphrastic word-image configurations are more adequately described as intermedial constellations and collaborations. As a pertinent feature of 20th- and 21st-century poetry and narrative fiction—examples are novels by Julian Barnes, Antonia Susan Byatt, Teju Cole, Siri Hustvedt, or Donna Tartt—ekphrasis has also attracted the attention of literary scholars and theoreticians of culture. Due to the many attempts to conceptualize and theorize ekphrasis, any attempt to give a simple definition will not suffice. In the 1980s and 1990s scholars such as Murray Krieger, William John Thomas Mitchell, and James Heffernan theorized ekphrasis: while Krieger saw ekphrasis as a symptom of the semiotic desire for the natural sign and Mitchell discussed ekphrasis within a paragonal framework of socio-cultural power relations, Heffernan defined ekphrasis as the verbal representation of visual representation. Included among the seminal concepts and definitions of ekphrasis in the early 21st century are approaches from phenomenology and cognitive poetics or new reception aesthetics, the digital humanities, postcolonial and transcultural studies, and the environmental humanities. By going beyond questions of representation that have dominated ekphrastic criticism for a long time, functions of ekphrasis, in particular socio-cultural and ethical functions, have gained new attention.
Article
Julian Murphet
Character is a property of narrative and discursive textuality, even as it is also a moral and ethical category referring to individual and collective norms of behavior and motive. This double valence has affected the concept since Aristotle and Plato first began the unfinished, centuries-long project of literary theory. On the one hand, stemming from Aristotle, there has been a tradition of formalist conceptions of character, understanding it as a device used by writers to drive narrative momentum and effect transformations within the discourse. The domain of action, and its variously entailed reactions and consequences, was thought to belong to the agents of narrative discourse by rights, while what was generally called their “character” typically concerned the incidental qualifications and explanations of their actions in speech and thought. Once that distinction is made, however, there are smaller and smaller units into which agency can logically be subdivided, and more and more arbitrary and capricious qualities of character used to flesh out an abstract narratological principle. The histories of formalism, structuralism, and poststructuralism attest to this labor of specialization and fissiparous subdivision of the bound concepts of agent and character. On the other hand, stemming from Plato, we see a centuries-long interest in the mutually interactive relations between imaginary persons, or fictional selves, and the fashioning of public or social selves in regimes of education and discipline. The question of the role of literary characters in the formation of good citizens, or indeed delinquent ones, is one that refuses to go away, since it has proven impossible to separate fiction from reality in the complex processes of self-fashioning through which every subject must go. One last matter of interest has exerted more theoretical influence over the concept in recent years, and that is the topic of affects: the qualities and intensities of human feelings can be seen to have had a major bearing on the writing and elaboration of fictional beings, and vice versa, at least since the late 19th century.
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