The Edinburgh Dictionary of Modernism 9780748637041

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The Edinburgh Dictionary of Modernism

THE EDINBURGH DICTIONARY OF MODERNISM

2 Edited by Vassiliki Kolocotroni and Olga Taxidou

Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © editorial matter and organisation Vassiliki Kolocotroni and Olga Taxidou, 2018 © the chapters their several authors, 2018 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 11/13 Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 3702 7 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 3704 1 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 0 7486 8406 9 (epub) The right of Vassiliki Kolocotroni and Olga Taxidou to be identified as the editors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

Contents

Acknowledgements vi A Note on Entries vii List of Entries ix Introduction 1 THE EDINBURGH DICTIONARY OF MODERNISM Notes on Contributors

5 405

Acknowledgements

This volume was made possible by all the contributors who so generously shared their expertise and continued engagement with modernism. Our warmest thanks and gratitude go to them. As ever, Jackie Jones at Edinburgh University Press proved the ideal editor: patient, supportive and insightful. We thank her and her team at EUP, particularly Adela Rauchova and James Dale, who saw us through the final stages of the publication process. Special thanks are also due to Randall Stevenson, who was central to the inception of this project.

vi

A Note on Entries

A dictionary of modernism might appear to be a contradiction in terms: how to define and contain such a complex, diverse and often conflicting set of practices and concepts that often actively position themselves against categorisation, fixed definition or listing? That is a productive paradox, however, as modernism may itself dictate ways of thinking openly and oppositionally about its contemporary moments and operations. From our initial vision for this project, it became clear that we could not approach modernism without the meta-languages that it had itself created. In that respect, we decided to focus on the terms, concepts and movements articulated in and by modernism to offer a genealogy of sorts that places them within a historical perspective while also tracing their afterlife. The dictionary contains 247 entries but cannot claim to be exhaustive. Rather, the list of entries included here is generative. Through cross-referencing and suggestions for further reading, readers are encouraged, and we hope enabled, to create their own map of modernism based on the coordinates of key fact, contextualisation and often unique focus provided by our selection and the contributors’ approach. Each entry contains cross references to other entries (capitalised on their first occurrence) that expand and finesse the understanding of each term. The terms themselves move across disciplines, genres and chronological boundaries, and aim to capture the complex provenance and multiple manifestations and implications of a practice or notion associated with modernism. The entries are of varying lengths: approximately 200, 500 or 1,000 words, tackling in each case the importance for modernism of a movement (e.g. ‘Anarchism’, ‘Bolshevism’, ‘Surrealism’); concept (e.g. ‘aura’, ‘clinamen’, ‘parataxis’); formal feature (e.g. ‘allusion’, ‘stream of consciousness’, ‘montage’); art form (e.g. ‘dance’, ‘Noh theatre’, ‘opera’); project or grouping (e.g. ‘Collège de sociologie’, ‘Harlem Renaissance’, ‘Living Newspaper’); historical, political, scientific or disciplinary frame (‘Communism’, ‘Mathematics’, ‘Translation’, ‘War’); line of influence (e.g. ‘Bergsonism’, ‘Wagnerism’); recurrent vii

A Note on Entries figures and motifs (e.g. ‘the flâneur’, ‘machine’, ‘silence’); related formation (‘British Poetry Revival’, ‘The Edwardians’, ‘The New Apocalypse’); event (‘The Entartete Kunst exhibition’, ‘The World’s Fair’). They include examples, a short list of reading suggestions and works cited where appropriate. ‘Modernism’ features as the first entry, by way of brief introduction. Vassiliki Kolocotroni Olga Taxidou

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List of Entries

Abstraction Absurd Acéphale Aestheticism Agitprop Aleatorism Alienation Allusion Anarchism Androgyny Anthropology Apollonian Arrière-garde Art Nouveau L’art pour l’art Arts and Crafts Atonality Aura Automaton Autonomy Avant-garde

Cabaret Cadavre exquis Calligram Celtic Twilight Censorship Chance Charisma Chronophotography Chronotope Cinema Circus Clinamen Collage Collège de sociologie Colonialism Commitment Communism Concrete poetry Confessional poetry Constructivism Consumption Cosmopolitanism Critique Crowd Cruelty (Theatre of) Cubism Cubo-Futurism Culture Industry Cut-up

Base materialism Bauhaus Beat Generation Bergsonism Biomechanics Black Mountain College Bloomsbury Group Bolshevism British Poetry Revival Bureaucracy

Dada Dance Dandy ix

List of Entries Dasein De Stijl Death drive Decadence Degeneration Dionysian Dissonance Dream

Georgians, The Gesamtkunstwerk Gestus Global modernisms Gramophone Gyres Habit Haiku Harlem Renaissance, The Hellenism High modernism History Hysteria

Eccentrism Edwardians, The Ego-Futurism Egoism Elegy Empathy Empire Entartete Kunst Epic Theatre Epiphany Estrangement Eugenics Event Everyday Exile Experiment Expressionism

Illness Imagism Impersonality Impressionism Interior monologue Isms Jazz Jazz Age Kino-Eye Kitsch Kulchur

Fabianism Fauvism Feminism Fin de siècle Flâneur Fordism Formalism Fourth dimension Fragmentation Frankfurt School, The Free indirect style Free Verse Functionalism Futurism

L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Late modernism Lettrism Little magazines Living Newspaper Logopoeia Machine Madeleine Manifesto Marionette, The x

List of Entries Marxism Mass Culture Mass Observation Mathematics Mean Time Melancholia Melopoeia Memory Metropolis Mimesis Modernism (see Introduction) Modernity Monochrome Montage Mother Right Mythical method Mythopoeia

OULIPO Paideuma Parataxis ’Pataphysics P.E.N. Personal Landscape Phanopoeia Photomontage Picaresque Pleasure principle Post-Impressionism Postmodernism Pragmatism Primitivism Projective Verse Proletkult Psychoanalysis

Nationalism Naturalism Négritude Neo-Pagans, The Neo-primitivism Neo-romanticism New Apocalypse, The New Criticism New Negro, The New Objectivity New Woman, The New York School, The Newspapers Nihilism Noh Theatre

Quantum mechanics Race Rayonism Readymade Realism Reification Relativity Revolution Ritual Roman-fleuve Romanticism vs Classicism Sapphic modernism Science Fiction Secession Semiology/Semiotics Serialism Sexuality Shell shock Significant form Silence

Objective correlative Objectivism October Circle, The Oedipus Complex Opera Orientalism Ornament xi

List of Entries Socialist Realism Sound poetry Southern Agrarians Speed Spiritualism Spleen Statelessness Stream of consciousness Structuralism Suffrage movement Suprematism Surrealism Syllabic verse Symbolism

Totem Tradition Translation Turn Uncanny, The Uranianism Utopia Verfremdungseffekt Vorticism Wagnerism War Woman Question Word and image Working Class World’s Fair, The

Taboo Taylorism Technology Theory Theosophy

Zaum

xii

Introduction

MODERNISM It is one of the cleverest devices of the Modernists [. . .] to present their doctrines without order and systematic arrangement, in a scattered and disjointed manner, so as to make it appear as if their minds were in doubt or hesitation, whereas in reality they are quite fixed and steadfast. For this reason it will be of advantage, Venerable Brethren, to bring their teachings together here into one group, and to point out their interconnection, and thus to pass to an examination of the sources of the errors, and to prescribe remedies for averting the evil results.

Thus cautioned Pope Pius X, in ‘On the Doctrine of the Modernists’, his 1907 Encyclical aimed at exposing the errors of ‘modernist’ interpretations of Catholic dogma. An ‘Oath Against Modernism’ followed in September 1910, two months before the time when, as Virginia Woolf claimed, ‘human character changed’. Extending to fifty-seven paragraphs, this pious pronouncement cannot be faulted for its polemical rigour: in what must be one of the earliest attempts to define ‘modernism’ as a project, aligned with rationalism, secularism and modern philosophical theories such as bergsonism, Pius X shows himself keener to attribute a coherent and literally un-canonical agency to it than many contemporary scholars. Such definitional reluctance is understandable as the term in literary and art-historical contexts has been imposed retrospectively since its inception in the 1950s, as Raymond Williams has pointed out (Williams 1989: 48). In fact, it may be more appropriate to define modernism as what it is not: for Theodor W. Adorno, ‘modernism is not a positive slogan’; it is a ‘privative [concept], indicating firmly that something ought to be negated and what it is that ought to be negated’ (Adorno 2004: 30). In that sense, modernism can be said to be consistently oppositional, including in its own self-definition. Even when one insists on the fact of modernisms, that plurality cannot be said to cohere into an easily unifiable position. Modernism, then, is not a movement, or the sum total of its avant-gardes, their museum, archive or canon. Although 1

Introduction it cannot be thought (or taught) without ­reference or fidelity to the singular, combative challenges issued at their moment, innovative energies and experiments, their heroic failures and ongoing legacies, modernism is equally unthinkable without its arrière-garde, the resistance to the charge of the ‘new’ and the recourse to tradition as the literary superego or enduring pantheon within which true ‘individual talent’ would find its place. T. S. Eliot’s arbitration of such a jostling for position remains influential in accounts of modernism which pit the ‘high’ against the ‘low’, ‘centre’ against ‘periphery’, ‘the elite’ against ‘mass culture’. Such binaries underpin definitions of high modernism as an exclusive preoccupation composed of the distinctive and difficult oeuvre of a handful of European writers, whose totalising vision of art and the world marked modernism’s historical moment and instituted its canon. While this may be largely true of Anglophone modernism in its institutionalised form and mid-twentieth-century reception by the British and North American academy, the ‘New Modernist Studies’ and the renewed interest in global modernisms and theory have realigned critical focus with modernism’s international and transcultural horizons. In other words, the traditional pairing of modernism with new criticism in the Anglo-American academy tells a very partial story. Modernism is inconceivable without its theoretical idioms. For how can we dissociate the practices and projects we gather under the rubric of ‘modernism’ from the critical thought they harnessed and articulated in their moment and beyond? In that sense, one can argue, it is both illuminating and historically accurate to read Jacques Lacan with surrealism, Jacques Derrida with James Joyce, Julia Kristeva with Russian formalism, Cyborg theory with futurism, constructivism and the modernist preoccupation with the machine. By the same token, modernism can no longer be thought (or taught) as a monolingual or monocultural enterprise, as a single moment or high point; the many isms, projects and attempts that comprise its collective programme cannot be accessed without the work of translation, to which modernism owes its dissemination and productive creative encounters. Nor can modernism be disengaged from its deep preoccupation with history, as the past still haunting the present or as a series of catastrophes piling guilt and trauma onto collective and individual memory. The concern with the living legacies of colonialism and empire, the radical visions of sexuality and the participation in and invocation of revolution as the primary mode of action and thought for a full realisation of 2

Introduction human potential in the world of modernity distinguish modernism as a political phenomenon par excellence. The fundamental modernist mode of critique as self-reflection and resistance against final or finite categorisations is sometimes read as a concern with form and internalised perspectives developed in techniques such as the interior monologue or stream of consciousness, yet formal experimentation is unintelligible without its political dimensions. In this sense modernism can be seen as both an intensification of the aestheticism of the late nineteenth century and its politicisation, a productive tension that engaged the theorists of the frankfurt school and informed discussions of artistic autonomy and commitment. The critical and political imperative of modernism refashioned long-standing relationships between aesthetic practices and the spaces, communities and institutions that housed and disseminated them – the gallery, the theatre, the state exhibition, the academy. Artists and collectives that shared ambivalent attachments to the great humanist institutions – from the bloomsbury group to dada and futurism – at once reconfigured in their work the role of the artist, the artwork and its audience. Key in all these configurations is the notion of defamiliarisation and the imperative to ‘make it new’, as Ezra Pound famously proclaimed. Whether formal, institutional or broadly political this central trope appears in many modernist guises: as alienation, in its Marxist sense, as estrangement or ostranenie and the verfremdungseffekt in formalist terms. In that respect too modernist form is worldly at its core: the reworking of noh by Ezra Pound and W. B. Yeats and the impact of primitivism on impressionism, cubism or fauvism are relationships that go beyond a process of exotic borrowing and begin to unsettle the colonial dynamic between centre and periphery, the European metropolis and its imperial satellites or regional scenes. Similarly, mobilities and communities formed through cosmopolitanism, war, exile and statelessness complicated conceptions of nationalism and cultural belonging and generated artistic and political formations of international solidarity as a collective front for the defence of the universal rights of writers and artists. Organisations such as p.e.n. and the pages of little magazines provided refuge for modernist work in times of peril and a template for the dissemination of ongoing vanguard projects. In this sense, modernism’s active span extends well beyond the chronological endpoint of the mid-twentieth century and may be seen to resonate through concepts and visions that testify to its afterlife, such 3

Introduction as the beat generation, the countercultures of the 1960s, postmodernism and contemporary avant-gardes. READING Adorno, Theodor W. ([1970] 2004) Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. London and New York: Continuum. Compagnon, Antoine (1994) Five Paradoxes of Modernity, trans. Franklin Philip. New York: Columbia University Press. Kolocotroni, Vassiliki, Goldman, Jane and Taxidou, Olga (eds) (1998) Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Nicholls, Peter (2009) Modernisms: A Literary Guide, 2nd edn. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Ross, Stephen and Allana C. Lindgren (eds) (2015) The Modernist World. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Williams, Raymond (1989) ‘When was Modernism?’, New Left Review 175 (May–June): 48–52.

Vassiliki Kolocotroni

4

THE EDINBURGH DICTIONARY OF MODERNISM

A ABSTRACTION In aesthetics, ‘abstraction’ denotes forms of art and literature that present their materials – whether visual or verbal – in ways that strongly privilege formal arrangements over meaning or reference. Abstraction is thus implicitly juxtaposed with work that is figurative or representational – that aims to correspond to real things in the world. Following the fifteenth-century ‘discovery’ of the rules of linear perspective, which permitted the convincing depiction of three-dimensional objects on a flat canvas, and the seventeenthand eighteenth-century rise of the novel, with its attentiveness to everyday detail and clear, unadorned, ‘transparent’ prose, the desire accurately to change the world in art grew progressively more dominant in Western culture. Art, however, was abstract long before it was figurative. Prehistoric art is highly stylised in its depictions of humans and animals, and often forgoes figuration entirely in favour of pure arrangements of line, form and colour. Beyond Europe and North America, non-figurative artistic traditions remained central to cultural expression long after the onset of Western modernity. Following the progressively more radical disfiguring of the image performed by the impressionists, the post-impressionists, the fauvists and the cubists, the decisive breakthrough to abstraction in modern art came around 1910 as painters such as Wassily Kandinsky, Francis Picabia, Piet Mondrian, Kazimir Malevich and Robert and Sonia Delaunay, began to produce works wholly shaped by their own internal formal logic and devoid of representational content. Malevich’s suprematist masterpiece Black Square (1915) is the ultimate example: a square canvas entirely covered with black paint. The conceptual implications of modernist abstraction are complex, however. As Hal Foster and his collaborators note in an important survey of twentieth-century art, a ‘tension between idealist and materialist imperatives runs throughout modernist abstraction’ (Foster et al. 2004: 119). On the one hand, abstract artists ‘moved away from a mimetic relation to the world’ in order to evoke ­‘transcendental 7

Absurd concepts’ or ‘ideal states’ (Foster et al. 2004: 119), but at the same time such works also had a distinctly different valence. ‘Abstraction approaches the nonobjective by definition’ but ‘many artists sought “objectivity” above all – to make art as “concrete” and as “real” as an object in the world’, hence an emphasis on ‘the materiality of paint on canvas’ (Foster et al. 2004: 119). While abstraction tends to be associated most closely with visual art, similar questions attend various forms of modernist literature. From the symbolists of the late nineteenth century to aspects of the late work of Samuel Beckett, to the l=a=n=g=u=a=g=e poets of the 1960s to much of postmodernist writing such as the oulipo circle and the linguistic experiments of Christine Brooke-Rose, avantgarde writers have consistently produced works that resist reference to, or representation of, a world outside the text. Again, though, it is debatable whether such strategies entail the liberation of ideas or images from their material referents (as in ‘formalist’ or ‘subtractive’ modes of painterly abstraction), or whether, on the contrary, their purpose is to foreground the pure, non-signifying materiality of language itself (as in variants of abstraction that lay their emphasis on the physicality of the art object). The barely decipherable, 100-letterlong ‘thunderwords’ that wind their way through James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939), for example, might be understood, on the one hand, as agglomerations of numerous free-floating signifiers, or, on the other, as lumps of raw, unrefined textual matter. READING Dickerman, Leah (ed.) (2013) Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925: How a Radical Idea Changed Modern Art. New York: MoMA. Foster, Hal, Rosalind Krauss, Yves-Alain Bois and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh (2004) Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism. London: Thames & Hudson. Goldsmith, Kenneth (2011) Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age. New York: Columbia University Press.

Paul Crosthwaite

ABSURD This term is usually associated with post-war, mainly Paris-based theatre. Coined by Martin Esslin in the 1960s, it has dominated the critical reception of a group of playwrights who may all share a sense of the limitations of reason and particularly language to conceptualise the world, but are also quite distinct in other respects 8

Acéphale (Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Jean Genet, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Fernando Arrabal, Václav Havel, Harold Pinter and Edward Albee). Esslin’s analysis links the work of these playwrights broadly to the Existential philosophy of Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. However, the ‘Absurd’ is also linked with the modernist theatrical experiments of Alfred Jarry and his ’pataphysics – the ‘science of imaginary solutions’ – and the blasphemous, irreverent performances of futurism and dada. The term identifies a kind of drama that is non-representational, tragi-comic and plays havoc with language and the body of the actor. The quasi-existential context of this critical term sees the works deemed to be Absurd as somewhat naively reflecting the irrationality of modernity, lamenting the loss of human agency and humanism in representation more generally. READING Cornell, Neil (2006) The Absurd in Literature. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Esslin, Martin (1961) The Theatre of the Absurd. New York: Doubleday. Innes, Christopher (1993) Avant-garde Theatre, 1892–1992. London: Routledge.

Olga Taxidou

ACÉPHALE Between 1936 and 1939, the journal Acéphale ran to four issues under the editorship of Georges Bataille. The journal combined an interest in Nietzsche – two issues were explicitly themed around ‘Nietzsche and the Fascists’ and ‘Nietzsche and Madness’ – with a revulsion at the rise of Fascism in pre-war France, accusing this movement of misappropriating the philosopher. Bataille’s long essay which begins the second issue quotes from Nietzsche’s correspondence : ‘Que croyez-vous que j’éprouve lorsque le nom de Zarathustra sort de la bouche des anti-Semites!’ [‘How do you think it makes me feel when I hear the name of Zarathustra in the mouths of anti-­Semites?’], arguing that ‘Fascisme et nietzschéisme s’excluent, s’excluent même avec violence’ [‘Fascism and Nietzscheanism are mutually exclusive, even violently mutually exclusive’]. The journal’s other major concern was the cultic – the dionysian, borrowing Nietzsche’s terminology – as a riposte to the overbearing rationalism of contemporary society. In ‘La Conjuration sacrée’ [‘The Sacred Conspiracy’], the manifesto piece which opens the first issue, Bataille writes : ‘La vie humaine est excédée de servir de tête 9

Acéphale et de raison à l’univers. Dans la mesure où elle devient cette tête et cette raison, dans la mesure où elle devient nécessaire à l’univers, elle accepte un servage’ [‘Human life is worn out from acting as the head and reason of the universe. Insofar as it becomes this head and this reason, insofar as it becomes necessary to the universe, it accepts servitude’]. Thus André Masson’s striking cover illustration – an idealised male figure in the pose of Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man but with no head – represents the site of reason triumphantly overthrown. While the journal was publicly available, Acéphale was also the name of a secret society formed by Bataille and a number of the journal’s contributors with the intention of enacting the ideas of cultic behaviour expressed in the journal. The society had a code of practice, which included a refusal to shake hands with anti-Semites and the commemoration, in the Place de la Concorde, of the execution of Louis XVI. In addition to this, however, members would meet by night in secret in the forest of Saint-Nom-la-Bretèche, a few miles to the west of Paris, and details of these meetings are far more obscure. Surviving correspondence between Bataille and other members suggests the enactment of certain unspecified rituals, the most notable and strongly rumoured of which concerns the group’s deep interest in human sacrifice. Bataille and his lover Colette Peignot shared an obsession with photographs of the execution of Fu Zhu Li, a Chinese man killed by slow dismemberment in 1905. Both Bataille and Peignot, it seems, put themselves forward to be the group’s sacrificial victim, but no volunteer could be found to be the executioner. READING Bataille, Georges (1995) Encyclopaedia Acephalica, ed. Alastair Brotchie, trans. Iain White. London: Atlas. Bataille, Georges (1999) L’Apprenti Sorcier: Textes, Lettres et Documents (1932–1939), ed. Marina Galletti. Paris: La Différence. Robertson, Eric (2013) ‘“A Shameless, Indecent Saintliness”: Documents (1929-31) and Acéphale (1936–9)’, in Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (eds), The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, Vol. 3. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Surya, Michel (2002) Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography, trans. Krzysztof Fijalkowski and Michael Richardson. London: Verso.

Dennis Duncan

10

Aestheticism

AESTHETICISM ‘Aestheticism’ (or ‘art for art’s sake’ from the French l’art pour l’art) – the idea that art constitutes its own autonomous sphere separate from nature, religion, politics or ethics and that works of art should be judged on their success in achieving ideal beauty, on form rather than content or social purpose can be traced back to German, French and British romanticism. But it takes on a new significance with the rise of the Aesthetic movement in Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century. The movement’s early phase was represented by the poetry and art of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, in particular D. G. Rossetti, William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones and their associate A. C. Swinburne, whose work exerted a significant influence on the development of symbolism. Swinburne’s poetry, decadent in inflection, prized technical ingenuity and beauty rather than morality, and drew inspiration from the ancient classical world and a sexually charged paganism. J. M. Whistler and Aubrey Beardsley, illustrator of The Yellow Book, the flagship journal of the Aesthetic movement in the 1890s, championed Aestheticism in the visual arts, though here the key ingredient was not hellenism but Japonisme. The main principles of Aestheticism as a theoretical position were developed by Walter Pater in texts such as Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873). The function of the aesthetic critic, according to Pater, was to be deeply moved by the presence of beautiful objects and to analyse the impressions and pleasurable sensations derived from art. Pater emphasised subjectivism, unpredictability and ephemerality: experience was merely a collection of impressions in the mind of the observer; to get as many of them as possible was the purpose of life. Oscar Wilde, a disciple of Pater, took his precepts to a paradoxical extreme in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) and essays like ‘The Critic as Artist’. Wilde, along with other Decadent poets and critics of the 1890s such as Ernest Dowson and Arthur Symons, was particularly receptive to French ideas, derived from Théophile Gautier, Charles Baudelaire, the Symbolists and Decadents such as J.-K. Huysmans. The French influence helped to sour the British popular reception of Aestheticism and the movement was routinely accused of moral corruption and satirised in popular culture, where it came to be associated with a particular lifestyle, manner of dress, behaviour and decor. The aesthetes may be seen as the first of the oppositional avantgardes or experimental waves of reaction against the orthodoxy 11

Agitprop of High Victorianism, middle-class philistinism and respectability, and notions of utility and realism in art. In this respect they were the direct precursors of the modernist anti-bourgeois revolts of the twentieth century, the ground for which was cleared by the aesthetic insistence on artistic autonomy, the spurning of social and moral conventions and the emphasis on technical perfection and exclusivity. Despite their strenuous attempts at parricide, modernist writers from James Joyce and Virginia Woolf to T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound owed significant debts to nineteenth-century Aestheticism, especially Swinburne, Pater, Symons and the decadent poets of the 1890s, through whom the French Symbolist influence fed into Anglophone modernism. The modernist little magazines were descendants of the Pre-Raphaelite The Germ, The Savoy and The Yellow Book of the 1890s, while limited-edition handmade avant-garde books or livres d’artiste, with their emphasis on the interplay of word and image, were twentieth-century analogues of Morris’s and Burne-Jones’s collaborations in book production and the typographic experiments of the fin de siècle art presses. READING Ardis, Ann (2002) Modernism and Cultural Conflict, 1880–1922. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hönnighausen, Lothar (1988) The Symbolist Tradition in English Literature: A Study of Pre-Raphaelitism and Fin de Siècle, trans. Gisela Hönnighausen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Meisel, Perry (1980) The Absent Father: Virginia Woolf and Walter Pater. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Potolsky, Matthew (2013) The Decadent Republic of Letters: Taste, Politics, and Cosmopolitan Community from Baudelaire to Beardsley, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Prettejohn, Elizabeth (ed.) (1999) After the Pre-Raphaelites: Art and Aestheticism in Victorian England. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Anna Vaninskaya

AGITPROP ‘Agitprop’ is an umbrella term for activities and publications promoted by the Department for Agitation and Propaganda of the Central Committee of the communist Party in the early Soviet period. It refers to pamphlets, music shows, plays and motion pictures imbued with political messages, as well as oral-agitation networks and literacy campaigns. 12

Aleatorism Soviet agitprop theatre was one of the most popular modes of artistic propaganda in the 1920s–early 1930s. It comprised different performative styles that had clear political aims, including the living newspaper genre. In 1923 the Blue Blouse troupe created by the Moscow School of Journalism became famous for its performances in clubs and cafeterias and on factory floors. It dramatised current events with little scenery and performed 10–15 short sketches on topics ranging from local news to international affairs, which were published in the journal Blue Blouse in 1924–8. The Blue Blouse’s performances at workers’ clubs were emulated by other amateur groups, including the Red Whip and the Red Tie. In 1927 the Blue Blouse toured Germany where it inspired the creation of similar groups, including the Red Megaphone and the Red Rockets. In 1932, due to the emergence of socialist realism, many independent organisations, including the Blue Blouse, ceased to exist. READING Mally, Lynn (1990) Culture of the Future: The Proletkult Movement in Revolutionary Russia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mally, Lynn (2000) Revolutionary Acts: Amateur Theatre in the Soviet State, 1917–1938. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Tolstoy, Vladimir, Irina Bibikova and Catherine Cooke (eds) (1990) Street Art of the Revolution: Festivals and Celebration in Russia, 1918–1933. New York: Vendome.

Alexandra Smith

ALEATORISM In his biography of James Joyce, Richard Ellmann recounts a story about the time Samuel Beckett was acting as Joyce’s amanuensis during the writing of Finnegans Wake. One afternoon there had been a knock at the door, to which Joyce responded ‘Come in’. Reading back that day’s writing, Ellmann tells us, Joyce realised Beckett had included the interjection, but decided to let it stand: he was happy to let coincidence act as his collaborator. Randomness or chance as collaborator stands as a useful definition for the practice of aleatorism, a term for any compositional artistic method that incorporates the operation of chance, where a random element is introduced to a text’s construction and allowed to determine the structure, form or content of the narrative. Aleatorism derives from the Latin āleā, a die, or a roll of the dice, and usually implies letting randomness determine the order of an element or set of elements of the text. 13

Aleatorism Aleatorism is used for a hugely diverse set of reasons but it is often marked by a desire to create new and unexpected associations or adjacencies and often evinces a frustration with the limitations of the bound book and its ability accurately to represent the randomness of experience. Similarly, there is often a desire to undermine the authority of the writer; the use of chance helps to circumvent his or her own control of the text. In terms of Western art and literature, the use of aleatorical techniques grew rapidly in the early twentieth century, although Lewis Carroll, through his ‘nonsense verse’, had advocated similar principles in the 1860s. Werner Meyer-Eppler first used the term ‘aleatory’ in 1955 to describe music that depends on chance in its detail, and John Cage is perhaps the best known proponent of aleatorism in music, but the dadaists had embraced random compositional techniques in the early years of the century as a way of circumventing agency. Marcel Duchamp’s major works include Erratum Musical (1934), where he wrote the names of notes on slips of paper and drew them out of a hat randomly to denote the order in which they were to be played, and Three Standard Stoppages (1913–14), which consisted of three dropped pieces of string, their shapes as they fell later recreated in wood. Tristan Tzara was also experimenting with randomly ordered poetry in the first decade of the twentieth century (created by the selection of random lines from a newspaper), and the surrealist practice of automatic writing employed similar principles of spontaneity and the refusal of artistic control. Beckett himself was part of the explosion of aleatorical art in the 1950s and 1960s when he used aleatorical techniques in ‘Lessness’ (1969), where he wrote individual phrases, or ‘image clusters’, mixed them in a container and drew them out in random order twice to form the 120 sentences that make up the short story. Beckett’s injunction that artists must find a form to accommodate the mess of modern experience was often quoted by aleatorical artists as a totemic injunction to rescind artistic control and let narrative form become as disordered as the reality it sought to represent. B. S. Johnson was one writer who tried to answer this call, and The Unfortunates (1969) stands as the most sustained attempt by a British novelist to use aleatorical principles in a mainstream novel. Johnson was almost certainly influenced both by Dada and perhaps by the French writer Marc Saporta’s 1962 experiment with random order (but with pages rather than chapters), Composition No. 1. Similarly, Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar (1966 in English) was structured around the reader’s 14

Alienation participation, the author instructing readers to ‘hopscotch’ through the 155 chapters any way they pleased, including the ninety-nine deemed expendable. Alan Burns’s cut-up, Babel (1969), bore a close relation to William Burroughs’s similar cut-ups in the USA in the early 1960s, where sections of prose were dismembered and reassembled to recreate better the randomness and fragmentation of perception. READING Beckett, Samuel (1995) ‘Lessness’, in The Complete Short Prose, 1929– 1989, ed. S. E. Gontarski. New York: Grove Press. Burroughs, William (1963) ‘The cut up method’, in Leroi Jones (ed.), The Moderns: An Anthology of New Writing in America. New York: Corinth Books. Cortázar, Julio (1966) Hopscotch [1963], trans. Gregory Rabassa. New York: Pantheon. Ellmann, Richard (1982) James Joyce. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Johnson, B. S. (1999) The Unfortunates [1969]. London: Picador. Saporta, Marc (2011) Composition No. 1 [1962]. London: Visual Editions. Sheppard, Richard (2000) Modernism – Dada – Postmodernism. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

Julia Jordan

ALIENATION Alienation connotes the experience of being cut off from one’s social environment and the products and processes of one’s own labour, being unwilling or unable to share prevailing social values and being subject to loneliness, isolation and disaffection. For thinkers like Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, Georg Simmel and Max Weber, an intensifying state of alienation was an inevitable by-product of modernity. Industrialisation, urbanisation and secularisation all played their parts in eroding traditional communal bonds, alienating the anonymous ‘masses’ from one another and from themselves. Marx offers the most precise and influential account of socioeconomic alienation: under an earlier mode of production, organised around the artisanal labour of individual craftsmen, the production of goods might, Marx argues, be a gratifying act of self expression and realisation; under capitalism, however, workers are decisively severed – or alienated – from the objects they produce, forced to sell their labour to their capitalist masters and condemned to play narrowly circumscribed roles in the production of commodities whose form and design are externally imposed. 15

Allusion Alienation – as a broader subjective phenomenon – is likewise one of the great themes of modernist literature, whether it takes the form of epiphanic moments of estrangement in James Joyce’s Dubliners (1914), conservative anxieties about a culture alienated from its roots and tradition in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), encounters with the forbidding edifices of law and bureaucracy in the literary expressionism of Franz Kafka’s The Trial (1925), or (as one influential line of criticism, at least, has contended) absurdist alienation from logic and meaning in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953). For modernist dramatists in particular, a further mode of alienation served as a formal strategy. Much like the techniques of estrangement or ostranenie theorised by Russian formalism, the ‘alienation’ (or ‘distancing’) effect (verfremdungseffekt) advocated by the German playwright Bertolt Brecht sought to highlight the artificiality of performance, inculcating an attitude of critical distance in the audience. READING Bloom, Harold and Blake Hobby (eds) (2009) Alienation. New York: Infobase. Williams, Raymond (1985) ‘Alienation’, in Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, revised edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 33–7.

Paul Crosthwaite

ALLUSION Allusion is a deeply engrained feature of literature as a medium, though it has been variously accented and deployed in different periods. Robert Alter has argued that it should be regarded as ‘not merely a device, like irony, understatement, ellipsis, or repetition, but an essential modality of the language of literature’ (Alter 1996: 111). The practice of allusion seems to have had a special importance for modernist writers, though: we think immediately of works by W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, T S. Eliot, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett . . . the list could go on; everywhere, it seems, modernist writing recalls and echoes literatures of the past. It is what Pound calls ‘this love of allusion in art’ that explains his early enthusiasm for Japanese noh theatre: ‘These plays, or eclogues, were made only for the few; for the nobles; for those trained to catch the allusions’ (1916; ‘Noh’ Plays in Pound 1970: 214). While his own age seemed to seek only ‘an image / Of its accelerated grimace’ 16

Allusion (Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, 1920; Pound 2010: 111), Noh was refined and urbane, an art of signs and gestures created for those trained to understand them. As Pound would make abundantly clear in his own poetry, allusion was something he thought might protect the arts against the encroaching vulgarities of contemporary life. In another influential formulation, T. S. Eliot suggested that the modern poet with ‘a refined sensibility’ must meet the challenges of modernity by becoming ‘more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning’ (1921; Eliot 1972: 289). As Eliot notes, the characteristic feature of allusion is its indirectness. Even when it seems to entail simple reference – as with, say, Pound’s line in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), ‘His true Penelope was Flaubert’ – the allusive habit of mind constantly discerns meanings and associations beyond any simple one-to-one correspondence. So ‘Penelope’ does more than name the wife to whom Odysseus is attempting to return, contributing to a whole complex of allusions in the poem’s opening stanzas which denotes the nature of ancient epic, the sea voyage, the sound of the ‘chopped’ sea as rendered in the ancient Greek, the force of desire, and so on. Etymologically, ‘allusion’ takes us to ‘play’, Latin alludere, a useful reminder that a kind of literary game is often involved and one at which the reader might not be wholly proficient. Allusions can be missed – Antoine Compagnon observes that ‘literature is the graveyard of lost allusions’ (Murat 2000: 245) – and writers who use them also have to take their chances with what will be forgotten and obscured from one generation to another (the fragments of popular songs and advertising slogans in Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) have needed careful retrieval, for example, while other allusions, like Woolf’s to Shakespeare’s Cymbeline in Mrs Dalloway (1925), remain transparent). For some readers, allusion will always be tainted by exclusivity; for others, it promises moments of vertiginous textual pleasure like the one in Beckett’s More Pricks than Kicks (1934) when we realise that the ‘grand old yaller wall’ alludes to a patch of yellow paint in Vermeer’s The Little Street (1657–8) as remarked by Bergotte, the novelist in Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27). More than a dictionary entry is needed to unpack that. READING Alter, Robert (1996) The Pleasures of Reading in an Ideological Age. New York: Norton. 17

Anarchism Ben-Porat, Ziva (1976) ‘The Poetics of Allusion’, PTL: A Journal for Descriptive Poetics and Theory of Literature, 1: 105–28. Compagnon, Antoine (1979) La seconde main ou le travaille de la citation. Paris: Seuil. Eliot, T. S. (1972) Selected Essays. London: Faber & Faber. Murat, Michel (2000) L’Allusion dans la Littérature. Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris – Sorbonne. Nicholls, Peter (2010) ‘The Elusive Allusion: Poetry and Exegesis’, in Peter Middleton and Nicky Marsh (eds), Teaching Modernist Poetry. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 10–24. Pound, Ezra (1970) The Translations of Ezra Pound. London: Faber & Faber. Pound, Ezra (2010) New Selected Poems and Translations, ed. Richard Sieburth. New York: New Directions. Ricks, Christopher (2002) Allusion to the Poets. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Peter Nicholls

ANARCHISM Anarchism is a libertarian ideology that developed around the time of the French Revolution, originating in the work of the rationalist philosopher William Godwin, whose Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) argued that the external check of law would be unnecessary once humanity had achieved sufficient moral virtue to govern itself. Godwin, however, did not use the term ‘anarchism’; that distinction belongs to the French social philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, whose distinctive slogan ‘Property is theft’ became a rallying cry for later anarchists. As that slogan suggests, Proudhon’s anarchism is a species of socialism, but it differs from communism, or ‘state socialism’, in that Proudhon imagined a stateless society organised around contractual arrangements between individuals. Because of such differences, anarchism posed a philosophical threat in the nineteenth century to the communist ideology espoused by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Among Marx’s more important anarchist rivals was Mikhail Bakunin, who urged violent revolution as a means of overthrowing all governments, whether monarchal or republican. One of Bakunin’s best-known statements, ‘The passion for destruction is also a creative passion’ (‘The Reaction in Germany’, 1842) proved to be important not only politically but also artistically, as anarchism migrated in the late nineteenth century from politics to culture. 18

Anarchism Bakunin’s notion of creative destruction, for example, could almost stand as a summation of the anti-art movement known as dada. Long before Dada emerged in the early twentieth century, however, avant-garde artists began to be attracted to the individualist strain of anarchist ideology sometimes called ‘egoism’, a term derived from the writings of Max Stirner, whose book Der Einzige und sein Eingethum (1844) was translated into English as The Ego and His Own in 1907 and published in New York by Benjamin R. Tucker’s anarchist press. The autonomous, ‘egoistic’ individual whose superior intellect sets him apart from the mass of society became a character type in the early days of modernism. The hero of Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People (1882), for example, appealed to activist anarchists such as Emma Goldman. Ibsen himself identified with anarchism, and for a while so did James Joyce, who saw himself as Ibsen’s successor. Ezra Pound, likewise, called himself an ‘individualist’ early in his career, at a time when ‘individualist’ was a code word for ‘anarchist.’ Another connection between modernism and anarchism lies in the little magazines of the period where both Joyce and Pound published. Joyce’s Ulysses was serialised in The Little Review, published by Jane Heap and Margaret Anderson, both Stirnerite anarchists. Pound wrote and edited for Dora Marsden’s The New Freewoman, whose relation to individualist anarchism was certified in January 1914 when Marsden changed the name of her magazine to The Egoist: An Individualist Review. After World war I, anarchism declined as a mass movement, but an argument might be made that anarchism survived in cultural form after its political demise, with certain political values, such as individualist autonomy, being transposed into aesthetic values. At the very least, modernists who rejected artistic tradition and aesthetic convention had something in common with anarchists who rebelled against government and law. READING Antliff, Alan (2007) Anarchist Modernism: Art, Politics, and the First American Avant-Garde. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rabaté, Jean Michel (2001) James Joyce and the Politics of Egoism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sonn, Richard David (1989) Anarchism and Cultural Politics in Fin de Siècle France. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Von Hallberg, Robert (1995) ‘Libertarian Imagism’, Modernism/modernity, 2 (2): 63–79. 19

Androgyny Weir, David (1997) Anarchy and Culture: The Aesthetic Politics of Modernism. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

David Weir

ANDROGYNY Androgyny describes the combination of masculine and feminine characteristics in the same mind or body. Modernist artists and writers were influenced by earlier accounts of androgyny (Classical, Renaissance, Romantic and decadent), and engaged with nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sexological, psychoanalytic, anthropological, sociological and feminist debates in which androgyny played a central role. Following on from the depiction of androgyny in Plato’s Symposium, the dually or ambiguously sexed figure of the androgyne often served an aetiological function in discussions of desire and sexuality. In sexological, psychoanalytic and literary texts, for instance, androgyny was drawn upon to explain same-sex desire or cross-gender identification both in pathological or celebratory terms (see uranianism). For writers like Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, H.D., Gertrude Stein, D. H. Lawrence and William Faulkner, the androgynous reconciliation of masculine and feminine traits in a single individual also offered a crucial if, at times, troublesome means to negotiate topical questions about difference, language, creativity and authorship, placing androgyny at the very heart of modernist aesthetics. READING Hargreaves, Tracy (2005) Androgyny in Modern Literature. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Weil, Kari (1992) Androgyny and the Denial of Difference. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.

Jana Funke

ANTHROPOLOGY While the madman of Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Gay Science (1882) declared the death of a Judeo-Christian God, the modernist period witnessed an extraordinary burgeoning of interest in going after the strange gods unearthed by the nascent science of anthropology. As D. H. Lawrence attested in his correspondence, anthropology, as an official field of knowledge that came of age during the late nineteenth century, benefited on the one hand from the rapid rise of Darwinism 20

Anthropology and on the other from an unprecedented expansion by major European powers and the USA of colonial territorial holdings across the globe in the final three decades of the nineteenth century and the years immediately preceding the outbreak of World war I. This generated a sizeable and burgeoning mass of ethnographic and linguistic data about the so-called ‘primitive’ peoples encountered by merchants, colonial mandarins, military expeditions, missionary societies and charitable organisations. The doyen of the social evolutionary school of anthropology and keeper of Oxford University’s Museum Edward Burnett Tylor sifted this mass of evidence from all quarters of the globe for what he designated in his landmark twovolume Primitive Culture (1871) as ‘survivals’ – vestiges of an older condition of civilisation which had lingered obdurately into a later one. These survivals – formerly denigrated as the worthless wreckage shunned by an ostensibly enlightened society – would become an object of acute curiosity as scientists and artists like Lawrence in The Lost Girl (1920), Kangaroo (1923) and Mornings in Mexico (1927) traced alternative, dissident sources of value, meaning and spirituality in primitivism. It was mainly owing to Tylor’s unflagging industry that James George Frazer in The Golden Bough (1st edn 1890), the Cambridge Ritualists (active 1909–19) and Jessie L. Weston in From Ritual to Romance (1920) acknowledged with increasing formality that anthropological myth and the folk-practices to which they related told at least as much of the distant past as excavated material artefacts. Sigmund Freud, whose Totem and Taboo (1914) owes a notable debt to Tylor’s and Frazer’s discussions of sacrifice as a totemic communion sacrament, refined this research to show how the prehistoric impulses of the race were replicated in the unconscious layers of the individual psyche, tracing basic neurotic traits back to a common prehistory. One of the striking facets of aesthetic modernism’s avid desire to make it new by shadowing these anthropological findings – as evidenced by Frazerian echoes in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907), Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out (1915), T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) and E. M. Forster’s Howards End (1910) and A Passage to India (1924) – was its ability both to uphold and expose the methodological frailties of what was fast becoming an outdated late-Victorian model of construing the ‘primitive’ according to universal patterns of cultural development and a steadily progressive temporality. These authors, equipped with concepts of analysis and comparison adapted from anthropology, variously responded to a 21

Anthropology curious cultural phenomenon: the failure fully to address colonial subjectivities and zones in fictional texts published at a time when the colonial enterprise was becoming key to justifying ‘Western’ traditions, principles and values. Through carefully crafted narrative tropes of self-alienation and psychic dissolution, as well as the tenacious exploration of multiple, disordered, even contradictory viewpoints, these modernist texts probed the conceptual boundaries between civilised and savage, centre and margin, here and there, which Frazer’s ‘armchair’ acolytes policed more sedulously. As such, modernist cultural production treats anthropology not so much as a rigorously defined investigative field as a flexible style of address. When T. S. Eliot’s review of James Joyce’s Ulysses appeared in 1923, absorbing the world-encompassing sweep of Frazer’s project, European anthropology’s leading lights had disavowed the unilineal, evolutionist paradigm synonymous with The Golden Bough, which had expanded to twelve volumes in the edition of 1911–15. Franz Boas and Bronislaw Malinowski, through their rival ethnographic model of diligent participant-observation fieldwork, were subjecting the Frazerian concept of a single, monolithic ‘Culture’ to searching critique. That experimental women writers of the 1930s and 1940s such as Mary Butts, Sylvia Townsend Warner and H.D. all found still untapped resources in The Golden Bough’s magisterial ethnographic stance and archetypal images of dying gods suggests, however, that aesthetic modernism’s most formally innovative voices still favoured the armchair exponent’s key to all mythologies over Malinowski’s solitary eyewitness researches, in which he famously described himself as ‘the Conrad’ of ‘Anthropology’, immersing himself in the disturbingly strange element of exotic worlds. READING Elliott, Michael (2003) The Culture Concept: Writing and Difference in the Age of Realism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Esty, Jed (2003) A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Harrison, Jane (1925) Reminiscences of a Student’s Life, London: Hogarth Press. Manganaro, Mark (1990) Modernist Anthropology: From Fieldwork to Text. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Snyder, Carey J. (2008) British Fiction and Cross-Cultural Encounters: Ethnographic Modernism from Wells to Woolf. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Andrew Radford 22

Apollonian

APOLLONIAN Friedrich Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy (1872) introduces the Apollonian in its opening sentence as an aesthetic principle in continuing duality with the dionysian. The central Dionysian art is music, the central Apollonian equivalent is sculpture, but also the epic: Aschenbach, the Apollonian writer of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (1913), is ‘the author of the massive and lucid prose epic about the life of Frederick of Prussia’. If the Dionysian decisively subverts the account, classically formulated by Johann Joachim Winckelmann, of Greek art and culture in terms of serene harmony, the Apollonian as decisively refigures that serenity. The Apollonian is the world of the Olympian gods, founded on the defeat of the Titans; it is the lucid order and restraint of the Doric state that rigidly defies the forces of barbarism; but, crucially, the Apollonian is a world of beautiful illusion, its lucidity the lucidity of dream. This separates its dream-working from the probing subversion which the world-asdream exercises in those late-Renaissance dramas of political power, Shakespeare’s Tempest (1611) and Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s La Vida es Sueño (1636); separates it, equally, from the mordant cosmic phantasmagoria of August Strindberg’s A Dream Play (1907). Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy grounds the Apollonian and the Dionysian in an ontology of individuation and primal unity out of Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation (1824), and both serve in Nietzsche’s evangelising for Wagner’s music-drama. Julian Young (1992) tracks the development of the Apollonian from this first matrix through Nietzsche’s subsequent work to its terminus in Twilight of the Idols (1889) where it joins with the Dionysian as a transforming intoxication of art, though still an intoxication of the visual. Transformation provides a key turn in Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus (1922) for which metamorphosis is central, and where the godlike poet-musician triangulates Dionysius and Apollo, as in the sonnet on the death of Orpheus at the hands of the Maenads which consummates Part One. Within modernism, the Apollonian may have had less traction than the Dionysian. If so, that tells us something about the cultural and political arenas in which modernism enacts itself. Jones (2013), tracing George Balanchine’s revision of his 1928 ballet Apollon musagète into the Apollo of 1979, sees the fully Apollonian mode of the latter as coming from the choreographer’s conjoining of modernism with the neoclassical. In two of modernism’s iconic classics the 23

Arrière-garde Apollonian is engulfed by the Dionysian (Mann’s Death in Venice) or displaced (in the climactic interview with Kurtz’s Intended in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness [1899] Apollonian radiance and the marmoreal are cross-hatched with the shadow and pressed upon by the darkness, historical and ontological, into which Marlow has voyaged). In Conrad’s oeuvre at large the ironical dialectic of an idealising which is at once humanly necessary and destructive may provide one major relocating of the Apollonian as transforming illusion. Another may be found in those para-modernist manifestos, Oscar Wilde’s ‘Decay of Lying’ (1889) and R. L. Stevenson’s ‘A Humble Remonstrance’ (1884) in his dialogue with Henry James on the nature of fiction. But the closing word on the Apollonian in modernism may be given to the two poems which open, respectively, the two parts of Rilke’s New Poems (1907–8). The first prefigures key features of the Sonnets to Orpheus. The second integrates a neoclassical-cumRomantic focus on Greek sculpture, encountered as both fragment and radiantly serene, with a very Nietzschean imperative of transformation: ‘the bright torso, as a lamp turned low, / still shines, still sees . . . This marble otherwise would shine defaced /. . . and would not radiate / and would not break from all its surfaces / as does a star / There is no part of him / that does not see you. You must change your life.’ READING Heller, Erich (1988) ‘Rilke and Nietzsche’, in The Importance of Nietzsche. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Jones, Susan (2013) Literature, Modernism and Dance. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Silk, M. S. and J. P. Stern (1981) Nietzsche on Tragedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Young, Julian (1992) Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Donald Mackenzie

ARRIÈRE-GARDE In its most straightforward sense, the notion of arrière-garde (French for ‘rearguard’) denotes the complete opposite of avantgarde. As such the term refers to reactionary and conservative cultural forces that challenge or resist the new ideas propagated by the historical avant-garde movements and adhere to allegedly outmoded 24

Arrière-garde artistic ideas. From the viewpoint of the avant-garde these arrièregarde or rearguard phenomena are regarded as mere relics of the past, involved in a battle for a lost cause. From the turn of the new millennium onwards, however, particularly in French theory, the concept has been used in a more sophisticated way, in order to challenge the standard model of literary historiography that conceives of evolution as a linear succession of innovative literary movements (in other words: as a series of clashes between the avant-garde and the arrière-garde). In reaction to this model, scholars such as Antoine Compagnon and William Marx have demonstrated the fundamental interconnections between the modern and the anti-modern (Compagnon) and between the avant-garde and the arrière-garde (Marx). Departing from the military connotations of the vanguard/rearguard opposition, the latter distinguishes two basic meanings of arrière-garde. First of all, the arrière-garde can be interpreted as a group which moves in the same direction as a preceding avant-garde, defending and even institutionalising its ideas and forming some kind of delayed avant-garde. Exemplary cases are the many ‘post’-movements (such as postsymbolism), which subscribe to older models (that were once avant-gardes), yet adapt these models to new historical contexts. Second, the concept of the arrière-garde can refer to a group that marches in the opposite direction of a contemporary avant-garde, fighting its ideas by deliberately returning to ideas of the past. If Marx associates the first kind of arrière-gardism with ‘post’-movements, the second kind is related to the vogue of ‘neo’-movements (such as neoclassicism). Elements of the past were here used deliberately as part of a literary strategy to break the established order, often to renew and revitalise contemporary literature. This implies that an arrière-garde movement can actually hide powerful avant-garde tendencies. Or, seen from another perspective, many seemingly revolutionary literary innovations appear to have been based on the rediscovery and reinterpretation of literary tradition. In this reading, the arrière-garde is not just an anachronism and a reactionary cultural force. On the contrary, arrière-gardism is an essential dimension of literary dynamics. The label has been used to account for the complex stance towards tradition and innovation taken by highly canonised ‘modernists’ such as Marcel Proust, Paul Valéry, Thomas Mann, André Gide and many others. The notion seems particularly well-suited to describe the position of Anglo-American high modernist poetry (vis-à-vis the European avant-garde movements), exemplified by Ezra Pound’s return to 25

Art Nouveau more traditional poetic forms such as metres after the free verse of imagism and vorticism, or by T. S. Eliot, who famously invented a new poetic language with poems such as The Waste Land (1922), yet simultaneously sought to reconnect with the past, as is shown by his seminal essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919) and his increasingly conservative political and religious stance. READING Baetens, Jan and Eric Trudel (eds) (2013) Old and New, Avant-Garde and ‘Arrière-Garde’ in Modernist Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Compagnon, Antoine (2005) Les antimodernes: de Joseph de Maistre à Roland Barthes. Paris: Gallimard. Ingelbien, Raphaël (2011) ‘Focus: Avant-garde/Arrière-garde: Metres and the Pound: the Measure of British Modernism’, European Review, 19 (2): 285–97. Marx, William (2009) ‘The 20th Century: Century of the Arrière-gardes?’, in Sascha Bru et al. (eds) Europa! Europa? The Avant-Garde, Modernism and the Fate of a Continent. Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 59–71.

Pieter Verstraeten

ART NOUVEAU Art Nouveau was, at least for a brief period of little more than a decade around the turn of the twentieth century, perhaps the most widespread and popular manifestation of a modernising spirit in architecture, design and the applied arts; to a lesser extent its influence extended to painting and sculpture too. Art Nouveau had a key moment of triumph with the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris where it appeared as a ubiquitous aesthetic innovation for manufacturers and artists alike, and even seemed – for example in buildings created for the Exposition such as the Grand Palais with its decorative ironwork – to bring art and industry together in a shared aesthetic language. Art Nouveau was also, however, often subject to strident critique from contemporaries and successors who perceived it as a mistaken diversion from truly modernising or modernist principles. Known as ‘Jugendstil’ (‘Youth Style’) in Germany, and going by many other local names – some of them less than flattering – Art Nouveau was not a particularly French phenomenon. Its French name is borrowed from the Maison Art Nouveau, an influential Paris gallery owned by Siegfried Bing which existed from 1895 to 1904, and which promoted the use of art and furnishings in har26

Art Nouveau monious ensembles that clarified the eclectic clutter of Victorian domesticity. Though such reforming intent was common to much of Art Nouveau, the name itself is something of an umbrella term, serving to gather various international movements that shared some precepts and some formal traits, but could also accommodate disparate, even contradictory, positions which had little more than ‘newness’ in common. Thus the work of Antoni Gaudí, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, the Vienna secession and Louis Comfort Tiffany could all be seen as ‘Art Nouveau’, as could the symbolism of Aubrey Beardsley, though these scarcely constitute a coherent group and each deviates considerably from the work of more ‘properly’ Art Nouveau figures such as the Belgians Henry van der Velde and Victor Horta, for instance. Accordingly, the roots of Art Nouveau are varied and can be found in the arts and crafts revival and the theories of William Morris, aestheticism and Japonisme, among other nineteenth-century developments. Hector Guimard’s iconic Paris Métro entranceways, which use cast-metal to emulate organic plant-like forms, more imaginative than naturalist in their treatment, might serve as a useful exemplar of the Art Nouveau aesthetic in its stereotypical form – Style Métro was even an alternate name for Art Nouveau in France. For Guimard, as for other exponents of Art Nouveau, form – and above all line – could be freed from merely representative or utilitarian function (see functionalism) and allowed to describe arabesque, curvilinear shapes, seemingly motivated by private whimsy even on pragmatic, public or urban infrastructure. The efforts of Art Nouveau to synthesise vibrant, dynamic natural forms and the suggestion of handicraft with the seemingly antithetical world of modern industry, and the sense that solutions such as Guimard’s were inevitably compromise formations, were central to the unease felt by its opponents. So too were concerns that its urge to create ornament and its tendency towards the decorative led to irrational frivolities rather than masterpieces. Walter Benjamin memorably described Art Nouveau as ‘the last attempt at a sortie on the part of Art imprisoned by technical advance within her ivory tower.’ Art Nouveau’s characteristic use of free-flowing botanical forms to adorn bourgeois interiors was an unsuccessful attempt, Benjamin contended, to rehabilitate the modern subject within an environment that reconciles technology, nature and individuality. Though it might provide luxury goods that would function as the signature of a wealthy consumer’s taste, and inspire a legion of cheaper commercial imitations of its stylistic tropes, Art 27

L’art pour l’art Nouveau seemed not to be able to offer a deeper response to the practical or artistic challenges of industrial modernity. The sense that the movement had gone to seed set in quickly as its tendrils extended in the first decade of the twentieth century, and the very solutions Art Nouveau’s adherents had devised across all the arts would be themselves subject to severe revision in the years that followed. READING Benjamin, Walter (1999) ‘Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century’, in The Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press, pp. 3–13. Duncan, Alastair (1994) Art Nouveau. London: Thames & Hudson. Greenhalgh, Paul (ed.) (2000) Art Nouveau, 1890–1914. London: V&A Publications. Howard, Jeremy (1996) Art Nouveau: International and National Styles in Europe. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Rheims, Maurice (1966) The Age of Art Nouveau. London: Thames & Hudson. Silverman, Debora (1989) Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France: Politics, Psychology, and Style. Berkeley and London: University of California Press.

Dominic Paterson

L’ART POUR L’ART L’art pour l’art or ‘art for art’s sake’ refers to a doctrine of autonomy in art that came to prominence in Europe in the late-nineteenth century. Adherents to l’art pour l’art generally insist upon the separation of art from nature, art from utility, art from society, art from narrative, art from morality, art from life, and so on. One of the earliest manifestos for the movement was Théophile Gautier’s ‘Preface’ to Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835), in which the author declared: ‘There is nothing truly beautiful but that which can never be of any use whatsoever; everything useful is ugly, for it is the expression of some need, and man’s needs are ignoble.’ Gautier and other influences, including Walter Pater’s landmark Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), can be read in the ‘Preface’ to The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), Oscar Wilde’s manifesto for aestheticism. The English movement represented the synthesis of several overlapping French movements of the period: l’art pour l’art, Parnassianism, decadence and symbolism. Wilde’s ‘Preface’ ends with the famous declaration: ‘All art is quite useless.’ The Paris-trained and London28

Arts and crafts based American artist James McNeill Whistler played an important role in popularising the doctrine of l’art pour l’art in England, especially in his outspoken comments as plaintiff in the landmark trial against John Ruskin in 1878. Whistler declared: ‘Art should be independent of all clap-trap – should stand alone, and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear, without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism, and the like.’ At the same time, a central criticism of l’art pour l’art – articulated by Theodor W. Adorno and others – is that far from achieving autonomy, it is at precisely this moment that art begins to engage with consumer culture: in the form of luxury editions, for example. Despite attempts by many (especially British) modernists to distance themselves from the ‘greenery-yallery’ aesthetes of the previous generation, the idea of the work of art as a self-contained object had a profound influence on the theoretical foundations of modernist art and literature, resulting in everything from Kazimir Malevich’s suprematist paintings to the autonomy of language in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake to the formalism that held sway over Anglo-American literary criticism until the 1970s. READING Goldstone, Andrew (2013) Fictions of Autonomy: Modernism from Wilde to de Man. New York: Oxford University Press. Marshall, Gail (ed.) (2007) The Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Siècle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Prettejohn, Elizabeth (2007) Art for Art’s Sake: Aestheticism in Victorian Painting. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Julian Hanna

ARTS AND CRAFTS The Arts and Crafts movement originated in Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century in response to the art and social criticism of John Ruskin and William Morris, both of whom condemned the perceived vulgarity of Victorian taste and the working conditions created by machine production, and advocated design reform and the revival of traditional handicrafts in everything from printing and architecture to textiles and furniture design. The resulting products would express the craftsman’s pleasure in labour, and embody an aesthetic of simplicity, or what modernists would later term functionality (see functionalism). Numerous associations followed in the footsteps of Morris’s pioneering firm Morris & Co. 29

Atonality and his Kelmscott Press, including the Art Workers’ Guild, the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, C. R. Ashbee’s Guild and School of Handicraft, Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s Glasgow School of Art and various art presses. The international exhibition of their wares and the theoretical writings of Ruskin, Morris, Ashbee and Walter Crane influenced leading designers in Western Europe, as well as the national arts and crafts revivals in Northern and Eastern Europe. The Wiener Werkstätte and the Abramtsevo colony represented cognate movements in Austria and Russia respectively, while the Deutscher Werkbund and bauhaus applied the arts and crafts philosophy to industrial mass production. The movement found fertile soil in America, inspiring leading architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright. In Britain, the activities of modernist artists and designers associated with the bloomsbury group, such as Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and Roger Fry’s Omega Workshops, and small presses such as the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press and Nancy Cunard’s the Hours Press, reconfigured the tradition of earlier arts and crafts enterprises. READING Blakesley, Rosalind (2006) The Arts and Crafts Movement. London: Phaidon. Pevsner, Nikolaus (1991) Pioneers of Modern Design: From William Morris to Walter Gropius. London: Penguin.

Anna Vaninskaya

ATONALITY Contrary to appearances, this term in Western art-music does not signify music that has no tone but rather music that breaks away from the conventions of the traditional Western system of tonality. That system assumes a particular hierarchy of the twelve different notes within the octave: a hierarchy which, from the later seventeenth century on, has mostly been manifested in two ‘diatonic’ scales, the major and the minor. The elite notes in these scales are the tonic, third and fifth (e.g. the triad formed by C, E and G in the ‘white-note’ scale or key of C major), while the remaining notes of the twelve have various degrees of subservience to that triad. The scales create force fields, so that music written in them gains meaning through operating under the gravitational pull of the triad: the ‘home’ to which, both in simple musical structures like a song tune and in elaborate ones like the sonata form, the music aspires to return. However, under the influence of musical developments in the later nineteenth century (often 30

Aura involving an interest in scales other than the major and minor or in widespread chromaticism, i.e. the frequent use of semitones outside the adopted scale), some composers were moving towards styles which evaded or positively rejected the hegemony of the triad and suggested an equal value for all the notes in the octave, thereby loosening or dispensing with the gravitational pull of the tonal centre or key. Between 1895 and 1915, figures such as Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, Claude Debussy and Alexander Scriabin explored these regions, but it was Arnold Schoenberg from 1908 and his pupils Alban Berg and Anton Webern from not long afterwards who went all the way and embraced what was in effect a full ‘atonality’ (though it was a term Schoenberg was never happy with) in works such as the Erwartung (1909) and Pierrot Lunaire (1912) of Schoenberg himself, Berg’s Five Orchestral Songs (1912) and Webern’s Six Pieces for Large Orchestra (1910). This was not music that entirely abandoned the late-Romantic past; indeed, it had several marked continuities with it. But in its pursuit of expressive – or rather e ­ xpressionist – intensity away from the old key centres, it pioneered a new idiom which would have a widespread influence, not only on later thoroughgoing atonalists but also on adventurous composers still wedded to the tonal system. READING Rognoni, Luigi (1977) The Second Vienna School: Expressionism and Dodecaphony, trans. Robert W. Mann. London: John Calder. Samson, Jim (1977) Music in Transition: A Study of Tonal Expansion and Atonality, 1900–1920. London: Dent.

Roger Savage

AURA This is a key term in the writing of the German critic and theorist Walter Benjamin and central to his influential essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility’ (first published in French in 1936). Like many concepts in Benjamin, the precise role of ‘aura’ in his thought is disputed; moreover, this well-known essay has a complex textual history as a result of its political content and exists in multiple versions. The meaning of the term needs to be understood in the context of the overall shape and style of Benjamin’s thinking. The Work of Art essay offers a speculative account of the reshaping of experience in modernity by technology in order to draw out what Benjamin sees as the conflicting possibilities contained within 31

Aura the present. The term ‘aura’ should be understood as an artefact of this project, and will be misunderstood if seen as a standalone term or as part of an aesthetic rather than critical theory. Benjamin argued that a transformation in experience occurred in the mid to late nineteenth century, of which his major work The Arcades Project (begun in 1927 but left incomplete at his death in 1940) was a detailed and idiosyncratic study. Because the means of reproduction for art have always existed, the reproducibility of an artwork has always been part of the concept. However, a quantitative increase in the technological means of reproduction have resulted in a qualitative shift or crisis in the concept of art. Aura names that which now appears to us as having been lost in this crisis. As Howard Caygill argues, aura for Benjamin is not an intrinsic material property of artworks, but a property bestowed on them by the practices of their reception and transmission. Although Benjamin relates aura to traditional attributes associated with autonomous artworks – uniqueness, the sense that the object stands and remains at a distance from the viewer, reader or spectator – the implication is that these ‘auratic’ properties are themselves produced, just as the perception or sensation of the viewer, reader or spectator are naturally and historically conditioned. For Benjamin, it is the material and ideal changes in works of art over the course of time, and in light of their historical reception, rather than their origin, which constitute their ‘uniqueness’. In the context of the art market, this becomes the idea of their authenticity or originality. Benjamin proposes that the elimination of aura marks the point at which the ritual value of the artwork has been finally eclipsed by its display value – the detachment of art from practice (tradition) and the emergence of new art forms based only on images. It is wrong to see these new forms (photography and cinema) in relation to traditional aesthetic categories. They are revolutionary in the ambiguous sense that the destruction of tradition and experience in modernity gives rise to new possibilities. Benjamin also notes the emergence of new reactionary phenomena in which auratic value is reinvested in art – an example is the cult of the movie star. Because of the difficulty of his work and its presentation in an allusive and fragmentary form, Benjamin has been accused both of nostalgia for the lost aura of the art of the past and of an equally uncritical endorsement of the post-auratic art of film. But these responses assume that his argument is historical, and that ‘aura’ is an aesthetic property which could be lost or destroyed rather than 32

Automaton an ineluctable feature of the social processes infesting the production and reception of artworks. Benjamin’s friend Theodor W. Adorno makes a more powerful challenge, arguing that the opposition between auratic and technological art is insufficiently dialectical, and that Benjamin in effect reduces autonomy to aura while exaggerating the emancipatory promise of the new forms. This response was to form the basis for Adorno’s and Max Horkheimer’s analysis of the culture industry in the late 1940s. READING Adorno, Theodor W. (1977) ‘Letter to Walter Benjamin, 18 March 1936’, trans. Harry Zohn, in Adorno et al., Aesthetics and Politics. London: New Left Books, pp. 120–6. Benjamin, Walter (2006) ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility’, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Volume 4: 1938– 1940, ed. Howard Weiland and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Caygill, Howard (1998) Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience. London: Routledge. Steiner, Uwe (2010) Walter Benjamin: An Introduction to His Work and Thought, trans. Michael Winkler. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Alex Thomson

AUTOMATON With a long history in the European literary and philosophical imagination, the automaton acquires special significance within the discourses of modernism as that object that embodies debates about representation. Literally meaning ‘self-acting’ in Greek, the automaton appears in Plato’s philosophical writings as the emblem that allows contemplation about the fraught relationships between truth/ illusion, body/soul, agency/constructivism, freedom/slavery, physics/ metaphysics. In the allegory of the cave (Republic 514a–519a), Plato uses the idea of the thaumata (sometimes translated as ‘puppets’, though closer to the notion of the ‘wondrous’ or ‘frightful’ object) to stage a drama about the relationship between truth and illusion, shadow-play and reality, and in general to discuss the personal and political implications of mimesis. Similarly, in The Laws (644c–645b), Plato compares the soul to a thauma and its well-being is seen to rely not on some higher force pulling ‘the strings’, but on the smooth workings, like a wound-up toy, of the soul’s three factors ­(pleasure-pain-calculation). During the early modern period 33

Autonomy in Europe the automaton resurfaces in many a theological debate about the distorting power of artifice. The 1890s see a revival of the automaton as an object of beauty or as extravagant toy (the most popular being the mechanical bird). The advent of electricity and the faith in or ambivalence about technology provide the automaton with its uniquely modernist life, during which it acts as a wondrous toy (Thomas Edison made a series of talking dolls in 1890, which managed to scare off children), as a way of thinking about humanism and anti-humanism, and as a mode that negotiates both technophobia and glorification of the machine. The female automaton has a distinct modernist pedigree. From E. T. A. Hoffman’s Olympia in ‘The Sandman’ tale (1816), which Sigmund Freud interprets in his 1919 essay ‘The uncanny’, to Villiers de L’Isle-Adam’s Alicia Clary in The Future Eve (1885–6), and the ‘false’ Maria in Thea von Harbou’s and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1925 novel; 1927 film), the figure embodies anxieties about sexuality, gender and reproduction. F. T. Marinetti’s early play, La donna è mobile (Electric Puppets) (1909), features living actors and automata, combining his adoration of technology with his ambivalence about women, whom he celebrated as actresses because their ‘highly strung’ nervous system made them puppets to their emotions. The quest for a non-anthropomorphic, non-psychological mode of creating presence for the actor finds a prototype in the automaton, as evidenced not only in the plays of Marinetti and Italian futurism, but also in the exploration of the figure of the marionette in the work of English theatre visionary Edward Gordon Craig, the biomechanics of Vsevolold Meyerhold and the Russian constructivists, as well as in the definition of the actor as the ‘Mechanized Eccentric’ (1919) by the bauhaus artist Oscar Schlemmer. READING Kang, Minsoo (2011) Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Reilly, Kara (2011) Automata and Mimesis on the Stage of Theatre History. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Olga Taxidou

AUTONOMY Although a central term in a number of modernist aesthetic theories, the definition of autonomy is difficult because of its range of meanings. The repeated use of this problematic word is itself suggestive: 34

Autonomy since the late eighteenth century, autonomy has been a privileged term in philosophical and moral vocabularies, naming the highest aspiration for modern individual selfhood. To set the law (nomos) for oneself (autos) is to be a free, rational, self-legislating agent. From this point of view, social theories have construed the modernisation process as one of emancipation from the strictures of traditional authority. From the same period we inherit the conceptualisation of the artwork as an autonomous structure, connected in complex ways to moral, social and political freedom. This is said to flow from some aspect of the artwork’s disinterest, distance or resistance and can be seen in the familiar claim that all art is in some sense critical of society. However, we also inherit a range of social practices in which the modes of production, exchange and valuation of art are also understood as autonomous, differentiated from other types of commercial or social relation. One consequence of this is that the modernist theoretical attempt to define the autonomy of the artwork tends also to be a stance taken on modernisation or modernity in general, and a defence of a particular set of social practices. Another is that the definition of the artwork’s autonomy has proved elusive, combining as it does questions relating to the production, circulation and reception of art within the social sphere, questions concerning the distinctive materials and effects from which art is made, and questions about the valuation of art. Because successful autonomy is taken to be a sign of the artwork’s economic and/or spiritual value, we might expect definitions of autonomy in relation to different works and media to be both pressing and highly contested. In broad terms, most modern art can be understood as relatively autonomous, that is characterised by a degree of self-consciousness about its difference from both traditional forms and more commercial forms, and evaluated in terms which displace rhetorical norms in favour of originality and innovation. The description of art as specifically modernist can be understood to signal further embrace of these tendencies, hence as a further inward or self-referential turn. This can lead to a more dramatic break with tradition, for instance serial or atonal composition in music, increasing abstraction in visual arts or the rejection of realist conventions in fiction. However, the historical avant-gardes pose a particular problem for thinking modernism in relation to autonomy. On the one hand avant-garde art can be taken as the furthest development of autonomy, emphasising the difference characteristic of the relation between the artwork and its 35

Avant-garde world even further, and breaking more drastically with convention. On the other hand, the originality of the avant-garde has been seen to lie precisely in its desire to overcome the difference between art and life presumed by what had by the early twentieth century become the dominant critical, commercial and academic modes of valuing art. READING Adorno, Theodor W. ([1997] 2013) Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Ralph Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. London: Bloomsbury. Bürger, Peter (1984) Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Alex Thomson

AVANT-GARDE ‘Avant-garde’ was originally a military term that came to be applied to political and aesthetic domains, where it denotes a practice of assaulting established authorities and cultural tradition. The concept of an artistic avant-garde emerged in the nineteenth century more or less in parallel with the development of modernity. In aesthetic criticism, it signified much more than a vague notion of an art that is ‘ahead of its time’. The term dates back to the Middle Ages, where it designated the advance troops of an army. Its figurative meaning of an advanced position in the arts and literature originated in the Renaissance. Around the time of the French Revolution, the term came to be applied to Jacobin politics and utopian, futureoriented philosophies. The metaphor certainly appealed to radical intellectuals who regarded themselves as an advance guard leading the rest of humankind into a liberated future. The concept of an artistic avant-garde as a parallel development to the political avant-garde was first introduced by Henri de SaintSimon, who held that artists, scientists and craftsmen were the most useful members of society and should therefore play a leading role in the future society. The idea was further elaborated by his pupil Olinde Rodrigues, who propagated the idea of the artist as a leader, priest and Messiah, who would ‘serve as the avant-garde’ of a new society and use the arts ‘as his weapon’. The Saint-Simonean conception exercised considerable influence in the nineteenth century. The image of the artists marching in a united front with political revolutionaries and the notion of radical, engaged art as a complement to political radicalism caused Charles Baudelaire to criticise the concept of the avant-garde for being too militaristic and disciplinarian. 36

Avant-garde Nonetheless, the idea of merging radical art with revolutionary politics continued to hold sway among artists of varying persuasion. In the following century, many avant-garde artists sought to ally themselves to political liberation movements. The slogan ‘art and the revolutionary artists to power’ did not aim at turning artists into politicians but at transforming politics into a creative occupation and thus instituting change both in the arts and in politics. However, the strategies and methods employed to further these goals did not find much backing from political parties of the Left. For example, the futurist coalition with the newly founded communist Party of Italy came to an end, when its leader, Antonio Gramsci, departed for Russia; the surrealist engagement in the Communist Party of France brought several years of stormy conflicts; and many constructivists fell victim to the Communist Party’s political purges. So, in the end, the paradoxical situation arose that avant-garde artists were accepted, if not honoured, by the bourgeoisie, against whom they had rebelled, and were rejected by the revolutionary forces, with whom they had sought to form a coalition. The historical avant-garde in the arts propagated a radical break with preceding formulae of artistic production and promoted creativity as part of a wider cultural-political revolution. Many avant-garde artists shared anarchist ideals and their manifestos found a positive reception in the anarchist movement. This transgressive, subversive stance separated avant-garde artists from other modernists, with whom they shared an interest in experimentation with new artistic forms and techniques. Avant-garde artists opposed conventional concepts, values and standards, and instead aimed at absolute originality in their creations. They operated in an uncharted realm with genuinely novel means of expression, created works of art that were substantially and significantly different from the average production of their time, and produced a body of theoretical reflections that was initially only appreciated by a small number of critics and fellow artists. It was a characteristic trait of all avant-garde movements that their opposition to the established canons of art went hand in hand with a battle against the guardians of tradition and social propriety. The avant-garde showed art to be an ideological construct sanctioned by custom and tradition, highlighted its subservient function in the dominant social system and sought to bridge the gap between art and life. The dadaists’ assault on the institutions of bourgeois society contained an echo of the military semantics mentioned above. These 37

Avant-garde revolutionaries in the ‘culture wars’ of the modernist period took it upon themselves to scout the enemy territory, attack the barriers erected by the forces of tradition, force a breach and then move into the virgin terrain of the future. The ‘advance guard’ would then be followed by the ‘rank-and-file’ of modernist artists, who shared with the elite corps an oppositional, progressive stance, but were less reckless in their actions and did not expose themselves to the same risks. The Futurists characterised themselves as a ‘fearful invasion’ of ‘a great army of madmen’ into ‘the land of paralysis’, where they wanted to ‘raze Goutville to the ground’ and build ‘the great Futurist Railroad!’ F. T. Marinetti, who was well-versed in the theory and practice of anarchism, viewed these interventions in the social and cultural fields as a form of insurrection that emulated the ‘destructive gesture of freedom-bringers’ and produced an art that was like throwing ‘a well-primed grenade over the shattered heads of our contemporaries’. He encouraged artists to become ‘gay incendiaries’ and, in a metaphorical sense, to set fire to libraries and demolish museums and academies. Hans Arp spoke of Dada as a crusade organised to win back the promised land of creativity. Hugo Ball compared his position in Zurich to that of a fighter in the trenches, and the Berlin Dadaists sought to transform art from a marketable commodity into a weapon. Another metaphor often employed by avant-garde artists was that of a purgative that clears out the constipation of body and mind. The concept of hygiene occupied a central role in Marinetti’s writings. ‘Dr F. T. Marinetti’, as he proudly signed many of his early essays and theoretical reflections, conducted his surgical strikes against the perceived illness of the body politic, which earned him the reputation of being ‘il Poeta Pink’, named after a popular medicine believed to restore the weak organism and to provide a cure against anaemia, sclerosis and fatigue. In a similar manner, the Dadaists described their activities as ‘practical self-detoxification’, which fulfilled the function of a purgative. Such medical metaphors and references continued to be used after World war II, for example by George Maciunas, who wanted the Fluxus movement to have the effect of a laxative and who planned to sell his Fluxus magazine in a box designed like a disposable enema unit. Whether functioning like a bomb or a cleanser, avant-garde art was always conceived as an oppositional force that attacked the dominant ideology of bourgeois society and subverted the institutional framework of the production, distribution and reception of 38

Base materialism cultural artifacts. After World War II, many key ideas of the historical avant-garde re-emerged in New York, from where it returned to European capitals as a neo-avant-garde. It also played a significant role in Japan and in some Latin American countries, where until the 1960s it continued to be linked to political radicalism. READING Adamson, Walter L. (2007) Embattled Avant-gardes: Modernism’s Resistance to Commodity Culture in Europe. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kostelanetz, Richard and Richard Carlin (eds) (2000) Dictionary of the Avant-gardes, 2nd edn. New York: Schirmer Books.

Günter Berghaus

B BASE MATERIALISM A term coined by the French writer and intellectual Georges Bataille to refer to a mode of thought that attempts to subvert all forms of abstraction and idealism by emphasising that which is low, denigrated or reviled. Other forms of materialism, Bataille argues, cannot help but elevate matter onto a rarefied metaphysical plane – even the ‘dialectical materialism’ of marxism had Hegelian idealism as its starting point. Insisting that ‘base matter’ resists such recuperation, Bataille at times associates the term with the most abject forms of matter: rotting flesh, excreta or the literally ‘low’ parts of the body – parts like the big toe, the ignominious basis of homo sapiens’ erect, dignified stance. Elsewhere, however, he rejects the idea that base matter is simply reducible to brute physical substance, ‘the thing-initself’ or the ‘dead matter’ of scientific investigation. Instead, he finds inspiration in the Gnostic conception of matter as an ‘active principle having its own eternal autonomous existence’ as ‘darkness’ and as ‘evil’ – the latter understood not as ‘the absence of good’ but as a ‘creative action’. READING Bataille, Georges (1985) Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, ed. Allan Stoekl, trans. Allan Stoekl with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie Jr. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Base materialism cultural artifacts. After World War II, many key ideas of the historical avant-garde re-emerged in New York, from where it returned to European capitals as a neo-avant-garde. It also played a significant role in Japan and in some Latin American countries, where until the 1960s it continued to be linked to political radicalism. READING Adamson, Walter L. (2007) Embattled Avant-gardes: Modernism’s Resistance to Commodity Culture in Europe. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kostelanetz, Richard and Richard Carlin (eds) (2000) Dictionary of the Avant-gardes, 2nd edn. New York: Schirmer Books.

Günter Berghaus

B BASE MATERIALISM A term coined by the French writer and intellectual Georges Bataille to refer to a mode of thought that attempts to subvert all forms of abstraction and idealism by emphasising that which is low, denigrated or reviled. Other forms of materialism, Bataille argues, cannot help but elevate matter onto a rarefied metaphysical plane – even the ‘dialectical materialism’ of marxism had Hegelian idealism as its starting point. Insisting that ‘base matter’ resists such recuperation, Bataille at times associates the term with the most abject forms of matter: rotting flesh, excreta or the literally ‘low’ parts of the body – parts like the big toe, the ignominious basis of homo sapiens’ erect, dignified stance. Elsewhere, however, he rejects the idea that base matter is simply reducible to brute physical substance, ‘the thing-initself’ or the ‘dead matter’ of scientific investigation. Instead, he finds inspiration in the Gnostic conception of matter as an ‘active principle having its own eternal autonomous existence’ as ‘darkness’ and as ‘evil’ – the latter understood not as ‘the absence of good’ but as a ‘creative action’. READING Bataille, Georges (1985) Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, ed. Allan Stoekl, trans. Allan Stoekl with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie Jr. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Bauhaus Noys, Benjamin (1998) ‘Georges Bataille’s Base Materialism’, Cultural Values, 2 (4): 499–517.

Paul Crosthwaite

BAUHAUS The Bauhaus was an art school that spread the ideas of modern, constructivist design among the young generation of Western Europe. The school had three different directors: Walter Gropius (1919–28), Hannes Meyer (1928–30) and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1930–3). It went through three different phases in three German cities: Weimar (1919–25), Dessau (1925–32) and Berlin (1932–3). In the fourteen years of its existence, the Bauhaus taught some 1,250 students, many of whom made major contributions to artistic developments in the twentieth century. The school was founded in March 1919 by a group of like-minded artists and craftsmen, as a bold experiment that united the former Grand-Ducal School of Arts and Craft in Weimar (which had been closed during World war I) with the Saxon Academy of Art. Their aim was to reform art education by bringing together different artistic disciplines and to overcome the divide that traditionally separated the arts from the crafts (see arts and crafts). The name ‘Bauhaus’ created an associative link to the medieval ‘Bauhütte’, a cooperative association between the various crafts required for the construction of major edifices such as cathedrals and castles. The principal aims of the Bauhaus were: to overcome the divide between artist and craftsman, between fine arts and applied arts; to reunite the artistic disciplines in a ‘Total Work of Art’ (gesamtkunstwerk); to close the divide between teacher and pupil through collective working methods in workshops; and to reform society through a new concept of artistic creation. During its first phase in Weimar, the Bauhaus was led by a group of artists who had been politically active in the revolutionary uprising of November 1918 and who pursued a programme of renewal and social reform based on expressionist principles. However, with the rappel à l’ordre and the emerging trend towards a New Sobriety, the artistic and political orientation of the school’s founding fathers became an anachronism and made them lose their appeal to young students. When, in September 1922, the Constructivist International (KI) met in Weimar, the group’s attitude towards the Bauhaus was derogatory and they considered the institution ‘an hotel for invalid artists’. 40

Bauhaus The year 1922 was in many ways a transition period for the Bauhaus. A group of some fifteen loosely organised Constructivists (the KURI group under the direction of Farkas Molnár) had been founded in December 1921 and was given reinforcement by Van Doesburg’s de stijl course held in Weimar from 8 March to 8 July 1922. In October 1922, Johannes Itten handed in his resignation and was replaced, in March 1923, by László Moholy-Nagy. In the stage workshop, Oskar Schlemmer succeeded Lothar Schreyer. At the summer exhibition of 1923, the theme of ‘Art and technology – A New Unity’ indicated that the transformation of the Expressionist art school into a Constructivist institution was taking shape. Between 1922 and 1925, the Bauhaus remodelled its curriculum and began to offer courses that combined theoretical enquiry with practical experimentation. After deconstructing a work of art and stripping it down to its basic components, these constituent parts were then reassembled according to the principles of elementary design and material aesthetics. Initial instruction was carried out in a foundation course where students were trained to analyse the basic components of all art forms, to understand their material characteristics and to investigate how the material affected the artistic forms derived from it. Successful completion of the six-month probation period (twelve months as of 1925) in the foundation course allowed them to enroll for training with a chosen master in one of the workshop disciplines, where they received both theoretical tuition (art history, composition, structural analysis, material science, anatomy, chemistry, optics) and practical training (mural painting, woodcarving, stonemasonry, metalwork, cabinet making, weaving, printing and bookbinding). In 1933, under pressure from the Nazi regime, the school was closed and many teachers and students emigrated. Mies van der Rohe re-settled in Chicago, where in 1937 he founded the New Bauhaus, later to become the Institute of Design, part of the Illinois Institute of Technology. After the Nazi period, the Ulm School of Design, founded by Max Bill in 1953, continued the Bauhaus tradition and influenced international design education. READING Whitford, Frank (1984) Bauhaus. London: Thames & Hudson. Wingler, Hans Maria (ed.) (1976) The Bauhaus: Weimar, Dessau, Berlin, Chicago, 2nd edn. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Günter Berghaus 41

The Beat Generation

THE BEAT GENERATION The Beat Generation was a loose confederation of novelists and poets, initially centred on and around the Columbia University campus in Manhattan in the mid-1940s. The group then included Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Lucien Carr, Edie Parker, Joan Vollmer and Hal Chase. In the winter of 1946, Neal Cassady arrived in New York for the first time, changing the dynamics of the community and, in time, serving as the model for Dean Moriarty in Kerouac’s seminal Beat text, On the Road (1957), and fictionalised under various names in many of Kerouac’s other novels, as well as in John Clellon Holmes’ Go (1952, often labelled the first ‘Beat’ novel) and as ‘N.C.’, the ‘secret hero’ of Allen Ginsberg’s poem ‘Howl’ (1956). These first-wave Beats, who were also drawn to the small-time thief and Times Square hustler Herbert Hunke as a muse, were later joined by slightly younger writers, including Diane di Prima, Gregory Corso and LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka), and established close aesthetic and social ties with the city’s Abstract Expressionist artists and Method Actors. By the early 1950s, most of the original Beats had left New York: Kerouac had been crossing and re-crossing the United States for several years; Burroughs and Vollmer moved to New Orleans and then Mexico (where Burroughs shot and killed her while attempting to shoot a glass off the top of her head), and Burroughs then spent many years in Europe and Tangiers; Ginsberg relocated to San Francisco, where, along with Michael McClure, Phil Whalen, Lou Walsh, Lawrence Ferlinghetti (also the owner of City Lights publishing house and bookstore, responsible for publishing many canonical Beat texts) and others identified as ‘Beats’, he was part of the wider ‘San Francisco Renaissance’ that also had close ties with many of the black mountain poets and the confessional poets. On 13 October 1955, Ginsberg performed sections of ‘Howl’ for the first time, in a reading at the Six Gallery in San Francisco, also featuring Gary Snyder, McClure, Whalen and Philip Lamantia and compered by the anarchist poet (and proto-Beat) Kenneth Rexroth. The evening, which was fictionalised in Kerouac’s novel The Dharma Bums (1958), has become mythologised as the starting point in a process that would see the Beat Generation transformed from obscurity to the Beatnik phenomenon of the late-1950s. Early studies of the Beats concentrated upon their American antecedents, most notably the writers Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, 42

Bergsonism Jack London, Thomas Wolfe, Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, alongside the significance of jazz, especially the playing of bebop saxophonist Charlie Parker, in inspiring the ‘breath lines’ that are a feature of Ginsberg and Kerouac’s work. With the exception of William Blake and Arthur Rimbaud, European influences were largely neglected. More recently, critics have identified James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and W. B. Yeats’s experiments with streamof-consciousness writing as models for what Kerouac termed ‘spontaneous prose’ and have demonstrated the importance of Charles Baudelaire, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Paul Cézanne, Dylan Thomas and other European writers and artists as precursors. For many years, more attention was devoted to the lifestyles of the Beats than to their writings: Kerouac’s alcohol and drug-fuelled road trips, Cassady’s charismatic charm and skills as a driver, Burroughs’s heroin addiction and fascination with firearms and Ginsberg’s role as early mentor to Bob Dylan and flamboyant father figure to 1960s counterculture led to more biographies than to studies paying close attention to their work as artists. These studies also led to the marginalisation of other important Beat writers, such as di Prima and Joyce Glassman, with the perception – rarely challenged by Ginsberg – that the Beats was largely a group defined by homosocial (and often homosexual) relationships between men. More recently, the study of Beat writing has become a central component of many university literature programmes, with attention being given to the Beat canon as a significant moment in the history of modernism and the emergence of postmodernism and – in a rejoinder to the perception that Kerouac’s exhortations to write spontaneously were adopted by all Beat writers – to the broad diversity of the material labelled as ‘Beat’. READING Campbell, James (1999) This Is the Beat Generation: New York, San Francisco, Paris. London: Secker & Warburg. Gair, Christopher (2008) The Beat Generation. Oxford: Oneworld. Johnson, Roanna C. and Nancy M. Grace (eds) (2002) Girls Who Wore Black: Women Writing the Beat Generation. New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press.

Christopher Gair

BERGSONISM Henri Bergson’s position in the early twentieth century can be compared to Jacques Derrida’s at its end – as a Francophone thinker of 43

Bergsonism considerable complexity whose ideas were nevertheless widely – even fashionably – disseminated throughout the culture of the time, and potentially influential among contemporary writers. Later commentators have often shared some version of Wyndham Lewis’s conclusion in 1927 – that ‘without the pervasive growth of the timephilosophy starting from the little seed planted by Bergson . . . there would be no Ulysses, or there would be no Á la recherche du temps perdu’. First developed in Essai sur les donnés immédiates de la conscience (1889; translated as Time and Free Will, 1910), Bergson’s philosophy asserted that temporality should truly be experienced as ‘durée’ (duration) – a seamless ‘interpenetration of conscious states’. The ‘interconnexion and organisation of elements, each one of which represents the whole’ ensures for durée ‘a qualitative multiplicity, with no relation to number’ – one falsified by ‘the time which our clocks divide into equal proportions’, and, more generally, by the divisive, rationalising habits of the intellect. Distinctions of this kind can be found throughout modernist writing. T. S. Eliot’s contrast of ‘synthesis’ with temporally exact ‘divisions and precisions’ in ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’ (written in 1909 when he was listening to Bergson’s lectures and first published in Blast in 1915) seems thoroughly Bergsonian; so does Virginia Woolf’s description in Mrs Dalloway (1925) of clocks extolling ‘proportion’ by ‘shredding and slicing, dividing and subdividing . . . the mound of time’. Marcel Proust’s seamless interminglings of present and past, through memory, might likewise be compared to some of Bergson’s teaching, as, more generally, might the fluid inner interfusions of James Joyce or Dorothy Richardson’s stream of consciousness. Contrary to Lewis, though, Bergson may not have been a sole or even principal source of these ideas and styles. Like Lewis, Eliot had attended Bergson’s lectures at the Collège de France, which were highly popular during the first decade of the twentieth century. Yet any influence scarcely outlasted the period of ‘Rhapsody’, while Lewis himself soon became vociferously hostile. Woolf may have known of Bergson at most only indirectly, through her bloomsbury circle or her reading of Proust. Richardson denied any specific influence, suggesting instead a general contemporary uneasiness about clock-based time-measurement. Perhaps responding to increasingly stringent, globalised temporalities in the 1880s (see mean time), Bergson may merely have expressed and codified a set of alternative 44

Biomechanics concepts – reliant on ‘depths of consciousness: the deep-seated self’ and memory – which later authors rediscovered or extended for themselves. In other ways, though, Bergson’s work can be seen as more widely influential than even Lewis suggests. His ideas of élan vital [‘vital impetus’] and of a seamless ‘creative evolution’ of life and mind were revivified in the late-twentieth century vitalist thinking of Gilles Deleuze. Tensions Bergson identifies between ‘inner life’ and ‘a self which can be artificially reconstructed’, for social purposes, in ‘the fixed terms of language’ also in some ways anticipate the thinking of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Within his own period, Bergson’s suggestion that – rather like the clock – ‘the word with well-defined outlines . . . covers over the delicate and fugitive impressions of our individual consciousness’ bears comparison with linguistic scepticisms shared widely among contemporary thinkers and modernist writers (see impressionism). Favouring in such ways the fluid evolutions of inner consciousness and intuition, rather than intellect, system and rationalisation, Bergson may at any rate be suggestively read alongside modernist literature, whether as origin or analogue of many characteristics of its vision. READING Bergson, Henri (1910) Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness [1889], trans. F. L. Pogson. London: George Allen & Unwin. Bergson, Henri (1911) Creative Evolution [1907], trans. Arthur Mitchell. London: Macmillan. Gillies, Mary Ann (1996) Henri Bergson and British Modernism. Montreal: McGill/Queens University Press. Kumar, Shiv K. (1962) Bergson and the Stream of Consciousness Novel. London: Blackie. Lewis, Wyndham (1927) Time and Western Man. London: Chatto & Windus.

Randall Stevenson

BIOMECHANICS The Soviet theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold developed biomechanics, a method for training actors, in reaction to the naturalism of Konstantin Stanislavski’s Moscow Art Theatre, shifting the focus from interiority, naturalism and affect to movement, balance and reflex response. Meyerhold developed an idea, recurrent in 45

Black Mountain College the scientific and philosophical methodologies of taylorism, and the structure of external stimulus and reflex response in Pavlovian reflexology, that the body’s responses to external stimuli preceded the formation of an emotion, that in fact the body’s response was the emotion itself. The actor is a machine responding to stimuli, rather than his or her own mental perception and interior states. Exercises were developed in gesture and movement, which were divided into three stages – physical stimulus, physical response and emotion – which would train the actor’s sense of balance, serving to distance the actor’s body from his role, and signal formal correlatives for intentional states. Biomechanics influenced the cinema of Sergei Eisenstein, Meyerhold’s pupil, who taught the exercises from the late 1920s to his students at the Moscow State Institute of Cinematography. Biomechanics does not make an impact on theatre practice until the 1950s, once first-hand documents become available. Grotowski at the Polish Theatre Laboratory and his pupil Eugenio Barba at Odin Teatret claimed to have revived Biomechanics during the 1960s and early 1970s. More indirectly, Biomechanics exerted its influence on the wider anti-naturalist tradition, including the theatre of Bertolt Brecht, Peter Brook and Complicité. READING Law, Alma and Mel Gordon (1996) Meyerhold, Eisenstein and Biomechanics. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Leach, Robert (1989) Vsevolod Meyerhold. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Meyerhold, Vsevolod (1998) Meyerhold on Theatre, ed. and trans. Edward Braun. London: Methuen.

Anthony Paraskeva

BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE Black Mountain College (BMC) was an experimental college in North Carolina, USA, founded by John Andrew Rice, Theodore Dreier, Frederick Georgia and Ralph Lounsbury in 1933. During its 24 years of existence, the college enrolled less than 1,200 students, but its impact on the post-war American avant-garde – especially in the fields of art, performance and literature – cannot be ignored. Throughout the various stages of its existence, BMC’s faculty included – either as all-year staff or as visitors during its summer programmes – figures such as Anni and Josef Albers, Eric Bentley, 46

Black Mountain College Ilya Bolotowsky, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Robert Creeley, Willem de Kooning, Robert Duncan, Lyonel Feininger, Buckminster Fuller, Paul Goodman, Franz Cline, Robert Motherwell and Charles Olson. In addition, Ruth Assawa, John Chamberlain, Fielding Dawson, Elaine de Kooning, Ed Dorn, Francine du Plessix Gray, Martha and Basil King, Robert Rauschenberg, Kenneth Snelson, Cy Twombly, Cora Kelley Ward, John Wieners and Jonathan Williams were among the students who attended the college. From early on, BMC’s approach to its curriculum was characterised by a mixture of American progressivism in education and the aesthetics of European modernism – the latter of these resulting from, for example, the Alberses’ previous connections to bauhaus – which produces a dynamic and creative communal atmosphere (Harris 2002). Contrary to establishments such as the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton, which described themselves as ‘a kind of assembly point of ideas’, Black Mountain was, in Olson’s terms, an ‘assembly point of acts’ (Olson 1977: 28). Indeed, while the college was instrumental in introducing modernist concepts to a younger ­generation of American artists and writers, its communal ethos also made it a productive site for noteworthy artistic experiments. Fuller constructed his first geodesic dome (a domical design based on efficiency and adaptability in terms of material, transportation and construction) there in 1948, and in the summer of 1952, Cage, together with collaborators such as Cunningham, Olson, Rauschenberg, David Tudor, Nicholas Cernovitch and M. C. Richards, staged an untitled mixed-media arts event. Partially influenced by both dada and the theatre of cruelty (which Cage had learnt about that summer through reading Antonin Artaud’s The Theatre and Its Double with Tudor and Richards), this performance later went on to be recognised as a progenitor of happenings. After Charles Olson was appointed as the rector of the college, BMC started to place more emphasis on the literary arts (Duberman 1972). In 1953, Creeley and Olson founded the Black Mountain Review. Edited by Creeley, the journal lasted for seven issues, published between 1954 and 1957; it is often recognised as one of the notable US-based little magazines. The subsequent publication of Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry 1945–1960 brought wider recognition to the socalled ‘Black Mountain school’ of poets, which the anthology identified as Olson, Duncan, Creeley, Dorn, Williams, Paul Blackburn, Paul Carrroll, Larry Eigner, Joel Oppenheimer and Denise Levertov. Many of them were a significant influence on figures a­ssociated 47

Bloomsbury Group with both l=a=n=g=u=a=g=e poetry and the british poetry revival. Despite these multifarious collaborations and activities, the community at BMC was not without its tensions. Josef Albers was critical of Cage’s turn towards chance and indeterminacy; there was a lack of consensus about the college’s educational policy – with some staff wanting to adopt the structure of a more conventional college while others favoured the continuation of its experimental, communal approach; many of the staff distrusted Olson’s domineering personality; and Hilda Morley, among others, found that the college’s attitude towards women became increasingly chauvinistic and patronising during the 1950s (Harris 2002). Furthermore, with so many of the staff focused on pursuing their own creative work, the college neglected to sustain a concentrated administrative effort in recruitment and fundraising. Ultimately, this meant that by the late 1950s, BMC’s debts were unsustainable in light of its decreased number of students. During the autumn of 1956, the remaining faculty decided it was time to close the college and liquidate its remaining assets. This sell-off was completed a year later in September 1957. READING Allen, Donald (ed.) (1999) The New American Poetry 1945–1960. Berkeley: University of California Press. Duberman, Martin (1972) Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community. New York: E. P. Durron & Co. Harris, Mary Emma (2002) The Arts at Black Mountain College. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lane, Mervin (ed.) (1990) Black Mountain College: Sprouted Seeds – An Anthology of Personal Accounts. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Olson, Charles (1977) ‘A letter to the faculty of Black Mountain College’, OLSON: The Journal of the Charles Olson Archives, 8: 26–33.

Juha Virtanen

BLOOMSBURY GROUP Bloomsbury is an area in central London that lends its name to a group of intellectuals and artists that contributed strongly to modernist literary culture, social and art criticism, painting and the decorative arts, and ethics, politics and economics. The so-called Bloomsbury Group started to come into existence in 1904 and existed for roughly four decades. Based on friendship and intimacy, Bloomsbury lacked 48

Bolshevism a formal membership protocol, but it is often agreed that art critics Clive Bell and Roger Fry, authors E. M. Forster, Molly MacCarthy, Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf, civil servants Saxon SydneyTurner and Leonard Woolf, economist John Maynard Keynes, literary critic Desmond MacCarthy, painters Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant and psychoanalyst Adrian Stephen were core members of the group. Bloomsbury did not have a single programme or manifesto and thrived on a culture of debate and discussion. Still, there are some shared influences, including the works of Cambridge scholars like G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica (1903) or Jane Ellen Harrison’s Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903). Bloomsbury is also often linked to a self-conscious desire to break with Victorian traditions and conventions, especially with regard to gender roles and sexuality. The Bloomsbury Group has often been criticised for its supposed elitism, utopianism and lack of political activism, but this assessment overlooks, for instance, Leonard Woolf’s critiques of empire or the direct involvement of the Strachey women in the suffrage movement, which also shaped Virginia Woolf’s feminism. READING Rosenbaum, S. P. (1998) Aspects of Bloomsbury: Studies in Modern English Literary and Intellectual History. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Wolfe, Jesse (2011) Bloomsbury, Modernism, and the Reinvention of Intimacy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Woolf, Virginia (1985) ‘Old Bloomsbury’, in Jeanne Schulkind (ed.), Moments of Being: A Collection of Autobiographical Writing. San Diego: Harvest Book.

Jana Funke

BOLSHEVISM Vladimir Lenin conceived of the Bolsheviks as being ‘professional revolutionaries’ charged with the overhauling of Tsarist dynastic control in the instigation of Socialism. Deriving from the Russian bolshinstvo, meaning ‘majority’, the Bolsheviks under Lenin split from the Mensheviks (of the ‘minority’) to form the communist Party of the Soviet Union after a policy disagreement during the Second Congress of 1903. The Mensheviks, who were more liberal democratic in their ideological make up, advocated an organisational model that would appeal to all workers, as opposed to Lenin’s Bolsheviks who favoured restricting membership to a dedicated band of revolutionaries who would become the ‘vanguard of the 49

British Poetry Revival ­ roletariat’. Lenin reinterpreted marxist teaching to fit the socioecop nomic backwardness of Russia at the turn of the twentieth century, and it is in this split from the Mensheviks and his preference for a small, centralised, radical elite that traces of his practical reworking of Marxist philosophy, a theory that would later become known as Leninism, can be discerned. Later in the twentieth century Bolshevism became synonymous with a paranoid politics and rhetoric – Winston Churchill considered Bolshevism to be a ‘disease’ – that reached its hysterical zenith with Joseph McCarthy and the witch hunts perpetrated by the House of Un-American Activities Committee. READING Lenin, Vladimir (1975) ‘On Bolshevism’, V. I. Lenin Collected Works Vol. XVIII. Moscow: Progress Publishers, pp. 485–6. Trotsky, Leon (1937) Stalinism and Bolshevism. New York: Pioneer Publishers.

Robbie McLaughlan

BRITISH POETRY REVIVAL The British Poetry Revival was a loosely associated set of developments in late twentieth-century British poetry, mainly during the 1950s–1970s, which indicated a newfound interest in early twentieth-century modernism and its subsequent evolution worldwide, notably in mid-century North American poetry. The term was first used in 1974 by the poet and academic Eric Mottram, who subsequently limited the Revival’s time frame to 1960–75, though by many accounts its origins stretch further back and its later manifestations extend beyond the mid-1970s (Mottram 1993). The Revival partly defined itself against the control exerted over post-World War II British poetry, especially English poetry, by writers, critics and editors associated with the so-called Movement, some of whom expressed an aversion to modernist techniques. The modernist poetic traditions of Scotland and Wales, the most striking manifestations of which often appeared years after the heyday of Anglo-American modernism, notably in the work of Hugh MacDiarmid, W. S. Graham, David Jones, Lynette Roberts and Dylan Thomas, were an important British precedent for the Revival, as was the overlapping development of British surrealism in the 1930s–1940s. The resurgent 1960s work of the Northumbrian modernist poet Basil Bunting also became a lodestar for some Revival poets. Internationally, the ongoing 50

British Poetry Revival adaptation of modernist poetics, including the Poundian long-form poem, in mid-century North American objectivism, notably in the work of Louis Zukofsky, Charles Reznikoff and Lorine Niedecker, was a vital influence; so too was the poetry associated with black mountain college, including that of Robert Creeley and Charles Olson, and the new york school and beat poetry, notably the work of John Ashbery and Allen Ginsberg. In many cases, these poets were in direct communication and collaboration with Revival poets, while the international sound poetry and concrete poetry movements of the 1950s–1970s performed a similar function for other poets. The Revival can be traced both in the development of a large, heterogeneous body of literature and in the establishment of cultural projects such as small presses, little magazines, reading series, exhibitions, festivals and collectives. In the first case, early manifestations of Revival poetics can be found in the 1950s and early 1960s work of Charles Tomlinson and Roy Fisher, among the first British poets to register the influence of William Carlos Williams. Poets subsequently associated with the Revival include J. H. Prynne, a sometime associate of the Black Mountain poet Ed Dorn, Bob Cobbing, an innovator in Concrete and Sound Poetry, and Tom Raworth, whose early poetry channels the influence of Beat, Black Mountain and New York School poetry. Considered as a cultural phenomenon, an important early episode in the Revival was the establishment of the transatlantic small press Migrant by the Scottish poet Gael Turnbull in 1957. The Revival’s subsequent manifestation comprised a number of loosely connected nodes of activity in locations throughout Britain, including London, Cambridge, Brighton, Bristol, Cardiff, Nottingham, Newcastle, Edinburgh and Glasgow. In most of these locations, small presses, journals, independent galleries and reading series were in operation throughout much of the 1950s–1970s. Iconic cultural expressions of the Revival include the International Poetry Incarnation staged at the Royal Albert Hall in 1965 and the takeover of the Poetry Society by pro-modernist figures in the early 1970s. READING Barry, Peter (2006) Poetry Wars: British Poetry of the 1970s and the Battle of Earls Court. Cambridge: Salt. Duncan, Andrew (2003) The Failure of Conservatism in Modern British Poetry. Cambridge: Salt. Monk, Geraldine (ed.) (2012) Cusp: Recollections of Poetry in Transition. Bristol: Shearsman. 51

Bureaucracy Mottram, Eric (1993) ‘The British Poetry Revival, 1960–75’, in Robert Hampson and Peter Barry (eds), New British Poetries: The Scope of the Possible. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Sheppard, Robert (2005) The Poetry of Saying: British Poetry and Its Discontents, 1950–2000. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

Greg Thomas

BUREAUCRACY The increasing scale of industry and commercialisation in the nineteenth century required the rapid expansion of government administration. In US and British usage, the terms ‘public service’ or ‘civil service’ are used in order to imply impartiality and professionalism, whereas the foreign term ‘bureaucracy’ has more negative connotations, suggesting the excessive use of power. In Economy and Society (1922) the German sociologist Max Weber argues every bureaucracy guards its power against all rivals. In order to do so it carefully controls the flow of information. The concept of ‘official secrets’ conceals the interests of the bureaucracy itself. Bureaucracy is not limited to the nation state; it also extends into private and commercial institutions and corporations. The intrusion of bureaucracy into everyday life is a key theme in the work of Franz Kafka. Kafka’s employment in the ‘Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia’ gave him insights into how bureaucracy works. His major texts depict individuals caught in the wheels of institutional machinery. In Metamorphosis (Die Verwandlung, 1915) Gregor Samsa is a commercial traveller. When he discovers that he has transformed into a verminous insect, his initial reaction is to worry about missing the train for work. In The Trial (Der Process, 1925) Josef K. is subject to proceedings by a mysterious court, whose authority he implicitly accepts, even as he protests against it. K., the main protagonist of The Castle (Das Schloss, 1926), confronts an advanced bureaucratic administration which, despite its apparent incompetence, exerts a magnetic hold over a village community. The quasi-supernatural power of bureaucracy in Kafka’s fiction can be linked to other modern forms of authority such as hypnosis and charisma. Other modern representations of bureaucratic regimes include George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961).

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Cabaret READING Andriopoulos, Stefan (2008) Possessed: Hypnotic Crimes, Corporate Fiction, and the Invention of Cinema. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Munro, Iain and Christian Huber (2012) ‘Kafka’s Mythology: Organization, Bureaucracy and the Limits of Sensemaking’, Human Relations, 65 (4): 523–44. Robertson, Ritchie (2004) Kafka: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ernest Schonfield

C CABARET ‘Cabaret’ in French denotes a tavern, wine cellar or small restaurant, and the performances given in such places came to be called ‘cabaret’ too. The environment dictated some aspects of cabaret performance: relative brevity (since there was no call – and hardly the atmosphere – to mount a full-length show), a need to grab customers’ attention with something striking (since at least in cabaret’s early days they had come primarily to do something else: eat, drink, talk), and a certain clubby informality: a playfulness and knowingness which acknowledged that the audience – often the local artistic community, the intelligentsia and folk from the Bohemian quarter – either were or liked to think themselves the ‘in’-crowd. In the English-speaking world (apart from the one-off ‘Cave of the Golden Calf’ run briefly by August Strindberg’s widow Frida in London in 1912–13), cabaret didn’t really get under way until after the 1914–18 war, and even then its melange of catchy songs, dance numbers and comic turns hardly rated as a major performance genre (though it did generate the Auden-Britten ‘Cabaret Songs’ for Hedli Anderson in the late 1930s). Things were different on the European mainland. There, between the 1880s and the 1930s and to an extent beyond, cabaret performance was a more serious – though rarely a solemn – matter. It flourished in many of the major continental cities, offering programmes of chansons (often risqué, satirical or subversive), monologues (often outrageous), dance routines, skits, parodies and dramatic sketches, and also longer playlets (often experimental, sometimes shocking) which 53

Cabaret READING Andriopoulos, Stefan (2008) Possessed: Hypnotic Crimes, Corporate Fiction, and the Invention of Cinema. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Munro, Iain and Christian Huber (2012) ‘Kafka’s Mythology: Organization, Bureaucracy and the Limits of Sensemaking’, Human Relations, 65 (4): 523–44. Robertson, Ritchie (2004) Kafka: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ernest Schonfield

C CABARET ‘Cabaret’ in French denotes a tavern, wine cellar or small restaurant, and the performances given in such places came to be called ‘cabaret’ too. The environment dictated some aspects of cabaret performance: relative brevity (since there was no call – and hardly the atmosphere – to mount a full-length show), a need to grab customers’ attention with something striking (since at least in cabaret’s early days they had come primarily to do something else: eat, drink, talk), and a certain clubby informality: a playfulness and knowingness which acknowledged that the audience – often the local artistic community, the intelligentsia and folk from the Bohemian quarter – either were or liked to think themselves the ‘in’-crowd. In the English-speaking world (apart from the one-off ‘Cave of the Golden Calf’ run briefly by August Strindberg’s widow Frida in London in 1912–13), cabaret didn’t really get under way until after the 1914–18 war, and even then its melange of catchy songs, dance numbers and comic turns hardly rated as a major performance genre (though it did generate the Auden-Britten ‘Cabaret Songs’ for Hedli Anderson in the late 1930s). Things were different on the European mainland. There, between the 1880s and the 1930s and to an extent beyond, cabaret performance was a more serious – though rarely a solemn – matter. It flourished in many of the major continental cities, offering programmes of chansons (often risqué, satirical or subversive), monologues (often outrageous), dance routines, skits, parodies and dramatic sketches, and also longer playlets (often experimental, sometimes shocking) which 53

Cadavre Exquis might involve live actors and/or shadow puppets or marionettes. The ‘Black Cat’ in Paris, which in 1881 set the tone for European cabaret, the ‘Four Cats’ in Barcelona, the ‘Bat’ in Vienna, another ‘Bat’ in Moscow, the ‘Eleven Executioners’ in Munich, ‘Sound and Smoke’ in Berlin, the ‘Green Balloon’ in Cracow and the ‘Cabaret Voltaire’ in Zurich: these were some of the notable continental cabarets artistiques. And some of the artists who worked in them? At one time or another Christian Morgenstern and Max Reinhardt wrote for cabaret, Erik Satie played piano at it, Frank Wedekind sang to his mandolin at it, Arnold Schoenberg composed songs for it and did a stint as music director, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec created posters for it, the young Pablo Picasso designed flyers and menu-cards, and Gustav Klimt devised a costume for one of its characteristic conférenciers or masters of ceremony. The audiences and ambiences of the various cabarets varied considerably, as did the theatrical and musical fare they offered, but most shared an unofficial, small-is-beautiful, there’s-somethingdifferent-here philosophy which often allowed them to reflect new movements in the arts that would only gain general exposure later. It was so in 1909 in Vienna when the ‘Bat’ mounted the professional premiere of one of the earliest German-language expressionist plays, Oscar Kokoschka’s explosive Grotesque (later retitled Sphinx and Strawman), an erotically charged proto-absurdist ‘Comedy for automata’ involving speaking actors, masks, puppets, dolls, clowning and acrobatics. And it was so again in 1916 in Zurich when the Meierei Bar played host to Hugo Ball’s ‘Cabaret Voltaire’: an energetically anarchic group of performers (among them Tristan Tzara and Ball himself) who put on avant-garde soirées – ‘music, theories, manifestos, poems, paintings, costumes, masks’, recalled Tristan Tzara – and quickly developed into the first dada fraternity. READING Appignanesi, Lisa (2004) The Cabaret, rev. edn. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Segel, Harold B. (1987) Turn-of-the-Century Cabaret. New York: Columbia University Press.

Roger Savage

CADAVRE EXQUIS Among the various parlour games adopted and adapted by surrealism was ‘consequences’. This involves the construction of a sentence in 54

Calligram which various participants each contribute an adjective, subject, verb or noun and so on, according to a prescribed order, each unaware of the other players’ contributions and of the semantic consequences of their own insertion until the newly minted phrase is revealed at the end of each round. The Surrealists renamed the game after the ­sentence – uncannily resonant with their s­ensibilities – produced in the course of one of their first experiments with this procedure in 1925: ‘le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau’, or ‘the exquisite corpse will drink the young wine’. The game, usually played by passing a piece of paper folded so as to conceal each new addition to the sentence, could also be used to construct images, and many Surrealist works were made in this way too, producing collaborative depictions of agglomerated, heterogeneous figures. Such pictorial experiments were often undertaken with the involvement of literary or poetic members of the group such as André Breton in addition to the visual artists. ‘Exquisite Corpse’ exemplifies several important concerns in Surrealism, including an attraction to ludic pursuits, the distribution of authorship into collective activity and experimentation, the conviction that courting ‘objective chance’ [le hasard objectif] could produce literary and visual works of aesthetic power, and the use of various procedures – including chance – to access the unconscious. READING Brotchie, Alastair and Mel Gooding (1995) A Book of Surrealist Games. Boulder: Shambhala. Kochhar-Lindgren, Kanta, Davis Schneidermann and Tom Denlinger (eds) (2009) The Exquisite Corpse: Chance and Collaboration in Surrealism’s Parlor Game. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press.

Dominic Paterson

CALLIGRAM A calligram is a poem that requires to be seen as well as heard, since its meaning and impact are bound up with the visual arrangement of its words in pictures, patterns or other significant shapes on the page. It was Guillaume Apollinaire who coined the term by bringing ‘calligraphy’ and ‘ideogram’ together, and he too who gave it wide currency by calling his 1918 collection of the poems written over the previous four years Calligrammes. In all, Apollinaire left over forty poems in which the text (printed or reproduced from his handwriting) was shaped into pictures – fountains, mandolins, stars, horses, cravats, tables, doves and so on – so as to enable the whole poem to be 55

Celtic Twilight grasped as a spatial simultaneity rather than a temporal sequence. In this he was partly adding to the two-thousand-year-old Western tradition of the literary text that was inscribed in such a way as to form a picture of its subject. But he was also echoing developments in his own age: the elaborate rethinking of the visible presentation of a text in Stéphane Mallarmé’s ‘Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard’ of 1897, tearaway experiments with typography’s layout on the page which climaxed in the Italian futurists’ parole in libertà from 1913 onwards, and the concern of Apollinaire’s good friends the cubist painters to focus on the picture-plane as a thing in itself rather than a mere window on an illusionistic world beyond. Post-Apollinaire, makers of calligram-like poems such as the Catalan Josep Maria Junoy and Joan Salvat-Papasseit, the Castilian Ultra-ists and later e. e. cummings and Dylan Thomas tended to prefer spatial patterns and other abstract deployments of type to pictures, so providing a link with the coming concrete poetry (as practised by Edwin Morgan, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Pierre Garnier and others) which was largely concerned with typographical patterning and sequencing. READING Bohn, Willard (1986) The Aesthetics of Visual Poetry, 1914–1928. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Peignot, Jérome (1978) Du calligramme. Paris: Editions du Chêne.

Roger Savage

CELTIC TWILIGHT The phrase ‘The Celtic Twilight’ derives from the title of a book of stories by W. B. Yeats published in 1893. It subsequently came into currency as a descriptor of Anglo-Irish or ‘Celtic Renaissance’ writing related to the movement for Irish nationhood. This claimed to show a continuance of the ancient Celtic spirit through a modern Englishlanguage poetry. The work of ‘Fiona Macleod’, the feminine identity of the Scottish writer William Sharp, who had close links to Yeats and late nineteenth-century writing as well as to the ideas of Patrick Geddes and his Evergreen magazine, similarly claimed to keep the ancient but doomed Celtic spirit alive through its communication in English. This claim to a relationship with traditional Celtic sources was fiercely contended by Celtic scholars throughout the twentieth century who insisted that ‘the indolent dreaminess, nebulous vagueness and exaggerated melancholy’ of this Celtic Revival writing was on the contrary ‘peculiarly un-Celtic’ (Shaw 1934). 56

Celtic Twilight Although Yeats himself did not maintain a connection with Celtic Renaissance ideas, his early lyrical poetry, the Celtic Twilight collection of stories and reminiscences and his 1898 ‘Essay on the Celtic Element in Literature’ encouraged the spread of the idea of a Celtic literary renaissance. Its origins, however, lay even earlier in James Macpherson’s translations of the newly found poems of Ossian (1760), the impact of this supposedly ancient verse on the development of European Romanticism, and subsequently on the ideas of Ernest Renan and Matthew Arnold in relation to the Celts. Renan was himself a Celt from Brittany who lamented the loss of the distinctive qualities of what he viewed as a ‘feminine’ race, in whose traditions and bardic songs he found a belief in a destiny which humans were powerless to alter and a predilection for elegy as opposed to gaiety or songs of victory. Although he had no specific knowledge of Irish Celtic culture, Renan looked to Ireland as the place where the Celts had ‘remained pure from all admixture of alien blood’ (Renan 1896). Matthew Arnold, whose series of lectures ‘The Study of Celtic Literature’ were first given at Oxford University in 1865–6, did not have a Celtic heritage or any knowledge of the tradition of Celtic bardic poetry. His lectures followed closely Renan’s interpretation of the Celts as a gentle and imaginative, but melancholy race now pushed to the margins of Europe. He differed from Renan, on the other hand, in his view that the contribution of the Celts lay in the past, and that whatever relevance their qualities might still have could be brought into modern life only through the medium of English language and literature. Lyra Celtica: An Anthology of Representative Celtic Poetry (1896), with an introduction by William Sharp, was reissued in 1924 during the Scottish literary revival movement led by Hugh MacDiarmid. This movement had political as well as literary revival ambitions and rejected strongly any connection with Sharp/ Macleod’s Celtic Twilight ideas which were critiqued in the early Highland fiction of Neil M. Gunn. READING Bromwich, Rachel (1965) Matthew Arnold and Celtic Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sharp, William (‘Fiona Macleod’) (1924) ‘Introduction’, Lyra Celtica (1896). Edinburgh: John Grant. Shaw, Frances (1934) ‘The Celtic Twilight’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, 23 (89): 25–41. 57

Censorship Yeats, W. B. (1898) ‘The Celtic Element in Literature’, Cosmopolis, 10 (30): 675–86.

Margery Palmer McCulloch

CENSORSHIP During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there were strict UK and US legal controls over the production and dissemination of novels, plays and poems, mainly because of their sexual content. Many modernist works were either prohibited by the UK and US courts or were subject to censorship at the editorial stage. The UK Obscene Publications Act of 1857 had made it a statutory offence to circulate obscene writing, but Lord Campbell, the instigator of the Act, had left it to the courts to devise a test at common law. The result was the 1868 ‘Hicklin Ruling’ which laid down the following definition of obscene writing: if ‘the tendency of the matter charged as obscenity is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to immoral influences and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall’. This definition of obscenity and corruption, notable for its extreme vagueness, was the basis for legal prosecutions of obscene writing in the UK, the US, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and India from the late nineteenth century through to the mid-twentieth century. There were a number of high-profile trials of modernist literary works in the early twentieth century, most notably the suppression of D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow in London in 1915, the 1921 prosecution of New York Little Review editors Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap for publishing the ‘Nausicaa’ episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses and the UK prosecution of Jonathan Cape for publishing Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness in 1928. Many more authors were asked to alter their works at the editorial stage. Joyce was told to change the original text of Dubliners because the printer had concerns about its language and content, Ezra Pound was told by his British publisher Elkin Matthews to omit four poems from Lustra because the printer objected to their salacious content and Wyndham Lewis was advised to alter the title of his novel False Bottoms to The Revenge for Love in 1937 because Boots Circulating Library thought the title too vulgar for their readers. These are just a handful of examples. In fact, there was hardly a modernist text which was not altered by editors and publishers because of concerns about prosecution. However, far from persuading writers to stop writing about sex and using sexualised words, 58

Chance the experience of censorship merely seemed to spur on many writers to produce more explicitly sexual scenes and to use taboo words. Further, censorship and the nature of the obscene became a theme in many poems and novels, including Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1936), Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer (1938) and many more. This heavily policed publishing climate also prompted writers to defend the rights of authors and literature, a defence that, in turn, had an impact on understandings of the literary value of transgression. READING Bradshaw, David and Rachel Potter (eds) (2013) Prudes on the Prowl: Fiction and Obscenity in England 1850–the Present Day, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ladenson, Elizabeth (2007) Dirt for Art’s Sake: Books on Trial from Madame Bovary to Lolita. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Pease, Alison (2000) Modernism, Mass Culture and the Aesthetics of ‘Obscenity’. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Potter, Rachel (2013) Obscene Modernism: Literary Censorship and Experiment 1900–1940. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Rachel Potter

CHANCE The theoretical assumption that events happen for no reason, chance had a central role in the development of modernist art, literature and thought. In the early twentieth century chance came to be understood as the basic currency of life, or what Gerda Reith describes as ‘the fundamental category of reality to which we must orientate ourselves’. The word chance itself is derived from cadere, the Latin for ‘to fall’, so chance is what ‘befalls’ us, how the dice fall for us, what falls to us (or on us or what we fall into), the unforeseen, the random occurrence with no obvious cause or design. In his 1983 essay ‘My Chances/Mes Chances’, Jacques Derrida exploits this point: ‘Is not what befalls us or descends upon us – coming from above, like destiny or lightning, taking our faces and our hands by surprise – exactly what thwarts or undoes our anticipation?’ In German, the link is more explicit: Zufall, or Zufalligkeit, means chance; zufallen, to ‘fall due’. Hasard in French has also bequeathed us an echo of its meaning, which has leaked into the modern understanding of hazardous. Aristotle identified two different kinds of chance, tyche and automaton (which would later form the basis of an influential 59

Chance discussion of the narrative uses of chance by Jacques Lacan), both part of natural chains of causation. The cultural dominance of indeterminism came about through a confluence of literary, artistic, scientific and mathematical developments, understood as an integral and codified part of the world; it is inscribed in our understanding of the universe, as demonstrated by the advance of probability theory, quantum mechanics and chaos theory. The advent of quantum theory in the early twentieth century happened in tandem with the cultural encroachment of indeterminacy that was fomented by the dadaists and the surrealists. The effect of these wider cultural changes on the novel was a twentieth-century retreat from the sort of nineteenth-century narrative structure that sought to explain the world through an examination of sociological, political or psychological cause and effect. Writers including Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett and Henry Green all explored the arbitrary nature of human life, and depicted chance as a fundamental principle of early twentieth-century existence. The modernist novel was increasingly developing a sense of the stuff of everyday life as the proper study of the novel, throwing into question our categories of significance and insignificance, and chance became associated with a rejection of the sort of authorial omnipotence associated with the nineteenthcentury novel. A chance event, one that is not the predictable outcome of a detectable cause, is peculiarly hard to assimilate into a view of our surroundings that places man at their centre. Indeed, narrative itself is at odds with chance: once something is written, it is perhaps no longer capable of representing the random. Chance disrupts all our categories of sense-making, and resists recuperation into the deterministic impulses of narrative linearity – and thus offered modernist writers and artists a mode of resistance, experiment and subversion. READING Derrida, Jacques (2007) ‘My Chances/Mes Chances: A Rendezvous with Some Epicurean Stereophonies’, in Psyche: Inventions of the Other Vol. I. Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 344–77. Hacking, Ian (1990) The Taming of Chance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jordan, Julia (2010) Chance and the Modern British Novel: From Henry Green to Iris Murdoch. London: Continuum. Kavanagh, Thomas (1993) Enlightenment and the Shadows of Chance. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 60

Charisma Monk, Leland (1993) Standard Deviations. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Reith, Gerda (1999) The Age of Chance: Gambling in Western Culture. London: Routledge.

Julia Jordan

CHARISMA The concept of charisma is defined by Max Weber in ‘The Three Types of Legitimate Rule’ (1922). The word derives from the ancient Greek charis, a gift from the gods. Weber defines charismatic rule as a social relation based on the belief that the ruler has extraordinary, perhaps even supernatural, qualities. Charisma relies on the perception of an emotional bond between leader and followers. Charismatic leaders are legitimised in terms of their personal presence and their command of accepted forms of authority. For a leader to be recognised as charismatic by the public, the element of performance is crucial. The blueprint of the modern charismatic leader is provided by Louis XIV and Napoleon. The rise of mass culture in the nineteenth century facilitates the proliferation of charismatic figures, as the spread of literacy and expansion of media outlets (e.g. newspapers) enables political messages to be broadcast more widely. This leads to a succession of charismatic leaders from all points of the political spectrum including General Boulanger and Marshal Pétain in France, Mussolini in Italy, Lenin and Stalin in Russia, Karl Lueger in Austria and Wilhelm II, Adolf Stoecker and Adolf Hitler in Germany. The first modernist novel to feature an analysis of the charismatic authoritarian leader is Heinrich Mann’s The Loyal Subject (1918). Other modernist texts and films reflect on the workings of charisma via an exploration of a closely related phenomenon: hypnosis. The most notorious hypnotist of this period is Svengali in George du Maurier’s novel Trilby (1894, film adaptation by Maurice Tourneur 1915). This was followed by Somerset Maugham’s The Magician (1908). Films about hypnotists include George Méliès’s Le Magnétiseur (1897), Louis Feuillade’s ‘Hypnotic Eyes’ (‘Les yeux qui fascinent’, episode six of Les Vampires, 1916), Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) and Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler (1922). In the novel form, Franz Kafka’s The Trial (1925) and The Castle (1926) and Hermann Broch’s The Sleepwalkers (1932) explore the hypnotic, charismatic power that adheres to corporate institutions and bureaucracy. The most advanced modernist 61

Chronophotography study of charisma is arguably Thomas Mann’s novella Mario and the Magician (1929) because it takes the figure of the hypnotist as a departure point for deeper reflections on the psychology of the fascist demagogue and his followers, with subtle allusions to Mussolini and Hitler. Klaus Mann’s novel Mephisto: The Novel of a Career (1936) continues the analysis of the connections between populist artist and fascist leader: the main protagonist, the actor Hendrik Höfgen, is modelled on the famous German actor and director Gustaf Gründgens. READING Andriopoulos, Stefan (2008) Possessed: Hypnotic Crimes, Corporate Fiction, and the Invention of Cinema. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Berenson, Edward and Eva Giloi (eds) (2010) Constructing Charisma: Celebrity, Fame, and Power in Nineteenth-Century Europe. New York and Oxford: Berghahn. Halliwell, Martin (2006) ‘Myths of the Magician: Klaus Mann, Thomas Mann and Nazi Germany’, in Martin Halliwell, Transatlantic Modernism: Moral Dilemmas in Modernist Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Horvath, Agnes (2013) Modernism and Charisma. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Ernest Schonfield

CHRONOPHOTOGRAPHY The application of instantaneous photography to the study of movement: it permits the human eye to see phases of movement that it cannot perceive directly. Further, chronophotography enables ‘the reconstitution of the movement that it has deconstructed’, as Etienne-Jules Marey, the French physiologist who developed the technique and first published his chronophotographs in the popular scientific journal La Nature in July1882 put it. In its first application, of making the invisible visible, chronophotography was applied to a range of sciences (including aerodynamics, ballistics, ergonomics, fatigue studies and psychology), to the arts (as an aide to realist and naturalist painters and sculptors and as a way in to abstraction for futurists and others), to the development of sports techniques and to military training. Its second application, the ‘reconstitution’ of movement led directly to the development of the cinema in 1895 by the Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis. 62

Chronophotography On the one hand, chronophotography was used to analyse, record, measure objectively and, if possible, improve and standardise the natural world, including the human animal. On the other hand, its multiple, overlapping representations of a singular action fragmented nineteenth-century fixities. Marey’s chronophotographic images were referenced by philosophers Henri Bergson (see bergsonism) and Paul Souriau in their works on time and movement respectively. Passages from their writings relating to chronophotography were subsequently mirrored in Futurist writings. At the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, Albert Londe and Paul Richer applied chronophotography to the study of ‘illogical attitudes’, which they related to notions of ‘Bacchic’ frenzy (see dionysian). Maurice Emmanuel, the French musicologist and composer, used chronophotography to compare poses of contemporary dancers with representations of movement on vases, statues or bas reliefs, for his 1895 ‘Ancient Greek Dance’. Initially adopted as a tool by naturalist and realist artists (such as Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier), in the early twentieth century chronophotography became an inspiration for artists exploring subjectivity and multiplicity of viewpoints. From 1911, Italian artist and director, Anton Julio Bragaglia championed the variant of chronophotography he called ‘photodynamism’. Giacomo Balla explored the possibilities of chronophotography in paintings including Dynamism of a Dog on a Lead (1912). In Russia, Kasimir Malevich employed Futurist/chronophotographic multiplication of images in his Knife Grinder (1912). Gestures of a blacksmith wielding a hammer were chronophotographically captured by the engineer Charles Fremont, working with Marey in 1894. Their aim was to discover the optimum trajectory for the movement: the one most successfully accomplished with the least effort. Chronophotography was subsequently adopted and adapted by European researchers, including Jules Amar, into the scientific management of work (see taylorism), fatigue and ergonomics. Similarly, the American couple Lillian and Frank Gilbreth used a variant of chronophotography in their scientific management studies, as did the worker-poet, Alexei Gastev in the USSR. As director of the Central Institute of Labour (1920–37), Gastev developed of a system for improving workers’ performance that he called biomechanics. The work of his institute was familiar to Soviet worker-artists in the fields of theatre and dance, such as theatre director Vselovod Meyerhold. With the help of Marey’s assistant, Georges Demenÿ, the 63

Chronotope French psychologist Alfred Binet studied perception by chronophotographing sleight-of-hand artists from the theatre of French magician Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, run by the impresario and future pioneering filmmaker Georges Méliès. READING Bragaglia, Anton Giulio ([1911] 2008) ‘Futurist Photodynamism’, trans. Lawrence S. Rainey, Modernism/modernity 15 (2): 363–79. Marey, Étienne-Jules (1899) Chronophotographie. Paris: Gauthier-Villars.

Clare M. Brennan

CHRONOTOPE The term was coined by Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin in ‘Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes toward a Historical Poetics’, written in the late 1930s, published in The Dialogic Imagination in 1975 and translated into English in 1981. Chronotope, meaning literally ‘time space’, is used to describe the interconnected nature of time and space both in literature and in the study of literature. One example of a chronotope is the road, where various people from diverse backgrounds can converge at a single point, conceived of in spatial and temporal terms. Bakhtin’s essay describes other examples taken from early novel forms to show how chronotopes internal and external to the literary text change over time. The chronotope can therefore be understood as both a narrative device and a method for analysing relationships between art and life, and text and context. Works by modernist writers such as James Joyce, Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf that explore the tensions between individual experience of temporality and spatiality, and cultural conceptions of time and space, may therefore productively be interpreted in relation to Bakhtin’s view of language as chronotopic. READING Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich (1990) ‘Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes toward a Historical Poetics’, in Michael Holquist (ed.), The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, pp. 84–258.

Jade Munslow Ong

CINEMA The impact of cinema on the international culture of modernism, beginning with the projection of the Lumière Brothers’ Arrival of 64

Cinema a Train at the Grand Café, Paris in 1895, was immediately wideranging. The Russian writer Maxim Gorky, in a commentary a year later, wrote about the hallucinogenic effect of the train carriages moving into the foreground, an effect also vividly described in Henry James’s short story ‘Crapy Cornelia’ (1909). The early trick-films of Georges Méliès left their mark on the visual imagination of James Joyce, who lived two miles from the Théâtre Robert-Houdin owned by Méliès in 1902: visual shock tactics and transformation effects in the ‘Circe’ chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) hark back to Méliès’s pioneering stop-motion technique. Joyce famously opened Ireland’s first cinema in Dublin, the Volta, in 1909, and he remained an avid filmgoer during the composition of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake (1939). The Russian director Sergei Eisenstein, who met with Joyce in 1929, advised his students to learn film technique by reading Ulysses. Virginia Woolf’s sense of cinema’s capacity to perceive objects in the absence of a human observer, registered in her 1926 essay ‘The Cinema’, is echoed in the impersonality of her eyeless prose. The first Keystone comedies in Hollywood, in which Charlie Chaplin makes his first appearance and which began to demonstrate primitive reverse-angle cross-cutting, a method Mack Sennett learnt from working at Biograph with D. W. Griffith, inflect sequences in Franz Kafka’s Amerika (1912); Kafka’s extensive cinema-going enriches his fantasy version of a country he never visited in person. Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, John Dos Passos and William Faulkner each absorbed the methods of European avantgarde cinema as well as classical Hollywood. The history of silent film (1895–1928) is also partly a history of its shifting relations to literature. The rapid development of continuity editing, pioneered by D. W. Griffith, brought film language closer to the mobility of focal points found in nineteenth-century prose fiction. These techniques, incipient in Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903) and The Kleptomaniac (1905), were standardised by Griffith between 1908 and 1913 in films which effectively translate the narrative techniques of the nineteenth-century novel into the parallel editing and multiple focal points of film form. When questioned on the use of the parallel cross-cut in After Many Years (1908), Griffith cited the similarity with a literary technique he found in Dickens. Eisenstein also argued that film language originates in this encounter with Dickens via Griffith. The development of film form is also caught up with its complex relation to theatre. On the one hand, the turning point in the shift 65

Cinema towards continuity editing between 1908 and 1913, of the breaking up of space and the body into focal points and shots of varying distance, and the technique of spectator–subject identification, parallel cuts and shot-reverse-shot, is marked by the rejection of the theatricality of earlier cinema, with its uniform frontality and long-shot tableau perspectives, its emphasis on exhibitionism and its reliance on live elements such as film lecturers, music and the variety format. But the new style of classical narration, despite eliminating those elements of liveness, is indissociable from a new performance style directly imported from naturalist theatre, as Griffith – who started his career acting in Ibsen plays – often acknowledged. The alteration in camera technique and editing inaugurated by Griffith parallels the shift in performance from a histrionic, melodramatic style of performance, to one characterised by naturalistic restraint, smallscale gestures and a more detailed observation of actions and reactions. Cinema emerges from theatre by transforming presence into mediated technological representation, eliminating the auratic presence of the actor and bringing it closer to writing; yet it remains haunted by theatre, and by the representation of the performative body which originates in theatre. From the early 1920s, cinema begins to be regarded as a distinct art form which ought to keep pace with contemporary movements in modernism, as for instance in the surrealism of Antonin Artaud, Fernand Léger, Luis Buñuel, Man Ray and Germain Dulac, the futurism of Dziga Vertov and Eisenstein, the dadaism of René Clair, Francis Picabia and Hans Richter, the impressionism of Abel Gance, Louis Delluc, Jean Epstein and Marcel L’Herbier and the expressionism of Fritz Lang, Robert Wiene, F. W. Murnau. These filmmakers rejected the theatrical staging of psychological drama and the visual illustration of a literary plot, emphasising instead techniques used to express interiority and poetic logic. Expressionism sought to express subjective reality through distorted, stylised mise-en-scène and camera angles, high contrast lighting and histrionic acting style; Impressionism heavily employed optical devices, such as dissolves, superimpositions, gauze-focus, split screens and rapid editing to denote flashbacks, memory-images and fantasies. The Soviets employed rhythmic and associative montage editing to generate dialectical argument. These movements set themselves in opposition to Hollywood’s increasingly standardised, homogenous narrative style. With the advent of the talkies in 1928, Hollywood’s character-driven causal66

Cinema ity and formulaic, linear, naturalistic synchronised sound effectively superseded the still developing modernist cinema of critically reflective montage, of repetition and variations of speed, of superimposition, dynamically mobile camera movement, radical alternations of lenses and camera angles, and anti-naturalist performance style. A modernist and avant-garde culture of the 1930s, including Sergei Eisenstein, Bertolt Brecht, Antonin Artaud, Samuel Beckett, Charlie Chaplin and Vsevolod Meyerhold, regarded the talkies as having slowed down film’s attempt to keep up with the other arts. The central forum for this short-lived opposition to Hollywood’s standardisation thrived in the pages of two little magazines, Close Up (1927–33) – which published, for instance, H.D.’s essay on Greta Garbo, and Eisenstein and Pudovkin’s famous response to the talkies, ‘The Sound Film: A Statement from U.S.S.R.’ – and transition (1927–38), which serialised James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, the first English translation of Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Eisenstein’s essay on the cinematic hieroglyph and film scenarios by Artaud. The modernist project in film, as a collective and sustained exploration of the formal aspects of the medium, cut short by sound, is not rediscovered until the late 1950s and 1960s. The vision of nonsynchronous sound and image, of fragmentary associative structures influenced by Joyce and Proust, of the presence of the camera as an often unreliable narrative consciousness, become guiding principles for Alain Resnais, Jean-Luc Godard, Marguerite Duras, Robert Bresson, Samuel Beckett and others during the rediscovery of the modernist project in the cinema of the 1960s and 1970s. These filmmakers asserted a continuity with the silent films of Abel Gance, Marcel L’Herbier, Jean Cocteau, Germaine Dulac and Jean Epstein. Second-wave film modernism also revives cinema’s parallel history with literature: Alain Robbe-Grillet and Marguerite Duras were instrumental in their scripts for Alain Resnais; Roberto Rosselini’s Voyage to Italy (1954), a film regarded as a key precursor to the French New Wave, is partly an adaptation of Joyce’s ‘The Dead’, and Federico Fellini, and Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet, adapt Kafka’s Amerika in Intervista (1987) and Class Relations (1984) respectively. READING Kovács, András Bálint (2007) Screening Modernism: European Art Cinema 1950–1980. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 67

Circus McCabe, Susan (2005) Cinematic Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marcus, Laura (2007) The Tenth Muse: Writing About Cinema in the Modernist Period. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Paraskeva, Anthony (2013) The Speech-Gesture Complex: Modernism, Theatre, Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Anthony Paraskeva

CIRCUS What we may be tempted to think of as the age-old ‘big top’ circus isn’t in fact much more than two centuries old. However, there were longer histories behind most of the elements it brought together: equestrian display, freak show and menagerie show, clowns and tumblers, jesters and jugglers, acrobats and high-wire artistes, wildanimal trainers, commedia dell’ arte Pierrots and Harlequins – all assembled under a name that alluded to the great displays mounted in ancient Rome at the Circus Maximus and the like. And it was the sense of the circus as at once highly traditional, brilliantly skilful and shamelessly populist that was part of its appeal to a range of modernists. Edgar Degas, Georges Seurat, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Fernand Léger and Max Beckmann all drew and painted circus folk in action or repose. Igor Stravinsky included a polka in his Three Easy Pieces for Piano Duet (1915) which he said portrayed the Ballets Russes impresario Sergei Diaghilev as ‘a circusanimal trainer cracking a long whip’, later (1942) writing an orchestral Circus Polka (‘For a Young Elephant’). Jean Cocteau planned to mount a modern-dress production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Cirque Medrano on Montmartre in 1915 which would feature the clowning Fratellini Brothers as the Mechanicals. Writers fretting about their craft reached for circus evocations: in his experimental play Him (1927), for instance, e. e. cummings has his circus-mad dramatist-hero compare his goal in playwriting to the ultimate balancing act on the highest of high wires, and W. B. Yeats in a late poem, ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’ (1938), imagines the themes of his early plays as so many circus turns quitting his Big Top. Out of such things emerged a ‘circus aesthetic’: one quite often reflected in modernist theories of performance that were concerned to ‘retheatricalise’ theatre so that it might move beyond naturalism and Drama of the Word. Before World war I, the futurists’ manifestoblast included an essay by Marinetti on the one sort of current theatre 68

Circus that interested him: ‘We assiduously frequent the Theatre of Varieties (Music Halls, café-chantants or equestrian circuses), which today offers the only theatrical spectacle worthy of a truly futurist spirit, [. . .] owing to its dynamism of form and colour (simultaneous movement of jugglers, dancers, gymnasts, varicoloured riding troupes).’ During the War, it was probably the circus ring that gave Guillaume Apollinaire and the ‘Nunique’ theatre-theorist Pierre Albert-Birot their ideas for radical circular theatres. From 1918 to 1923 Russian theatre had an influential phase of energetic ‘circusisation’ in shows directed by the notable innovators Sergei Radlov, Nikolai Foregger, Vsevolod Meyerhold and Sergei Eisenstein. Radlov pioneered the use of circus clowns in improvised stage comedy; Foregger declared that circus was theatre’s ‘Siamese twin’; Meyerhold envisaged a theatre where the actor would appear ‘now as a dramatic artist, now as an opera singer, now as a dancer, now as an equilibrist, now as a gymnast, now as a clown’; and Eisenstein, in an adaptation of Alexander Ostrovsky’s Wise Man for the First Workers’ Theatre of the proletkult, featured acrobats, tightrope-walkers and pole-climbers. (His eccentricist comrade Grigori Kozintsev announced that the proper wear for an actor was ‘not a mask but a red nose’.) Even at the sober bauhaus in Germany in the mid-1920s, László Moholy-Nagy, his sights set on a wholly new sort of theatre, praised what had been done in ‘eliminating the subjective’ by ‘today’s Circus, Operetta, Vaudeville, the Clowns in America and elsewhere (Chaplin, Fratellini)’. Not that Big-Top connections eliminated the subjective entirely. The converse of the directors’ upbeat assertion that ‘the circus is life’ – ‘life is a circus’ – gave food for downbeat thought. The contrast lies behind Franz Kafka’s tiny short story of 1919, ‘Up in the Gallery’. Thus the appearance of a ringmaster-like animal-tamer advertising his menagerie in the Prologue to the first of Frank Wedekind’s ‘Lulu’ plays, Earth Spirit (1895, later set as the first part of Alban Berg’s opera Lulu), implies that the recognisable contemporary types who make up the play’s dramatis personae are just so many wild beasts. The sensitive protagonist of Leonid Andreyev’s He Who Gets Slapped (1915) joins a circus because the role he can take on there – the clown who is the perpetual butt – is an image of his own defeated private life. And in his fifth Duino Elegy of 1922, Rainer Maria Rilke addresses a troupe of travelling acrobats, inspired in part by Pablo Picasso’s La famille des saltimbanques, seeing them as a potent symbol of the transience of the whole human family and its inability 69

Clinamen to sustain a perfect poise. This melancholy use of the circus aesthetic was an inspiration for Thomas Bernhard’s play of fifty years later, Force of Habit, with its microcosmic travelling circus whose manager’s search for perfection is endlessly thwarted, and a positive use of the aesthetic emerges at the climax of Federico Fellini’s film 8½ (1963), when the movie-director protagonist chooses circus over ultra-modern technology as his guiding metaphor. READING Amiard-Chevrel, Claudine (ed.) (1983) Du cirque au théâtre: collectif de travail. Lausanne: L’Age d’homme. Clair, Jean (ed.) (2004) The Great Parade: Portrait of the Artist as Clown. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Roger Savage

CLINAMEN It is the Greek philosopher Epicurus who first gives us the notion of the clinamen, or the minute swerving of atoms. Other Pre-Socratic Greek philosophers had been proponents of atomism, notably Democritus, but Epicurus first developed the notion of the clinamen and established it as a spontaneous, non-deterministic principle that allows for free will. Among the extant writings of Epicurus, there is a fragment on the clinamen (parenklisis in Greek), but most of what we know about it comes rather from Epicurus’ Latin follower, the first-century bce poet and philosopher Lucretius. In his epic poem De Rerum Natura (variously translated as On the Nature of Things or On the Nature of the Universe), Lucretius describes how an individual atom might suddenly deviate from its path. This is the clinamen, or swerve – the inclination or declination of a single atom that has enormous consequences. For Lucretius, swerving is a miniscule turn, and yet it is what brings about all events and all collisions, all creation and all will. ‘When the atoms are travelling straight down through empty space’, he writes, ‘they swerve ever so little from their course.’ If it were not for this swerve, everything would ‘fall downwards like raindrops through the abyss of space. No collision would take place and no impact of atom upon atom would be created.’ Thus, he concludes, ‘nature would never have created anything.’ All creation is due to the clinamen; from deviation comes form. Nevertheless, the clinamen itself is hard to grasp. The atomic world that Lucretius describes is solidly material – the corporeality of the ‘bodies’ that make up everything is crucial to his argument – and yet 70

Clinamen the clinamen itself has no form or presence; as a movement it has no being of its own, but provokes and impels creation. It is also temporally obscure, both happening in a tiny amount of time, and at any time: ‘the minute swerving of the first-beginnings at no fixed place and at no fixed time’. The clinamen is itself uncaused, even as it causes all things, and Lucretius, and those who have subsequently appropriated his model, present the atom’s swerve as a moment of formative free-will: the clinamen’s inclination and swerve demonstrates atomic autonomy, an instance of its private volition. Karl Marx, in his doctoral dissertation of 1841, entitled ‘The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature’, emphasised the clinamen’s emblematic wilfulness, just as for Lucretius it is what gives freedom to all self-moving things. Describing how the swerve ‘snap[s] the bonds of fate, the everlasting sequence of cause and effect’, he identifies this atomic veering as ‘the source of the free will possessed by living things throughout the earth’. Michel Serres and Jacques Derrida emphasise the Lucretian principle of pleasure at the heart of the clinamen’s swerve: ‘the clinamen’, as Derrida explains in My Chances/Mes Chances, ‘is the condition of freedom, of the will . . . or the voluptuous pleasure’). Lucretius consistently associates freedom with voluptas (pleasure) and specifically bodily pleasure: there is something sexy in the very notion of the swerve: ‘love veers’ as Nicholas Royle has recently argued. The erotic negotiation at the heart of the Epicurean balance held between restraint and fervour displays an understanding of the universe as, in Stephen Greenblatt’s words, ‘inherently sexual’. Collisions create as well as destroy, and atoms combine, dissolve and recombine in new and exciting forms. The Lucretian clinamen explicitly appears in the work of a wide range of twentieth-century theorists and philosophers including Henri Bergson, Michel Serres, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Harold Bloom and Nicholas Royle; writers including Samuel Beckett, Flann O’Brien, Louis Zukofsky, Francis Ponge, Georges Perec and Italo Calvino, variously encountering Lucretius at first hand or via these theoretical sources, all make use of its creative potential. More broadly, the metaphor of the atom as individual is central to modernist writers such as Ezra Pound, Samuel Beckett, Virginia Woolf and Robert Musil, and as quantum mechanics in the early twentieth century began to echo many aspects of the ancient atomists’ theories, writers and artists began to see atomic movement as a fundamental metaphor for chance and indeterminacy. 71

Collage READING Deleuze, Gilles (2004) The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester. London: Continuum. Derrida, Jacques (2007) ‘My Chances/Mes Chances: A Rendezvous with Some Epicurean Stereophonies’, in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Vol. I. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Greenblatt, Stephen (2011) The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. London: New York: Norton. Lucretius Carus, Titus (1994) On the Nature of the Universe, trans. R. E. Latham. London: Penguin Books. Royle, Nicholas (2011) Veering. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Serres, Michel (2000) The Birth of Physics, trans. Jack Hawkes. Manchester: Clinamen Press.

Julia Jordan

COLLAGE ‘Collage’ refers to the technique of gluing objects drawn from real life – including wallpaper, photographs, newspaper cuttings, bus-tickets and domestic materials – to canvas or paper in the creation of visual works of art, juxtaposing these elements with each other and more conventional drawn and painted elements. Invented by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque around 1912, collage was a defining feature of early cubism and was quickly adopted by other avant-garde movements, most notably futurism, dada and, later, surrealism. The term has since been applied more widely to describe work in other media which employs juxtapositional and fragmentary modes, such as T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), and visual works which use cut-and-paste techniques, most famously the late cut-out (or découpage) works of Henri Matisse. The word ‘collage’ is derived from the French coller, meaning ‘to stick or glue together’. Among the earliest works to use the technique is Picasso’s Still Life with Chair-Caning (1912), for which the artist glued cloth printed with a chair-caning pattern to an oval-shaped, oil-painted canvas of a French cafe. Soon, he and Braque were integrating a range of materials into their works, such as sand, sheet music, newspaper and string, and a real postage stamp in place of a painted representation. The influence of these innovations on the development of twentieth-century art was profound. By using elements expressly drawn from everyday life in the traditionally privileged art space of the canvas, the Cubists challenged the distinction between the two, laying the groundwork for the revolutionary fusion 72

Collège de Sociologie of art and life espoused by many of the avant-gardes and setting up the conditions for Marcel Duchamp’s readymade. While the Cubists’ invention of collage was motivated largely by their preoccupation with form, the technique took on expressly political dimensions as it was adopted and adapted by contemporary and later avant-garde movements. Futurist Carlo Carrà’s work Free Word Painting – Patriotic Festival (1914), for example, is comprised largely of pasted newspaper clippings which embody the twin Futurist passions for dynamism and Italian nationalism, while the parole in libertà (words-in-freedom) poetry of F. T. Marinetti uses typographical collage to celebrate war. Dadaists found the juxtapositional mode of collage well-suited to satirical attacks on the cultural establishment, as the merz of Kurt Schwitters pushed the form further into the realm of sculpture, with use of relief objects such as wood and his ‘Merzbau’ home and studio. For the Surrealists, collage was a powerful tool to open up the unconscious and bridge the distance between dream and reality. Along with automatic writing, André Breton proposed it as a key method for producing surrealist texts. Artists and poets alike adopted and adapted collage techniques, among them Max Ernst, Joan Miró and Paul Éluard. In particular, the Surrealists emphasised collaborative and aleatoric approaches, as in their group writing exercise the cadavre exquis (‘exquisite corpse’). The lasting value of these avant-garde experiments is borne out by the enduring popularity of collage, and while its once revolutionary implications may have been neutered somewhat, its legacy can be read everywhere from advertising to Photoshop and meme culture. READING Adamowicz, Elza (1998) Surrealist Collage in Text and Image. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Poggi, Christine (1992) In Defiance of Painting: Cubism, Futurism, and the Invention of Collage. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press.

Calum Rodger

COLLÈGE DE SOCIOLOGIE Formed by Georges Bataille, Roger Caillois and Michel Leiris, the Collège de Sociologie was a loose gathering of Parisian intellectuals which was active from November 1937 to July 1939. Intended as a ‘moral community’ (‘collège’ evoking collegiality rather than a 73

Colonialism place of formal education), the group met twice monthly in the back room of a bookshop on the Left Bank. Meetings were organised around a talk, usually on some aspect of contemporary society – secret orders, the sacred in everyday life, the role of the army – with early talks given largely by the founder members. Unlike acéphale, however, the Collège was a public venture and over time the roster expanded to include other speakers: Alexandre Kojève on Hegel and Hans Mayer on German Romanticism, among others. Attendees meanwhile included Jean Paulhan, Walter Benjamin and the painter André Masson. While the Collège was not by any means bound by the disciplinary constraints of academic sociology, its influence was nevertheless far-reaching. In an article on the history of sociology in France, Claude Lévi-Strauss mentions the Collège: ‘[It] became a meeting point for sociologists on the one hand, and surrealist painters and poets on the other. The experiment was a success’ (Lévi-Strauss 1947: 517). READING Hollier, Denis (1979) Le Collège de Sociologie (1937–1939). Paris: Gallimard. Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1947) ‘La sociologie française’, in G. Gurvitch, La sociologie du XXe siècle. Paris: PUF.

Dennis Duncan

COLONIALISM ‘The trouble with the English is that their history happened overseas, so they don’t know what it means.’ This quotation from Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988) implies colonialism and imperialism must be considered as essential components of British history. It is no accident that the high tide of Anglophone modernism, in the opening decades of the twentieth century, coincides with the greatest geographical expansion of the British empire and the emergence of American imperialism. If we date the beginning of the modernist period to the 1880s and the emergence of naturalism and symbolism in France, then this occurs in the same decade as the Berlin conference of 1884–5, which regulated the European ‘scramble for Africa’. The component of primitivism within high modernism derives from colonial contact with non-Western cultures. And if we date the end of the modernist period to the late 1940s/early 1950s, then this is precisely the moment when the Cold war begins and colonised nations start to win their independence. 74

Colonialism Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), set in the Belgian Congo of King Leopold II, has been accused of racism by Chinua Achebe on the grounds that the novella reduces Africa to a cipher for the breakdown of one European mind. Even so, Heart of Darkness contains a fierce denunciation of colonialism, in line with the report on the Congo produced by Conrad’s friend Roger Casement in 1904. Both texts contributed significantly to the Congo reform movement. Heart of Darkness stages moments of existential vertigo and disorientation, representing the failure of European intelligence. Its horrific depiction of colonial violence is equalled only by Franz Kafka’s In the Penal Colony (In der Strafkolonie, 1919). One of Kafka’s uncles, Joseph Loewy, had worked in the Belgian Congo from 1891 to 1902 as an administrator on a railway built by forced labour, and his reports, combined with the Dreyfus affair and the German suppression of the Herero uprising in South West Africa, influenced Kafka’s story. In the 1920s Bertolt Brecht drew on the work of Rudyard Kipling, the unofficial poet of empire, to write the play Man Equals Man (Mann ist Mann, 1926). In this play the Irish porter Galy Gay is tricked into joining the British colonial army, where he is transformed into a human fighting machine. All three of these texts show powerfully how human relationships are distorted and perverted by colonialism and imperialism. In ‘Modernism and Imperialism’ (1988), Fredric Jameson argues that colonialism is a key determinant of modernism because it means that a significant segment of the economic system is located elsewhere. The consequence of this spatial disjunction is that, by around 1900, the novel is no longer able to grasp the way that the social system functions as a whole. Jameson regards Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) as an attempt to turn a colonial city into a cultural monument. Jameson also analyses a description of a train journey in E. M. Forster’s Howards End (1910), in which the Great North Road seems ‘suggestive of infinity’. The conventional description of the journey becomes disrupted, and a sense of a transcendent reality intrudes into the narrative. Jameson characterises modernist style here as a hesitation between the contingency of physical objects and the demand for an impossible meaning. The road, suggestive of infinity, implies the new global vistas opened up by the ‘Imperialist’, Mr Wilcox, who hopes to inherit the earth. The discussion of empire in Howards End occludes the persons of the colonised. Howards End responds to the representational dilemma posed by the imperial world system by retreating into a self-subsisting community. 75

Colonialism Forster attempted to address this problem in his subsequent masterpiece A Passage to India (1924). The novel centres on a court case in which an Indian, Dr Aziz, is accused of sexually molesting an Englishwoman, Adela Quested, at the Marabar Caves. The allegations are false and are later withdrawn. The subtext to the novel is Forster’s own friendship with Syed Ross Masood, as well as the Amritsar (Jallianwala Bagh) massacre of 13 April 1919, in which several hundred non-violent protestors were murdered by British troops under the command of Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer. The English responded to the atrocity with the fear that Indians would take revenge by raping Englishwomen. This led to hysteria about the safety of English women and children. At the end of A Passage to India, Fielding asks Aziz ‘Why can’t we be friends now?’ but the earth and sky respond that it is not yet possible. Friendship implies a relationship between equals; such equality remains impossible until India gains its independence. Anglophone modernism, including the celtic twilight, was profoundly shaped by contacts with global modernisms and with anticolonial intellectuals such as Rabindranath Tagore. When the first English translation of Tagore’s poems (Gitanjali: Song Offerings, 1912) was published, it made a huge impression on W. B. Yeats, who welcomed Tagore in London in 1912. Yeats described the encounter as ‘one of the great events of my artistic life’. Edward Said places W. B. Yeats in a tradition of other anti-colonialist poets including Aimé Césaire, Faiz Ahmad Faiz and Mahmoud Darwish, arguing that their poetry seeks to reclaim, rename and re-inhabit their colonised lands with poetry. The bloomsbury group also had contact with anti-colonial movements. Leonard Woolf was in dialogue with the anti-imperialist John A. Hobson, the black South African politician Sol Plaatje and the Chinese writers Xu Zhimo and Xiao Qian. Other examples of global modernisms which developed in response to colonialism include négritude (Léopold Sédar Senghor, Aimé Césaire, David Diop, Camara Laye) and the Chinese modernism of Liang Qichao and Lu Xun. Several texts of late modernism explore life in the colonies from a female perspective: Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa (Den afrikanske farm, 1937) recounts the Danish writer’s experiences of life in British East Africa, now Kenya. In the late 1930s and early 1940s the Swiss-German writer Annemarie Schwarzenbach wrote of her travels in Turkey, Persia, Afghanistan and the Congo. Muriel Spark’s early short story ‘The Go-Away Bird’ (1958) draws on her time 76

Commitment in Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. In the mid-1950s Maria Dermoût, an Indonesian writer, won international acclaim for her novel The Ten Thousand Things (De tienduizend dingen, 1955), set in the Molucca Islands of the former Dutch East Indies. READING Achebe, Chinua (1977) ‘An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness’, Massachusetts Review, 18 (4): 782–94. Begam, Richard and Michael Valdez Moses (eds) (2007) Modernism and Colonialism: British and Irish Literature, 1899–1939. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Das, G. K. (2001) E. M. Forster’s India. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave. Dawe, Tracey (2008) ‘Kafka’s “The Penal Colony”: Reflections of German Colonialism and National Identity’, in Sarah Buxton and Laura Campbell (eds), Reflections: New Directions in Modern Languages and Cultures. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars. Jameson, Fredric (2007) ‘Modernism and Imperialism’, in Fredric Jameson, The Modernist Papers. London and New York: Verso. Mishra, Pankaj (2012) From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia. London: Allen Lane. Said, Edward (2000) ‘Yeats and Decolonization’, in Moustafa Bayoumi and Andrew Rubin (eds), The Edward Said Reader. London: Granta. Wisnicki, Adrian S. (2009) ‘Reaches of Empire: Heart of Darkness, Colonial Administration, and the Victorian Conspiracy Narrative Tradition’, in Jennifer Craig and Warren Steele (eds), Revolutions: Mapping Culture, Community, and Change from Ben Jonson to Angela Carter. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars.

Ernest Schonfield

COMMITMENT The term ‘comitment’ is the usual English translation of Jean-Paul Sartre’s notion of littérature engagée, a position advocated by the circle around the Parisian review Les Temps Modernes (founded 1945). More broadly, the debate about the commitment of writers can be said to be characteristic of the period from the 1930s to the 1950s, falling into two distinct phases. One of the consequences of the rise of European fascism in the 1930s was political coalitionbuilding, and in particular alliances between communist parties, aligned with the Soviet Union and other socialists, as well as between socialists and other democratic parties. The struggle against fascism led liberal intellectuals to accept the necessity of compromise with 77

Commitment communism,

despite their qualms about the implications for literature of a political system which denied freedom of thought and expression, and saw violence as justified in pursuit of goals identified with the movement of history itself. Following the defeat of Nazi Germany and her allies, the onset of Cold war ideological divisions forced Western European writers to take sides for or against the Soviet Union, which claimed to be the one and only embodiment of progressive historical forces. In retrospect, the tacit object of the question of commitment was always the idea of communism. This is the context for Sartre’s attempt, in the highly charged atmosphere of post-war Paris, to distinguish a non-communist but politically engaged intellectual position on the left. Sartre’s position in the essays collected as What Is Literature? (1947) is characterised firstly by his emphasis on writers’ responsibility to their society and so by his rejection of the tradition of seeing literature in terms of autonomy. (It is worth noting that his focus is largely on prose literature.) Contra all formalist positions, this emphasises content and treats literature primarily as a communicative medium. Secondly, while partially accepting the Kantian view that literature is an end in itself and so cannot be reduced to propaganda, Sartre argues that literature and history are already aligned. This means a literature of praxis: revealing to readers their own freedom in relation to an oppressive present reality and thus their choice to commit to the larger course of freedom. Thirdly, accepting the marxist view of history as class struggle, Sartre views the working class as both the oppressed subject of history and the force for liberation: this leads to the challenge faced by French writers, whom Sartre sees as bourgeois intellectuals without a working-class audience. Sartre’s position led him into conflict with both the French Communist Party, whose authority he contested, and with other writers, most notably Albert Camus who severed links with Les Temps Modernes in 1952, unable to tolerate the subordination of individual freedom to the truth of historical materialism. Theodor W. Adorno also responded to Sartre in his essay ‘Commitment’ (1962) in which he defends the idea of artistic autonomy. In time, Sartre himself moved to an avowedly communist position, while mainstream intellectual opinion in Europe tended towards liberalism. READING Adorno, Theodor W. (1992) ‘Commitment’, Notes on Literature Vol. 2. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 76–94. 78

Communism Poster, Mark (1975) Existential Marxism in Post-War France: From Sartre to Althusser. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Sartre, Jean-Paul (2001) What Is Literature? trans. Bernard Frechtman. London: Routledge.

Alex Thomson

COMMUNISM Communism itself derives from the Latin communis meaning shared or universal. Although the term has now become synonymous with the political writings of Karl Marx, the structuring of society around the principle of common ownership dates back to classical antiquity and is a prevalent theme throughout political philosophy. In the Republic, Plato provides a description of a proto-communist society: ‘[i]n the first place none must possess any private property save the indispensable’. The Christian Humanism that underpins the bold vision of Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) has its origins in the New Testament account of the early followers of Christ: the King James Bible (1611) articulates that ‘all that beleeued were together, and had all things in common’. Karl Marx, therefore, may not have been the first to theorise an idea of communism – he lived in the age of utopian socialism – but was the first to expose the unseen forces of capitalism upon the individual and to theorise a radical ideological alternative. Marx provides little insight in to how a communist society might be organised; instead his forensic analytical prowess remains focused on the plight of those toiling under capitalism. As always in Marx’s writing, the spectre of the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel looms with this influence most discernible in his famous materialist understanding of history. Industrialised capitalism is a necessary precursor to communism – Marx was writing with the technologically developed countries of Western Europe in mind – but communism is not the inevitable, teleological, endpoint of history; for that to occur the proletariat need to be active agents determining their own future. In the Critique of the Gotha Program (1871), Marx delineates the transition from capitalism to communism via the intermediate stage of socialism. This coincides with the establishment of the famous ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ that is established under the maxim of ‘each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’. Only then will the means of production be pressed into the service for the whole of society to facilitate ‘full communism’. 79

Concrete poetry Lenin in State and Revolution (1917) sets out to illuminate the blind spots within Marxist philosophy in providing a practical account of how a radical reordering of society could be established. Marxism-Leninism, as this melding became known, was the ideological and organising system adopted by most communist parties in the twentieth century. After Lenin’s death in 1924, Joseph Stalin proclaimed Marxism-Leninism to be the official ideology of the Communist Party, appropriating this transitional aspect of socialism – ‘full communism’ remained forever deferred – often invoked as a means to legitimise the one party state system. Stalin’s purges of avant-garde artists and political opponents, including the assasination of Leon Trotsky (while in exile in Mexico in 1940), the imposition of socialist realism as official aesthetic dogma and the fractured battle lines of the Spanish Civil war (1936– 9) were defining and traumatic events for international communism. Despite the fragmentation, however, it may be argued that modernism is inconceivable without reference to the twentieth-­century communist vision, which was central to the aesthetic practice, community-formation and sense of engagement (however temporary for some) of artists and activists beyond Soviet Russia as varied as W. H. Auden, Bertolt Brecht, André Breton, Nancy Cunard, Pablo Picasso and Paul Robeson, to name but a few. READING Pons, Silvio and Robert Service (eds) (2010) A Dictionary of 20th-century Communism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Service, Robert (2008) Comrades! Communism: A World History. London: Pan Books.

Robbie McLaughlan

CONCRETE POETRY In its narrowest definition, concrete poetry is a type of modernist visual poetry which emerged in the early 1950s and flourished on the fringes of avant-garde practice throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Invented more or less simultaneously by Eugen Gomringer in Switzerland and the Noigandres group in Brazil (whose key members were Haroldo de Campos, brother Augusto de Campos and Decio Pignatari), it is a non-linear form of poetry in which language is designed not only to be read, but to be looked at. Influenced by the typographical experimentation of figures such as e. e. cummings and Stéphane Mallarmé (particularly the latter’s ‘Un Coup de dés jamais 80

Concrete poetry n’abolira le hasard’, 1897), Guillaume Apollinaire’s calligrammes, geometrical abstraction in the visual arts and post-war global advertising and visual culture, the early concrete poets devised a visual syntax based primarily on spatial relations between words and letters. Many concrete poems thus have no conventional beginning or endpoint but are perceived, initially at least, as a visual whole. The poem is considered not as utterance, but as object in the world. The introduction of new devices such as coloured inks and folding pages (the latter leading to a form later termed ‘kinetic poetry’) shows how this idea was further developed, while the preference for Futura and other sans-serif typefaces reflects the early practitioners’ preoccupation with formal purity and self-sufficiency. In the late 1950s and early 1960s the form spread throughout Europe and North America, with key proponents including Edwin Morgan and Ian Hamilton Finlay in Scotland, Dom Sylvester Houédard and Bob Cobbing in England, Pierre Garnier and Henri Chopin in France, Ernst Jandl in Austria and Mary Ellen Solt in the USA. Its increased exposure and popularity led not only to opprobrium from conventional poets (and even from some among the avant-garde of the time), who considered it frivolous and unsubstantial, but also to disputes among the concrete poets themselves. While some, such as Finlay, wished to retain the purity of the first-wave concrete poets, others found in the form and nascent community a springboard to further experimentation, such as the development of a primarily aural and abstract sound poetry in the work of Chopin and Cobbing or a greater push towards the visual, as in Houédard’s ‘typestracts’ which use the typewriter as an abstract art-making machine. As such, by the mid-1960s the term ‘concrete poetry’ was being used as a catch-all term to describe a whole range of experimental poetic and art practices which emphasised language as ‘material’ in both visual and aural modes. While this activity peaked in the late 1960s, concrete poetry remained an avant-garde current throughout the 1970s, most notably in the ‘dirty concrete’ of Canadian bpNichol and his contemporaries. Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in the form from both critics and practitioners, in part, perhaps, for the ways in which it anticipates and bears upon how language is presented in digital culture. Today, its influence continues throughout a range of contemporary poetries, such as the conceptual poetry of figures such as Kenneth Goldsmith and the meme poetry developed on Internet Poetry and other Tumblr blogs. 81

Confessional poetry READING McHughes, Janet Larsen (1977) ‘The Poesis of Space: Prosodic Structures in Concrete Poetry’, Quarterly Journal of Speech, 63 (2): 168–79. Marcus, Aaron (1966) ‘An Introduction to the Visual Syntax of Concrete Poetry’, Visible Language, 8 (4): 333–60. Williams, Emmett (ed.) (1967) An International Anthology of Concrete Poetry. New York: Something Else Press.

Calum Rodger

CONFESSIONAL POETRY The term ‘confessional’ is used to describe a tendency in American poetry of the late 1950s and 1960s. It gained traction after it was employed by the poet M. L. Rosenthal in a review of Robert Lowell’s Life Studies (1959) published in The Nation, which he described as ‘a series of personal confidences, rather shameful, that one is honourbound not to reveal’ (1959; Rosenthal 1991: 112). Its core application broadened quickly to other poets of the period, such as Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, John Berryman and W. D. Snodgrass. Characteristics of confessional poetry are use of first person in which distance between poet and speaker is elided, directness and immediacy of diction, autobiographical detail and the interweaving of external observation with techniques associated with psychoanalysis. Key texts of confessional poetry include, alongside Life Studies, Anne Sexton’s To Bedlam and Partway Back (1960), Sylvia Plath’s Ariel (1965), W. D. Snodgrass’s Heart’s Needle (1959) and John Berryman’s 77 Dream Songs (1964). These texts blend virtuosity of language and an investment in form with visceral and uncompromising emotional and psychological exploration. Confessional poetry has been seen by some critics as a reaction against a perceived impersonality associated with certain strands of new criticism, while others have described it as a poetics that substitutes the modernist interest in history with autobiography (Collier 1994). In contrast, in her essay ‘What Was Confessional Poetry?’ Diane Middlebrook emphasises the historical context of the Cold war era, and ‘other areas of culture that had obvious influence on middle class life at the time: psychoanalysis as a mode of address to postwar existential misery, anticommunism as a pressure on artists and intellectuals, and television as a solvent of boundaries between public and domestic life’ (1993: 633). Confessional poetry is often contrasted with other contemporane82

Constructivism ous movements in American poetry such as the new york school and beat generation, both of which employ some of the same techniques although with more emphasis on the poem as social and political event and the materiality of language. By the 1970s, many of the tropes of confessional poetry had become ubiquitous and the shock that early works met with was seen by many to have been replaced with an indulgent lyric solipsism. Confessional poetry came to stand for writing that privileged the expression of emotion and narrative over its sound, complexity of construction and other formal and structural concerns. As such, it became an inevitable target for early critical attack from the poets of the l=a=n=g=u=a=g=e movement. As the critic Albert Gelpi has written, ‘Lowell was never going to see language as an autonomous semiotic code that determines the poem’s indeterminacies’ (2015: 35). A number of influential figures have reacted against the term itself, and in particular its tendency to mask significant differences in the styles of poets whose work is discussed in relation to it. Nevertheless, elements of the confessional mode have persisted, and its influence can be seen in the work of poets such as Anne Stevenson, Adrienne Rich, Louise Glück, Delmore Schwartz, Sharon Olds and the poets of the New Sincerity movement of the 2000s. READING Collier, Michael (ed.) (1994) The Wesleyan Tradition: Four Decades of American Poetry. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Gelpi, Albert (2015) American Poetry After Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Middlebrook, Diane (1993) ‘What was Confessional Poetry?’, in Brett Candlish Miller and Jay Parini (ed.), The Columbia History of American Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 632–49. Rosenthal, M. L. (1991) Our Life in Poetry: Selected Essays and Reviews. New York: Persea Books.

Colin Herd

CONSTRUCTIVISM Inspired by Soviet painter and architect Vladimir Tatlin’s threedimensional constructions (1919–20), the Constructivist movement was established in the USSR in 1921. The Constructivists were especially keen on developing abstract images inspired by Tatlin’s model for the Monument for the Third International (1919–20) because they saw it as being modern, functional and dynamic. In the 1920s, 83

Constructivism such artists as Aleksandr Rodchenko, Liubov Popova, Aleksandr Vesnin, Aleksandra Exter and Varvara Stepanova promoted collective creativity and utilitarian use of art forms. While Popova’s and Rodchenko’s two 5x5=25 exhibitions (1921) displayed a new vision of space, Rodchenko’s pamphlet The Line (1921) conveyed new scientific-artistic attitudes towards non-objective painting which prioritised construction over composition. In the ‘First Programme of the Working Group of Constructivists’ (March 1921), the three central tenets of Constructivist production were defined as tectonics, faktura and construction: they corresponded to structuring, handling and organising material. In the same year Popova and Vesnin designed the mass spectacle ‘The Struggle and Victory of the Soviets’ directed by Vsevolod Meyerhold, which was, however, banned by the authorities. In his 1922 treatise, Constructivism, Aleksey Gan called upon the artists to embrace the cinema, considering Rodchenko’s nonobjective artistic production useful for Dziga Vertov’s group kinoks; Rodchenko went on to design several Cine-Photo covers and contribute to Vertov’s documentary Cine-Truth. In 1923 Rodchenko’s and Popova’s contributions to the magazine LEF turned graphic design into one of the main platforms for Constructivist experiment. In 1924 Popova and Stepanova became popular among Soviet citizens for their fabric designs produced by the First State Cotton-Printing Factory in Moscow. Rodchenko’s and Popova’s working clothes also reflected their ideas about geometrising everyday life and about Soviet monumental style. Popova’s non-objective props produced for Meyerhold’s productions of The Magnanimous Cuckold (1922) and Sergei Tretyakov’s play Earth in Turmoil (1923) revolutionised Soviet stage design. Her non-objective set design for Earth in Turmoil was a stylistic hybrid in which Constructivist structures were transformed into industrial shapes imbued with political photographic imagery. Popova saw non-objective form as a revolutionary condition that could be best realised through theatrical spectacle. In his 1923 article ‘School of Constructivism’, Osip Brik defined Rodchenko as the major artist-constructivist who redefined Soviet everyday objecthood through his designs and teaching at the Higher State Artistic and Technical Workshops (Vkhutemas). Rodchenko’s designs and advertising posters were exhibited in Paris in June 1925 at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes. Russian Constructivism inspired similar experiments abroad (pri84

Consumption marily in Germany): in 1922, Russian artist El Lissitsky, the founder of the International Constructivist movement, co-organised the Düsseldorf Congress of International Productive artists and also cooperated with Dutch artists Hans Richter and Theo van Doesburg. READING Lodder, Christina (1983) Russian Constructivism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Rickey, George (1995) Constructivism: Origins and Evolution, revised edn. New York: George Braziller. Tupitsyn, Margarita (ed.) (2009) Rodchenko and Popova: Defining Constructivism. London: Tate Publishing.

Alexandra Smith

CONSUMPTION The final decades of the nineteenth century witnessed a transition towards the consumption of goods and services as the primary motor of growth in the advanced Western economies. In The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), the American economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen gave an account of this transition in terms of ‘conspicuous consumption’ – the lavish accrual and display of luxury goods (a common feature of narratives by proto-modernist novelists such as Edith Wharton and Henry James). For many critics in the early decades of the twentieth century, particularly some (though not all) of those associated with the Institute for Social Research, now known as the Frankfurt School, modernist art and literature – austere, complex and difficult – was understood as opposed to the readily consumable commodities that made up the landscape of mass culture and to the emergence of a rigidly standardised and administered culture industry. Likewise, expressions of revulsion at the supposedly mindless and debased commercial artefacts of consumer society – gramophone records, Hollywood melodramas, fashion, cosmetics (all, in a misogynist twist noted by Andreas Huyssen, aligned with femininity) – feature in the writings of many modernists, such as T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence and Nathanael West. From the 1990s onwards, however, much work in modernist studies has been devoted to arguing that modernism was intimately bound up with the consumer economy, albeit in the form of a niche product marketed at a cultivated, discriminating customer. Critics like Rachel Bowlby, Jennifer Wicke and Alissa Karl have indicated that for modernist women writers in particular – the new consumer environments 85

Cosmopolitanism of the shopping arcade and department store offered opportunities for forms of pleasure, display and self-expression that were at least partly liberatory. READING Bowlby, Rachel (2000) Carried Away: The Invention of Modern Shopping. London: Faber & Faber. Huyssen, Andreas (1986) After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Karl, Alissa G. (2009) Modernism and the Marketplace: Literary Culture and Consumer Capitalism in Rhys, Woolf, Stein, and Nella Larsen. New York: Routledge. Rainey, Lawrence (1998) Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Wicke, Jennifer (1994) ‘Mrs Dalloway Goes to Market: Woolf, Keynes, and Modern Markets’, Novel, 28 (1): 5–23.

Paul Crosthwaite

COSMOPOLITANISM While Friedrich Meinecke’s 1908 work Cosmopolitanism and the National State underlined the interconnectedness between cosmopolitan and nationalist ideologies in nineteenth-century thought from the perspective of the growing dominance of nations and the inevitable decline of cosmopolitan states, many historians of cosmopolitanism today view it also as a social practice and as a cultural form that spreads across different countries, classes and ethnicities. The strand of cosmopolitanism that involved aestheticism, dandyism and flânerie inspired an interest in alternative modes of political consciousness among early modernist authors. British journalists linked it to foreign practices, bodies, spaces and transnational forms of commercialised culture. Cosmopolitanism, as a system of distinction and taste, reordered the economies of modern cities and expanded consumer markets (see consumption). Between 1900 and 1920s dance was one of the major cultural expressions of cosmopolitanism in London: the performances of the North American dancer Maud Allan and of Sergei Diagilev’s Ballets Russes incited fantasies of escape, displacement and pleasure. The transnational developments in Europe between the 1910s and 1930s enabled black American cosmopolitanism to evolve in inter-war Paris through jazz performances. Travel as a precondition for cosmopolitanism was promoted by many modernist authors, including Henry James and E. M. Forster. 86

Critique READING Berman, Jessica (2001) Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism and the Politics of Community. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Junyk, Ihor (2013) Foreign Modernism: Cosmopolitanism, Identity and Style in Paris. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Walkowitz, Rebecca L. (2013) Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation. New York: Columbia University Press.

Alexandra Smith

CRITIQUE The term ‘critique’ means judgement, and in the Enlightenment tradition it has meant a reasoned judgement against objective standards of validity, truth or beauty. Since at least the eighteenth century that definition has raised two further problems: what is the basis for the standard against which judgement is made, and by what standard do we judge the rationality of the judgement itself? So the age of criticism becomes modernity, the age of critique. Or to put it in other words, a world in which not just social and political institutions but reason itself are seen to require legitimation or justification, and in which the critique of social conditions in the light of increasing knowledge is thought by many to be linked to emancipation and progress. In the wake of Kant, critique gains the specific additional sense of an enquiry into something’s conditions of possibility; after Hegel, we can distinguish also the idea of immanent critique, in which judgement is based only on the standards found within the object itself rather than drawn from outside. Weakening of confidence in the links between reason, progress and emancipation in the twentieth century has pushed social theorists to find a new basis from which to challenge modern society. For the frankfurt school, reason must continue to undertake its own self-critique without assuming the possibility of progress; for postmodernists such as the French sociologist Bruno Latour, the idea of both critique and modernity have ceased to be useful. READING Benhabib, Seyla (1986) Critique, Norm and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory. New York: Columbia University Press. de Boer, Karin and Ruth Sonderegger (eds) (2012) Conceptions of Critique in Modern and Contemporary Philosophy. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Kosselleck, Reinhart (1988) Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 87

Crowd Latour, Bruno (1993) We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Alex Thomson

CROWD The crowd, differentiated from the urban ‘masses’ or an unruly ‘mob’, is a social phenomenon that developed new significance in the nineteenth century in response to both increasing urbanisation and social and political unrest. In The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (La Psychologie des Foules, 1895), Gustave Le Bon said we were about to enter ‘the era of crowds’ (1896: xv), a troubling development when the psychology, politics, morality and behaviour of a crowd is, according to Le Bon, irrational and destructive. As the individuals within a crowd are not accountable for the actions of the whole, Le Bon suggests that the crowd possesses an inferior consciousness, aligning not with the intellectual qualities of its best members but with the basest unconscious desires of the group, which are set free under the protection of anonymity. Unlike a ‘mass’ of people, a crowd gathers for a shared purpose, and in the modernist period that purpose was often political; for example, campaigning suffragettes, striking labourers and depression-era hunger marches, the likes of which feature in modernist works from Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas (1938) to John dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer (1925). However, while the potential of the crowd was to be feared, Le Bon also argued the crowd has an essential role to play in social and political progress: to deal the final destructive blow to a civilisation in decline. fin de siècle modernisms frequently explore the experience of both being in a crowd and being witness to one. Many of the poems in Charles Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil (Les Fleurs du Mal, 1857) speak to the crowd, and in ‘To the Reader’ (‘Au Lecteur’), the urban crowd is ‘huddled, teeming, like gut-worms by the million’, a horrific vision defined by inescapability from others and an excess of desire (Baudelaire 2006: 5). Likewise, the epigraph to Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Man of the Crowd’ (1840) laments the urban wanderer’s inability to be alone. Yet that closeness also creates the conditions for a flâneur to observe others undetected and contains the promise of chance encounters. This positive potential of the crowd features more in twentieth-century modernisms, particularly in the literary works of surrealism. 88

Cruelty (Theatre of) READING Baudelaire, Charles ([1857] 2006) The Flowers of Evil, trans. Keith Waldrop. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Le Bon, Gustave (1896) The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. New York: Macmillan. Plotz, John (2000) The Crowd: British Literature and Public Politics. Berkeley: University of California Press. Poe, Edgar Allan ([1840] 2014), ‘The Man of the Crowd’, in The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. New York: Race Point.

Tara S. Thomson

CRUELTY (THEATRE OF) Coined by the French poet, dramatist, director, theatre theorist and visionary Antonin Artaud, the term ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ refers to a system of training both actors and spectators for a theatre that is mythopoeic, archetypal and ritualistic. Artaud’s theorising for a Theatre of Cruelty eventually appeared in the 1938 collection of essays Le Théâtre et son double (The Theatre and Its Double, trans. 1958) and is the fruit of his interaction with the heady cultural scene of Parisian modernism: the rejection of Artaud’s first poems by Jacques Rivière, editor of the influential review La Nouvelle Revue Française ignited a correspondence between the two men; he ran the Alfred Jarry Theatre with Roger Vitrac from 1926 to 1928, wrote the scenario for the first surrealist film, The Seashell and the Clergyman (dir. Germaine Dulac, 1928) and played the role of the monk in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), having learned the craft of the actor under the tutelage of the charismatic Charles Dullin. Greatly influenced by his encounter with Balinese dance at the 1931 Paris colonial Exposition, Artaud’s quest for a theatre that was non-expressive, non-representational, metaphysical and ecstatic found analogies in the theatres of China and the East. In turn, these influences informed his production of Percy Shelley’s The Cenci (1819) – the only performance that specifically functioned as a laboratory for a Theatre of Cruelty. Predictably, and in the spirit of modernist utopian stagings, this production was a failure which further triggered Artaud’s travels to lands that he considered inspirationally raw and exotic. In 1935 he received a grant from the French government to travel to Mexico, where he lived with the Tarahamaran people and experimented with peyote, and in 1937 he visited the 89

Cruelty (Theatre of) Aran Islands in Ireland, from where he was deported, probably having suffered a mental breakdown. The Theatre of Cruelty with its emphasis on rupture, violence and ritual has been read as the mirrored other of Bertolt Brecht’s epic theatre, where historical, political and mostly materialist tropes of making and experiencing the theatrical event are opposed to the metaphysics of Artaud’s theatre. However, this binary that posits these two formative figures of modernist theatre in opposition has been problematised by performance theorists and philosophical thinkers alike. Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty has been read by the post-1968 generation, espcially those thinkers of negativity as a mode that shatters the supplementarity of theatre and of art in general and attempts to break down the binary inherent in all representation through the function of violence. In particular, Artaud’s thinking has been very influential for Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Philippe Sollers, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, whose formulation of ‘the body without organs’ in their critique of psychoanalysis is borrowed from Artaud. Artaud’s tortured life and descent into madness has itself been read as enacting the Theatre of Cruelty he propagated, as its sacrificial actor/scapegoat. More recently, Jane Goodall has read Artaud’s project and the Theatre of Cruelty itself as a ramification of Gnostic Theology, an apophatic mode of thought that underscores the unknowability of the world and the divine, and where the body (of the holy actor in this case) is both the site of the fall but also offers the possibility of redemption, another binary that the Theatre of Cruelty strives to bridge. Artaud’s influence has been mostly felt in the theatre and performance art of the post-war era, where the catastrophes of the twentieth century form the backdrop in a non-illusionary, nonmetaphorical manner and where more often than not the body of the actor becomes the stage of the theatrical performance. READING Artaud, Antonin (1963) Artaud Anthology, ed. and trans. Jack Hirschman. San Francisco: City Lights. Artaud, Antonin (1976) Selected Writings, trans. Helen Weaver, ed. Susan Sontag. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Artaud, Antonin (2013) The Theatre and Its Double, trans. Victor Corti. London: Alma Classics. Goodall, Jane (1994) Artaud and the Gnostic Drama. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Olga Taxidou 90

Cubism

CUBISM One of the most important movements in modernist art, Cubism was born in France in 1908–9 by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, in part under the influence of the later work of their revered postimpressionist Paul Cézanne, who had died in 1906. We owe the movement’s imprecise name to the critic Louis Vauxcelles, who added the ‘-ism’ to a mot of Henri Matisse on seeing the first exhibited paintings in the new style (Braque’s): that they seemed to be made of ‘little cubes’. The offending cubes were in fact merely an aspect of something more widely characteristic of the style that Picasso and Braque were developing (‘like two mountaineers roped together’, as Braque put it): its concern to render reality, embodied in portrait-sitters, landscapes and still-life groupings, as arrangements of interlocking facets and clearly defined rectilinear planes. This gave mass, weight and a new kind of presence to the pictures’ subjects, at the same time banishing the sense of depth – the ‘space behind the picture frame’ – traditional in Western art since the Renaissance. The style further allowed for aspects of the subjects to be fragmented and shown simultaneously from different viewpoints – to be ‘analysed’, so to speak, hence the name sometimes given to this phase of the movement, ‘Analytic Cubism’. Picasso and Braque’s muted tones and the restricted and sober colour-values that characterised these pictures reflected the high seriousness of the project. Something momentous was going on: the return of painting, after several centuries in a world of spatial illusionism, to the plane of the canvas itself. In 1910 the two pioneers were joined by a third of comparable skill, Juan Gris, and their new way of rendering the external world began to make controversial celebrities of them, of Picasso especially. Echoes of their style could soon be seen in the work of such ‘Salon Cubists’ as Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, in the machine-turned solidities of Fernand Léger (‘Tubism’, quipped Vauxcelles) and in Robert Delaunay’s scenes of unstable tenements and fractured Eiffel Towers. Abroad too, Cubism was having an impact: on the futurists in Italy, the cubo-futurists in Russia and the vorticists in Britain. Meanwhile, the central troika were not marking time. In 1912– 13, partly as a result of the incorporation of numbers and letters into their pictures and of the use of collage – the attaching of actual objects to the canvas (cuttings of wallpaper, newsprint and printed music, cigarette packets and the like) – Picasso, Braque and Gris were 91

Cubo-Futurism beginning to develop a manner which, so to speak, picked up the fragments scattered by the explosion of Analytic Cubism and used them to build new images: the less earnest, more relaxed, beguiling and often witty images of Synthetic Cubism. Among other things, bright colours now made their appearance, as if to celebrate that the picture-plane had fully come into its own as a field of action and could be made the site of an exuberant new invention. Cubism’s heydays were over by the early 1920s. Braque’s style became more lyrical-mystical, while Picasso, though ever afterward affected by the Cubist experience, was moving towards a very personal classicism and would soon come close to surrealism. Still, Cubism’s legacy – the redefined picture-plane, the banishing of the vanishing point, the multiplicity of viewpoints, the witty construction of realities, the establishment of collage and the use of everyday, ‘pop’ materials, the demonstration of a modernist middle way between Post-Impressionist figurativeness and thoroughgoing abstraction – would be apparent for decades in the work of artists of very various stripes. As for the achievement of Cubism in its own time, this is perhaps the more resonant if one sees it as complementing contemporary movements in other arts: its concern with the surface of the canvas echoing the concern with the concrete configuration of the visible page in such poets as Apollinaire, the Russian Futuristy and the Italian champions of parole in libertà (‘words in freedom’), its estranging representation of reality analogous to the work of such writers as Gertrude Stein, and its divorce from traditional perspective coinciding with the divorce from the key-centred, triad-based tonal system of earlier Western music effected by the pioneers of atonality in the years around 1910. READING Golding, John (1959) Cubism: A History and an Analysis, 1907–1914. London: Faber. Richardson, John (1996) A Life of Picasso, Vol. II, 1907–17: The Painter of Modern Life. London: Cape.

Roger Savage

CUBO-FUTURISM Like Acmeism, neo-primitivism, rayonism and ego-futurism, CuboFuturism was a lively element of the manifesto-rich ethos of avantgarde poetry, painting and music in the Moscow and St Petersburg of the 1910s. The group advocating it (known as the Hylaeans in 92

Cubo-Futurism 1911–12 and then as the Cubo-Futurists) centred on four characters in search of a fourth dimension: the painter Kasimir Malevich, the poets Velimir Khlebnikov and Alexei Kruchenykh and the paintermusician Mikhail Matyushin, with – a little to the side of them – the poets Vladimir Mayakovsky and Benedict Livshits, and the versatile David Burliuk with his brothers Vladimir and Nikolai. (The painters Natalya Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov were associated in the early days but then moved away.) The Cubo-Futurist label, suggesting leanings westward and southward towards the Paris of Picasso and the Milan of Marinetti, is likely to mislead unless one bears in mind that the group was first and foremost intensely Slavic and often primitivist. True, Malevich responded strongly and receptively to Picasso’s cubist work, but in 1913–14 he extended it in a very personal way; and similarly, though his fellow Cubo-Futurists had some energetic activities and attitudes in common with their Italian cousins, several of them prized their own distinctness – Khlebnikov particularly, as he made clear by dubbing himself and his colleagues ‘Futurians’. The group first made its appropriately scandalous mark in Moscow in 1912 with a collaborative manifesto-cum-miscellany, A Slap in the Face of Public Taste, and in the following year in St Petersburg with the staging of a play of Mayakovsky about poetry and modernity, named after and starring himself, plus an ‘opera’ – really an explosive piece of music-theatre with a score by Matyushin – Victory over the Sun. This presented an unstoppably aggressive-progressive masculinity quelling Apollo-Yarilo, symbol of everything that was passé-ist in Russia, and it featured Malevich’s brightly schematic cardboard costumes and masks and his pioneeringly geometrical set, along with Khruchenykh’s text of slogans, newsflashes, non-sequiturs and dark sayings: a shop-window for his and Khlebnikov’s concept of zaum (‘beyonsense’), a new ‘transrational’ language loaded with neologisms, puns and fractured syllables. Malevich and the zaum poets developed further after Victory. Malevich reached pure abstraction in 1915, announcing that he was crossing over from Cubo-Futurism ‘to suprematism, to the new realism in painting, to objectless creation’; and the poets pushed forward with promoting ‘new ways of the word’ and a ‘rebirth of language’. In his last years Khlebnikov further embraced a holistic, internationalist utopianism in which he dubbed himself ‘a President of Planet Earth’.

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Culture Industry READING Bartlett, Rosamund and Sarah Dadswell (eds) (2012) ‘Victory over the Sun’: The World’s First Futurist Opera. Exeter: Exeter University Press. Markov, Vladimir F. (1969) Russian Futurism: A History. London: MacGibbon & Kee.

Roger Savage

CULTURE INDUSTRY A phrase coined by Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) as a speculative and dialectical proposition, linking kultur which, particularly in the German philosophical tradition is supposed to be the expression of a spiritual realm of harmonious freedom, to the conditions of modern industrial production. The critical aim of the term is to foreground both the general claim that consciousness and experience are produced by social conditions (a standard Hegelian and sociological viewpoint) and to highlight the historical breakdown of the distinction between folk or popular culture and high bourgeois culture which emerged in the eighteenth century. The consequence of this shift is that the autonomy asserted by modern art since the mid-nineteenth century has been compromised by its inevitable reabsorption into commercial society; at the same time, what romanticism sees as the spontaneous expression of ‘folk’ culture is also being structured and produced in ways which are mediated through capitalist economic enterprise. The phrase ‘culture industry’ should not be confused with a nondialectical preference for a particular type of artistic production (e.g. artisanal rather than industrial) or for concern about the concentration of capital in certain sectors of production (e.g. Hollywood rather than independent cinema). Because they are designed to supply the needs and desires of consumers, the products of the culture industry are characterised by standardisation, but also by the identification of new consumer categories. The result is a situation in which there is an endless variety of cultural goods available for consumers, but all are equally integrated into a single administered economic and political totality. READING Adorno, Theodor W. (2002) ‘Culture Industry Reconsidered’, trans. Anson Rabinbach, in J. M. Bernstein (ed.), The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture. London: Routledge, pp. 98–106. Adorno, Theodor W. and Max Horkheimer (2002) Dialectic of 94

Cut-up Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Alex Thomson

CUT-UP ‘Cut-up’ is the term for a compository form which consists of rearranged fragments of a text or texts. The form originated with the dadaists of the early twentieth century (although Lewis Carroll had advocated similar methods in the 1860s), but cut-ups took hold among the aleatorical art of the 1960s, influenced by modernist poetry like T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922). William Burroughs, perhaps the cut-up’s most famous proponent, made collages after being introduced to the technique by the artist Brion Gysin. For the writers who dismembered sections of text, often newspapers or magazines, the cut-up was meant to recreate the randomness and fragmentation of perception. The method was often indicative of a desire to get closer to reality; as Burroughs wrote: ‘Consciousness is a cut up. Every time you walk down the street or look out the window, your stream of consciousness is cut by random factors.’ At the same time, Burroughs reflected on the cut-up’s paradoxical attempt to represent that randomness: ‘You cannot will spontaneity. But you can introduce the unpredictable spontaneous factor with a pair of scissors.’ The spontaneity and intimacy of the form attracted experimental novelists of the period: Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch (1963), Alan Burns’s Babel (1967) and B. S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates (1969) all incorporate cut-up techniques. As Johnson commented: ‘I continue to believe that my solution was [. . .] a better solution to the problem of conveying the mind’s randomness than the imposed order of a bound book.’ READING Burroughs, William (1965) ‘The Cut-Up Method’, in LeRoi Jones (ed.), The Moderns: An Anthology of New Writing in America. London: MacGibbon & Kee. Johnson, B. S. (2013) ‘Introduction’ to Aren’t You Rather Young to Be Writing Your Memoirs? in Well Done God! Selected Prose and Drama of B. S. Johnson. London: Picador. Saporta, Marc ([1962] 2011) Composition No. 1. London: Visual Editions.

Julia Jordan

95

Dada

D DADA Dada was a literary and artistic movement that emerged during the First World war and came to an end around 1922–3. It originated in neutral Switzerland, where a considerable number of writers and artists from various nationalities found refuge and banded together in loosely knit groups, usually centred on a little magazine, a cafe, a gallery or a theatre venue. One such venue was the Cabaret Voltaire, which opened on 5 February 1916 and gave local artists opportunities for presenting their music and poetry. The nightspot was located in a small room of the bar ‘Holländische Meierei’ and had some fifteen to twenty tables, offering seating for no more than fifty guests per night. Performances were given daily except Fridays, and instead of an entrance fee a slightly raised cloakroom fee was charged. The audience consisted mainly of young people, often students, who had spent a raunchy night in other amusement venues and dropped in to have a late night drink. There was always a motley crew of emigré artists, writers, dancers and musicians who felt attracted to the cabaret because of its international ambience. Occasionally, members of the petty-bourgeoisie or ‘visitors in evening dress who seem to have descended to the lower depths after a classy dinner’, as Kurt Guggenheim described them, showed up, felt scandalised by the performances and helped to establish the venue’s reputation as an outré anti-art venue. The cabaret had been founded by Hugo Ball, a man with considerable theatre experience, and Emmy Hennings, a singer and entertainer. They were joined by Tristan Tzara, a young poet from Romania, the painters Marcel Janco and Hans Arp, and Ball’s old friend Richard Huelsenbeck. Initially, the performances were quite tame and very much in the tradition of German literary cabaret. A new note was introduced by Huelsenbeck when he recited his own poems accompanied by a big drum. In March 1916, they presented some short futurist plays and Futurist noise music, and on 30 March 1916, during a dance soirée, Huelsenbeck, Tzara and Janco performed the simultaneous poem, L’amiral cherche une maison à louer [The Admiral Looks for a House to Rent], which is generally considered to have been the first Dada event. The term ‘dada’, according to Tzara, was coined to distinguish 96

Dada their work from the Futurist movement. It is said to have been arrived at by sticking a knife into a French-German dictionary, where it happened to point to the entry ‘dada’, a French word for ‘hobbyhorse’. Others attribute it to the Romanian members of the group who frequently made use of the words ‘da, da’, meaning ‘yes, yes’. In any case, it was a nonsensical word and tied in with the group’s rejection of reason and logic, and their admiration for non-rational and non-intelligent forms of communication. The Dadaists pursued a delicate balance between art and anti-art in all artistic media. Hugo Ball had a particular affinity to the performing arts, whereas Tristan Tzara was responsible for some of the poems created with the help of a newspaper and a pair of scissors. Others created sculptures in the objet-trouvé tradition or paintings of a highly abstract nature. On 12 January 1917, the first Dada Exhibition was held at the Galerie Corray, which in March 1917 was re-baptised Galerie Dada. The group also edited an anthology, Cabaret Voltaire, and a magazine, Dada. After the armistice, the Zurich association disbanded and a variety of new groups in other countries came into existence. The international influence of Dada can already be observed in 1917, when Huelsenbeck moved to Berlin and founded the first German group there. A second followed in Cologne, led by Max Ernst and Johannes Baargeld. During World War II, New York also served as a refuge for writers and artists from war-torn Europe, and Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia and Man Ray established a Dada circle there. Soon, the Dada spirit entered artistic life in the Netherlands, Italy, Russia, Yugoslavia, Spain and elsewhere. The Dada magazine was sold at Adrienne Monnier’s bookshop in Paris and Apollinaire passed it around among his circle of friends, where it made an immense impression. Jean Cocteau, Philippe Soupault, André Breton, Louis Aragon and others engaged in a lively and enthusiastic correspondence with Tzara who, on 17 January 1920, moved to Paris. In spring 1920, he set up a number of events (poetry readings, exhibitions of paintings, musical and theatrical performances) that prepared the ground for another artistic development that sought to unlock the secrets of the unconscious and irrational mind: surrealism. The principal aim of Dada was, as Tzara explained, ‘to make a clean break with everything that existed before us, to see life and everything with new eyes, with new and fresh feeling’. In their works and actions, the Dadaists combined a nihilistic stance with a search for new forms and profound truths. Dada had a double nature 97

Dance that drew on the tension between the two poles of art and anti-art. Dada creations were polemical and highly unorthodox, yet they were always works of art. Even Tzara, who issued some of the most provocative nihilistic statements, was convinced that art played an essential function in the life of every human being. Dada art, so it seems, should never be taken at face value. The Dadaists did not embrace nihilism for its own sake, but mimed the nihilism of the bourgeoisie in order to expose the degradation of humanist values and the butchery of the war. Hans Arp characterised Dada as a search for an elementary art that could cure humankind from the madness of the times and could contribute towards the building of a new order. The Dadaists’ principal aim was to restore life to art. However, before something new could be created, the old had to be destroyed. Destruction was seen to be therapeutic; it was an act of defiance against the bourgeois value system and established cultural institutions. First, the Dadaists had to create a tabula rasa before a new art could be created. Therefore, their destructive energy possessed a positive value in so far as it prepared the way for other things to follow. READING Guggenheim, Kurt (1953) Alles in allem, Vol. 2. Zurich: Artemis. Motherwell, Robert (1951) The Dada Painters and Poets. New York: Wittenborn, Schultz. Richter, Hans (1965) Dada: Art and Anti-art. London: Thames & Hudson.

Günter Berghaus

DANCE The traditional narrative of modern dance that defines the art form primarily as a rejection of ballet has been supplanted by more nuanced and pluralistic approaches that query how dancing bodies have engaged in contemporaneous artistic pursuits and sociopolitical debates. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for instance, dance instruction manuals and anti-dance treatises with titles like The Perfect Art of Modern Dancing (1894) and Immorality of Modern Dances (1904) championed and condemned the social efficacy of the latest ballroom dances. Even early concert dancers had to defend their art form. Dancing barefooted in Greek–inspired robes, the legendary American performer Isadora Duncan coupled hellenism with an affinity for Delsarte-influenced poses to express the sacredness of ‘natural’ dance. Another American dance pioneer, Ruth St Denis, who was 98

Dance attracted to Eastern philosophies and religions, developed a repertoire of dances, including The Nautch (1908), that conveyed her sense of spirituality while aligning with a popular and exoticist fascination with the East. Other modernists were less concerned with the probity of dance and instead embraced interdisciplinary experimentation. Most notably, the gesamtkunstwerk aesthetic of Sergei (or Serge) Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes (1909–29) resulted in productions like Parade (1917), which was based on a scenario by Jean Cocteau and included a programme note by Guillaume Apollinaire, choreography by Léonide Massine, music by Erik Satie and costumes and sets by Pablo Picasso. Les Ballets Suédois (1920–5) similarly provided opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration in productions like the jazz ballet La Création du Monde (1923), which was choreographed by Jean Börlin and featured costumes designed by Fernand Léger. Some artists transformed dancers’ bodies into sites of interdisciplinarity. The sculptural costumes in Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadic Ballet (1922), one of the architectonic choreographic works created at the bauhaus school, emphasised the geometric shapes the dancers created as they moved through space. Similarly, Loïe Fuller’s innovative use of electricity to create special lighting effects as she manipulated billowing silk costumes rendered her body a kinetic sculpture. The seismic effect that the Russian-born George Balanchine had on ballet can be sensed as early as 1928 in Apollon Musagète (later called Apollo) as his artistic innovations eschewed elaborate costumes and decor to place the attention on his choreography. In revolutionising ballet, Balanchine, who co-founded the New York City Ballet with Lincoln Kirstein, developed an angular movement vocabulary and his extreme technical demands that elongated the dancers’ bodies to their limits were markers of his neoclassical style which redefined virtuosity. Ausdruckstanz, the German form of modern dance which was associated closely with Rudolf Laban and Mary Wigman, encompassed many visions, including a desire to recalibrate the balance between modern life, nature and spirituality. In particular, Laban’s movement choirs for large numbers of amateur participants fostered a sense of community to counter the seemingly isolating effects of industrialisation and urbanisation, though this utopian goal was later co-opted by the Nazis. Aesthetically, structured improvisations facilitated the development of creative individuality while movement 99

Dance dynamics free of characterisation and narrative, and often performed in silence, were viewed as a powerful conduit for emotion. In Wigman’s Monotony Whirl (1926), for example, the performer twirls on stage for seven minutes. The simple movement and repetition not only has religious connotations in its allusion to Sufism, but the potential exhaustion and euphoria that result from this sustained action invites the audience to empathise with the performer’s emotional experience. In the United States, the validation of modern dance was secured with the second generation of modern dancers. Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman along with German-born, Ausdruckstanz-trained Hanya Holm, were collectively known as the Big Four because of their prominence and leadership within the New York concert dance community. By codifying their pedagogical techniques and garnering the attention of the New York Times critic John Martin who initiated the use of the phrase ‘modern dance’ to describe their divergent styles, these artists created works like Graham’s Lamentation (1930), which became iconic markers of American modern dance. Later modernist experimentation in the United States returned to the issue of collaboration. Influenced by the Zen Buddhist precept of detachment and drawn to formalist choreography using chance methodology, Merce Cunningham rethought collaboration as artistic simultaneity when working with colleagues, including John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol. Summerspace (1958) is typical of this approach as the choreography, music, costumes and decor were created independently of each other, converging only on opening night. The politicisation of gendered bodies and sexuality against the backdrop of modernisation is another coalescing theme. Vaslav Nijinsky and his sister Bronislava Nijinska were both associated with the Ballets Russes. While their individual choreographic works featured innovative movement such as turned-in feet (Nijinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps, 1913) and contemporary subjects like leisure activities for the affluent on vacation (Nijinska’s Le Train Bleu, 1924), both artists also frequently embraced sexually charged themes. Nijinsky’s L’Aprés-midi d’un Faune (1913) ends with the titular character appearing to achieve orgasm. Nijinska’s Les Biches (1924) involves guests at a party flirting indiscriminately as the sexual frisson intensifies. Directly opposing discriminatory gender-based views, Ted Shawn 100

Dance and his Men Dancers challenged effeminate stereotypes with a hallowed veneration of male relationships and beauty in choreographic works like Labor Symphony (1934), which also equated dance with traditionally masculine work. race was another flashpoint in dance. For artists like Katherine Dunham and Pearl Primus, both of whom had African ancestors and had conducted anthropological research on African dance and its diasporas, modern dance was a way to combat racism implicitly by their presence on stage or more directly through political subjects. Dunham’s Southland (1950) brought the issue of lynching to the concert stage. Primus’ African Ceremonial (1943) celebrated Africanist traditions and influences. To the same end, the virtuosity of African-American dancers, including tap dancer Bill ‘Bojangles’ Robinson and jazz tap dancers Fayard and Harold Nicholas – the Nicholas Brothers – proved that dance was a colour-blind meritocracy. In addition to gender and race, modern dancers were concerned with the issue of class. Dancers and choreographers aligned their artistic practice with leftist politics, sympathising with the plight of the working class. For instance, the New Dance Group, guided by the motto ‘Dance is a Weapon of the Class Struggle’, offered dance classes that concluded with discussions of marxism and presented work like Sophie Maslow’s Dust Bowl Ballads (1941). Dance exposed other injustices, too. In particular, dance reveals how the term ‘modernisation’ needs to be considered carefully as it has often been used as a synonym for ‘westernisation’ and has euphemistically concealed hierarchical values calibrated to serve colonial priorities. In India, the Anti-Nautch movement, led by the social elite influenced by Christianity, fought to ban the ‘devadasis’ temple dancers, characterising these women as prostitutes. As legislation to this effect was passed in 1947, however, the revivalist proponents referenced the devadasis in sacred terms while also responding to the receding colonial power by reframing a largely regional practice as a national tradition. Not all modernist cultural encounters were necessarily discriminatory. During the 1930s, Wu Xiaobang, ‘the father of Chinese new dance’, studied Ausdruckstanz, modern dance and ballet in Japan before founding the first Chinese modern dance studio in Shanghai. Using modern dance as the foundation for his choreography, Wu – a member of the ‘National Salvation’ movement – pursued politicised themes in works like March of the Volunteers (1937). The resulting 101

Dandy syncretism demonstrates a transnational circulation of ideas that fostered intercultural and artistic innovation. When viewed from these perspectives, the phrase ‘modern dance’ does not reference a single style, geopolitical region or particular aesthetic philosophy. The art form does, however, signal a dominant, though expansive, concern: the engagement of dancing bodies with the processes of modernisation. READING Foulkes, Julia L. (2002) Modern Bodies: Dance and American Modernism from Martha Graham to Alvin Ailey. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Franko, Mark (1995) Dancing Modernism/Performing Politics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Garafola, Lynn (1989) Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. New York: Oxford University Press. Manning, Susan (2004) Modern Dance, Negro Dance: Race in Motion. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ross, Stephen and Allana C. Lindgren (eds) (2015) The Modernist World. Abingdon and New York: Routledge.

Allana C. Lindgren

DANDY ‘Dandy’ refers to an identity or subculture which originated in eighteenth-century London with the dazzling and immaculately dressed Regency celebrity Beau Brummell and was later popularised by Lord Byron and others. In the nineteenth century, dandyism became associated with l’art pour l’art because it emphasised the pursuit of beauty and the cultivation of the self while opposing bourgeois ideas of utility. As in the case of the flâneur, the dandy is simultaneously on display as an object of beauty and perfection and also a dedicated observer of urban society (both figures are discussed at length in Charles Baudelaire’s landmark 1863 essay ‘The Painter of Modern Life’). Oscar Wilde, James McNeill Whistler, Charles Algernon Swinburne and other poets and artists associated with English aestheticism took up the pose; in France, Whistler’s friend Robert de Montesquiou, an aristocratic dandy par excellence, became the model for the characters Jean Des Esseintes in Huysmans’ A Rebours (Against Nature, 1884), itself the reputed model for the ‘poisonous yellow book’ in Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and Baron de Charlus in Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du 102

Dasein temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time, 1913–27). As the examples illustrate, however, being a dandy in most cases has more to do with an aristocratic state of mind (and manners) than actual lineage. Many famous dandies, including Brummell himself, were of humble birth and their aristocratic pose was entirely self-invented. Despite being ‘blasted’ by the vorticists in 1914, the figure of the dandy continued to thrive in the modern period – seen for example in the futurist leader Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, or in the character Jay Gatsby in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925). READING Feldman, Jessica R. (1993) Gender on the Divide: The Dandy in Modernist Literature. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Moers, Ellen (1978) The Dandy: Brummell to Beerbohm. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Julian Hanna

DASEIN The ordinary German term for existence (Da-sein: ‘being there’) was given a unique philosophical significance in Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (1926), a central work of twentieth-century philosophy. Heidegger aims to re-establish philosophy on a new basis through a deconstructive dismantling and reappropriation of a traditional problem: the question of being, which he sees as the unexamined horizon presupposed by Western philosophy. The analysis of Dasein is the investigation of the mode of being proper to humans, seen as finite, mortal beings. Existence for Dasein is radically temporal: time is not something outside us and through which we move, but rather we are constituted by our past experience, present concerns and future possibilities, including our inevitable death. Heidegger chooses this non-philosophical word in order to avoid confusion with any existing philosophical accounts of man, and it signals his ambition to reorient philosophy to the ordinary and everyday aspects of the world that it has tended to overlook. For Heidegger Dasein is the type of being for whom being is in question and for whom this kind of philosophical enquiry is possible. This apparent privilege ascribed to humanity has been challenged for its anthropocentrism. But in the course of Heidegger’s analysis the human subject is displaced from its central position in modern philosophy and shown to be inextricably situated within pre-existing social, historical and linguistic worlds. Moreover, the questioning of 103

De Stijl Dasein is not primarily theoretical, but a derivative form of our practical navigation and making sense of the everyday world in which we live. This approach to philosophy can be compared to some key concerns of modernist art and literature: giving priority to the brute existence of reality (including our lived experience) and its resistance to any conceptual or linguistic grasp; stressing the overlooked significance of the ordinary and the everyday; and rejecting both metaphysical systems of value and formal systems of logic. READING Heidegger, Martin (1962) Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell. Large, William (2008) Heidegger’s Being and Time, Edinburgh Philosophical Guides. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Mulhall, Stephen (1996) Heidegger and Being and Time, Routledge Philosophical Guidebooks. Abingdon: Routledge.

Alex Thomson

DE STIJL De Stijl was a Leiden-based, internationally oriented, avant-garde little magazine first published in 1917. Its driving force, as well as that of the artistic movement or ‘ism’ of the same name, was Dutchman Theo van Doesburg, who, operating under his pseudonyms I. K. Bonset and Aldo Camini, brought together contributions from the fields of architecture, literature, painting, cinema and music, most notably by Gerrit Rietveld, Piet Mondriaan, László Moholy-Nagy, Antony Kok and Vilmos Huszár. This seemingly heterogeneous assembly of artistic perspectives was set against the unifying aesthetic backdrop of Nieuwe Beelding, a striving for new means of abstract expression within the arts, as exemplified by the geometrical, visual compositions of Piet Mondriaan. Not only did the magazine promote this aesthetic through reproductions of paintings, movie stills, architectural blueprints or patches of poetry, it also refined and adjusted it through a series of essays and manifestos, such as the 1920 literary manifest II van ‘de Stijl’ (manifesto II of ‘De Stijl’), co-signed by Mondriaan, Kok and Van Doesburg. Despite its international appeal, the magazine failed to maintain its foothold in the Low Countries after van Doesburg’s death in 1931. Its final issue appeared in 1932.

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Death drive READING Bru, Sascha (2013) ‘“The Will to Style”: The Dutch Contribution to the Avant-Garde’, in Bru Brooker and Weikop Thacker (eds), The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines. Vol. III, Europe 1880–1940. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hoek, Els (ed.) (2000) Theo van Doesburg. Oeuvrecatalogus. Bussum: Thoth. Petersen, Ad (ed.) (1968) De Stijl (reprint) (2 vols). Amsterdam: Athenaeum.

Tom Willaert

DEATH DRIVE No concept in the history of psychoanalysis has generated, and continues to generate, more controversy than Sigmund Freud’s theorising of the death drive (Todestrieb) in his later work. It was first outlined in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) after Freud observed in those returning from the First World war the symptom of obsessively repeating behaviours that caused pain to subjects. This compulsion to repeat sensations of ‘unpleasure’ directly contradicted the pleasure principle. Why would individuals repeat acts that generated pain instead of pleasure? In order to answer this psychological puzzle, Freud linked together the ‘recurrent dreams of war neurotics’ and the repetitive play of children, with Freud’s epiphany occurring after watching his nephew play with a bobbin in a biographical vignette of psychoanalytic lore that has become known as the fort/da game. For the late Freud wearied by war and grief, the death drive is ‘more primitive, more elementary, more instinctual than the pleasure principle’ and ‘overrides’ all other drives within his psychoanalytic system. In its simplest form, therefore, the death drive demonstrates that ‘the aim of all life is death’, an observation that underpins Freud’s cynical diagnostic vision of twentieth-century modernity in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930): ‘Homo homini lupus [man is wolf to man].’ READING Freud, Sigmund (1964) Civilisation and Its Discontents, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XXI, ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, pp. 7–64.

Robbie McLaughlan

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Decadence

DECADENCE ‘Decadence’ is not to be viewed as a lurid episode of the English 1890s, still less as the defining feature of that decade in which much else was going on. It is a European phenomenon of the later nineteenth century that arcs back to Romanticism and forward into modernism. It can meld with aestheticism, shares at least a borderland with symbolism and genuflects, on occasion, to satanism and the occult. Its most incisive diagnostician is Friedrich Nietzsche in The Case of Wagner (1887), and much of its most potent writing is continental, most notably Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal (1857) and Joris-Karl Huysmans’s À Rebours (1884). Decadence can call up figures and tropes – the femme fatale or the phosphorescent beauty of corruption – from the pathology of romanticism (Praz 1933). More fundamentally, it channels and expands a pursuit of the intense experience or sensation. For English romanticism, John Keats in Lamia and Ode on Melancholy (both 1820) represents this at its keenest. His Victorian successors are Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne in Poems and Ballads, First Series (1865), but also Gerard Manley Hopkins. The seminal English theorist of Decadence is Walter Pater from The Renaissance (1873) through Marius the Epicurean (1885) to the essay in Miscellaneous Studies (1895) on Prosper Mérimée – a figure who stands at an acute angle to French romanticism. As defining features of Decadence, Pater elicits a self-enclosed sensibility, the pursuit of sensation and the experience of ennui, a pervasive feeling of world-weariness and discontent. Sensation comprehends both the intense experience ennui craves and the basic elements or impressions into which experience can be analytically reduced. In Pater’s Mérimée the defeat of the French Revolution and the Kantian negation of all access to the transcendent provide an immediately post-Napoleonic context for self-enclosure and ennui, but Mérimée as himself an exemplar of the Decadent sensibility can resonate with nineteenth-century fictional protagonists from Pechorin in Mikhail Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time (1840) to Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler (1890). In the ‘Preface’ to The Renaissance the analytic quest of the aesthetic critic for the distinctive ‘virtue’ or potency of the objects he contemplates is, simultaneously, the analysis of his own sensations, and such criticism leads into a life-project of aesthetic self-­fashioning. The ‘Conclusion’ articulates that project as the pursuit of the moment as intense experience, a pursuit conceptually undergirded 106

Decadence by an ontology of universal flux and an empiricist epistemology that debouches into solipsism. Flux gives the project a fiercer intensity; solipsism is one endpoint for the enclosed and ambivalent idealised places of earlier decadent texts, from fairy-tale (Lamia’s palaceboudoir) or myth (the garden of Proserpine, the Venusberg of the Tannhauser legend) (see mythical method). An alternative end-point for the enclosed decadent space is the cabinet of curios and experiments in sensation assembled by Huysmans’s neurasthenic, world-rejecting aesthete Des Esseintes, which can shadow the imaginary museum of modernism. Gerontion, the flagship piece for T. S. Eliot’s Poems (1920), enacts the enclosed space in a dramatic monologue refracted by a Symbolist poetics. It tracks the loss of religious and aesthetic experience in a cosmopolitan underworld of the occult, and the pursuit of intensity in a Jacobean drama world of mirrors, cultivated sensation and inescapable decay. Elsewhere in early Eliot, ‘Prufrock’s Pervigilium’ ironises a key episode from Pater’s Marius the Epicurean; ‘The Love Song of Saint Sebastian’ assimilates a perverse fin-de-siècle eroticism; the aestheticised body in ‘The Death of Saint Narcissus’ moves in the penumbra of ‘Hérodiade’, Stéphane Mallarmé’s dialogue-poem (1899) on the most commanding of decadent femmes fatales; and The Hollow Men (1925) carries ennui into a vacuity of damnation. W. B. Yeats’s Paterian essay, ‘The Autumn of the Body’ (1898), transposes the chemical analysis of the aesthetic critic into an alchemical and Symbolist pursuit of spiritual essences within a vision of the arts taking over the functions of religion from a Christianity now passé. The vision is tinctured with the occult and an apocalyptic world-weariness, and in The Trembling of the Veil (1922), Yeats brings his magisterial memoir of the 1890s, ‘The Tragic Generation’, to its climax in a conjunction of avant-garde experiment, the occult and the scatological apocalypse of the first performance of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi (see ’pataphysics). Apocalypse can be one issue of, and out of, Decadence. The bastard ‘twilight of the idols’ of Max Nordau’s cultural polemic in Degeneration (1894) provides an unintentionally comic instance of this, D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love (1920) a systematic orchestration, from its analysis of Birkin’s Baudelairean oscillation, in the Prologue, between sexual idealising and the fascination of the repellent, to the degenerate aesthetes who frequent the Café Pompadour where Gerald, the masterful captain of industry, is also a visitor, on to the final movement where Decadence and an anti-organic 107

Degeneration i­ ndustrialism come together in the figure of the industrial artist Loerke who carries degeneration into nihilism. In the cardinal Chapter XIX Birkin meditates on an African fetish and the race-disintegration that follows the lapse from organic wholeness. This chimes with primitivism and Nietzsche’s diagnosis of Decadence, but extends it from contemporary culture into an apocalyptic psycho-history. Decadence can feed, variously, into a modernist aesthetic. Its pursuit of sensation and essence can serve the Symbolist driving of language towards the condition of music. Thomas Mann, in a series of texts from Tonio Kröger (1903) to Doctor Faustus (1947) takes up the self-dramatising decadent figure of the poète maudit, the artist as outcast or accursed, into a massive exploring of alienation or illness as essential to creativity. Théophile Gautier in his 1868 memoir-essay on Baudelaire picks out a cultivated artificiality in the pursuit of the intense as one hallmark of a decadent style. Des Esseintes in the second chapter of Huysmans’s À Rebours rejects Nature in favour of artifice. In Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Decay of Lying’ this flowers as an anti-mimetic aesthetic, which the companion essay on ‘The Critic as Artist’ caps by its exaltation of the former over the latter. Here, as in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), his exploration of the implications of the Huysmansian aesthetic, Wilde emerges as a key bridging figure between Decadence and modernism. READING Burrow, John (2000) The Crisis of Reason. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Davie, Donald (1952) ‘Hopkins as a Decadent Critic’, in Purity of Diction in English Verse. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Dowling, Linda (1986) Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siècle. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Praz, Mario (1933) The Romantic Agony, trans. Angus Davidson. London; Oxford: Oxford University Press. Symons, Arthur (2014) The Symbolist Movement in Literature, ed. Matthew Creasy. Manchester: Carcanet Press. Weir, David (1995) Decadence and the Making of Modernism. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

Donald Mackenzie

DEGENERATION The term was made famous by the Hungarian-born physician and social critic Max Nordau, whose book of the same title (Entartung, 108

Degeneration 1892; translated as Degeneration, 1895) launched a moralistic attack on leading writers and artists of the time. Nordau’s book made a profound impact: though rejected by prominent intellectuals including the psychologist William James (who called Nordau’s approach ‘pathological’), it was the first impression many English readers had of Friedrich Nietzsche, for example. Nordau’s arguments found favour with those people who were opposed to several interrelated movements of the period: aestheticism, decadence and l’art pour l’art. The bestselling English translation directly coincided with, and may even have contributed to, the dramatic turning point in Oscar Wilde’s career: from the peak of his critical acclaim to his sentencing to prison with two years’ hard labour. Nordau’s book is dedicated to Cesare Lombroso, whose theory of atavistic criminal ‘types’ Nordau sought to apply to contemporary artists and writers like Nietzsche, Wilde, Wagner, Zola, Ibsen and Whitman. The dedication states: ‘Degenerates are not always criminals . . . they are often authors and artists.’ (Lombroso was actually the first to argue that ‘men of genius’ displayed a much higher than average rate of degeneracy.) If degeneration was the illness, many people at the time believed that eugenics was the cure: the leading British sexologist Havelock Ellis, for example, subscribed to theories of degeneration and eugenics (The Task of Social Hygiene, 1912). Fear of degeneration was so great, in fact, that the World war I was initially welcomed by some as a ‘cleansing’ force. It was seen, as the leader of Italian futurism Filippo Tommaso Marinetti famously phrased it, as being ‘the world’s only hygiene’. This kind of thinking culminated in the late modernist period with the notorious 1937 entartete kunst [‘Degenerate Art’] exhibition in Munich, where hundreds of works by contemporary artists such as Marc Chagall, Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky were shown to the public. The exhibited works were chosen from among thousands confiscated by the Nazis; also on display were dada and surrealist manifestos juxtaposed with Nazi propaganda. (Inevitably the ‘degenerate’ exhibition, which was intended as an instructive counterpoint to the ‘healthy’ art of the Great German Art Exhibition, proved a far more popular draw.) Nordau’s theories helped to establish the image of the neurotic artist: the hypersensitive individual who feels life’s shocks more keenly than ordinary people, and who is more susceptible to moral failings and hysteria.

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Dionysian READING Childs, Donald J. (2001) Modernism and Eugenics: Woolf, Eliot, Yeats, and the Culture of Degeneration. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Greenslade, William (2010) Degeneration, Culture and the Novel: 1880– 1940. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nordau, Max (1993) Degeneration. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Julian Hanna

DIONYSIAN The ‘Dionysian’ as a seminal concept for hellenism, aesthetics and modernism appears with Friedrich Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy (1872) where it conceptualises, as one pole of ancient Greek art and culture, the orgiastic experience of a primal unity over against the dream-clarity of individuation in the apollonian. Tragedy, for Nietzsche the supreme achievement of Greek culture, unites the two. The Birth of Tragedy disrupts accounts of Greek art as supremely characterised by a radiant marmoreal calm. The English classicist Walter Pater had already chequered such an account in his 1867 essay on the German art historian and archaeologist Johann Winckelmann. Elsewhere he sketches a reading of Dionysus which is mythopoeic where Nietzsche’s is metaphysical. The latter finds its modernist climax in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (1912), the former in Ezra Pound’s Cantos (1930–69) for which Dionysius as a god of metamorphosis and fertility is a configuring presence. Pater’s ‘Study of Dionysius’ (1876/1895) and ‘The Bacchanals of Euripides’ (1878/1895) tease out the dualities of Dionysus as a god of fire and dew, a figure ecstatic and chthonian, hunter and spoil. His ‘Denys l’Auxerrois’ (1886/1887) rewrites the myth onto a medieval Christian setting where its dualities generate a grotesquerie of the squalid and savage that anticipates Mann. The Dionysian, whether Nietzschean or Paterian, reverses Platonic or Christian structurings of transcendence in favour of a transcendence of the underworld and its dark liberating energies. In English Romanticism, William Blake flare-tracks such reversals in his Nietzschean carnival text before Nietzsche, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793). They are probed and orchestrated by D. H. Lawrence in The Rainbow (1915) and pinpointed in the protagonist, Count Dionys, of his World war I story, ‘The Ladybird’ (1923). Death in Venice sets Apollonian and Dionysian (together with a Platonic Eros) in iridescent and corrosive interplay. For modernist dance and music the Dionysian can gener110

Dissonance ate an agonistic aesthetic of dissonance, reaching into primitivism, as in Igor Stravinsky’s 1913 Rite of Spring, and it may buttress one central modernist imperative, drawn from Gertrude Stein, the meditative romance-adventurer of Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim (1901): ‘In the destructive element, immerse.’ READING Jones, Susan (2013) Literature, Modernism and Dance. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1993) The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Shaun Whiteside. London: Penguin Books. Pater, Walter (1873) ‘Winckelmann’, in Studies in the History of the Renaissance. London: Macmillan. Pater, Walter (1887) Imaginary Portraits. London: Macmillan. Pater, Walter (1895) Greek Studies. London: Macmillan. Silk, M. S. and Stern, J. P. (1981) Nietzsche on Tragedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Donald Mackenzie

DISSONANCE In the early twentieth century, modernist musicians were famous for their attachment to dissonance. Not that they were the only ones attached. The concept was alive and well in other arts too; for instance, in 1911–12 the painter Kandinsky, busy pioneering expressionist abstraction, celebrated the ‘principle of dissonance’ in his own work. Dissonance’s shop-window, however, was the new music, which gained a lasting reputation among traditionalists for being ‘full of discords’. Of course, the implied converse, that earlier art-music was empty of them, didn’t hold water. Dissonance as understood within the Western tonal tradition had been an important feature of music’s procedures for at least five centuries, especially though not exclusively in connection with melodic suspensions, passing notes and cadence-making. However, until the later nineteenth century it had tended to be regarded as a phenomenon – an affecting and expressive one often – of transience, so that even in special cases of foregrounded dissonance (the violent first bar of the finale to Beethoven’s ‘Choral’ Symphony for example, or the notorious ‘Tristan chord’ that Wagner announces in the first minute of Tristan und Isolde) the justified expectation was that in time discord would properly resolve into concord. But things were changing at the beginning of the twentieth century. As was not surprising in a 111

Dissonance centuries-old harmonic system evolving towards greater complexity, there was a growing accommodation (as much among composers who had no interest in being modernist or avant-garde as among those who had) of much that would once have been considered troublingly dissonant, and a growing acceptance that these dissonances might take a long time to be resolved – or indeed might not be resolved at all. This ‘expanded tonality’ came about partly because the preceding generation had gone a long way in the exploration and exploitation of chromatic chordal effects, partly because there was a loosening-up of the practice of polyphony so that clashes between increasingly independent lines that once would have been thought beyond the pale became quite acceptable, and partly because exotic or archaic scales – the whole-tone, the pentatonic, the octatonic, the church-modal – were making their presences felt and bringing strange harmonies with them (not least when backed with block chords in parallel motion). Beyond all that, however, the champions of a consciously new music were adopting procedures that were still more dissonancefriendly. One procedure maintained close contact with the tonal tradition but expanded it yet further in several directions, per such things as ostinato, bitonality, polytonality and the piling of ‘musics’ on top of each other, so as to find harmonies that would embody specifically twentieth-century interests – neurosis, the ‘primitive’, etc. – or would reflect the sounds of the mechanised urban world, or accommodate the newly revered and celebrated folk-melos. (Brought together, the scores of Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring (1913) and Béla Bartók’s Miraculous Mandarin (1919) yield something of a compendium of such dissonances.) A yet more radical procedure came from Vienna: the practice of free atonality and later twelve-note serialism as developed from 1909 to the mid-1920s by Kandinsky’s friend Arnold Schoenberg and his pupils Alban Berg and Anton Webern. In the Schoenbergian system, which its originator saw as evolving seamlessly from the revered German classic-romantic tradition, music’s domination by the basic consonances of the age-old tonal centres was overthrown, with the result that a dissonance would now have a significance in its own right and not merely in relation to a consonance lurking in the background. Dissonance was thus ‘emancipated’, Schoenberg said. After all, he argued, ‘dissonances are only different from consonances in degree. [. . .] We have already reached the point where we no longer make the distinction between consonances and dissonances; or at most, we make the distinction that we are less 112

Dream willing to use consonances.’ A third dissonance-promoting procedure was to consider bringing into the concert-situation those recently developed or adopted instruments that had no necessary allegiance to tonal or atonal Western harmonic systems: the futurist noise boxes of Luigi Russolo, the ships’ sirens of Erik Satie and firemen’s sirens of Edgar Varèse, the new-fangled ‘theremin’, ‘trautonium’ and Ondes Martenot, Percy Grainger’s Tone-Tools, and the microphones and tape-decks, tone-generators and synthesisers that gave birth to musique concrète and electronic music in the 1940s and 1950s. True, some of these devices, when on their best behaviour, could accommodate themselves to the well-tempered semitones of Western concert music, but all of them had it in their power when they chose to take dissonance to a new frontier beyond traditional sharps and flats. READING Hahl-Koch, Jelena (ed.) (1984) Arnold Schoenberg – Wassily Kandinsky: Letters, Pictures and Documents. London: Faber. Samson, Jim (1977) Music in Transition: A Study of Tonal Expression and Atonality, 1900–1920. London: Dent.

Roger Savage

DREAM The English word ‘trauma’ has its etymological origins in the Greek word for physical wound (trauma), and via its German rendition (Traum for dream) elucidates the importance of somatic visions for psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) was the first attempt to codify the nascent discipline of psychoanalysis, with Freud analysing his own dreams as a means of explaining his pioneering discoveries into the psychic lives of individuals. Dreams, for Freud, convey unconscious wishes that yearn for fulfilment, but which are disguised in narratives that are dislocated and in a visual language that is fragmentary. Unconscious wishes are dark, violent, sexually aggressive and, as such, are deemed by the Ego to be too shameful for conscious articulation, so must find an outlet by being reworked into a complex symbology in a process that Freud termed ‘condensation’. The interpretation of dreams may be ‘the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind’, but this psychic process of condensation – wherein images, themes, motifs and symbols are melded together – testifies to the complexity of the Freudian unconscious. Freud turns to literature – 113

Dream the act of writing will be explained later in his work as a form of adult day dreaming – in order to explain his dream work; not only does he borrow from Greek myth (see also hellenism) when christening his famous theory of infantile sexuality but he first evokes it when explaining Hamlet’s inability to kill Claudius, with Freud drawing upon a distinctly literary methodology in order to conceptualise the operation of condensation. Just as the images in poems possess multiple interpretive possibilities, dreams articulate unconscious wishes desiring fulfilment that have been recathected into a complex, condensed, allegorical form. It is the role of the analyst, then, to decipher the encrypted meaning of an analysand’s dream by encouraging them to free-associate on aspects of the dream: the talking cure in practice. Arguably the most famous dream in the developmental history of psychoanalysis was one that would provide the pseudonym to a case study entitled ‘From the History of an Infantile Neurosis’ (1918). Sergei Pankejeff, a Russian aristocrat, approached Freud in the hope of finding a therapeutic cure for a disparate symptomology that included melancholia and constipation. The analysis had reached a deadlock until Pankejeff recounted an infantile dream that would enter into psychoanalytic lore. Pankejeff described a terrifying dream he had of ‘six or seven’ wolves in a tree and the mortal danger he sensed of being devoured at any point. Freud interpreted the dream within his oedipal schema, dividing the number of wolves down to one which he then read as being emblematic of a fear of the father. The dream of the ‘Wolfman’, as Pankejeff would become known, testified to the traumatic legacy of encountering the primal scene, and to how threatening injunctions of the father could continue to haunt waking and nocturnal lives of adults long after childhood. Carl Jung extended Freud’s understanding by attempting to account for the universal nature of dreams. Jung’s desire to incorporate the numinous within a psychoanalytic framework would develop into a crisis point between the two most important figures of early psychoanalysis; yet, for Jung, dreams represented more than the repressed memories or wishes of an individual. Jung noticed that the dreams of his patients often shared many similarities – images, mythical symbols, narrative themes, etc. – which he interpreted as evidencing a universal humanism that he termed the ‘collective unconscious’.

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Eccentrism READING Freud, Sigmund (1953) The Interpretation of Dreams, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. V, ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press. Freud, Sigmund (1955) An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. VXII, trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, pp. 7–135. Jung, Carl Gustav (1962) Memories, Dreams, Reflections, trans. by Richard and Clara Winston. London: Collins and Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Robbie McLaughlan

E ECCENTRISM Launched on 5 December 1921 at a public meeting in Petrograd, by Grigory Kozintsev, Leonid Trauberg and Georgy Kryzhitsky with their Eccentric Theatre manifesto, eccentrism asserted that ‘the performance is a rhythmical beating on the nerves’, ‘the author is an inventor-improviser’ and ‘the actor is mechanised movement’. Their vision of the Americanisation of the theatre suggested that acting should be viewed as contortion, grimace and screaming in the style of Charlie Chaplin’s comic performances. Their Factory of the Eccentric Actor (FEKS), which opened on 9 July 1922, attracted several prominent actors, directors and artists, including Sergei Yutkevich, Nikolai Evreinov and Yuri Annenkov. Its training course comprised gymnastics, mime, clowning, screen acting and acrobatics. The FEKS’ production of Nikolai Gogol’s play Marriage took place on 25 September 1922 at the Petrograd Central Arena of proletkult. It featured a sequence from a Charlie Chaplin film accompanied by a mesmerising kaleidoscope of theatrical trickery, dance, clowning and acrobatics. Likewise, Kozintsev’s and Trauberg’s 1923 show Foreign Trade on the Eiffel Tower included a short film as part of the stage action. In December 1924 Kozintsev and Trauberg ended their theatrical careers and produced their film The Adventures of Oktyabrina.

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Eccentrism READING Freud, Sigmund (1953) The Interpretation of Dreams, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. V, ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press. Freud, Sigmund (1955) An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. VXII, trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, pp. 7–135. Jung, Carl Gustav (1962) Memories, Dreams, Reflections, trans. by Richard and Clara Winston. London: Collins and Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Robbie McLaughlan

E ECCENTRISM Launched on 5 December 1921 at a public meeting in Petrograd, by Grigory Kozintsev, Leonid Trauberg and Georgy Kryzhitsky with their Eccentric Theatre manifesto, eccentrism asserted that ‘the performance is a rhythmical beating on the nerves’, ‘the author is an inventor-improviser’ and ‘the actor is mechanised movement’. Their vision of the Americanisation of the theatre suggested that acting should be viewed as contortion, grimace and screaming in the style of Charlie Chaplin’s comic performances. Their Factory of the Eccentric Actor (FEKS), which opened on 9 July 1922, attracted several prominent actors, directors and artists, including Sergei Yutkevich, Nikolai Evreinov and Yuri Annenkov. Its training course comprised gymnastics, mime, clowning, screen acting and acrobatics. The FEKS’ production of Nikolai Gogol’s play Marriage took place on 25 September 1922 at the Petrograd Central Arena of proletkult. It featured a sequence from a Charlie Chaplin film accompanied by a mesmerising kaleidoscope of theatrical trickery, dance, clowning and acrobatics. Likewise, Kozintsev’s and Trauberg’s 1923 show Foreign Trade on the Eiffel Tower included a short film as part of the stage action. In December 1924 Kozintsev and Trauberg ended their theatrical careers and produced their film The Adventures of Oktyabrina.

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The Edwardians READING Braun, Edward (1988) Meyerhold: A Revolution in Theatre. London: Methuen Drama. Drain, Richard (ed.) (2000) Twentieth Century Theatre: A Sourcebook. London: Routledge. Berghaus, Günter (ed.) (2000) International Futurism in Arts and Literature. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter.

Alexandra Smith

THE EDWARDIANS The Edwardians belong, chronologically, to the reign of Edward VII (1901–10); in common usage their period extends to 1914. This can assist the myth of an upper- and upper-middle-class idyll abruptly engulfed in the catastrophe of the First World war. In fact, the period is fraught with social and political tensions: industrial disputes, the suffragette movement, a constitutional crisis in 1910 over the powers of the House of Lords and, by the summer of 1914, a possible threat of civil war over Home Rule for Ireland. (D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, written 1916, published 1921, evokes a panorama of Edwardian society under the sign of apocalypse.) Cultural movements, and the work of major writers, flow over the millennium divide. A case can be argued for the Edwardian period as a coherent field, with its matrix in the 1890s (and a hinterland in the 1880s). Its defining features include romance as a pervasive mode, an inheritance from decadence, the mapping and analytic or mythical account of present English society and historic Englishness, an opening to new foreign literatures and the cultural institution of the bookman. Virginia Woolf’s ‘Character in Fiction’ (1924) sets the documentary realists H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy as ‘Edwardians’ against their successors of the next reign (who include Giles Lytton Strachey along with James Joyce, E. M. Forster and T. S. Eliot) as the ‘georgians’. The latter term has long been confined to the poets of the eponymous anthologies, but Woolf’s classification fits a persistent mapping of the Anglophone modernists as a mountain range cutting across the swamps (e.g. Marie Corelli) and flatlands (e.g. Galsworthy or even Bennett) of the Edwardian period. Yet the defining features cited above bed down key modernists within it; and this is reinforced by considering the Edwardian outsider Rudyard Kipling, the central Edwardian G. K. Chesterton, 116

The Edwardians and those twin entrepreneurs of modernism, Ford Madox Ford and Ezra Pound. Romance infuses a range of Edwardian genres: the historical novel, the detective story, science fiction as classically pioneered by Wells, the ghost story and other varieties of Gothic, imperial romance. Henry James, drawn into dialogue with Robert Louis Stevenson on romance and the art of fiction in Longman’s Magazine in the 1880s, provides an opulent, intricate analysis of romance in the 1907 Preface to The American. Ford’s first major fiction, the Fifth Queen trilogy (1906–8) is the finest historical romance of the period. Joseph Conrad collaborates with Ford on the science-fiction satire of The Inheritors (1901). Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), that key modernist narrative, is a skewed quest-romance. And Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) aligns itself systematically with the archetypal European romance of the Odyssey. Chesterton in two of his theological romances counters Decadence’s deepest drives: ennui in The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904), solipsism in The Man who was Thursday (1908). In Heretics (1905) and elsewhere he engages, at his best with a luminous intelligence of paradox, Edwardian issues and ideologies, from empire to neo-paganism to the aesthetic of the grotesque. A journalist in the new world of mass popular education, he combines the roles of polemicist, culture critic and professional jester; and his championing of popular culture and its forms can counterpoint assimilations of the popular in modernists like Eliot and Bertolt Brecht (both admirers of Kipling). Kipling, like his 1940 anthologist Eliot, is an alien Tory in English politics and culture – Chesterton in Heretics attributes him a cosmopolitan sensibility. Traffics and Discoveries (1904) responds with propaganda (‘The Army of a Dream’) and satire (‘Below the Mill Dam’) to the imperialist trauma of Britain’s initial near-defeat in the Second Boer War of 1899–1902 and the anxieties it sparked about imperial competence and national degeneration. But the intercutting worlds and the response to modern technology in ‘Wireless’ or ‘Mrs. Bathurst’, with the intensely elliptical narrative of the latter, confirm Kipling as a significant modernist. Similarly ‘They’, in the same volume, creates an outsider’s idyll of Englishness (laced with a ghosts-in-daylight motif), which feeds, alongside Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898), into Eliot’s Burnt Norton (1936). To oppose cosmopolitan modernism to an Edwardian cultivation of Englishness overlooks the French connections of Arnold Bennett or 117

The Edwardians the complex affiliations of Ford Madox Ford, champion of the high modernist novel in Gustave Flaubert, Conrad and James. As editor (1908–9) of The English Review Ford publishes Thomas Hardy, Galsworthy and Wells alongside the early D. H. Lawrence, James and the modernist autobiography of Conrad’s ‘Some Reminiscences’. His England and the English is a major text for the mapping of Englishness; his Some Do Not . . . (1924) evokes, from a World War I standpoint, a panorama of Edwardian society to complement Forster’s Howards End (1910) and Wells’s Tono-Bungay (1909). The opening of English to new literatures, including Russian, the contemporary Nordic, and Provençal, can infuse individual writers and movements: Henrik Ibsen is variously assimilated by Joyce, Bernard Shaw and the later James; Fyodor Dostoevsky is a continuing point of reference for Woolf in polemics on the novel; Pound’s pioneering studies of Provençal bear on imagism. At a popular level, it can incorporate a concept of Weltliteratur (World Literature) into the enterprise of Everyman’s Library launched in 1906 by Ernest Rhys (co-founder with W. B. Yeats of the 1890s Rhymers Club). It also provides a natural field for the bookman from the amateurish pioneering of Nordic literature by Edmund Gosse to the prolific histories of literature written or edited by the most gargantuan of the period’s bookmen, George Saintsbury. The bookman is an Edwardian morphing of the nineteenthcentury man of letters: the non-specialist critic ranging easily across periods and literatures, whose native medium, as in Matthew Arnold, is the causerie. With the Edwardians causerie can dwindle into the chat, gossipy or precious, of Andrew Lang’s long-running column in Longman’s Magazine. But Ford plies it trenchantly in his contributions (1907–10) to The Tribune and (1913–15) to The Outlook, and Woolf will burnish it in The Common Reader (1925, 1932). The figure who most flamboyantly bridges the Edwardian and modernist is Pound. In the years when he is promoting imagism and vorticism he also moves in a coherent Edwardian literary and social world. His 1910 Spirit of Romance can provide a popularising analogue for William Paton Ker’s classic medievalist monographs on Epic and Romance (1897) or The Dark Ages (1904). It also bristles with programmatic aphorisms from the modernist Pound, and its ‘Praefatio ad Lectorem Electum’ urges a synchronic vision of all literature that anticipates, but is exuberantly more flexible than, that advanced a decade later by Eliot in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’. 118

Ego-Futurism READING Coates, John (1984) Chesterton and the Edwardian Cultural Crisis. Hull: Hull University Press. Davie, Donald (1991) Studies in Ezra Pound. Manchester: Carcanet Press. Ellmann, Richard (ed.) (1960) Edwardians and Late Victorians. New York: Columbia University Press. Gross, John (1969) The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Hynes, Samuel (1968) The Edwardian Turn of Mind. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kenner, Hugh (1971) The Pound Era. Berkeley: University of California Press. Saunders, Max (ed.) (2013) The Edwardian Ford Madox Ford. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

Donald Mackenzie

EGO-FUTURISM Of all the lively -isms that characterised the arts in pre-World War I Moscow and St Petersburg, Ego-Futurism, which was launched in 1911 and had a high profile in its day, is now probably the least known: it has certainly not had the long-term significance of cubo-futurism (with which it had a prickly relationship). Its ‘Academy of Ego-Poetry (Universal Futurism) 19 Ego 12’ – a small group of like-minded thinkers in fact, not a grand institution – was the brainchild of Igor Severyanin, the first writer to use the word ‘futurism’ in a Russian connection. However, he withdrew quite soon, leaving another poet, Ivan Ignatyev, to be the movement’s front-man, and Ignatyev’s suicide early in 1914 largely brought it to an end. Less concerned than Cubo-Futurism with primitive Russian folk-culture, avant-garde music or painting, Ego-Futurism was essentially a West-leaning literary enterprise: its forebears Nietzsche, Baudelaire, Wilde and Marinetti, its territory the international bourgeois metropolis. In spite of the polemical assertiveness of its manifestos and the dandyish affectations of some of its adherents, its cult of the ego was fairly benign, rooted as it was in a conviction that the untrammelled development of the individual, as manifested in the artist’s liberty to explore new words, forms, techniques and areas of allusion – things exemplified in the nine almanacs Ignatyev edited – was the best guarantee of a happy futurity.

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Egoism READING Lawton, Anna and Herbert Eagle (eds) (1988) Russian Futurism through Its Manifestos, 1912–1928. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Markov, Vladimir F. (1969) Russian Futurism: A History. London: MacGibbon & Kee.

Roger Savage

EGOISM The main reason why the term ‘egoism’ has to figure in this dictionary derives from the impact of three little magazines called successively The Freewoman, New Freewoman and The Egoist. The Egoist became the leading magazine disseminating modernist ideas and texts in England. The transformation of the title as well as the meaning given to ‘egoism’ were due to their editor, Dora Marsden. Often working with Harriet Weaver, she turned a militant feminist and anarchist review into an innovative organ for experimental literature in 1914. Marsden had been a militant suffragette early on, and if today she is known for her contribution to high modernism, for having launched the careers of writers like Ezra Pound, H.D., Richard Aldington, James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis, her selfappointed mission was to elaborate an original critical philosophy of language in the editorials of the Egoist, in which she saw her true legacy. The technical features of The Egoist were discernible in the original layout of The Freewoman: the large format, the small font and the style of the advertisements remained identical between 1911 and 1919. The Freewoman already made it clear that activist politics were relayed by a reflexive attitude that included paying attention to language, culture and history. It was the first self-conscious ‘modernist’ review, a term it used regularly. But in 1911 as in 1914, Marsden’s source of inspiration was Max Stirner’s The Ego and His Own, which had been translated into English in 1907 by Benjamin Tucker. Stirner rejected all the abstract ‘Causes’ that were not his own. Similarly, Marsden repudiated the cause of suffragism, along with other ‘metaphysical’ bogeys or illusions. To achieve this task, Marsden appealed to ‘egoism’, a concept in whose name any form of authority was debunked. The last issue of the New Freewoman dated 15 December 1913 advertised Stirner’s The Ego and His Own, praising ‘the most powerful work that has ever emerged from a single human mind’. When it became The Egoist, it was less that a 120

Elegy male-centred modernism was replacing feminism as has been argued repeatedly than the fact that a political review was turned into a literary and philosophical magazine. It had caught up with the fate of a prestigious predecessor, George Meredith’s 1879 novel The Egoist, a scathing critique of the sexual values of the Victorian age. Thus T. S. Eliot’s early essays (like ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, published in the last two issues of The Egoist) often respond to Marsden’s provocative theses about language and belief, while Pound made the pages of the Egoist a launching pad for imagist poetry and the most important prose pieces of the times, like James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, and Wyndham Lewis’s Tarr. READING Clarke, Bruce (1996) Dora Marsden and Early Modernism. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Horkheimer, Max (1936) ‘Egoismus und Freiheitsbewegung. Zur Anthropologie des bürgerlichen Zeitalters’ (‘Egoism and the Freedom Movement: On the Anthropology of the Bourgeois Age’), no. 2 of Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung. Morrisson, Mark S. (1997) ‘Marketing British Modernism: The Egoist and Counter-public Spheres’, Twentieth Century Literature, 43 (4): 439–69. Morrisson, Mark S. (2001) The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences and Reception, 1905–1920. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Rabaté, Jean-Michel (2001) James Joyce and the Politics of Egoism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rabaté, Jean-Michel (2009) ‘Gender and Modernism: The Freewoman, The New Freewoman and The Egoist’, in Peter Booker and Andrew Thacker (eds), The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, Vol. 1, Britain and Ireland 1880–1955. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 269–89.

Jean-Michel Rabaté

ELEGY ‘Elegy’ is an ancient Greek metrical mode traditionally composed to voice personal and national grief or loss. In the modernist period the elegy was radically retooled to query with sophisticated scepticism not only the possibility of locating existential solace, but also the capacity of language to articulate what has passed away irrevocably. Bitter resistance to or loss of faith in the poet’s ethical responsibility to craft fresh methods of living beyond these vexed sensations becomes a core concern of modernist elegy, as it addresses 121

Empathy an expectation of the bereavement which attends all human attachments according to Sigmund Freud’s essay ‘On Transience’ (1916). The generic trajectory of traditional elegy – especially the search for sustaining myths in the face of philosophical despair, mourning and lawless cosmic caprice – is disrupted and destabilised in Bohemian-Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies as well as in Thomas Hardy’s enigmatically ambivalent Poems of 1912–13. Wilfred Owen’s ‘Preface’ to Selected Poetry is bluntly emphatic that his formal aesthetic response to the slaughter of so many servicemen in the First World war is in no way consolatory and teaches few lofty lessons about mortality, while his ‘Anthem of Doomed Youth’ suggests there will be few ‘passing-bells’ for those ‘who die as cattle’. Poems of the 1930s such as W. H. Auden’s ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’, Dylan Thomas’s ‘A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London’ and Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Journals variously debunk poetry’s persistent fascination with depicting – and ­assuaging – ontological torment. Indeed, Thomas’s anti-elegiac poetic is remarkable more for a tone of weary resignation at the bitter problems of living while MacNeice directs accusatory verve at the disappeared themselves. Robert Lowell’s highly individualised pattern of elegiac reminiscence is marked by a slyly sardonic animus towards the revenants of his parents while Sylvia Plath’s elegiac reflections teeter on the brink of unhinged nursery rhyme. It is only recently, in deliberately halting and tonally complex elegies by Amy Clampitt and Seamus Heaney, for example, that the narrative arc of this very traditional poetic mode has been more explicitly reclaimed. READING Ramazani, Jahan (1994) Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Vickery, John B. (2006) The Modern Elegiac Temper. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Watkin, William (2004) On Mourning: Theories of Loss in Modern Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Weisman, Karen (ed.) (2010) The Oxford Handbook of the Elegy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Andrew Radford

EMPATHY ‘Empathy’ as a critical term becomes prominent throughout modernism particularly in the visual arts due to the influence of German 122

Empire art historian Wilhelm Worringer’s 1907 Abstraction and Empathy, where he formulates two main urges for understanding and responding to works of art, which in turn are seen to relate to psychic states. The subtitle of Worringer’s study, ‘A Contribution to the Psychology of Style’, helps to place his work within the broader context of the development of modern psychology that sought to understand sentiment in relation to affect. The term ‘empathy’ was in fact first used by the British psychologist Edward Bradford Titchener in 1909, as a translation of the German Einfühlung (‘feeling into’), itself a term associated with the Idealism of Schelling and Hegel. German Idealism can also be seen as providing the conceptual and metaphysical context for Worringer’s ideas, where the urge to empathy is seen as a ‘happy’ relationship to the world with identification and verisimilitude as its structuring force. Conversely, the ‘urge to abstraction’ enacts a more troubled, alienated experience that Worringer identifies somewhat paradoxically with both ‘primitive’ art (some scholars suggest that he was influenced by the exhibition of African Art at the Trocadéro of 1906) and modernist abstract art, especially expressionism. READING Gluck, Mary (2000) ‘Interpreting Primitivism, Mass Culture and Modernism: The Making of Wilhelm Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy’, New German Critique, 80 (Spring–Summer): 149–69. Worringer, Wilhelm (2007) Abstraction and Empathy, trans. Michael Bullock. Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks, Ivan. R. Dee Inc.

Olga Taxidou

EMPIRE For the Cambridge academic J. R. Seeley in 1884, empire was the great phenomenon of modern English history. Loosely defined, empire refers to a geographically widespread matrix of states and ethnic groups united (often by military force) and governed either by a monarchy or an oligarchy keen to secure fresh markets, new raw materials and valuable natural resources. Between the publication of Joseph Conrad’s first novel Almayer’s Folly in 1895 and W. B. Yeats’s death in 1939 the geography of the British Empire was at its most sprawling, and coincided with the radical mutations in aesthetic and literary register synonymous with the culture of modernism. Just before the outbreak of World war I, approximately 88 per cent of the world’s territorial map was under direct or indirect European 123

Empire sway. It was at this juncture that, in Britain at least, the romanticised consolations of cultural and ethnic identity offered by the popular adventure tales of H. Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling and John Buchan were debunked by more formally challenging and enigmatically ambivalent fictions of Empire. Such texts were often produced by authors with profound personal experience of migrancy, expulsion, dislocation or self-imposed statelessness. Extending the trenchant and intensely critical spirit of Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Footnote to History (1892) and stories like ‘The Beach of Falesá’ (1892) and ‘The Ebb-Tide’ (1894), Conrad, Leonard Woolf, Claude McKay, Anna Wickham, Katherine Mansfield, Olive Schreiner, James Joyce and E. M. Forster variously suggested that the ‘savage other’, hitherto segregated as a vague presence in remote colonial spaces, was in fact much closer to home, indeed lodged at the very dark heart of civilised self-definition. Of these exemplary authors Conrad, an exiled Polish national and career merchant seaman, persistently displaced the modernist vista away from the bustling metropolis synonymous with it to the seductive yet sinister fringes of the imperial map. By the end of World War I, four vast transnational empires – the Habsburg, Ottoman, Romanov and Wilhelmine – had been reduced to so much ruinous disorder, and a host of smaller nation-states began to emerge, including a modern Turkish republic. Portugal and Spain looked back in languor to their former imperial prestige while Italy launched a series of disastrous imperial campaigns in Libya and Ethiopia. Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West (1922–3) and W. B. Yeats in A Vision (1925) anticipated sifting the repressive rubble of the British Empire as part of their quest for new narratives of personal as well as national legitimacy. Yet the interwar period in which these texts were published saw the fortunes of the British Empire greatly improved by an elaborate global system of telegraph and wireless connecting all of its territorial possessions for the first time. C. L. R. James’s Letters from London (1932) and Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1942) confront and process at length the grave existential implications of this accelerating globalisation and often heedless exportation of Western capitalist credos. Elizabeth Bowen in The Last September (1929), writing from the colonial capital of Dublin, broods over a vexing question that postcolonial pundits continue to debate: was the aesthetic dissidence of modernism a specific, highly charged reaction to the formation of empire, or was such technical innovation entangled with a cluster 124

Entartete Kunst of civic, ideological and economic forces that included imperial agendas? READING Armstrong, Tim (2005) Modernism. London: Polity. Begam, Richard and Michael Valdez Moses (eds) (2007) Modernism and Colonialism: British and Irish Literature, 1899–1939. London: Duke University Press. Boehmer, Elleke (2002) Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial 1890– 1920: Resistance in Interaction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Das, Santanu (ed.) (2011) Race, Empire and First World War Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Andrew Radford

ENTARTETE KUNST On 18 July 1937, as part of what had been declared the first ‘Day of German Art’, Adolf Hitler opened the ‘Great German Art Exhibition’ in the newly founded House of German Art in Munich. This relentlessly nationalistic presentation of the officially endorsed products of Nazi cultural policy was contrasted by another exhibition of socalled Entartete Kunst (‘Degenerate Art’) that opened the following day. This hastily arranged exhibition consisted of the work of 112 artists (including many major figures associated with expressionism and dada), amounting to some 650 paintings and sculptures, confiscated from 32 German museums in response to a decree issued only weeks beforehand by Hitler, via Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, to Adolf Ziegler, the president of the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts. Opening the exhibition, Ziegler would announce to the audience that ‘you see around us monstrosities of madness, of impudence, of inability, and degeneration. What this show has to offer causes shock and disgust in all of us.’ The exhibition was indeed designed as a negative demonstration of modernism’s malign effect on art; works were shown merely in order to mock them as inept, to scandalise the German public with the prices paid for such pieces (a note next to several works read ‘purchased with the taxes of the German working people’), to reveal modern art as the work of a bolshevik and Jewish clique and fundamentally un-German, and, most disturbingly of all, to associate discourses of racial degeneration rooted in nineteenth-century social Darwinism with the distortions of form and perspective characteristic of Expressionism and other manifestations of modernism in art. Viewers were encouraged to see 125

Entartete Kunst modern works as resulting from actual pathologies (as if the artists had literally painted or sculpted what they perceived), or as the perverse and pernicious imitation of such pathologies. The works were often packed tightly together, displayed in a relatively random manner, albeit according to thematic groupings related to Nazi determinations of ‘degeneracy’ (whether political, moral, religious, racial or anti-Semitic), and were sometimes shown unframed. Slogans from Hitler and Goebbels adorned the walls, instructing visitors on the flaws of such art. There was precedent for an exhibition of this kind in the conduct of elected Nazi officials in Thuringia in the early 1930s, and in local outbursts of antipathy to modernism on the part of some Nazi functionaries and supporters after the party took power in 1933, for instance in an exhibition of ‘Images of Cultural Bolshevism’ mounted at the Kunsthalle Mannheim in 1933. There was precedent too in a wider cultural discourse, notably Max Nordau’s 1892 publication Degeneration, and especially architect Paul Schultze-Naumburg’s 1928 Art and Race, which used visual comparisons between modern works and photographs of people with disabilities or deformities, and which Goebbels read in the summer of 1937. The ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition, however, was not a well-planned or gradually conceived response to such precedents. It was above all an opportunistic and quickly assembled venture on the part of Goebbels (jettisoning his prior advocacy of Expressionism’s cooption as an official German Art), who correctly anticipated Hitler’s approval for such a wholesale denunciation of modernism. Recent scholarship argues that Entartete Kunst emerged not only from ideologies of cultural and genetic degeneracy circulating in the 1930s, but also from local power struggles within the Nazi Party, specifically from arguments over the direction of cultural policy and as a compensatory response to the acknowledgement within the Nazi hierarchy that the official art they had attempted to produce was not convincing in its own right. The Entartete Kunst exhibition toured Germany and Austria until 1941 and a catalogue was produced in several editions to reinforce its argument, using visual comparisons between modern works (many not actually included in the exhibition) and art made by asylum patients, and thus echoing Schultze-Naumburg’s approach to the illustration of Art and Race. The catalogue also quoted Hitler’s speeches at length, including that given at the opening of the House of German Art in which he stated that any modern artists found to have congenitally defective vision would be the concern of the Ministry of 126

Epic Theatre the Interior, and could expect to be prevented from ‘hereditary transmission’ of such defects. In this and many other regards, Entartete Kunst can be seen as closely connected to the wider atrocities perpetrated by the Nazi state. It has been claimed that some two million visitors saw the Entartete Kunst exhibition in Munich alone but such astonishing, unprecedented numbers should probably be regarded with suspicion. Nonetheless, and for the worst of reasons, Entartete Kunst must be counted among the most significant exhibitions of the twentieth century. READING Altshuler, Bruce (1994) The Avant-Garde in Exhibition: New Art of the 20th Century. New York: Harry N. Abrams. Barron, Stephanie (ed.) (1991) Degenerate Art: The Fate of the AvantGarde in Nazi Germany. Los Angeles: LACMA. Peters, Olaf (ed.) (2014) Degenerate Art: The Attack on Modern Art in Nazi Germany, 1937. Munich, London and New York: Prestel.

Dominic Paterson

EPIC THEATRE Epic Theatre is a category principally associated with the theory and practice of Bertolt Brecht. Many of its key techniques originate in Brecht’s early collaborations with the German theatre director Erwin Piscator, with whom he worked on Piscator’s production of Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Schweik in 1928. This ground-breaking production, a significant influence on Brecht, demonstrated many of the techniques characteristic of his later method: anti-illusionism, rationality as against empathy, didacticism, interruption, episodic form and the use of the stage to examine social and political relations. Brecht absorbed lessons from Piscator as well as the Soviet director Vsevolod Meyerhold and the Chinese theatre to create a new politicised, didactic, fable-like non-illusory theatre. The technique is extensively described in his key theoretical statement, ‘A Short Organum for the Theatre’ (1949), where he argues for a new theatre which would expose social and historical contradictions, and examine class structures and economic systems using certain techniques. In Epic Theatre, the actor should avoid performative mimesis, speaking in the third person or the past tense, often directly addressing the audience, blocking empathy in favour of critical selfreflection; actors would foreground their social relations using the gestus technique; sources of light would be visible and the stage 127

Epiphany would be open, bare, with set changes made in front of the audience; music would contradict the action; plays would be structured episodically, with each scene announced with a written title; visual captions would often interrupt the action; the play would be set in the historical past but would confront contemporary problems. These effects would contribute to the verfremdungseffekt and would provoke the audience into recognising the constructed nature of the play, and by extension the ever-shifting contingencies of social and political reality. The interruption of the seamless flow of action with critical commentary allows the inference of alternative deeds and histories and a sense that the narrative might be altered by critical intervention. To alter the representation entails a concomitant reconstruction of the spectator’s attitude to the representation, and consequently to the governing institutions which appropriate that representation and hypnotise their subjects into a false coherence. The legacy of Epic Theatre is hard to overestimate. In British postwar theatre, it was reinforced by the Berliner Ensemble’s productions in London in 1956 and then by John Willett’s translations of Brecht’s writing in 1964. Epic Theatre techniques strongly characterise the work of directors such as William Gaskill, Joan Littlewood, Peter Brook and John Dexter and playwrights including Edward Bond, Keith Johnstone, John Arden, Arnold Wesker, Howard Brenton, David Hare, Edward Bond, Trevor Griffiths, Caryl Churchill and John McGrath. In Germany, the shadow of Epic Theatre looms over the post-Brechtian theatre of Heiner Müller, Peter Handke and Peter Weiss. Epic Theatre techniques have also profoundly influenced the post-war European art cinema of Jean-Luc Godard, Straub-Huillet, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Lindsay Anderson, Joseph Losey, Nagisa Oshima, Alexander Kluge and Lars Von Trier. READING Brecht, Bertolt (1964) Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett. London: Methuen. Jameson, Fredric (1998) Brecht and Method. New York: Verso. Reinelt, Janelle (1996) After Brecht: British Epic Theatre. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Anthony Paraskeva

EPIPHANY Originally a theological term for the revelation of religious phenomena, the modernist epiphany is a secular experience situated within an 128

Estrangement aesthetic context. With roots in nineteenth-century lyric poetry, the epiphany signifies a moment of clarity in which artistic or ontological truths are exposed. Evidenced particularly in the modernist novel and short story, the epiphany is an instance of plenitude wherein an object or experience might be brought forth and revealed within an otherwise fragmented modernity. Virginia Woolf described the epiphanic experience as a ‘moment of being’ in which the reality behind everyday life is unveiled and a pattern of interconnection can be glimpsed. Elaborated in her essay ‘A Sketch of the Past’ (1939), the moment of being was also explored by Woolf in her fiction, for example in Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To The Lighthouse (1927). Other modernist literary exponents include Marcel Proust, Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster, William Faulkner and perhaps most notably James Joyce. His early prose series of Epiphanies (1898–1904) later formed part of Stephen Hero (1904–6; published 1944) and its subsequent rewriting as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), representing his formal interest in the nature and significance of these revelatory manifestations as moments of realisation with the potential to reveal one’s being in the world and to contribute to the formation of artistic identity by crystallising aesthetic insight. READING Beja, Morris (1971) Epiphany in the Modern Novel. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Kim, Sharon (2012) Literary Epiphany in the Novel, 1850–1950: Constellations of the Soul. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Nichols, Ashton (1987) The Poetics of Epiphany: Nineteenth-Century Origins of the Modern Literary Moment. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Taylor, Charles (1989) Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Maria-Daniella Dick

ESTRANGEMENT Viktor Shklovsky’s concept of estrangement (ostranenie, also known as ‘defamiliarisation’) is usually associated with formalist modernism and has its roots in German Romanticism, Marx’s materialism and Hegel’s theory of alienation. It embodies Shklovsky’s theoretical responses to depersonalisation as a modern condition. Shklovsky’s theoretical approach to the aesthetic forms of depersonalisation might also be seen both as a response to traumatic 129

Eugenics e­ xperiences of Russian life in the 1910s and to futurist experiments in the visual arts and literature. In his article ‘Art as Technique’ (1917), Shklovsky insists that in the age of mechanical reproduction habit makes people behave in a ritualised manner (unconsciously) and deprives them of meaningful existence. In his view, art brings back the sensation of things as they ‘are perceived and not as they are known’. The technique of art, according to Shklovsky, is to make objects ‘unfamiliar’, and increase the difficulty and length of perception. Shklovsky provides several examples from Lev Tolstoy’s works in which Tolstoy makes familiar things ‘seem strange by not naming the familiar object’ or portrays familiar objects from the point of view of animals or children. For Shklovsky, estrangement enables the reader to divide his mental and emotional perception of an object into something that is familiar and something that is totally novel to him. The reader’s perceptual tools become contaminated as a result of such an exercise that adds a strangeness to the perception of familiar things and adds a familiarity to something that looks excessively strange. Caryl Emerson finds Shklovsky’s notion of estrangement comparable to some extent to Mikhail Bakhtin notion of ‘outsidedness’. Her analysis focuses on bodies that either feel too little and seek intensified sensations or feel too much and are in need of distancing themselves from their experiences. Despite the fundamental differences between their methods, both Shklovsky and Bakhtin were sceptical of a marxist model and an ethics of identity that precluded individuals from embracing acts of distancing and of cultivating respect. READING Emerson, Caryl (2005) ‘Shklovsky’s ostranenie, Bakhtin’s vnenakhodimost’ (‘How Distance Serves an Aesthetics of Arousal Differently from an Aesthetics Based on Pain’), Poetics Today, 26 (4): 637–64. Robinson, Douglas (2008) Estrangement and the Somatics of Literature: Tolstoy, Shklovsky, Brecht. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Shklovsky, Viktor (2004) ‘Art as Technique’, in Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (eds), Literary Theory: An Anthology. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 15–21.

Alexandra Smith

EUGENICS The term ‘eugenics’ was coined in 1883 by Sir Francis Galton who defined it as the science dedicated to the improvement of the human 130

Event race.

Influenced by Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory, eugenicists thought that the ideal of human development was possible through the complete rationalisation of human life. As a social movement, eugenics became prominent in the beginning of the twentieth century in Europe, South America and North America. In 1907–9, the States of Indiana and California passed the eugenic sterilisation law that enabled state hospitals and prisons to sterilise those who were considered to be either mentally ‘retarded’ or displayed the signs of sexually perversive behaviour. In the 1910s anxiety about bad heredity triggered the formation of several societies, including the Eugenics Education Society in London (1907), the German Society for Race Hygiene (1905), the American Eugenics Society (1912) and the French Eugenics Society (1912). The First International Eugenics Congress was held in London in 1912. By the 1920s eugenics societies existed in the Soviet Union, Japan, Scandinavia, Brazil, Mexico and many other countries. By the early 1940s public support for eugenics withered away as the association of the project with policies of extermination in Hitler’s Germany had discredited the movement. READING Bashford, Alison and Philippa Levine (eds) (2010) The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kline, Wendy (2005) Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Lynn, Richard (2001) Eugenics: A Reassessment. Westport, CT: Greenwood.

Alexandra Smith

EVENT The event is the concept with which twentieth-century philosophers, from Martin Heidegger to Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Alain Badiou, have sought to understand the nature of real change or novelty. These enquiries are characterised by the respective relations they propose between the event and ontological ‘being’ (‘being’, alongside dasein, is one of the two central categories of Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927)), and specifically whether novelty emerges within or outwith being’s bounds. Whereas in The Logic of Sense ([1988] 1993), Deleuze conceives events as ‘points of inflection’ in a continuity (Sayeau 2013), and later as ‘fluvia’, Badiou commits to the event’s radical discontinuity and the interruption of being, asking 131

Event how being can be ‘supplemented’ by the unfolding of an event’s consequences (Badiou 2005). The event is closely tied to these philosophers’ respective theories of the subject, as agent of practical change. Deleuze, for example, identifies a persistent question pertaining to the event in Leibniz, Bergson and Whitehead: ‘In what conditions does the objective world allow for a subjective production of novelty, that is, of creation?’ (Deleuze 1993: 79). Badiou emphasises instead the necessity of a chance occurrence that exceeds the conditions of the objective world. Accordingly, in order to be the material bearer of novelty (in a process Badiou calls a ‘truth-procedure’) the subject cannot precede the event. Badiou’s philosophy ‘institutes the subject, not as support or origin, but as fragment of the process of truth’ (Badiou 2005: 15). This emphasis on subjective creation explains in part the critical purchase attained by the event in studies of modernism from the late 1990s onwards, especially as a conceptual counterweight to the everyday, defined by Rita Felski in ‘The Invention of Everyday Life’ (1999) as ‘above all a temporal term’ both conveying ‘the fact of repetition’ and ‘habit, sameness, routine’ (Felski 1999: 26). As well as elaborating the possible rupture of such experience, which is bound to capitalist temporality, philosophies of the event also seek to revivify the resistant potential of the subject in the face of its ideological entrapment. In Against the Event: The Everyday and the Evolution of Modernist Narrative (2013), Michael Sayeau argues that the ‘philosophical struggle’ to articulate a concept of the event is ‘symptomatic of a period in which grave doubts emerge about human agency and subjective intentionality’ (Sayeau 2013: 21). However, the event bears not only on ostensibly political resistances, the likes of the Paris Commune for example, but also upon art (and for Badiou on love and mathematics as well). For Badiou, there are artistic events by which unanticipated formal innovations come to rupture the situations in which they emerge. In Badiou’s Logics of Worlds (2006/2009), Arnold Schoenberg’s development of serialism stands as the privileged example of an event ‘which breaks the history of the world in two’ by making possible a music no longer bound to the tonal system. The event’s contribution to modern understandings of temporality has also increased interest in literary representations of its occurrence. This raises a difficulty for modernist literature in particular, for which ‘what happens’ is often compressed into the everyday (James Joyce’s Ulysses or Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, for example) or rendered meaningless by the 132

Everyday broad temporal scope of works like Marcel Proust’s À la recherche de temps perdu (1913–27) or Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage (1915– 67) novels. Any simple application of the philosophical concept of the event to modernist literature is problematic, though Badiou offers an interesting route forward in his writings on Beckett’s late prose works from How It Is (1960) onwards, when he insists that the event (understood as a chance encounter) and the subject bound to its occurrence (‘the Two of love’) find their adequate elaboration by way of a ‘latent poem’ beneath the prose (Badiou 2003). READING Badiou, Alain (2003) On Beckett, ed. Alberto Toscano and Nina Power. Manchester: Clinamen Press. Badiou, Alain (2005) Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham. London: Continuum. Badiou, Alain (2009) Logics of Worlds, trans. Alberto Toscano. London: Continuum. Deleuze, Gilles (1993) The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley. London: Athlone Press. Felski, Rita (1999) ‘The Invention of Everyday Life’, New Formations, 39: 15–31. Heidegger, Martin (2010) Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Ross, Stephen (ed.) (2009) Modernism and Theory: A Critical Debate. Abingdon: Routledge. Sayeau, Michael (2013) Against the Event: The Everyday and Evolution of Modernist Narrative. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Tom Betteridge

EVERYDAY Modernist attempts to capture the everyday are premised on a fundamental reconsideration of what the everyday constitutes. Pioneering sociologist Georg Simmel, and later his students, the cultural critics Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin associated with the frankfurt school, had by the early decades of the twentieth century established the need for a revised approach to understanding the everyday in modernity. In aesthetic responses to the challenge of representing everyday life, formal innovation goes hand in hand with a focus on the previously overlooked aspects of daily life: interstices, moments of boredom, failed communication, periods of eventless or issueless time, as well as unexpected ecstasies or moments of incongruous emotion. 133

Everyday One way in which this is achieved is through experimentation with the extent of a literary narrative, from the intensive consideration of a single day in texts such as Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) or James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) to the detailed evocation of individual development over many years in the romans-fleuves of Dorothy Richardson and Marcel Proust. Texts such as these manipulate pace and pattern within their temporal frame, as well as the intensity and direction of their focus, in order both to reveal the exceptional within the everyday and to articulate the tawdry, humdrum or eventless aspects of everyday life. Some such moments of everyday ecstasy or revelation might be described as epiphanies, such as Mrs. Dalloway’s response to the news of Septimus Smith’s death, or the overwhelming feeling of aloneness experienced by the protagonist of ‘A Painful Case’ in James Joyce’s Dubliners (1914). Elsewhere, focus on everyday objects demonstrates their capacity to take on a variety of symbolic or aesthetic qualities while remaining inextricable from their ordinary function: Proust’s madeleine, the bar of soap in both Ulysses and the Oberland chapter-novel (1927) of Richardson’s Pilgrimage (1915–67), or the many household objects deformed and reformed in Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons (1913). Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis (1915) uses the singularly ­un-everyday situation of a man turning into a beetle to reflect on the norms of everyday life at work and at home, while the protomodernist Knut Hamsen’s looping, hallucinatory narrative of an impoverished writer walking a city’s streets in Hunger (1890) describes an everyday life spiralling chaotically between intellectual aspiration and attention to the most fundamental requisites of human e­ xistence. The everyday lives of the marginal and invisible are also the focus of Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable (1935), a day in the life of a latrine cleaner in pre-partition India, and Jean Rhys’s narratives of the lost women of early twentieth-century London and Paris, such as the lonely Caribbean expatriate and sometime prostitute Anna in Voyage in the Dark (1934). The development of psychoanalysis challenged writers and artists to reflect on and represent the workings of the unconscious in the everyday, most notably in the work of the surrealists such as André Breton and Louis Aragon. dada’s experiments with the objet-trouvé (found object) not only exploited the aesthetic qualities to be found in everyday materials, but in so doing prompted a radical reassessment of the distinction between art and everyday life. There are 134

Exile also points of connection, conceptually speaking, between these avant-garde art movements and sociological projects such as mass observation, founded in 1937, which aimed to create an ‘anthropology of ourselves’, enabling ordinary people to speak back to the establishment by recording their observations of their own lives and the lives of those around them. READING Highmore, Ben (2002) The Everyday Life Reader. London: Routledge. Olson, Liesl (2009) Modernism and the Ordinary. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Randall, Bryony (2007) Modernism, Daily Time and Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sayeau, Michael (2013) Against the Event: The Everyday and the Evolution of Modernist Narrative. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Bryony Randall

EXILE From a survey of twentieth-century figures, it could be said that to be in exile was, if not a precondition of then at least a catalyst for the creation of modernist art. There are two forms of exile in twentiethcentury modernism, both corresponding to the wider sociopolitical forces of modernity. One is forced, the result of pogroms, political dictat and migration due to civil unrest. The other is self-enforced, and ostensibly proceeds from a desire to make art in an environment more conducive to its creation, in a locus chosen because it serves as a nexus for intellectual thought, is regarded as politically or socially more progressive, or offers opportunity and community to the artist. When investigated, however, the distinction is perhaps more subtle than this division implies; as indicated by Stephen Dedalus at the end of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), the entrance into self-exile may be a necessary act for those living in hostile or restrictive conservative societies, and modernists would come to celebrate exile as a new ontological condition of statelessness affording a freedom and safety to the artist. Artists and writers who were already contending with forms of destabilisation that marked modernity now were physically dislocated as a result of sociocultural and geopolitical forces. Exile thus becomes a predicate for modernity as for modernist art; the interplay it creates between the displaced national and the new internationalist aesthetics can be discerned in those places that would become 135

Experiment ­ osmopolitan centres between which modernists moved, Paris c (Gertrude Stein, Samuel Beckett, Edith Wharton, Djuna Barnes), Berlin, Zurich (Tristan Tzara, James Joyce, Hugo Ball) and London (Joseph Conrad) among them, but also in the French Riviera of the jazz age (Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald), across Italy (Joyce, Ezra Pound, Mina Loy, among others) and outside of the Europe– North America axis, such as in the journeys of D. H. Lawrence to Mexico and Australia. The communities established facilitated work – for example, in the patronage of Sylvia Beach of Shakespeare and Company in Paris – and enabled artists to create new work, as T. S. Eliot, Pound and H.D. were to do in London. Exile, moreover, gives rise to variant modernisms: the congregation in avant-garde centres and European cities of modernists displaced by world war and by ideological and cultural heterodoxies later in the twentieth century give way to the transatlantic migrations, post-Weimar and World War II, of the surrealists and the frankfurt school. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer entered into temporary exile among the German Pacific Palisades community of Bertolt Brecht, Thomas Mann and Arnold Schoenberg, as artists such as Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, Luis Buñuel, Man Ray and Max Ernst took up residence in New York and Los Angeles, where Hollywood and the culture industry would provide gainful employment. READING Bahr, Ehrhard (2007) Weimar on the Pacific: German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism. Berkeley and London: University of California Press. Benstock, Shari (1987) Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900–1940. Austin: University of Texas Press. Norman, Will (2016) Transatlantic Aliens: Modernism, Exile, and Culture in Midcentury America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Spariosu, Mihai (2014) Modernism and Exile: Liminality and the Utopian Imagination. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Maria-Daniella Dick

EXPERIMENT In a 1590 edition of Sir Philip Sidney’s epic prose romance Arcadia, readers are presented with a page, two-thirds blank, in which to insert their own epitaph for the dead lovers, Argalus and Parthenia; in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, gentleman (1759–67) Lawrence Sterne not only leaves one page blank for his reader’s 136

Experiment sketching, but another blank as indication of lost text and a third entirely black to mark the death of Yorick; in 1971, B. S. Johnson’s House Mother Normal, comprising fictional transcripts of the monologues of increasingly demented psychiatric patients, trails off into inarticulate blankness, while the 1963 novel Travelling People – his first – reprises Shandy’s black page at the death of one protagonist. As this lineage of blank or black epitaphic pages suggests, from its earliest incarnations, prose fiction has explored the interpretive possibilities of experiment and textual play. Sterne’s Shandy has come to stand as the original ‘experimental’ text – with its sustained assault on the conventions of narrative structure, chronology, narrative voice and linear plot – and is considered a key influence on a broader literary movement of experimental novelists, writing in the early decades of the twentieth century in both Europe and the USA, culminating in the works of modernist writers such as Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot and James Joyce. Modernism’s rejection of the conventions of the nineteenthcentury novel resulted in a radical approach to literary art: what might the limitations of narrative itself and of the printed book be? Responses to this question were hugely diverse: from techniques such as stream of consciousness, as deployed by writers like Woolf, to the widespread introduction of polyphony into narrative and an embrace of non-linear and anti-realist devices like newspaper cuttings and advertising hoardings, as used by Joyce in Ulysses (1922). dadaists like Tristan Tzara were interested in the possibilities of the aleatorical in narrative and the disruption of linearity, using typographical experimentation and collage. In poetry, Eliot and Pound echoed this fragmentation of form, influenced in part by French poets Jules Laforgue and Charles Baudelaire. The French poet Stéphane Mallarmé’s ‘Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard’ (‘A Throw of the Dice will Never Abolish Chance’) (1897) had scattered its letters across the page in an approximation of constellations of stars, prefiguring the typographical innovations that would mark experimental writing from the modernists to later twentieth-century writers like B. S. Johnson and Mark Z. Danielewski. Modernism’s literary experimentalism was characterised by a heightened awareness of the manifold possibilities of form; by the mid-twentieth century, there was a strain of late modernist writing that reacted against the exuberance of experimentalism. Writers such as Henry Green and Samuel Beckett began to experiment with the retreat of authorial control, or what Beckett called his exploration of 137

Experiment ‘impotence, ignorance’, the zone that had, until now, been deemed ‘by definition incompatible with art’. In his seminal essay ‘The Literature of Exhaustion’ (1967), John Barth describes the enervating effects of modernist experimentation on subsequent generations of writers. This idea of the novel as a form that was finite in resources and possibilities resulted in what Barth calls the ‘felt ultimacies’ of mid-century artists. Late modernists like Beckett retreated into the silence of the post-Trilogy works such as Comment C’est (published as How It Is in 1964), John Cage explored the musical possibilities of silence and in art the white spaces of Robert Rauschenberg began to establish a visual response to the earlier effervescence of formal play. For Barth, though, texts such as Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962), which offers a narrative based around a poem, a foreword and commentary; Jorge Luis Borges’s Labyrinths (1962), a collection of dazzling metaphysical conceits; or Beckett’s post-Trilogy works – all offered examples of a different sort of experimentalism. The 1960s saw a return to the experimental impulses of modernism and a desire to extend and subvert the boundaries of narrative form. Writers like B. S. Johnson, Julio Cortázar and Marc Saporta all experimented with the linearity of the bound book and traditional narrative; William Burroughs’s ‘cut-up’ narratives experimented with dadaist collage; the oulipo group explored the ludic and aleatorical potential of ‘creativity under constraint’; and Daniel Spoerri’s An Anecdoted Typography of Chance (1966) comprised a list of all the objects that happened to be on the author’s desk at the moment of writing. The term ‘experimental’ literature carries with it certain cultural assumptions: it is assumed to be progressive, both formally and perhaps politically; to be experimental is to be up-to-date, to embody novelty. It is worth noting the concealed assumptions in the term, in part because they are likely to be historically suspect – as readers familiar with Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy will be aware, formal playfulness and a rejection of realism did not begin in the twentieth century – and because these assumptions carry with them a certain cultural freighting: they are unmistakeably evaluative (as B. S. Johnson points out disconsolately, ‘“Experimental” to most reviewers is almost always a synonym for “unsuccessful”’). An assumption of newness in particular discloses certain artistic and ideological prejudices, against the consolations of ‘plot’, say, and for a particular brand of difficulty as an unalloyed aesthetic virtue. Innovation, we assume, is a good in itself, as evidenced by Pound’s 138

Expressionism famous slogan ‘make it new!’ Historically, for experimental literature, progressiveness both temporal and political is part of the deal. Yet, while necessarily involving some sort of disavowal of what has gone before, experimentalism too always feeds off, and reinvigorates, what it seemingly rejects. READING Barth, John (1984) ‘The Literature of Exhaustion’, in The Friday Book: Essays and Other Non-Fiction. London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Bray, Joe, Alison Gibbons and Brian McHale (eds) (2012) The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature. Abingdon: Routledge.

Julia Jordan

EXPRESSIONISM As a general term ‘expressionism’ is widely used to denote a variety of artistic styles that aim at an immediate expression of feeling. However, in a narrow sense, the term Expressionism – with a capital E – relates to a specific historic and predominantly German phenomenon, which first appeared in the work of the 1905 Dresden group of painters called ‘Die Brücke’ (‘The Bridge’) and subsequently in the 1911 Munich group, ‘Die Blaue Reiter’ (‘The Blue Rider’). The trend towards more direct representations of inner feelings was also taken up by poets, dramatists and composers. In the 1910s, the generic term expressionism was attached to any kind of creation that derived its inspiration from subjective rather than objective realities. Contrary to other avant-garde movements of the period, the Expressionists never developed a unified group mentality or issued any programmatic foundational manifesto. There existed only loosely connected groups that published a plethora of proclamations and statements, none of which was ever considered binding by their members. In Expressionist poetry, we find works of great lyrical intensity that instead of offering descriptive, narrative threads convey an artist’s personal visions and ecstatic experiences. The poetic language communicates through its associative power rather than logical meaning. Yet, one can discern the topics of crisis and despair, perspectives of angst and absurdity, visions of downfall and degeneration. Images of the city and war are combined with apocalyptic visions of a collapsing civilisation. The first traces of an Expressionist style of drama can be found in the works of August Strindberg and Frank Wedekind In 1909, 139

Expressionism the painter Oskar Kokoschka staged a play that was Expressionist through and through: Murderer, Hope of Women. The event was followed by a first spate of Expressionist play-scripts, but due to the outbreak of World War II none of these were actually performed at the time. Some authors reflected on how these unusual texts could be put on stage, and it was from these statements that a theory of Expressionist acting developed. Towards the end of the war, several Expressionist plays were tried out in the theatre – usually in front of very small audiences – and the first experiments with an Expressionist acting style took place. The heyday of Expressionist theatre followed in the immediate post-war years, and it continued to be a dominant factor in German theatre until about 1924. Expressionism in its early phase was characterised by an attitude towards art and society that questioned many of the key tenets of conventional nineteenth-century culture. It continued the work undertaken by naturalist writers and impressionist painters, who had also condemned the idealised world of appearances beloved by the bourgeoisie and had directed their attention away from the realms of eternal beauty to the real world. When they discovered that straight transcripts of material reality were neither possible (because the interventions of the human mind could not be eliminated), nor desirable (because this method could only capture the surface appearance of reality), they concentrated their efforts on the interiority of human nature – either as an extension of the real world or as a spiritual counterbalance to material reality. This gave rise to two dominant trends in the artistic world of the turn of the century: psychological realism and symbolism. These artists directed their focus of attention towards the human soul, the spiritual world, the essence of Being underneath the superficial appearance of reality. They prepared the way for the Expressionists, who also sought to reveal an inner vision, experience or feeling of universal significance, but did so in an act of immediate rather than symbolic communication. Instead of regulating and channelling the flow of emotions and imposing objective form on a subjective experience, the Expressionists took recourse to the subconscious mind and sought to compel the viewer to respond with Einfühlung, an empathetic emotional response, rather than Verstehen, a rational understanding. In the years preceding World War I, German society – and in fact European society as a whole – was in a state of pervasive crisis. Expressionism was a reaction to this, and at the same time an indication of a young generation’s vision of a better future. The 140

Expressionism Expressionist artists wanted to start afresh. They were heralds of a new humanity and detested a culture that functioned like ‘a scaffolding for a collapsing building, or a corset for a decaying body’, as Herwarth Walden put it in 1913. Many Expressionists considered themselves to be revolutionaries – either in the sense that they acted in opposition to the prevailing order of society or that they rebelled against the traditional canons of art. Although a wide range of artists with different philosophical and political beliefs joined the Expressionist movement, they were all united by a common aim, formulated in negative rather than positive terms: opposition to bourgeois society, and more specifically to the tastes and values of Wilhelmine Germany. Most Expressionist artists came from a bourgeois background and had undergone a conventional education at a Gymnasium or university. When they entered the real world, they could not help but become aware of the gap that existed between lofty humanist and classical culture on the one hand and the depressing political and social reality of Wilhelmine Germany on the other. Consequently, they aimed at a complete renewal of art and society. But where could they start, and how could they proceed? The Expressionist artists took their inspiration from those parts of human nature that were untarnished by bourgeois society. It was the human soul in its virgin state, the life of ‘primitive’ tribes in Africa or Oceania or the artistic expressions of children. It could also be the deeper and darker layers of the unconscious mind. From these elements of the primitive, irrational world they sought to create a new and pure art. Although there exists a large number of theoretical tracts and essays that defined the key ideas and aims of the Expressionist movement, it is noticeable that few of them were written by the artists themselves. Expressionist art and literature, theatre, dance and music were created by individuals who only shared a fairly vague outlook on life and art. However, a key figure in the spreading of Expressionism across Europe and even further afield was Herwarth Walden, whose little magazine Der Sturm, founded in Berlin in 1910, had at its peak time a print run of over 25,000 copies. In 1912, Walden also set up a Sturm-gallery that acted as a main focus for Expressionist and other modern art, and founded the publishing house Der Sturm, where Expressionist books, albums and portfolios were printed. During the war, Walden instituted Sturmabende (lectures and discussions on modern art) and Die Sturmbühne, an Expressionist theatre. In the immediate post-war period, Expressionism, more than any 141

Fabianism other artistic movement of the time, provided German artists with a vehicle to reflect on the chaos and anxiety of a nation emerging from a war, a revolution and a dismantled monarchy. Expressionism established itself as a major force in the fine arts and literature, conquered the theatre and even entered the world of dance and music. After 1922, Expressionism lost its dominant role in Germany, but many of its principles entered the mainstream of artistic production and continued to exercise a powerful influence in the years after World War I, especially in the United States. READING Hollman Eckhard (2011) The Blue Rider. New York: Prestel. Serger, Helen and Monica Strauss (1981) Herwarth Walden and Der Sturm: Artists and Publications. New York: Helen Serger La Boetie.

Günter Berghaus

F FABIANISM The Fabian Society was a socialist organisation founded in 1884, which counted among its early members such writers as Edith Nesbit, Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells, as well as Jerome K. Jerome, Arnold Bennett, Rupert Brooke, Harley Granville-Barker and Leonard Woolf, and numerous other public figures. Although its origins lay in the bohemian Fellowship of the New Life, the Society quickly came to be associated with a reformist managerial state socialism. At the heart of the Society were Sidney and Beatrice Webb, whose gradualist anti-marxist and anti-anarchist stance, research agenda and policy of permeation of existing political parties came to define Fabianism in the long-term, as did its association with the Independent Labour Party and subsequently the Labour Party. Although the executive of the Fabian Society had little interest in modernist art, individual members played an instrumental role in the development of modernism. The Fabians Holbrook Jackson and A. R. Orage founded the Leeds Art Club in 1903 and re-launched The New Age journal in 1907 with financial assistance from Shaw as a modernism-oriented literary and political magazine (see little magazines). Fabian socialism was one of the prominent ingredients 142

Fabianism other artistic movement of the time, provided German artists with a vehicle to reflect on the chaos and anxiety of a nation emerging from a war, a revolution and a dismantled monarchy. Expressionism established itself as a major force in the fine arts and literature, conquered the theatre and even entered the world of dance and music. After 1922, Expressionism lost its dominant role in Germany, but many of its principles entered the mainstream of artistic production and continued to exercise a powerful influence in the years after World War I, especially in the United States. READING Hollman Eckhard (2011) The Blue Rider. New York: Prestel. Serger, Helen and Monica Strauss (1981) Herwarth Walden and Der Sturm: Artists and Publications. New York: Helen Serger La Boetie.

Günter Berghaus

F FABIANISM The Fabian Society was a socialist organisation founded in 1884, which counted among its early members such writers as Edith Nesbit, Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells, as well as Jerome K. Jerome, Arnold Bennett, Rupert Brooke, Harley Granville-Barker and Leonard Woolf, and numerous other public figures. Although its origins lay in the bohemian Fellowship of the New Life, the Society quickly came to be associated with a reformist managerial state socialism. At the heart of the Society were Sidney and Beatrice Webb, whose gradualist anti-marxist and anti-anarchist stance, research agenda and policy of permeation of existing political parties came to define Fabianism in the long-term, as did its association with the Independent Labour Party and subsequently the Labour Party. Although the executive of the Fabian Society had little interest in modernist art, individual members played an instrumental role in the development of modernism. The Fabians Holbrook Jackson and A. R. Orage founded the Leeds Art Club in 1903 and re-launched The New Age journal in 1907 with financial assistance from Shaw as a modernism-oriented literary and political magazine (see little magazines). Fabian socialism was one of the prominent ingredients 142

Fauvism in the heady brew of Nietzschean philosophy, spiritualism, psycho­ analysis and modernist aesthetics that characterised both the Club and the journal in its early years. After the departure of Jackson and Orage to London, the Leeds Art Club, under the leadership of the Fabians Michael Sadler and Frank Rutter, continued to champion post-impressionist art and Abstract Expressionist painting, displaying the work of Wassily Kandinsky as early as 1913. READING Bevir, Mark (2011) The Making of British Socialism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Britain, Ian (1982) Fabianism and Culture: A Study in British Socialism and the Arts, c.1884–1918. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Martin, Wallace (1967) The New Age Under Orage: Chapters in English Cultural History. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Steele, Tom (1990) Alfred Orage and the Leeds Arts Club 1893–1923. Aldershot: Scolar Press.

Anna Vaninskaya

FAUVISM The name Fauves (‘Wild Beasts’) was teasingly bestowed by critic Louis Vauxcelles on a loose and relatively short-lived affiliation of artists including Henri Matisse (the senior figure in the group), André Derain, Maurice Vlaminck and some of Matisse’s associates from his artistic training under the symbolist painter Gustave Moreau at the École des Beaux-Arts. The paintings these artists exhibited at the 1905 Salon d’Automne in Paris surprised Vauxcelles and others with the extent to which they seemed to break with the conventions of painting – even of post-impressionist painting, itself still controversial at that time – in their application of large areas of relatively unmodulated, non-naturalistic colour, the reliance on a restricted, high-key palette, the bold use of strong contours and outlining of forms, and the tendency to reveal areas of unpainted canvas as part of the composition. Though the stylistic traits of Fauvism emerged gradually and were always inflected by differences of temperament and technique among the Fauves themselves, a key point in their coalescence came when Matisse and Derain spent the summer of 1905 working together at the fishing port of Collioure, ‘painting from the imagination when nature herself could not be used’, as Matisse put it. A sense of naivety, sketchiness – even of the unfinished – was palpable in the works they produced, for 143

Fauvism both the artists themselves and contemporary critics, though the Fauves were also accused of making ‘theoretical’ paintings, a charge Matisse keenly contested. Key works such as Matisse’s Woman with the Hat and The Open Window were included in the 1905 Salon d’Automne, and Leo and Gertrude Stein bought the former. The fortunes of the key Fauvists were looking up by 1905, critical opprobrium being no barrier to success with adventurous collectors such as the Steins. Though the term ‘Fauvism’ aptly figures the intensity and urgency with which these artists were working in the years around 1904–7, and reflects a shared interest in the direct expression of subjective feeling on their part, it is also misleading insofar as above all their work was a deliberate, considered response to the complex and conflicting legacies of Post-Impressionism, as exemplified by the key figures of Cézanne, Seurat, Van Gogh and Gauguin. Fauvist works often aspired to achieve the pictorial order associated with the first two, but using the primitivist and expressive means of the latter two artists; Fauvism was often an art which aspired to formal coherence, then, forged not out of fleeting, observed impressions but through the arrangement of felt, distilled essences. Derain stated his interest in using ‘deliberate disharmonies’ in his work, but Matisse’s comments in 1908, made at the end of Fauvism’s most productive phase, offer an informative view of what the most important of the Fauves was attempting with his apparently ‘wild’ work: What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity, devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter, an art which could be for every mental worker, for the businessman as well as the man of letters, for example, a soothing, calming influence on the mind, something like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.

These often-quoted lines, seemingly very far from any avant-garde intent, reveal an important dimension of Fauvism’s modernism: a tension between aspirations to harmony within painting, to harmony in painting’s relations with the social world outside itself, and with the means used to achieve both. With such difficult problems at its heart, and with significant differences of approach among its practitioners, it is perhaps not surprising that Fauvism’s heyday was short-lived.

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Feminism READING Bois, Yves-Alain (1990) ‘Matisse and “Arche-Drawing”’, in Painting as Model. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, pp. 3–63. Elderfield, John (1976) The ‘Wild Beasts’: Fauvism and Its Affinities. New York: Museum of Modern Art. Matisse, Henri (1908) ‘Notes of a Painter’, in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (eds), Art in Theory 1900–1990. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 72–8.

Dominic Paterson

FEMINISM The modernist period coincides historically with the development of various feminist movements, which are often subsumed under the umbrella term ‘first-wave feminism’. At the turn of the twentieth century, an increasing number of women in different Western countries gained access to higher education and employment, and campaigned for the vote and other legal rights. These so-called new women came to embody a crisis in sexual and gender politics. As a result, questions around gender and sexuality, for instance, concerning women’s educational and professional opportunities, heterosexual relations within and outside of marriage, female samesex friendships and desires, and reproduction and motherhood, were placed at the very heart of political debate. Some masculinist brands of modernism, such as F. T. Marinetti’s futurism, were openly hostile towards contemporary feminist politics, but also inspired feminist writers. In her ‘Aphorisms on Futurism’ and ‘Feminist Manifesto’ (both 1914), for example, Mina Loy engages critically with both Futurism and feminism and illuminates what she perceives as the politically beneficial and damaging aspects of each movement. At the same time, male modernist critics and writers were deeply fascinated with female empowerment and in the case of Ezra Pound actively supported fellow female modernist writes such as Loy and Marianne More. Indeed, the very self-­ positioning of modernism as masculine has been challenged radically by feminist critics, who expanded the modernist canon and drew attention to the complicated yet constitutive relation between feminism and modernism. Female modernist authors and artists found different ways of shaping and participating in feminist practice. Moore, May Sinclair and Rebecca West were active in the suffrage movement and wrote about feminist politics in their journalism and fiction. Others, like 145

Fin de Siècle Virginia Woolf, were more ambivalent about certain militant aspects of feminist political practice, but were still deeply influenced by the first-wave women’s movement. In addition to exploring women’s direct involvement in feminist politics, both modernist authors and later critics have affirmed the feminist potential of modernist innovation and experiment. Writers like Katherine Mansfield, Gertrude Stein and Woolf sought to re-evaluate the gendered and erotic possibilities of domestic spaces, explored women’s novel experiences of public spaces and modes of transportation and addressed how women have been excluded from literary and political history. Moreover, from the 1970s onwards, modernist works by authors like H.D., Dorothy Richardson or, again, Woolf have been re-evaluated in terms of écriture féminine (‘feminine writing’). This term, first coined by French feminist theorist Hélène Cixous in her essay ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ (1975) describes a distinctive feminine mode of writing that uses literary innovation to challenge or expose the patriarchal implications of language. The concept of écriture féminine has also been applied to the writings of male modernists, like William Faulkner and James Joyce, which indicates that both female and male authors may be seen as contributors to the feminist modernist project. READING Dekoven, Marianne (1991) Rich and Strange: Gender, History, Modernism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. DuPlessis, Rachel Blau (1985) Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Felski, Rita (1995) The Gender of Modernity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Loy, Mina (1998) ‘Feminist Manifesto’, in Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Jane Goldman and Olga Taxidou (eds), Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Woolf, Virginia (1998) A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Jana Funke

FIN DE SIÈCLE Fin de siècle (or ‘end of century’) is a term used to designate the last decades of the nineteenth century, although some reconceptualisations mark the cultural continuities by extending the period 146

Fin de Siècle boundary up to 1914. Fin de siècle may be situated within what is known as the Belle Époque in France or the Gilded Age in America, but it is not merely a chronological label. In its narrowest meaning, it implies a particular cluster of associations virtually synonymous with decadence and aestheticism: a pessimistic sense of cultural decline and degeneration containing within it the seeds of renewal, a sophisticated world-weariness privileging artifice, occultism and ‘perverse’ sexuality. This definition is often expanded to encompass such different French-derived international movements as symbolism and naturalism. The Symbolist and Decadent writing of Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Laforgue, Huysmans and the Naturalist writing of Zola, Maupassant and the Goncourt brothers found followers across the world: from Belgium (Rodenbach, Verhaeren) and Britain (Symons, Wilde, Moore, the poets of the Rhymers’ Club) to Italy (D’Annunzio), Russia (Bryusov, Balmont, Blok, Bely) and America (Crane, Norris). The artistic ferment of the late nineteenth century served as the seed-bed of modernism, and the various ‘isms’ functioned as transitional stages in a complex process of development, in which debts and influences gave rise to reactions and repudiations. Many of the avant-garde groups of the early 1900s and 1910s defined themselves in relation to – and against – their fin de siècle precursors. Symbolism was the explicit point of departure for Acmeism and futurism in Russia (where it also persisted as a modernist current in its own right long into the twentieth century) and for AngloAmerican imagism: Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot drew on the poetry of the 1890s Rhymers’ Club and Symons’s criticism, while simultaneously abjuring their debts to Victorian Aestheticism. surrealism may be traced back to Symbolism via Guillaume Apollinaire; modernist theatre owed much to the Symbolist plays that Maurice Maeterlinck continued to produce into the 1900s; Franz Kafka emerged out of central European Decadence; and Symbolist, Decadent and Naturalist themes and techniques were taken up by novelists such as Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, André Gide and James Joyce. The output of many individual figures spanned the turn of the century, but also changed in style with the changing times: the work of W. B. Yeats registered very clearly the transition from Victorian Aestheticism and Symbolism to twentieth-century modernism. The wide-ranging philosophic influence of Friedrich Nietzsche and Henri Bergson (see bergsonism) furnished another element of continuity from the fin de siècle into the modernist period. 147

Flâneur However, it is not only in the artistic experimentation and philosophical innovation of the fin de siècle that the roots of modernism may be located. This was also a time of tremendous change in the social and political landscape, and the close relations between anarchism and Symbolism in France were just one example of the fusion of political and artistic radicalism that was to remain a characteristic of many avant-garde movements. In Britain, the rise of modern socialism, feminism and Fenianism, the renewed preoccupation with poverty and the city experience, and the innovations in journalism and popular culture, all fed into the development of Anglophone modernism. Eliot and Joyce in particular drew upon popular and mass culture in their writings, and Eliot’s championing of the music hall star Marie Lloyd is a typical manifestation of modernism’s engagement with that other fin de siècle – not of decadent literature, but of lowbrow working-class entertainment. READING Anderson, Mark (1992) Kafka’s Clothes: Ornament and Aestheticism in the Habsburg Fin de Siècle. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Greenslade, William (1994) Degeneration, Culture and the Novel: 1880– 1940. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ledger, Sally and Scott McCracken (eds) (1995) Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McGuiness, Patrick (2000) Maurice Maeterlinck and the Making of Modern Theatre. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Teich, Mikulas and Roy Porter (eds) (1990) Fin de Siècle and Its Legacy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weir, David (1996) Decadence and the Making of Modernism. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

Anna Vaninskaya

FLÂNEUR Literally a ‘stroller’ or ‘wanderer’ – synonymic approximations for an untranslatable term – the flâneur engages in the act of flânerie, a streetwalking of the city that is imbued with significance by virtue of being without object or destination. Carrying connotations of leisure and urban adventure (even danger), as well as urbane taste, literary merit and class distinction, his is a complex figure arising from, and in whom are inscribed, the tensions of nineteenth-century modernity. According to Charles Baudelaire, who develops the typology in ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ (1863), the flâneur’s natural milieu 148

Fordism is the crowd among which he moves detachedly, simultaneously unknown and sovereign. As such, he is a modern type born of the transfiguration of Paris under Baron Haussmann: Walter Benjamin’s extensive treatment of the Baudelairean flâneur emphasises how the arcades and boulevards of Haussmann transformed the experience of the metropolis by complicating the boundary between interior and exterior, enclosing and expanding the streets at the same time so as to encourage not only a new inhabitation of the environment but a new mode of city-dwelling. The flâneur is the connoisseur of this city, a distanced observer upon whom nothing is lost and who is capable in turn of receiving and creatively transforming the stimuli of modern urban life through the distinction of his vision, in the dual sense both of his eye and sensibility. By this attitude of absorption he becomes the privileged interpreter of the history of the city, traversing it undetected while observing: in this, Benjamin identifies the similarities between Baudelaire and Edgar Allan Poe’s respective men of the crowd. If the flâneur embodies the new energies of the city, he also contains its contradictions: class affords the time and leisure of flânerie; the intimacies of taste are also those of consumption, heralding the advent of commodity capitalism; and the masculine gender of the noun is indicative of the figuring of its bearer. In ‘Street Haunting: A London Adventure’ (1930), Virginia Woolf’s would-be flâneuse requires the alibi of buying a pencil to enjoy the pleasures of the city, foreclosing the aimless openness to adventure that is the prerequisite of the flâneur. READING Benjamin, Walter (2002) The Arcades Project, trans. by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Benjamin, Walter (2006) The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, ed. Michael W. Jennings and trans. Howard Eiland, Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingstone and Harry Zohn. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Parsons, Deborah (2000) Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, The City and Modernity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Maria-Daniella Dick

FORDISM A mode of economic and social organisation named after the American industrialist Henry Ford. The basis of Fordism was the 149

Formalism system of mass production refined by the Ford Motor Company in the 1910s (and emulated in other industries across the United States and beyond), in which workers repetitively performed specified tasks, each fitting a standardised component to the product as it passed along an assembly line. Fordism shared strong affinities with (though developed largely independently of) the taylorist principles of scientific management formulated in the same period by the American mechanical engineer Frederick W. Taylor. Fordism was a more capacious phenomenon, however, whose valorisation of high productivity, high wages (to encourage mass consumption of the very commodities produced) and cooperative relations between management and labour aimed at instituting nothing less than ‘a new kind of rationalised, modernist, and populist democratic society’ (Harvey 1989: 126), one that did in fact prevail to a significant extent in Western nations during the middle decades of the twentieth century. At the same time, as David Harvey has argued, the acceleration of the forces of production unleashed by Fordism was a major factor in the phase of ‘time-space compression’ from which dynamic new movements in modernist art and literature emerged. READING Cobley, Evelyn (2009) Modernism and the Culture of Efficiency: Ideology and Fiction. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Harvey, David (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford: Blackwell.

Paul Crosthwaite

FORMALISM Formalism is a school of literary criticism that deals with structural aspects of a particular text, including grammar, metre, tropes and literary devices. It encompasses two distinct schools: Russian Formalism (1910s–1920s) and Anglo-American new criticism (1940s–1970s). Russian Formalism, an important school of literary theory that emerged in the mid-1910s, was closely associated with the Moscow Linguistic Circle (founded in 1915) and the Petrograd group ‘Society for the Study of the Poetic Language’ (Opoiaz) formed in 1916. The members of these associations were interested in linguistics, the study of poetic language, the interaction between verbal and non-verbal forms of communication, the relation between literary and non-literary language, the autonomy of literary scholarship and the notion of literary evolution. The list of the most promi150

Formalism nent representatives of this school of Russian literary scholarship includes Roman Jakobson, Viktor Shklovsky, Boris Eichenbaum, Yuri Tynianov and Boris Tomashevsky. In the 1920s several major Formalists wrote on cinema and filmic adaptations of literary works. The main concepts of Formalist criticism are discussed in Shklovsky’s essay ‘Art as Technique’ (1917) and in Jakobson’s study Modern Russian Poetry (1921). Initially, Russian Formalists focused their attention on the notion of literariness, on the mode of representation and on the interaction between practical language and literary language. According to Jakobson, the subject of literary scholarship is not literature but literariness, or that which makes of a given work a work of literature. In the view of Russian Formalists, the literary should be sought not in the author’s individual psychology but in his or her work. They were also critical of those approaches to literature that emphasised the use of images as one of the most fundamental characteristics of literary texts and argued that poetic language and figurative language should be seen as totally independent from each other. In his essay ‘Art as Technique’, Shklovsky launched a series of attacks on Alexander Potebnia, a Russian-Ukranian linguist and thinker who advocated the view that art would not be able to exist without imagery. In ‘Art as Technique’, Shklovsky argues that art ‘make[s] the stone stony’, enabling people ‘to recover the sensation of life’, ‘to feel things’ because it breaks away from habituated behaviour and automatic perceptions of life. For Shklovsky the technique of art is to make objects unfamiliar and forms difficult so as to prolong the process of perception. Shklovsky’s essay identifies the device of estrangement (ostranenie) as an important part of literary works that enables the reader to understand the material form of words, images and sounds. Shklovsky’s references to the three binary pairs found in his essay, such as seeing and recognition, continuity and noncontinuity, deatomatisation and automatisation, echo Henri Bergson’s writings on memory, the comic and duration (see bergsonism). Shklovsky’s essay ‘The Novel of Parody’ – included in his 1925 study On the Theory of Prose – also invokes Bergson’s ideas about time as divisible homogeneous spatiality. The difference between visual perception and recognition was also discussed in Eikhenbaum’s 1926 article ‘Literature and Cinema’, in which he draws an analogy between filmic language and dream. Eikhenbaum insists that the cognitive processes of film viewers differ significantly from readers’ perception of the printed word. 151

Formalism In Eikhenbaum’s opinion, when one views a film, one’s perception moves toward the organisation of ‘an inner speech’. According to Eikhenbaum, the language used in film is somewhat transrational and allows the audience to play with objects with the help of montage and cutting. In later Formalism the main discussion of literary devices revolved around the linguistic and formal aspects of literary texts themselves. The linguists Jakobson and Tynianov published several works in which they argued that literary devices themselves become dominant in literary texts as defamiliarising tools. Closely related to ‘estrangement’, the role of defamiliarisation in literary evolution was scrutinised thoroughly in Tynianov’s essays ‘The Ode as an Oratorical Genre’ (1922) and ‘On Literary Evolution’ (1927) and in his books on Russian nineteenth-century literature – The Archaists and Pushkin (1926) and Dostoevsky and Gogol: Towards the Theory of Parody (1921). The latter interprets Dostoyevsky’s novels as parodic renditions of Nikolai Gogol’s works and offers many insightful observations on the role of parody in the evolution of literary form. One of the most important Formalist contributions to the theory of fiction was Vladimir Propp’s comparative study of folklore. His Morphology of the Folktale (1928) analyses stereotyped characters found in fairytales as a plot device subordinated to different functions performed by a protagonist in a story. Propp’s observations on the function of various protagonists found in the Indo-European fairy tale influenced many Western anthropologists and folklorists, including Claude Lévi-Strauss. Russian Formalism inspired many important examinations of literary devices and of literary evolution found in the works produced by Mikhail Bakhtin, Czech and French structuralists and Anglo-American New Critics, including Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren. Bakhtin’s notion of chronotope presents literature as a dialogue between texts and echoes the concept of structural laws in the history of literature developed by Jakobson and Tynianov. READING Curtis, James M. (1976) ‘Bergson and Russian Formalism’, Comparative Literature, 28 (2): 109–21. Erlich, Victor (1973) ‘Russian Formalism’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 34 (4): 627–38. Erlich, Victor (1981) Russian Formalism: History and Doctrine. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Alexandra Smith 152

Fourth Dimension

FOURTH DIMENSION Since the 1920s, the fourth dimension has primarily been associated with time in a four-dimensional spacetime continuum. Before this concept in relativity theory received sensational reception in the wake of Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity (1916), spatial accounts of the fourth dimension were widely influential in scientific, spiritual and cultural contexts. In its geometrical understanding, the fourth dimension is added to the three spatial dimensions of length, width and height. Thus expanding space beyond familiar experience, it provoked attempts to unlock new possibilities of perception that go beyond the restrictions of superficial physical reality. Occult and spiritualist movements – many of them inspired by the Russian mystic P. D. Ouspensky or by the physicist Johann Karl Friedrich Zöllner’s experiments with the American medium Henry Slade – turned to the fourth dimension for proof of a realm beyond material existence. Hopes to find there an explanation of supernatural phenomena attracted widespread interest and broadened the audience of popularisers such as Charles Howard Hinton and Edwin Abbott Abbott and their efforts to visualise the fourth dimension. In both its geometrical and temporal understanding, the fourth dimension is the subject of modern fiction, H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) being an early and influential example in science fiction. In modern art, the idea of higher dimensions with its promise of new ways of looking on the world resonates in cubist paintings’ simultaneous representation of multiple perspectives. But the freedom inherent in departing from visual reality and traditional viewpoints more broadly inspired innovation in modern art movements such as Italian and Russian futurism, dada and surrealism. READING Henderson, Linda Dalrymple (2013) The Fourth Dimension and NonEuclidean Geometry in Modern Art. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press. Ouspensky, P. D. (1920) Tertium Organum: The Third Canon of Thought, a Key to the Enigmas of the World, trans. Nicholas Bessaraboff and Claude Bragdon. Rochester, NY: Manas Press. Zöllner, Johann Karl Friedrich (1881) Transcendental Physics: An Account of Experimental Investigations from the Scientific Treatises of Johann Carl Friedrich Zöllner, trans. Charles Carleton Massey. Boston: Colby & Rich.

Nina Engelhardt 153

Fragmentation

FRAGMENTATION Fragmentation characterises much modernist writing of the early twentieth century, as authors sought to displace the dominance of, and value attached to, the causal, linear patterns of realist narratives dominant in the nineteenth century. For example, in ‘Character in Fiction’ (1924), Virginia Woolf argues that readers of literary texts should ‘tolerate the spasmodic, the obscure, the fragmentary, the failure’. Modernist writers also used fragmented forms to respond to issues and events of the period, including war, revolution, technology and empire. The presentation of social and psychological disintegration and collapse in works by writers such as T. S. Eliot, Ford Madox Ford and James Joyce reflects a feeling of contemporary disorder and emphasises a concern with the past. Like other modernist texts, Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) relies on fragmentation to indicate the potential for art to establish unity in the face of chaos and despair. The poem’s famous line ‘These fragments I have shored against my ruins’ suggests a yearning towards past wholeness by bolstering a sense of modern life that is separating into disconnected parts. READING Eliot, T. S. ([1922] 2005) The Waste Land, in Lawrence Rainey (ed.), The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Woolf, Virginia ([1924] 2008) ‘Character in Fiction’, in Virginia Woolf Selected Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Jade Munslow Ong

THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL The Franfurt School is a collective name for thinkers associated with the Institute for Social Research, founded in 1927 as an affiliate of the University of Frankfurt, in exile in the USA under the Nazi regime and re-established in Germany in 1950. Originally founded to study workers’ history, in the 1930s the Institute pioneered a distinctive blend of philosophy, psychoanalysis, social theory and aesthetic criticism. At that time its members advocated an ambitious programme of ‘critical theory’ in opposition to both idealist philosophy and positivist social theory. Widely seen as pioneers of interdisciplinary scholarship in the humanities and social sciences, most remained in the US after the 1939–45 war, where each went on 154

The Frankfurt School to make distinctive contributions in particular fields: Leo Lowenthal in the sociology of literature, Franz Neumann in legal and political theory, Erich Fromm in psychoanalysis. Herbert Marcuse became particularly influential in the 1960s as a radical critic of consumer society and inspiration of the new left. Only the political economist Friedrich Pollock and the Institute’s most well-known members Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno returned to Germany. Both were philosophers and social theorists: Horkheimer was director of the Institute from 1930 onwards; Adorno was also a composer and pianist, and produced an extensive body of literary and musical criticism. The degree to which the name Frankfurt School designates a programmatic ‘critical theory’ rather than a loose affiliation of distinctive thinkers remains disputed. However, the following broad characterisations can be made. Their interdisciplinary study of society was indebted both to the Hegelian elevation of Enlightenment social theory into a self-conscious philosophy of history and to the marxist inversion of Hegel into social critique. This entails the philosophical claim that as all cultural products, including art and knowledge, are conditioned by the economic and political basis for their historical emergence, there can be no neutral or objective vantage point from which to analyse them. This requires critique to be immanent (situated within the world), self-reflexive (recognising the limits of its perspective) and to be written from the point of view of the possible emancipation of society. Despite this emphasis on emancipation in the theoretical and historical basis of Frankfurt School thought, the experience of historical catastrophe and authoritarian regimes in the twentieth century led them to a suspicion of the revolutionary Marxist tradition. Empirical projects of the Institute focused on the persistence of irrational tendencies beneath the surface of post-war democracy: for example, personality types predisposed to authoritarian tendencies, and the basis of anti-Semitic prejudice. In their theoretical writings, Horkheimer and Adorno challenge the entwinement of modern philosophy with social domination, criticising both unitary conceptions of reason and the colonisation of the social sphere by instrumental and calculative rationality. Their account of the culture industry has been important for critics because, unlike many Marxist theories, it assigns equal weight to art and culture and economics in the analysis of social structures. In the 1960s their apparent pessimism about progressive social change led to conflict between Horkheimer 155

Free indirect style and Adorno and their own students; this criticism has hung over the reception of their work ever since. However, critical theory has continued to find valuable resources in the writing of the Frankfurt School, and in particular in late works by Adorno such as his Negative Dialectics (1966) and Aesthetic Theory (1970). Although Horkheimer and Adorno have been accused of a rejection of Enlightenment legacies, it is more accurate to see them as attempting to rehabilitate a more self-critical version of the Enlightenment tradition. In aiming to rehabilitate the sensuous and the aesthetic from technological domination they clearly anticipate strands in later environmental thought. Their challenge to teleological explanation, to historical materialism, and their emphasis on seeing society as a complex whole characterised by the interpenetration of different spheres of rationality have all been seen as anticipating poststructuralist thought. READING Buck-Morss, Susan (1977) The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute. New York: Free Press. Schecter, Darrow (2007) The History of the Left from Marx to the Present: Theoretical Perspectives. Continuum: New York. Wiggerhaus, Rolf (1994) The Frankfurt School, trans. Michael Robertson. Cambridge: Polity

Alex Thomson

FREE INDIRECT STYLE A translation of the French term style indirect libre (in German erlebte Rede), also called ‘narrative monologue’ (Cohn 1978) and ‘free indirect discourse’, free indirect style identifies one of the major means of representing a character’s speech or thought in narrative. Free indirect style (FIS) is poised between the direct and indirect styles, where the former purports to give the character’s utterance verbatim between quotation marks and the latter subordinates that utterance to a narrator’s controlling syntax and authority, FIS seems to combine or layer the character’s and the narrator’s voices and perspectives in the same sentence: Direct style: He said, ‘I will repair to the outhouse.’ Indirect style: He said that he would repair to the outhouse. FIS: He would repair to the outhouse. 156

Free verse Attested as early as classical and biblical literature, FIS emerged as a major resource of the novel in the course of the nineteenth century, from Jane Austen through Gustave Flaubert, Émile Zola and Henry James. In the modernist period, it became one of the vehicles of stream of consciousness in the fiction of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Franz Kafka, John Dos Passos and many others. Less glamorous than the direct-style interior monologue of, for example, Molly Bloom in Joyce’s Ulysses, FIS offered advantages of seamless transition between inside and outside, character and narrator, and opportunities for irony, empathy and/or strategic ambiguity: who speaks? READING Banfield, Ann (1982) Unspeakable Sentences: Narration and Representation in the Language of Fiction. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Cohn, Dorrit (1978) Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction. Princeton: Princeton University Press. McHale, Brian (2009) ‘Speech Representation’, in Peter Hühn et al. (eds), Handbook of Narratology. Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 434–46. Palmer, Alan (2004) Fictional Minds. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Brian McHale

FREE VERSE Free verse (or vers libre) is poetry not written in accentual-syllabic metre or other received prosodic form. Although examples of this pre-date modernism, the need to develop, define and defend forms unconfined by received metrics was felt as a matter of urgency by many poets in the early decades of the twentieth century; as Ezra Pound wrote in The Pisan Cantos (1948), ‘To break the pentameter, that was the first heave’. Diverse rationales were offered. The imagists aimed ‘to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of a metronome’ (Ezra Pound, ‘A Retrospect’, 1918), drawing their example and justification from the medium symbolism made pre-eminent. William Carlos Williams, who saw accentual-syllabic metre as inimical to American expression, promulgated the idea of a ‘variable foot’, while T. S. Eliot sought precedents in the irregular blank verse of the Jacobean dramatists. These formulations were motivated by the poets’ desire to rationalise their own practice and improve it by laying down guidelines, but also in response to the hostile conservatism of the literary establishment. Nevertheless, free verse remained 157

Free verse contentious even among its advocates, as when Eliot and Pound reacted against its growing ubiquity by adopting the rhymed quatrain for Poems (1920) and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920). Despite the proliferation of theories, free verse is recognisable if not definable by characteristics including: lines and stanzas of irregular length; patterns of stress not conformable to traditional scansion; sporadic use or total omission of features such as rhyme and alliteration; enjambment at any syntactic juncture, e.g. after particles; and the disposition, patterned or arbitrary, of type across the page. Such techniques were not necessarily adopted all at once; rather, poets tended to employ some combination of these, their selection thereby creating a distinctive prosodic style. The question of free verse was not only technical, but also related to the proper subject matter of modern poetry. ‘[A] new cadence means a new idea’, Amy Lowell claimed in the preface to the anthology Some Imagist Poets (1915); D. H. Lawrence argued in ‘The Poetry of the Present’ (1919) that ‘in free verse we look for the insurgent naked throb of the instant moment’ rather than the timeless certainties of traditional form. Its greater flexibility and the importance of its visual aspects mean that free verse is capable of incorporating more diverse materials, such as prose, direct quotations from foreign languages, foreign scripts and musical notation – all of which are evident in Pound’s Cantos (1964). At its most extreme, this tendency blurs the distinction between free verse and concrete poetry. Though modernism is strongly associated with free verse, it cannot be said that free verse is the sine qua non of modernist poetry. Several modernists wrote both free and metrical poetry, and many classics of modernism – Wallace Stevens’s ‘Sunday Morning’, for instance – are written in traditional metrical forms. Moreover, polemics for free verse were so successful that it has been widely accepted, and by the end of the twentieth century had ceased to seem intrinsically modernist. READING Hartman, Charles I. (1980) Free Verse: An Essay on Prosody. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lawrence, D. H. (1920) ‘The Poetry of the Present’, in New Poems. New York: B. W. Huebsch. Lowell, Amy (ed.) (1915) Some Imagist Poets. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin. Pound, Ezra (1918) ‘A Retrospect’, in Pavannes and Divagations. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 158

Functionalism Silkin, Jon (1997) The Life of Metrical and Free Verse in Twentieth-Century Poetry. Basingstoke: Macmillan Press.

Henry King

FUNCTIONALISM That aesthetic form might be given coherence and necessity through exposure to the rigours of usefulness constitutes one of modernism’s most ardent dreams, especially in the fields of architecture and design. This wish is concisely expressed in the often-repeated motto ‘form follows function’. ‘Functionalism’ does not name a particular movement or grouping, but is a term used to identify various disparate applications of that motto to cultural production. The phrase ‘form follows function’ was coined by American architect Louis Sullivan and was derived in part from his interest in the theory of evolution with its contention that forms in nature are the result of gradual adaptation to particular circumstances and pressures. Key tenets of this position had already been expressed as early as 1843 by sculptor Horatio Greenough in his essay ‘American Architecture’. Here Greenough set out a proto-functionalist attitude to building types, arguing against the repurposing of existing architectural types – banks designed to look like Greek temples, for instance – which in his view produced mere caprices, robbed of expressive force and artistic truth. Using examples such as the distinct physiognomies of animals, the design of boats, and the continual streamlining of an engine as it is tested and re-designed, Greenough illustrated his belief that adaptation to use resulted in beautiful, meaningful and efficient forms. Like Greenough, and many twentieth-century adherents of the functionalist attitude, architect Le Corbusier saw engineering and industrial architecture as having achieved relatively pure modern forms as they followed laws of necessity and fitness for purpose rather than imitating inherited symbolic canons. Corbusier gave pictorial expression to such a view when in his Towards a New Architecture (1923) he juxtaposed images of the progress in car design in the twentieth century with the gradual changes in Greek temple architecture more than two thousand years earlier. Functionalism’s faith in adaptation to use as an aesthetic principle can be traced also to the influential ideals of ‘truth to materials’ and social utility that were a notable aspect of the nineteenth-century arts and crafts movement in Britain. Arts and crafts theorists and practitioners such as John Ruskin and William Morris opposed artisanal 159

Futurism handcraft (drawing its inspiration from natural materials and forms) to what they saw as the banality and poverty of industrial production: art’s function was to refute the latter. Later modernist movements, however, usually saw Functionalism’s vocation as the achievement of a synthesis between machine-age means and idealised aesthetic ends. Groups such as the Wiener Werkstätte (established in Vienna in 1903 by members of the secession) and the Deutsche Werkstätte and the Deutsche Werkbund (founded in Munich in 1897 and 1907 respectively) made important strides in this regard, and paved the way for more intensive efforts at the bauhaus. Functionalism might seem to be the antithesis of aesthetic autonomy (another great modernist dream), and indeed schisms within modernism often occurred along such lines – for instance among architects in the early years of the Soviet Union. In practice, however, Functionalism was never so well defined as to maintain such a clear opposition to aestheticism. The notion that ‘form follows function’ in an unmediated manner greatly oversimplifies the determinants of cultural production and overstates the degree to which the requirements of use alone dominated the minds of artists, architects and designers, even when they professed a functionalist credo. Ironically, it was not infrequently the case that the structures created under this banner failed to function particularly well for their users, nor did different uses always produce notably different forms. READING Le Corbusier (1931) Towards a New Architecture. London: John Rodker. Curtis, William J. R. (1996) Modern Architecture Since 1900. London: Phaidon. Frampton, Kenneth (2002) ‘The humanist versus the utilitarian ideal,’ in Labour, Work and Architecture: Collected Essays on Architecture and Design. London: Phaidon, pp. 108–18. Greenough, Horatio (1966) Form and Function: Remarks on Art, Design and Architecture, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Dominic Paterson

FUTURISM Futurism was launched in 1909 by the Italian poet and publicist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and was the first radical expression of an avant-garde, modernist spirit in the arts. It was responsible for creating, and consciously disseminating to the public at large, an image of the avant-garde assuming a position of contrariety to society. 160

Futurism In their manifestos, the Futurists proclaimed the bankruptcy of a country that clung to tradition and ignored the great advances of the industrial era. In their works, they tried to capture the experience of a modern world transformed by steam engines, electricity, automobiles, locomotives and aeroplanes. Futurist art was an exaltation of modern technology and urban life and was designed to obliterate the contemplative, intellectual culture of Belle-Époque Italy. The Futurists ridiculed the ossified cultural and political institutions and the servile respect paid to Italy’s glorious past. Instead, they sought nothing less than to revolutionise society in an all-encompassing manner: morally, artistically, culturally, socially, economically and politically. Before Marinetti created his artistic-literary movement, the Catalan journalist Gabriel Alomar i Villalonga published a brochure, El futurisme (1904), that served both as an aesthetic manifesto and as a proclamation of his militant desire to emancipate the Catalan people from the economic and cultural hegemony of the Castilianspeaking government in Madrid. Marinetti’s choice of the term ‘futurismo’ may have been inspired by Alomar’s Futurisme, but was more in tune with an artistic movement in Russia that called itself Budetlyane, a neologism meaning ‘men of the future’. Between 1910 and 1922, Russian and Italian Futurism developed along parallel tracks, more or less independent of each other. In 1912, the Moscowbased literary group Hylaea (David Burlyuk, Vasily Kamensky, Velimir Khlebnikov, Aleksey Kruchenykh, Vladimir Mayakovsky and others) issued a manifesto entitled A Slap in the Face of Public Taste. Other Futurist groups were formed in St Petersburg (egofuturism), Moscow (Tsentrifuga), Kiev, Kharkov and Odessa. Like their Italian counterparts, the Russian Futurists repudiated the art of the past and eulogised the speed of machines and the restlessness and dynamism of everyday urban life. But there was also a powerful undercurrent that was fascinated by the primitivism of Russian folk life and the artefacts of an ancient Scythian past. Russian Futurism in the literary field was characterised by the use of zaum, a ‘transrational’, universal language used to compose sound poetry. It operated with a musical state of meaning directly in tune with the subconscious mind. However, in its graphic notation it possessed many features that were similar to the parole in libertà (Words-inFreedom) that Marinetti theorised in his Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature (1912). There is no doubt that, between 1910 and 1914, Marinetti’s 161

Futurism Futurism had considerable influence in Russia. However, his personal visit in 1914 and the largely negative reception he received also showed that the Russian Futurists were fiercely independent. Kazimir Malevich developed from his Futurist aesthetics a new conception called suprematism; Mikhail Larionov instituted rayonism as a new painterly trend, and Mikhail Matyushin’s music for the Futurist opera, Victory over the Sun (1913), went far beyond Luigi Russolo’s conception of an Art of Noise. Between 1909 and 1914, Marinetti and his followers published no fewer than forty-five manifestos that outlined their artistic concepts and methods. As to the form and content of these pronouncements, Marinetti developed a specifically Futurist ‘art of writing manifestos’ which assimilated the persuasive methods of political propaganda and commercial advertising. The Futurist manifestos became an essential ingredient of Marinetti’s publicity machine and acted as a model for countless other manifestos issued by the historical avantgarde. Marinetti entertained amicable contacts with nonconformist painters in Lombardy, and on 11 February 1910 they issued a manifesto specifically concerned with the state of the fine arts in Italy, followed, on 11 April 1910, by a technical manifesto and, on 5 February 1912, by a theoretical declaration in the catalogue of their first group exhibition at the Galerie Bernheim Jeune in Paris. In its early phase, Futurist painting remained attached to the styles and painterly manners of impressionism, symbolism and Divisionism. But when the painters became familiar with the artistic revolution that had been unleashed by cubism, Futurist painting took a new direction that was proudly presented in a touring exhibition that unleashed huge scandals and vociferous debates in Paris (February 1912), London (March 1912), Berlin (April 1912), Brussels (June 1912), Amsterdam (September 1912), Rotterdam (May 1913) and several other cities. Futurist painting took as its subject matter ‘the multi-coloured, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals’, that is the hustle and bustle of street life in the metropolis, the pulsating dynamism of trade and commerce, the machine as a civilising power, and the social and political tensions in industrialised countries. To render these experiences in works of art, the Futurist painters studied the science of optics, the physiology and psychology of vision, the analysis of movement in chronophotography and cinema. From this they arrived at the conclusion that the dynamic flux of movement links matter with its surrounding space, that the atmosphere dissolves 162

Futurism the borders of independent objects and that human sense impressions need to be depicted as a unified whole. However, the Futurists did not restrict themselves to a scientific analysis of the world and to rational organisation of the constituent elements of painting; they also absorbed bergsonist reflections on the new experience of time and space, and took into account how the artist’s subjective experiences of reality affects his or her state of mind. For example, when emotive reactions to a train ride or to the view of a busy boulevard were made a central concern of a painting, the image was turned into a sum total of the artist’s impressions and sensations, both past and present. Increasingly, the Futurists shook off the remnants of mimetic realism and developed an aesthetic which in their manifestos they summed up under the headings of simultaneity, interpenetration, synthesis, multiple viewpoints and universal dynamism. Painting as a complex network of forms, colours and force-lines was meant to connect not only the depicted objects and their surrounding space, but also to draw in the viewer until in the end s/he becomes ‘the centre of the picture’. Thus Futurist painting revolutionised both the production and the reception of a work of art. Futurist aesthetics were applied to a whole range of artistic media and genres, and in each case given a theoretical foundation in a large number of manifestos on sculpture, music, architecture, interior design, fashion design, murals, cooking, to name but a few. From the very beginning, politics played a significant role in the Futurist movement. Marinetti undertook numerous attempts to garner the support of the Anarcho-Syndicalists of Northern Italy. In 1915, he fought for Italy’s entry into World war I; in 1918, he founded the Futurist Political Party, formed an alliance with Mussolini’s Fasci di Combattimento, and stood as a candidate in the national elections of November 1919. In Russia, many Futurists supported the bolshevik Revolution and later joined the communist Party; in Italy, many Futurists espoused the Fascist cause. But any attempt to be awarded the privileges of an Art of the State were thwarted by the conservative Fascist establishment. Futurism was never allowed to occupy more than a marginal position in the Italian cultural landscape. Similarly, in Russia, the Kommunisty-Futuristy (Kom-Futs) had little influence in the cultural affairs of the country and disappeared during the Stalinist regime.

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The Georgians READING Marinetti, F. T. (2008) Critical Writings by F. T. Marinetti, ed. Günter Berghaus, trans. Doug Thompson. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Rainey, Lawrence, Christine Poggi and Laura Wittman (eds) (2009) Futurism: An Anthology. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Günter Berghaus

G THE GEORGIANS Although it may designate any writers active during the reign of George V (1910–36), the term ‘Georgian’ is usually ascribed one of two particular meanings. It refers either to the new generation of writers identified by Virginia Woolf in her essay ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown’ (1923), namely E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence, Lytton Strachey, James Joyce and T. S. Eliot, or the writers associated with the five popular Georgian Poetry anthologies edited by Edward Marsh and published from 1911 to 1922 by the Poetry Bookshop in London. These include Rupert Brooke, Lascelles Abercrombie, W. W. Gibson, John Drinkwater, James Elroy Flecker, John Masefield, Walter de la Mare, J. C. Squire, W. H. Davies and Harold Monro, as well as D. H. Lawrence and Robert Graves. Woolf’s essay was a response to Arnold Bennett’s accusation that the new generation of Georgian novelists could not create real and convincing characters. Woolf argued that it was in fact the preceding edwardian generation of Bennett, H. G. Wells and John Galsworthy that lost sight of character in its pursuit of social reform and the description of outward detail. Georgian novelists had to abandon these outworn conventions, Woolf proclaimed, and though she chided Forster’s and Lawrence’s early work for preserving Edwardian methods and expressed doubts about the indecency of Joyce, the obscurity of Eliot and the limited scope of Strachey, she nevertheless endorsed their destruction of old usages and their search for new ways of telling the truth about character. If Woolf’s definition appropriated the term ‘Georgian’ for a set of recognisably modernist writers and techniques, the second definition has come to be associated with modernism’s opposite: the supposedly timid and traditional late romantic rural verse of the Georgian 164

The Georgians READING Marinetti, F. T. (2008) Critical Writings by F. T. Marinetti, ed. Günter Berghaus, trans. Doug Thompson. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Rainey, Lawrence, Christine Poggi and Laura Wittman (eds) (2009) Futurism: An Anthology. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Günter Berghaus

G THE GEORGIANS Although it may designate any writers active during the reign of George V (1910–36), the term ‘Georgian’ is usually ascribed one of two particular meanings. It refers either to the new generation of writers identified by Virginia Woolf in her essay ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown’ (1923), namely E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence, Lytton Strachey, James Joyce and T. S. Eliot, or the writers associated with the five popular Georgian Poetry anthologies edited by Edward Marsh and published from 1911 to 1922 by the Poetry Bookshop in London. These include Rupert Brooke, Lascelles Abercrombie, W. W. Gibson, John Drinkwater, James Elroy Flecker, John Masefield, Walter de la Mare, J. C. Squire, W. H. Davies and Harold Monro, as well as D. H. Lawrence and Robert Graves. Woolf’s essay was a response to Arnold Bennett’s accusation that the new generation of Georgian novelists could not create real and convincing characters. Woolf argued that it was in fact the preceding edwardian generation of Bennett, H. G. Wells and John Galsworthy that lost sight of character in its pursuit of social reform and the description of outward detail. Georgian novelists had to abandon these outworn conventions, Woolf proclaimed, and though she chided Forster’s and Lawrence’s early work for preserving Edwardian methods and expressed doubts about the indecency of Joyce, the obscurity of Eliot and the limited scope of Strachey, she nevertheless endorsed their destruction of old usages and their search for new ways of telling the truth about character. If Woolf’s definition appropriated the term ‘Georgian’ for a set of recognisably modernist writers and techniques, the second definition has come to be associated with modernism’s opposite: the supposedly timid and traditional late romantic rural verse of the Georgian 164

Gesamtkunstwerk Poetry anthologies. Eliot, Edith Sitwell and John Middleton Murry, among others, in trying to clear the ground for their own kind of poetry, skewered the perceived failings of this school, and constructed in their reviews a stereotype of the Georgians as country trippers writing ‘weekend pastorals’ or sub-Wordsworthian false rustics specialising in charmingly glib lyrics. In actual fact, Georgian poetry started out as a revolt against stilted Victorian rhetoric and moralising, and the outworn conventions of aestheticist and imperialist verse; it was to be a new and revivifying poetry of realism, composed in the common speech. Poets like Gibson and Monro turned away from archaic medievalism, and adopted a plain style to treat of contemporary subjects. Brooke and Gordon Bottomley shocked contemporary taste by their raw and grotesque sensibilities, and older critics such as Edmund Gosse complained about the brutality and coarseness of the first anthology volume. This volume included Brooke’s decidedly anti-pastoral ‘Town and Country’ and Davies’s ‘The Heap of Rags’, which evoked a Thames-side landscape of urban poverty and homeless despair. Gibson’s ‘Geraniums’ offered another early Eliot-like description of a dreary gas-lit cityscape. Though they signalled a falling off in quality with the ascension of the ‘second generation’ of Georgians under Squire, the last three volumes diluted the bucolic effusions of the weekend poets with a hefty dose of the mud, corpses and shell-shock of World war I poetry. These volumes included seventeen poems by Siegfried Sassoon and twenty-three by Graves, as well as stylistically unconventional poems by Isaac Rosenberg and Robert Nichols. READING Ross, Robert H. (1965) The Georgian Revolt: Rise and Fall of a Poetic Ideal, 1910–1922. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Simon, Myron (1975) The Georgian Poetic. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Anna Vaninskaya

GESAMTKUNSTWERK In his 1849 essays Art and Revolution and The Art-Work of the Future, Richard Wagner evoked Greek tragedy in its heyday as the prime historical embodiment of what he called the Gesamtkunstwerk or ‘total art-work’: ‘total’ since in the Greek case poetry, dance and music all contributed harmoniously to the whole and its citizen-­ audience was fully attuned to what was going on. For Wagner this 165

Gesamtkunstwerk ancient achievement was a standing rebuke to the incoherence and artificiality of nineteenth-century Grand opera and to the ‘depraved elegance’ and ‘self-seeking caprice’ of its audience, but at the same time it was an inspiration for the big music-dramas (to be performed before an uncorrupted Volk) that he was himself planning: works which he said ‘must gather up each branch of art to use it as a means, and in some sense to undo it for the common cause of all’. Still, even c.1850 Gesamtkunstwerk wasn’t a term Wagner used often, and quite soon he stopped using it altogether, feeling that it undervalued music’s pre-eminence. The term soon gained a life of its own, however, and came to be used quite widely by twentieth-century theatre-artists and others. Some progressive companies were committed to it: thus for Alexandre Benois and his colleagues in Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes ‘the Gesamtkunstwerk [was] the idea for which our circle was ready to give its soul’. Some directors invoked it as a practical ideal of good staging: Vsevolod Meyerhold, for instance, regarding his own productions between 1907 and 1926, though certain at first that it could not be achieved under current theatrical conditions, came to feel that the utopian vision of fully integrated theatre skills ‘producing a concerted effect’ could in fact be realised. Others of the symbolist and/or expressionist persuasion yearned for a yet deeper fusion. For them the idea of the Total ArtWork was a stimulus to a wholesale bonding and blending of the various traditional arts so as to create what Wassily Kandinsky called a monumentale Kunst. Hence Kandinsky’s own Buhnesgasamtkunstwerk (‘total art-work for the stage’) with the composer Thomas Hartmann, Der Gelbe Klang (The Yellow Sound, 1909–12), and his friend Arnold Schoenberg’s Die Glűckliche Hand (The Fateful Hand, 1910–13) with text, costumes, scenery, movement and lighting all designed by the composer – not to mention the Mysterium of Alexander Scriabin: that huge multimedia apocalypse which was still at the planning stage when he died in 1915. Scriabin had called for an auditorium-illuminating ‘colour-organ’ to play during his earlier orchestral ‘Poem of Fire’, Prometheus, and with him as with Kandinsky the concern to unify all artistic media may have been intensified by their possibly being in strict neurological terms ‘synaesthetes’: persons whose experience of one sense can involuntarily trigger that of another (who can ‘taste red’, ‘see the sound of a flute’, ‘hear the odour of chrysanthemums’, etc.). Clinical synaesthesia of this kind was a fashionable concern at the turn of the twentieth century, and the concept was taken over and 166

Gestus freely adapted – by Victor Segalen, for instance, in his essay ‘Les Synesthésies et l’École Symboliste’ (1902) – to establish a ‘cultural synaesthesia’ in which Baudelairean ‘correspondences’ between different senses expanded beyond such involuntary ones to include others that arose from association, imagination and the play of metaphor, so accounting for the richness, range and hoped-for grand unity of the best modern art. Even a politically committed and technically radical theatre director like Erwin Piscator could feel the allure of hyper-integrated Gesamtkunstwerke of this sort. Said his designer George Grosz: ‘We see him continually on the thorny quest for the great synaesthetic art-work.’ But other theatre people, though not rejecting the notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk entirely, treated it with great caution, for fear that the integration it implied would lead to what they saw as dangerously seductive minglings and muddlings. For instance, in the notes to his Mahagonny opera of 1930 and in his Short Organum for the Theatre of 1949, Bertolt Brecht condemned the ‘witchcraft’ of the well-shaken cocktail of theatrical arts which the gesamt idea tended to license, insisting that there should be a degree of ‘mutual alienation’ to keep the arts apart in drama that aspired to be both pleasurable and socially useful. READING Borchmeyer, Dieter (1991) Richard Wagner: Theory and Theatre. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Roberts, David (2011) The Total Work of Art in European Modernism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Shaw-Miller, Simon (2002) Visible Deeds of Music: Art and Music from Wagner to Cage. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Roger Savage

GESTUS A signature technique of Bertolt Brecht’s epic theatre. A gestus is a performative action which expresses a social and political attitude, as distinct from a subjective or unconscious motivation. It indicates social status and the relation of the character to social and political institutions in order to draw attention to and critique those institutions rather than the character’s psychological or metaphysical condition. The stance of a hungry man eating soup, shielding his bowl as though protecting it from a thief, the flourish of a bureaucrat signing official documents, or a badly dressed man’s attitude of chasing away 167

Global Modernisms a watchdog, each reveal the relation between the character and a historical-political-economic power structure. By exposing every emotion as determined by political and social relations, Brechtian drama shifts attention away from the Stanislavskian drama of realistic illusion and performative mimesis. The gestus opens out the possibility of critique by explicitly turning the actor into a reader of his or her own role, standing aside from his role in order to comment on what is happening to him. This in turn provokes the spectator, who is also, by extension, refused identification, to critique the character and events portrayed, enabling the imagination of alternative social and political worlds. READING Brecht, Bertolt (1964) Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett. London: Methuen. Jameson, Fredric (1998) Brecht and Method. New York: Verso.

Anthony Paraskeva

GLOBAL MODERNISMS The term evokes a view of modernism as multiple, multi-centric, diverse in form, occurring across a range of temporalities and geographies, as part of various networks of exchange, and a way of communicating across and about boundaries. The move towards consideration of modernisms in transnational or global contexts is informed by postcolonial methods, work on world literatures and empire, race and diaspora studies. The study of global modernisms deals with issues relating to circulation, influence and translation through methods that do not seek to privilege particular groups or cultures, forms or styles. This suggests an ethical position that opposes the elitism often associated with modernism, and in a broader context challenges Western authority over modernist forms. A focus on the local and regional that emerges from global modernisms indicates that the metropolis and urban areas cannot be understood as the sole representative sites of modernity. Key scholars working on the topic include Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel, who foreground the importance of periodisation and location in both the development and interpretation of modernist art forms; Susan Stanford Friedman, who argues for expanded notions of modernism to incorporate modernisms from all places and all times; and Mark Wollaeger and Matt Eatough, whose edited collection, The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, emphasises the importance of 168

Global Modernisms context, contributing to the view that modernisms are plural and occur in various parts of the globe. Since the 1990s, modernist studies have emerged as a site of much debate, in part due to the difficulty of maintaining a sense of meaning or manageability when approaching a topic that spreads across a range of forms, countries and time periods. Although the ‘global’ implies a sense of community and connection, it remains an unstable and precarious concept that teeters on the edge of notions of homogenisation and isolation, and can even be seen as a way to maintain the hegemony of a Euro-American model of modernism. Any version of ‘global modernisms’, then, requires sensitivity to the specificities of national, local and individual context. In expanding modernisms to incorporate art from all over the world, the sense of what constitutes modernist practice is called into question. As scholars such as Howard J. Booth have noted, broader definitions of modernism may appear progressive, but the process of incorporating texts from outside of the West under the umbrella term ‘modernism’ tends to rely on Euro-American forms as a benchmark for critical judgements. While this approach enables ruptures in form, ideology and politics in non-Western art to be interpreted as modernist technique, it also runs the risk of losing historical, aesthetic and geographical specificity. Work in this area therefore needs to maintain openness to the idea that modernisms from different parts of the world may appear in different manifestations than the ones already privileged within Western culture. Scholars of global modernisms may consider how experimental art from other parts of the world influenced, or was influenced by, Western modernism. Although not always described as modernist, Russian symbolism and futurism provide well-known examples of movements from other parts of the world that contributed to the development of Western European and American modernisms in the early part of the twentieth century. Caribbean authors such as George Lamming, Claude McKay, Jean Rhys and Sam Selvon would later draw on modernist aesthetics in their fiction, while in 1922 Rabindranath Tagore had organised an exhibition of modernist works in Calcutta, where paintings by Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Wyndham Lewis were displayed alongside works by Tagore’s niece, Sunayani Devi, and his nephew, Gaganendranath Tagore. Both Gaganendranath and his brother, Abanindranath, were members of the Bengal School of Art which contributed to the development of modern art in India. Patricia Laurence’s work explores ­lesser-known 169

Global Modernisms Chinese influences on English modernism, as she traces the relationships between the writers and poets of the London-based bloomsbury group, and the Beijing-based Crescent Moon group. Laurence conceptualises the Crescent Moon group’s experimental texts as modernist in their own right after discovering that the two avant-garde groups drew influence from each other. Other examples of Chinese modernisms can be found in the New Culture movement and associated New Literature of the late 1910s and 1920s, Chinese engagement with European Symbolist poetry and drama, psychoanalytical literature by figures such as Guo Moruo and Lu Yin, and the Chinese New Sensationalist School of the 1920s and 1930s. A broader view of the time period normally associated with Western modernism is required to understand the name and nature of global modernisms. Although the beginning and end of the movement in Europe and America have been variably defined, a rough span covering 1890–1945 seems to suffice for many scholars of modernism. This view has been difficult to overcome, resulting in modernisms from other times and other parts of the world being described as late, early, peripheral, marginal or simply outside of the times and places conventionally associated with Western modernism. In the context of African literature, Olive Schreiner’s novel The Story of an African Farm (1883) is regularly described as proto-modernist; the innovative forms of Chinua Achebe’s The African Trilogy comprising Things Fall Apart (1958), No Longer at Ease (1960) and Arrow of God (1964), caused Booker Prize judge Nadine Gordimer to assign Achebe the epithet: ‘the father of modern African literature’, while J. M. Coetzee is frequently read as a belated or late modernist. These examples show that a genealogy of modernism that privileges Euro-American developmental narratives cannot be neatly applied to other parts of the world. It also draws attention to the possibility that the umbrella term ‘African modernisms’ may not sufficiently encompass the range of works that emerge from a diverse continent, thereby emphasising the need for geographical and temporal specificity in analyses of its art and artistic movements. The study of global modernisms is an expanding and highly contested field that brings together scholars from diverse disciplinary and theoretical backgrounds. This is particularly significant given its concern with uncovering underlying connections and celebrating diversity. As both ‘global’ and ‘modernisms’ remain unstable and unevenly applied terms, further work in this area will need to remain 170

Gramophone critically engaged with both in order to maintain a sense of meaning when describing artistic theories and practice in diverse contexts. READING Booth, Howard J. (2011) ‘Claude McKay in Britain: Race, Sexuality and Poetry’, in Len Platt (ed.), Modernism and Race. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Doyle, Laura and Laura Winkiel (eds) (2005) Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Friedman, Susan Stanford (2006) ‘Periodizing Modernism: Postcolonial Modernities and the Space/Time Borders of Modernist Studies’, Modernism/Modernity, 13 (3): 425–43. Laurence, Patricia (2003) Lily Briscoe’s Chinese Eyes: Bloomsbury, Modernism, and China. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Mitter, Partha (2007) The Triumph of Modernism: India’s Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1922–1947. London: Reaktion Books. Ross, Stephen and Allana C. Lindgren (eds) (2015) The Modernist World. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Wollaeger, Mark and Matt Eatough (eds) (2012) The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms. New York: Oxford University Press.

Jade Munslow Ong

GRAMOPHONE In present-day American English, the words ‘gramophone’ and ‘phonograph’ have become interchangeable. Both terms denote the record player: a device of early twentieth-century vintage capable of playing disks inscribed with music through a luscious bell or horn. Such terminological flexibility, however, does not apply to a description of the origins of this sound-reproducing medium. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, ‘phonographs’ and ‘gramophones’ were considered very distinct devices, each struggling to carve out its own niche at the intersection of science, engineering, business and aesthetics. Coincidentally, the history of phonographic media was written by creative minds as diverse and colourful as their technological feats. The backgrounds of the two founding fathers of sound recording beautifully illustrate this. The American Thomas Edison, an inventor, telegraph operator and aspiring industrialist famously presented the first ‘talking machine’ at the offices of Scientific American in December 1877. The device introduced itself to the editors as the ‘phonograph’, thus confirming its maker had, for the first time in human history, succeeded in storing the human voice and replaying it. Much more 171

Gramophone obscure were the scientific papers by the French symbolist poet and inventor Charles Cros, who, in the same year, wrote up a description for a device he called the paléophone. Like Edison’s phonograph, the paléophone was designed to store the voices of those who spoke in it for posterity. However, for want of money to finance its construction, the contraption did not make it past the drawing board. Apart from the fact that Cros never saw his machine produced, there were some key morphological differences between his design and that of Edison. Whereas the latter recorded soundwaves by inscribing them as vertical or so-called ‘hill and dale’ traces on a rotating cylinder covered in tinfoil, Cros proposed to make lateral grooves on a spinning disk, which would later have to be solidified in order to be replayed. This concept would prove its potential when in 1887, German-born American Emile Berliner patented his zigzagging ‘gramophone’. Thus, when Edison, who had turned his attention to electric light in 1878, revisited his phonograph a decade later, the competitive market for sound recording media had already begun to take shape. From the turn of the century onwards, the accumulated improvements by Chichester Bell and Charles Tainter, the Italian Gianni Bettini, the Frenchman Henri Lioret and the brothers Pathé transformed both the phonograph and gramophone from technological curiosities into mass media. Eventually, the disk-shaped, replay-only gramophone record would surpass the cylinders in sales. The production of the latter was discontinued at the time of the 1929 crisis and the former became the standard that still lives on in contemporary vinyl records. In less than three decades, the record industry established itself and modern life was saturated with the wonder of the ‘talking machine’ and mechanical music ranging from jazz to Wagnerian opera. Modernist literature, which had been interwoven with sound recording from its very inception, once again bears testimony to this omnipresence. Not only did many authors witness the rise of talking books, they also eagerly incorporated the device in their literary works. The phonograph is, for instance, mediated as a death-defying machine in the fantastic fin-de-siècle writings of Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (L’Ève future, 1886), Marcel Schwob (‘La machine à parler’, 1892) and Jules Verne (Le château des Carpathes, 1892). Its peer the gramophone takes on a similar guise in James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), where Leopold Bloom ponders placing such machines with recordings of the voices of the dead in every grave or home.

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Gyres READING Gelatt, Roland (1977) The Fabulous Phonograph 1877–1977. London: Macmillan. Kittler, Friedrich (2003) Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Read, Oliver and Walter Welch (1976) From Tin Foil to Stereo: Evolution of the Phonograph. Indianapolis: Sams.

Tom Willaert

GYRES W. H. Auden’s limerick (in Academic Graffiti, 1970) about grasping the late poetry of W. B. Yeats assures us that ‘All a reader requires / Is some knowledge of gyres’. ‘Gyre’ then, like ‘whirlpool’ and ‘vortex’, is one of a group of terms that denote various kinds of spiral. The gyre-spiral as Yeats conceives it is three-dimensional, with its central point drawn out from the plane of its circumference so as to produce a kind of cone. Gyres of this sort, which can be seen in earlier visionary contexts such as Botticelli’s painting of Dante’s Inferno, William Blake’s of Jacob’s Ladder and Vladimir Tatlin’s design for the Monument to the Third International, fascinated Yeats for their own sakes and also as symbols of the turning or winding/unwinding movement from one state of being to another. From 1919 on, they appear in several poems of his (most famously ‘The Second Coming’, ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ and of course ‘The Gyres’ itself), and they are central to the esoteric interpretation of character and history offered in his prose treatise A Vision (1925, revised 1937). There, gyres come in interpenetrating ‘double cones’, one conic spiral contracting from circumference to tip as the other expands from tip to circumference: so providing a model of the shifting relations between the sphere of Subjectivity – Emotion – Time – Self and that of Objectivity – Intellect – Space – World, both in the phases of human personality and in real time from the second millennium before the birth of Christ to the second after it. READING Harper, G. M. and W. K. Hood (eds) (1978) A Critical Edition of Yeats’s ‘A Vision’. London: Macmillan. Jeffares, A. Norman (1968) A Commentary on the Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. London: Macmillan.

Roger Savage

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Habit

H HABIT In the 1870s, Charles Darwin published a book in which he recounted a commonly cited experiment: a frog has its brain removed and is then tested for nervous reflexes. The application of acetic acid to the frog’s thigh causes the foot on the affected side to move in a manner suggesting irritation and consciously responsive planning, despite total encephalectomy. In 1936, Charlie Chaplin produced the satire Modern Times, in which the hapless Tramp succumbs to the bodily demands of the mechanised assembly line. Between these dates, a host of publications and even new discourses emerged to probe the boundaries between volitional action and passive reaction in complex organisms. Habit enters the literary modernist stage through the confluence of these sociological and scientific discourses. Among the most significant were the scientific and philosophical debates of the late nineteenth century between scientific and philosophical mechanists, for whom the interrelations of complex entities could be likened to the components of a machine, and the vitalists, philosophers and scientists for whom living organisms could not be reduced to their physical components. The question of determinism and human freedom was integral to this debate since the reduction of human capacity to mechanical operations involved the implicit curtailment of human potential. Rejecting rationalist and materialist conceptions of subjectivity (of mentally or physically predetermined substrata to human consciousness), the vitalist philosopher Henri Bergson foregrounded the role of environmental experience, continuity and duration to the constitution of individual personhood, as an open-ended process rather than a fixed entity (see bergsonism). For Bergson, habit was the embodiment of repetitive memory, a pattern of bodily reaction to external stimuli rather than any mechanical blueprint of action. Of course one of Bergson’s most famous literary modernist influences was on the sinuous convolutions of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27), a work that opens with a famously ambiguous declaration of nocturnal habit. Bergson’s popularity among Anglophone modernists was partly attributable to the American psychologist William James, the author of an essay on stream of consciousness and another on habit. For James, everyday habits of the body are far from incidental or 174

Haiku predetermined – indeed they play an active role in the formation of individual character. Moreover, by rejecting reductive or materialist accounts of habit, James also perceived its constraining social and ideological functions, calling it ‘the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent’. In a time of increasing mechanisation and cultural homogenisation, it was habit’s relation to personality and social curtailment which often interested literary modernists. A most notable example is the short story ‘Melanctha’ (1909) by Gertrude Stein, who had studied psychology under James. A pivotal work in Stein’s transition to modernism, ‘Melanctha’ interrogates the identity of its protagonist through the unconscious repetitions of her mind and body. Another important figure for habit in modernism is Samuel Beckett, whose oeuvre is peppered with references to mindless habits and contrived repetitions. However, true to the ethos of late modernism, these repetitions function not as shackles to be transcended, but as the last pitiful vestiges of subjectivities in psychic dispersal. READING Bergson, Henri (2004) Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer. New York: Dover. James, William (2011) Habit. New York: Henry Holt.

Sophie Vlacos

HAIKU In Japan from the thirteenth century onwards it was common for circles of poets to extemporise renga, sequences of linked stanzas often in celebration of the natural world. The first stanza of the sequence was the hokku, comprising seventeen syllables deployed in three groups: 5 – 7 – 5. Later the hokku broke away and became a free-standing form, and later still (towards the end of the nineteenth century) the form came to be called haiku. Along with brevity, its essence lay in its immediacy and resonance: the record of a moment of heightened perception, often implying a back-story but never spelling it out, presented in the present tense, steering clear of strong main verbs and making much of a marked pause at the end of the first or second line. Thus (to confect an example): ‘A sunburst through rain: / Bashō at the ancient shrine / penning a haiku.’ (Matsuo Bashō, 1644–94, was the form’s acknowledged master.) Haiku-making has gone on being popular in Japan: haiku clubs thrive. In the West, notice began to be taken of the form early in 175

The Harlem Renaissance the twentieth century. It had the chic of being connected with the recently fashionable Japonisme; its way of suggesting more than it stated could appeal to the symbolists, its brevity and vividness to the imagists (whose ‘Eiffel Tower’ group were thinking of it as a model as early as 1909), and its being pegged firmly at seventeen to the Syllabists (see syllabic verse). Published Western emulations followed, not at first in great numbers but with impressive credentials. Quasi-haiku were written by Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell, Rainer Maria Rilke and Paul Eluard, Antonio Machado and George Seferis, and Sergei Eisenstein even saw haiku as relevant to cinema, describing them in ‘The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram’ (1929) as ‘montage-phrases, shot-lists’. Later in Vägmärken (Markings), Dag Hammarskjöld and W. H. Auden worked in the form, and ‘beat’haiku by Kerouac and Ginsberg started a still-continuing fashion for English-language haiku-making: sometimes with a strict seventeensyllable count, sometimes not; sometimes staying with the natural world, sometimes treating other things. READING Eisenstein, Sergei (1949) Film Form, trans. Jay Leyda. New York: Harcourt, Brace. Higginson, William and Penny Hunter (1985) The Haiku Handbook. New York: McGraw Hill. Keene, Donald (1976) World Within Walls: Japanese Literature of the PreModern Era. New York: Holt Rinehart.

Roger Savage

THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE Although the moniker ‘the Harlem Renaissance’ is, geographically, something of a misnomer for the period between World wars I and II in which African American culture thrived across much of the United States and received acclaim both nationally and internationally, the term does capture the creativity and sense of excitement that centred around Harlem at the time. During the 1920s, in particular, Harlem was not only an integral part of jazz age America, attracting white visitors to venues such as the Cotton Club, where they could watch and listen to the ‘exotic’ pleasures of jazz music and dance, but was also the gathering point for many of the age’s most significant African American writers, musicians and artists, and a major centre of modernist innovation. The white music critic and novelist, Carl Van Vechten was a particularly significant figure in the advocation 176

The Harlem Renaissance of jazz and blues as serious art forms and his novel, Nigger Heaven (1926), steered large numbers of white visitors through Harlem. The Harlem Renaissance stemmed from a combination of historical factors, most notably the emergence of a new African American middle class, keen to distance itself from race stereotypes that were a legacy of antebellum United States, the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural south to northern cities in the opening decades of the twentieth century, and a growing resistance to the hypocrisy of a nation that claimed to be built on equality and democracy, but which systematically discriminated on the basis of colour. For African American veterans, returning from World War I, there was a stark difference between the ideological message they had fought to defend and the reality of the nation to which they returned. In addition, many artists of this generation met political dissidents and writers from Africa and the Caribbean, both in the United States and in Paris, in encounters that were mutually beneficial in shaping political and artistic agendas in areas such as civil rights, socialism and the Back to Africa movement (see négritude). The emergence of these new forms of racial identity construction was profoundly influenced by W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903), perhaps the first text to advocate horizontal cultural integration as an alternative to hegemonic melting pot ideology. Nevertheless, to think of the Harlem Renaissance as a ‘movement’, with a shared manifesto, beyond the expression of African American culture in its widest sense would be a mistake. While jazz and blues, for example, are integral to the writing of Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown and Jean Toomer, others, such as Countee Cullen, Angelina Welde Grimké, Nella Larsen and Claude McKay, shaped their work within more easily recognisable European forms, or, inspired by modernist interest in primitivism, highlighted links to early African cultures. Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) goes further, utilising a complex mix of modernism, folklore and ethnography in its representation of an African American woman’s three marriages and growing self-assertiveness. Many of the most significant figures had work published in Alain Locke’s influential anthology, The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925), a collection that attracted both critical and commercial attention (see the new negro). READING Baker, Houston A., Jr (1987) Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. Chicago: Chicago University Press. 177

Hellenism Huggins, Nathan Irvin (2007, updated edition) Harlem Renaissance. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lewis, David Levering (1997) When Harlem was in Vogue. London: Penguin.

Christopher Gair

HELLENISM Modernist Hellenism inherited from its Romantic and late Victorian antecedents an appreciation of the rich resources of classical antiquity, a fascination with myth and the allegorical imagination. To these nineteenth-century staples were added new knowledges and idioms garnered from the discoveries of archaeology, the emergent sciences of anthropology and psychoanalysis (itself very much reliant on the mythical canon for its conceptual analogies) and the study of ancient Greek religion. The work of Jane Ellen Harrison, an energetic and prolific member of the Cambridge Ritualists who posited the centrality of ritual in pre-classical and later religious and aesthetic practice, and pursued the persistence of ancient matriarchal beliefs in the shape of a bergsonian life force, was a direct influence on the Hellenising of T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, H.D. and D. H. Lawrence among others. Ancient figures abound in modernism, whether as haunting presences still uttering ‘strange cries’ resisting interpretation (as in Woolf’s instancing of Cassandra in the 1925 essay ‘On Not Knowing Greek’, and of Antigone in The Years (1937) and Three Guineas (1938)), or as menacing returners set on revenge for unexpiated crimes (as in Eliot’s Philomela crying ‘Jug, jug to dirty ears’ in The Waste Land (1922) and D. H. Lawrence’s modern-day dionysian maenads meting out punishment on a cocky tramway inspector in the 1919 story ‘Tickets, Please!’). For E. M. Forster, Greek ‘survivals’ are useful as epiphanic moments which radically change the course of complacent bourgeois lives as his characters are faced with sudden ‘panics’ of unrecognised desire: apparitions of the god Pan in natural and typically exoticised Mediterranean ladscapes become conduits for repressed emotion in ‘The Story of a Panic’ (1903) and ‘The Road from Colonus’ (1911). For H.D., James Joyce and Ezra Pound, Hellenism provides a major aesthetic principle and a language: from their early imagist poetry that sought to recreate the effect of the ancient lyrical and epigraphic fragment to the later projects of translation and reimagining of Greek tragedy, H.D. 178

High modernism and Pound are formidable Hellenists whose immersion in the Greek element, for all its idiosyncracies and complex personal and political inflections, is persistent and hugely productive. Joyce’s Grecophilia extended beyond the classical: while his Ulysses (1922), sporting the blue and white of the Greek flag on its original cover, was hailed as the key exemplar of the ‘mythical method’ by Eliot (in the 1923 essay ‘Ulysses, Order and Myth’) and described by Hugh Kenner as ‘a museum of Homers’ (The Pound Era, 1971), Joyce developed a love and an ear for modern Greek, which he was taught by fellow émigrés in Pola, Zurich and Trieste. His belief in the impure and thus rich provenance of all cultures and tongues is embodied by the ‘Jewgreek/greekjew’ Leopold Bloom and articulated in the many Greek-inflected mots-valises of Finnegans Wake (1939). READING Carpentier, Martha C. (1998) Ritual, Myth, and the Modernist Text: The Influence of Jane Ellen Harrison on Joyce, Eliot, and Woolf. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Gregory, Eileen (1997) H.D. and Hellenism: Classic Lines. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harrison, Jane Ellen (1912) Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kenner, Hugh (1971) The Pound Era. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Kolocotroni, Vassiliki (2012) ‘Still Life: Modernism’s Turn to Greece’, Journal of Modern Literature, 35 (2): 1–24.

Vassiliki Kolocotroni

HIGH MODERNISM As a literary historical shorthand, or canon, ‘high modernism’ claims to represent the very best – because most formally accomplished or innovative – of early twentieth-century cultural production. The term is associated with Anglophone critics who mapped modernism retroactively from the late 1930s and on, seeking to legitimise serious academic study of modern literature and art in universities and in the public sphere. This undertaking required both an identifiable canon and a set of rigorous methods. Despite their early experimental wildness, modernist works furnished both, and matched perfectly the emerging critical orthodoxy. The formalist approach of critics such as I. A. Richards, F. R. Leavis, Q. D. Leavis and Clement Greenberg, alongside the criticism of Herbert Read, met with a more rigorous 179

High modernism formalisation in the doctrines of the new criticism. Spearheaded by Richards, along with Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, W. K. Wimsatt, Monroe C. Beardsley and John Crowe Ransom, the New Critics helped establish the hegemony of high modernism in English and North American universities. Their approach aimed to be rigorous, objective, quasi-scientific. The New Critical method of ‘close reading’ was itself driven in large part by T. S. Eliot’s poetic and critical practice. High modernism furnished the material that let New Criticism prove its rigour, and New Criticism validated the aesthetic excellence of high modernist works. This fusion of aesthetic qualities with institutional approval led to the decades-long preeminence of high modernism in the academy – but also to its eventual downfall as the century came to a close. By mid-century, high modernism had been fully institutionalised. It stood for the very best artistic and cultural production of modernity. Its catch-phrase was Ezra Pound’s commandment to ‘make it new’, and its pervasive theme that of man’s alienation from the modern world. It was understood to eschew realism, harmony and ornament. Its formal experiments emphasised the dynamics of perception, association and affect through dense allusion, unreliable narration, nonlinear chronologies, stream of consciousness, narrative gaps and the verfremdungseffekt. It explored the unconscious and dream with collage and montage, and spawned a multitude of avant-garde movements. High modernism required its scholars to be experts in command of a highly specialised vocabulary and set of techniques for analysis. The ability to appreciate it conferred cultural standing, saving those with sophisticated taste from the compromising influence of mass culture – or kitsch, in a binary opposition, or ‘great divide’, first outlined by Clement Greenberg in the 1939 essay ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’. Though many more works than were included under the rubric of high modernism met some or all of the characteristics used to define it, the process of canon formation included only a chosen few and excluded many more others (notably women and people of colour). These exclusions would return to discredit high modernism in the later decades of the twentieth century. The rise of identity politics, theory and the culture wars from the 1960s to the 1990s in the Western academic world cast a harsh and profoundly critical light on the racial, sexual, cultural and gender homogeneity of high modernism. First feminist scholars and critics, then critical race scholars began to question why so few (if any) women or people of colour counted as high modernists. Theoretical challenges to categories of 180

History taste, excellence and aesthetic purity argued that the aesthetic and critical programme of high modernism encoded racist, sexist and ethnocentric values. Efforts to recover women modernists such as Mina Loy, May Sinclair, H.D., Radclyffe Hall and Djuna Barnes took on increasing force, as did the scholarly rediscovery of the harlem renaissance and of important modernist works by people of colour such as Langston Hughes, Claude MacKay, Jean Toomer and Zora Neale Hurston. By the 1980s, the narrow New Critical configuration of high modernism as ‘the Pound era’, as in Hugh Kenner’s influential 1971 study of the same title, had fallen to a rising tide of recovery operations and theoretical challenges. The end of the century saw the demise of high modernism as anything more than a historical artifact itself, a signifier of an earlier, less comprehensive, understanding of modernism. The late 1990s saw a revived interest in modernism across the spectrum, taking for granted the inclusion of writing and art by women, people of colour, openly queer people, non-Western artists and writers, middlebrow, lowbrow and no-brow. The parameters for what counted as modernism expanded geographically to include the entire world, temporally to include vast stretches of history, and materially to include ephemera such as postcards, dance-hall numbers and pulp fiction. The term ‘high modernism’ persists in usage today, but almost always either inflected with irony or in specific reference to the historical fact of the New Critical model. READING Greenberg, Clement (1939) ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, Partisan Review, 6 (5): 34–49. Huyssen, Andreas (1986) After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kenner, Hugh (1971) The Pound Era. Berkeley: University of California Press. Walkowitz, Rebecca and Douglas Mao (2008) ‘The new Modernist Studies’, PMLA, 123 (3): 737–48. Williams, Raymond ([1972] 2007) ‘When Was Modernism?’ in The Politics of Modernism. New York: Verso.

Stephen Ross

HISTORY In contrast to the reputed historical-mindedness of realism, to which it is typically opposed, modernism is deemed to turn away from 181

History history by favouring artistic autonomy, premised on the precedence of form over historical content. This argument can be traced back to Georg Lukács’s contention that modernism enacted the ‘negation of history’, separating ‘time from the outer world of objective reality’ (Lukács 1963: 21, 39), that spurred a debate, active since the 1930s, around the connection between modernism and conservatism. However, to the extent that modernism is conceived as the artistic response to the social and political transformations associated with modernity, it is already historicised. Moreover, since it is typically defined as a break with the past, modernism is entangled in questions of time and historical progress, central to the modern rationalist spirit. Even further, modernism directly engages with history on a number of levels: in relation to its historical actuality, as creative principle and as experience of temporality. Additionally, in their critical output, major modernist figures and strands framed their artistic project with reference to aesthetic and political uses of history. Modernism has been associated with the cult of the new, propagated by modernity and emblematised by the work of Charles Baudelaire, whose interest, as Walter Benjamin notes, ‘is in the fundamentally new object, whose power resides solely in the fact that it is new, no matter how repulsive or bleak it may be’ (Benjamin 2006: 96–7). Ezra Pound’s famous injunction to ‘make it new’ resonates with this quest for originality attendant on the destruction of the artwork’s auratic investment in tradition. However, while modernism is defined by its break with past traditions through the invention of new forms and sensations, epitomised by the shock-effect, the attitude of modernist and avant-garde artists towards the ideology of historical progress associated with the modern quest for novelty was more complicated and varied. futurism, for example, was paradigmatic in celebrating progress translated into technology but most modernist strands and individuals remained critical towards the modern urban and technocratic age. They often exhibited nostalgia for a premodern, putatively non-alienated world as they conceived of the modern present as catastrophe instead of advancement. Modernist experiments with time perception, with their focus on memory and the workings of the mind, privileged presentism, interpretation and experience, away from the nineteenth-century historicist paradigm that severed the past from the present and naturalised the latter as more advanced than previous epochs. In the wake of the bergsonian concept of durée, time was revealed to be subjective and the present moment became instead the point 182

History of intersection between past and future. In addition, the modernist poetics of synchronic coexistence of heterogeneous temporalities and perspectives, effected by intertextuality, montage and stream of consciousness techniques, further questioned the conventional teleological notion of history resting on chronological succession. The notorious plotlessness and multivocalism of modernist narration, its time distortion and disolocation burst the consequential pattern associated with Realism in order to accommodate the representational anxiety surrounding what Hayden White has called the ‘modernist event’, epitomised by the Holocaust trauma. The emphasis on the experience of the present, the time of the now, as the starting point rather than the culmination of history, was also shared by vitalist, neo-idealist, hermeneutic and materialist historians and philosophers of the early twentieth century who equally challenged the prevailing Rankean positivist tradition of historiography and called for new uses of history for life and for politics. The historical actuality of the first half of the twentieth century, marked by the two world wars, the Russian revolution and the rise of Fascism, was inscribed in a vocabulary of crisis, alienation and destruction, stressed by expressionism and dada. Although few modernists chose to allude directly to the dense historic facts of the period, most adumbrated their effects by undertaking a critical historiography of the present in its everyday, microhistorical, anthropological dimension, associated with the French Annales School of historiography. Their task was the simultaneous mapping out of the vicissitudes of modern subjectivity which ultimately became dissolved in the large spaces of urban modernity and of the unconscious, newly discovered by the modern science of psychoanalysis that pioneered the reconstructing of individual histories of the psyche. critique of modern times, generated by the historical ­experience of crisis and change, was often combined, in both creative and theoretical works of major modernists, with a quest for alternative models of historical movement to that of progressive causal linearity. The expression of this quest ranged from the flight to an idealised past, common origins and universal time patterns to the futurity of utopian dreams of a new, liberated world, most apparent in surrealism. Universal history, world history, cyclical history, the notion of a common primordial past and the evocation of myth and ritual were favoured by most modernists who, with James Joyce’s hero in Ulysses (1922), saw contemporary history as ‘a nightmare’ from 183

History which they were ‘trying to awake’. Oswald Spengler’s monumental Decline of the West (1918) echoed the period’s sense of decay and the popularity of world historical narratives. This is also evidenced in W. B. Yeats’s prophetic poem ‘The Second Coming’ (1920) and in the epic concatenation, influenced by Benedetto Croce, of ancient mythology and literary and historical elements in Pound’s account of the eventual corruption of Western civilisation. T. S. Eliot’s reference, apropos the Homeric subtext of unheroic Ulysses, to the mythical method as a technique of ‘giving shape and significance’ to what he described as the ‘futility and anarchy of contemporary history’ (Eliot 1975: 178), most obviously applies to his own poetry. Influenced by J. G. Frazer’s foundational recording of primitive rituals and myths, Eliot juxtaposes the destruction of civilisation with ancient tales of fertility and resurrection. The symbolist work of Yeats can also be described in terms of the mythical method as it evokes myths and even resorts to mysticism as a source of historical understanding. This is registered most clearly in A Vision (1926), an idiosyncratic theory of world history with periods of two thousand years divided according to moon phases and time unraveling as the spiraling movement of gyres that contain all past lives in an eternal now. Yeats’s schema of history was, like the cyclical pattern of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939), visibly inspired by Giambattista Vico’s model of universal theory of alternating barbarism and cultivated reason, mixing gods, heroes and humans, poetics and politics, reason and imagination in order to establish the guiding principles of human action through the ages. Despite refuting linearity, the diverse cyclical and recurrent historical patterns, including Friedrich Nietzsche’s influential theory of ‘eternal return’, articulated by modernists, still suggest a sense of continuity and permanence in human history that bridges epochs and cultures as well as the individual with the collective across time. This would offset the feeling of transience, distinctive to modernity as a result of secularisation, which is so pronounced in the historiographies of Virginia Woolf, though punctuated with primordial vestiges of circularity, and is contained by the life-regaining writing of Marcel Proust’s autobio-historical project. The dual nature of modernity was underlined in Baudelaire’s famous 1863 definition of modern art as ‘the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent’ whose ‘other half is the eternal and the immutable’ (Baudelaire 1964: 13). Such a coexistence resonates with Eliot’s notion of the ‘historical sense’ which brought tradition and the new together while transposing history 184

History into the aesthetic realm. The historical sense of poets partaking in an intertextual ‘simultaneous order’ of the totality of literary history is really a sign of their modernity. The activation of the past in the present is at the core of Walter Benjamin’s attempt at a cultural Ur-history of modernity through constellations that evoke the modernist features of citation and montage. The subject of Benjamin’s materialist historiography lies not in what has actually occurred but in the potentialities of history carried in the dreams of the oppressed and the defeated of the past. Bertolt Brecht’s epic theatre similarly provides an exception to the quest for universality through history, by evoking ‘historicisation’ as a critical term to denote a process of historical locatedness that evidences the idea that things could be otherwise. Brecht’s political theatre is a theatre of citation and estrangement that aims to dialectically expose social arrangements and institutions as historical, transitory and subject to change. That distance theorised by Brecht as essential to his theory and practice reveals the paradox of noncontemporaneity within the constitutive contemporaneousness of modernism which admits the future time within the now as a utopian possibility of historical liberation and fulfilment. READING Baudelaire, Charles ([1863] 1964) ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. Jonathan Mayne. New York: Da Capo Press, pp. 1–40. Benjamin, Walter (1999) The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Benjamin, Walter (2006) Selected Writings 4, ed. Howard Eiland and Michel W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and others. Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Eliot, T. S. (1975) Selected Prose, ed. Frank Kermode. London: Faber & Faber. Longenbach, James (1987) Modernist Poetics of History: Pound, Eliot, and the Sense of the Past. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lukács, Georg (1963) The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, trans. John and Neck Mander. London: Merlin Press. O’Malley, Seamus (2014) Making History New: Modernism and Historical Narrative. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rabaté, Jean-Michel (ed.) (2015) 1922: History, Culture, Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Spiropoulou, Angeliki (2010) Virginia Woolf, Modernity and History: Constellations with Walter Benjamin. London: Palgrave Macmillan. 185

Hysteria White, Hayden (1999) ‘The Modernist Event’, in Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 66–86. Williams, Louise Blakeney (2009) Modernism and the Ideology of History: Literature, Politics, and the Past. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Yeats, W. B. ([1926] 1961) A Vision. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Angeliki Spiropoulou

HYSTERIA The diagnosis and treatment of hysteria and investigations into its etiology were major preoccupations of the emerging fields of psychology and neurology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These issues also played a significant role in the development of psychoanalysis thanks to Sigmund Freud’s formative experience working under Jean-Martin Charcot on the treatment of female hysterics at Paris’s Salpêtrière Hospital in the 1880s, and due also to the significant number of hysterical patients Freud treated in his private practice in Vienna. Hysteria – as its name, derived from the Greek word hystera (womb), implies – had long been assumed to be a specifically female condition; by the nineteenth century it was often thought to be caused by congenital illness, and particularly to relate to a failure to conceive or bear children. Before Freud, it was seen as, above all, a bodily ailment and the symptoms presented such as numbness, partial paralysis or loss of voice (aphonia), seemed to justify such a view. Freud accepted that hysteria afflicted male patients in large numbers, and theorised that hysterical symptoms were caused by psychological factors related to sexuality rather than physical impairments. Significantly, Freud shifted the treatment of hysteria from the physical interventions deployed by other physicians (which ranged from mesmerism to hydrotherapy and even the use of electrical currents), initially deploying techniques of hypnosis and ultimately using simply the associative speech characteristic of psychoanalytic therapy. For Freud, hysterical symptoms, like dreams, jokes or slips of the tongue, are partial emanations of repressed thoughts and desires, transformed by psychic processes. Perhaps the best-known of Freud’s case studies of hysterical patients is the so-called ‘Dora’ analysis, in which he relates his largely unsuccessful and incomplete treatment of Ida Bauer, a young Viennese girl whose symptoms he gradually reveals to derive from 186

Hysteria the social and sexual circumstances in which she has been brought up, particularly her father’s obvious but unacknowledged infidelity. Freud’s account mixes a validation of ‘Dora’s’ perception of her family history with his conservative and patriarchal view of the solution to her predicament: marriage to the man cuckolded by her father. Key figures in surrealism were drawn to accounts of hysteria, but unlike Freud their interest was in validating the performance of hysterical symptoms and the outpourings of hysterical speech as unrepressed expressions of the unconscious, and in celebrating the overt sexuality of hysteria, rather than using treatment to return hysterics to ‘normal’ life. André Breton and Louis Aragon would write in ‘The Invention of Hysteria’ (published in La Révolution Surrealiste in 1928), that ‘hysteria is not a pathological phenomenon and can in every respect be considered a supreme vehicle of expression.’ This is in some ways prescient: hysteria has in fact been absent from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as a psychological condition since 1980. The textual accounts of hysteria given by Freud and the astonishing photographic images produced by Charcot’s clinic in an effort to isolate and analyse the phases of hysterical episodes have provoked extensive artistic investigation over the past century (for instance, in Louise Bourgeois’s sculptures of figures arched backwards in the characteristic pose of hysterical convulsion), and have also been subject to significant feminist revision. Hysteria may have effectively disappeared as a medical disorder but it remains an important topic in the analysis of modernity and modernism. READING Didi-Huberman, Georges (2003) The Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press. Freud, Sigmund (1905) ‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (“Dora”)’, in Angela Richards (ed.) (1977) Case Histories. 1, ‘Dora’ and ‘Little Hans’. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Rabaté, Jean-Michel (2002) ‘Loving Freud Madly: Surrealism Between Hysterical and Paranoid Modernism’, Journal of Modern Literature, 25 (3–4): 58–74. Bernheimer, Charles and Claire Kahane (eds) (1990) In Dora’s Case: Freud – Hysteria – Feminism. New York: Columbia University Press.

Dominic Paterson

187

Illness

I ILLNESS Susan Sontag argues that in nineteenth-century literature, tuberculosis (TB) was ‘the preferred way of giving death a meaning – an edifying, refining disease’. Because it involves progressive emaciation, it lent itself to aesthetic treatment as a gradual transfiguration of the body. Tubercular children feature in Dickens (Smike in Nicholas Nickleby (1839), Paul in Dombey and Son (1848)), whereas in the French literature of the period, the victims tend to be young women: Alexandre Dumas’s La Dame aux camélias (1852) and the Goncourt brothers’ Renée Mauperin (1864). The rise of modern medicine in the late nineteenth century, combined with the spread of Social Darwinism, led to scientific attempts to improve public health via public baths and sanitation. In Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (Ottsy i dety, 1862) Basarov dies of septicemia. In the dramas of naturalism, illness serves as a metaphor for inherited or moral guilt, for example Ibsen’s Ghosts (Gengangere, 1881), where Oswald Alving’s syphilis reflects his own illicit sexuality and that of his father, and in An Enemy of the People (En folkefiende, 1882), where the contamination of the baths indicates the corruption of the townspeople. Gerhart Hauptmann’s Before Sunrise (Vor Sonnenaufgang, 1889) examines hereditary alcoholism, and Elsa Bernstein’s Twilight (Dämmerung, 1893) features a girl with a chronic eye condition, which becomes a metaphor for moral blindness. Max Nordau’s cultural case history degeneration (Entartung, 1892) denounced the decadence of the modern age in general and of modern artists in particular. This work’s influence was so great that Bernard Shaw was compelled to publish a polemical response to Nordau (The Sanity of Art, 1908). Modernist fiction often bears comparison with medical case histories. Franz Kafka’s illness, TB, came to define his sense of self, and his short stories are littered with diseased bodies, as in Metamorphosis (Die Verwandlung, 1915), where Gregor Samsa’s insect body is diseased, and A Hunger Artist (Ein Hungerkünstler, 1922), which alludes to the emaciation of TB patients. psycho­ analysis relates physical symptoms to disturbances of sexuality. This same connection is evident in André Gide’s The Immoralist (L’Immoraliste, 1902), in which the main protagonist’s tubercular 188

Illness problems are gradually alleviated by his homoerotic encounters in Tunisia. The link between illness and sexuality is explored most fully in the works of Thomas Mann. In Buddenbrooks (1901) Hanno’s death from typhoid fever seems connected to his homoerotic feelings towards Kai. In Death in Venice (Der Tod in Venedig, 1912) the moral and physical decline of Gustav von Aschenbach is exacerbated by his infatuation for Tadzio, a fourteen-year-old adolescent. The outbreak of cholera, which the Venetian authorities attempt to conceal, inspires Aschenbach’s nightmares about tigers and tropical jungles, linking Nietzsche’s theory of the dionysian with fears aroused by modern germ theory and colonialism. In Mann’s masterpiece The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg, 1924), the protagonist Hans Castorp spends seven years in a TB sanatorium in Davos. Illness in The Magic Mountain functions on a number of different levels: it is a metaphor for the decadence and the decline of European politics in the years leading up to the First World war, and it opens up a debate on rival ideologies of nationalism. It sets off a philosophical debate about human mortality and leads to a heightened awareness of the body. It is through illness that the body appears most fully, whereas in healthy circumstances it is less obtrusive. Illness is also a metaphor for sexuality, presented here as inherently transgressive. Dr Krokowski gives a lecture entitled ‘Love as a force contributory to disease’ drawing on Freudian psychoanalysis, which concludes with the claim that symptoms are disguised manifestations of love and that ‘all disease is only love transformed’. When Hans Castorp’s cousin Joachim Ziemssen dies of TB, we as readers grieve together with the characters. Mortal illness is not merely a metaphor or theme in The Magic Mountain, it is also an agonising event. Illness and death, whatever else they may imply, are painful, traumatic events to be mourned. READING Dowden, Stephen D. (ed.) (1999) A Companion to Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain. Rochester, NY: Camden House. Foucault, Michel (2003) The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A. M. Sheridan. New York and London: Routledge. Gilman, Sander (1995) Franz Kafka: The Jewish Patient. New York and London: Routledge. Otis, Laura (1999) Membranes: Metaphors of Invasion in NineteenthCentury Literature, Science and Politics. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 189

Imagism Sontag, Susan (2002) Illness as a Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. London: Penguin.

Ernest Schonfield

IMAGISM In the simplest sense, image refers to a word or constellation of words in a poem that denotes an object, scene or action. Insofar as it is left open as an unstated suggestion, an image functions as a symbol: it stands for or represents something indeterminable. However, in the sense in which it was used by the early twentieth-century poets T. E. Hulme and Ezra Pound, an image is to be distinguished from a symbol. While a symbol is a specially evocative image that has some further significance associated with it and usually alludes to a higher unifying idea, as for example in W. B. Yeats’s swan (symbolising nature) in ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’ (1919) or Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s albatross (symbolising penance) in ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ (1798), an image in its early modernist use is supposed to be limited and finite, fleeting and ephemeral. According to Hulme, modern poetry, consisting of ‘certain images [. . .] put into juxtaposition in separate lines’, should convey ‘momentary phrases in a poet’s mind’, not ‘big things’ or ‘epic subjects’ (1994: 53–4). Likewise, Pound argues that the modern poet ought to avoid using symbols which deal ‘in “association” [. . .] in a sort of allusion, almost of allegory’, and must instead ‘use his image because he sees it or feels it, not because he thinks he can use it to back up some creed or some system of ethics’ (2005: 281). In theorising about the use of images in modern poetry, Hulme was largely appropriating ideas in the work of the French philosopher Henri Bergson, namely Bergson’s distinction between intellect and intuition (see bergsonism). According to Bergson, whereas intellect analyses the superficial structures of reality, intuition can lead us to the fullness of experience that no intellectual or conceptual description can match. Bergson never wrote explicitly on poetry, but his suggestion in An Introduction to Metaphysics (1903) that ‘Many diverse images, borrowed from very different orders of things, may, by the convergence of their action, direct consciousness to the precise point where there is a certain intuition to be seized’ (1999: 27–8) was taken up by Hulme. Casting Bergson’s metaphysics into a theory for modern poetry, Hulme explained that poetry consisting of images could enable intuition, and thus be revealing and engaging. Although 190

Imagism Pound did not credit Bergson in his own writings on poetry directly, he too defined an image along the same lines: as an ‘intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time’ that ‘gives that sense of sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits; that sense of sudden growth’ (Pound 1913: 200–1). The group of poets who, under Pound’s initiative, emphasised the use of images in their poetry came to be known as the Imagists. Imagism or Imagisme (as the doctrine was first advertised) describes the practice and method of composing poems that aim at clarity of expression through the use of succinct phrases and visual images. Another key characteristic of Imagist poetry is that it does not obey fixed metre or rhyme, as regularity is deemed to stifle expression and creativity. As well as Pound, the group initially included H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), John Gould Fletcher, Amy Lowell, Richard Aldington, F. S. Flint and D. H. Lawrence. Skipwith Cannell, John Cournos, Ford Madox Ford (then Ford Madox Hueffer), James Joyce, Marianne Moore, Allen Upward and William Carlos Williams also published under the banner of ‘Imagism’ but were not intimately connected with the group’s poetic practices. Pound first used the term ‘Imagistes’ in 1912, to describe some poems by H.D. and Richard Aldington (in Poetry magazine) and the poetry of T. E. Hulme (in the appendix to his own volume of poetry, Ripostes). Imagism as a doctrine was formally launched a year later, in March 1913 when Flint and Pound outlined in Poetry the tenets of the movement. According to Flint, Imagist poetry follows three rules: 1. Direct treatment of the thing whether subjective or objective. 2. To use absolutely no word that did not contribute to presentation. 3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase not in sequence of a metronome. Pound made similar demands, including the following: Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something. Don’t chop your stuff into separate iambs. Use either no ornament or good ornament. (Pound 1913: 201, 204, 202) The directness, precision and musicality prescribed by Flint and Pound are at play in Pound’s archetypal Imagist poem, ‘In a Station of the Metro’, published in Poetry in 1913: 191

Imagism The apparition    of these faces    in the crowd : Petals    on a wet, black   bough . This haiku-like poem is short and precise, superimposing two images in irregular metre yet preserving musicality. The first Imagist anthology, Des Imagistes, appeared in March 1914, with poems by H.D., Aldington and Pound as the centrepieces. H.D.’s ‘Hermes of the Ways’ piles up images in the way encouraged by Hulme: ‘the wind / playing on the wide shore, / piles little ridges / and the great waves / break over it’. In Aldington’s ‘Choricos’, ‘To a Greek Marble’ and ‘To Atthis’, one can detect the influence of hellenism, while Pound’s poems in the collection reveal Imagism’s debt to another source: Chinese verse. Not all poems conform to the principles laid out by Flint and Pound, which has led some critics to conclude that there is little aesthetic coherence or unity in the movement. This assessment is backed by Pound’s apparent admission that Imagism as a name ‘was invented to launch H.D. and Aldington before either had enough stuff for a volume’ (Pound 1951: 288). By 1914, Pound had abandoned Imagism under acrimonious circumstances and moved on to form vorticism, a short-lived movement in art and poetry that, by virtue of its continued emphasis on the ‘super-position’ of images into poetry, can be thought of as largely an offshoot of Imagism. Three further Imagist anthologies appeared between 1915 and 1917, all under the title Some Imagist Poets. These were edited by the American poet Amy Lowell, who sponsored and led the movement following Pound’s departure. A final anthology, edited by Flint, appeared in 1930. READING Bergson, Henri (1999) An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. T. E. Hulme, ed. Thomas A. Goudge. Indianapolis: Hackett. Flint, F. S. (1913) ‘Imagisme’, Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, 1 (6): 199–200. Hulme, T. E. (1994) ‘A Lecture on Modern Poetry’, The Collected Writings of T. E. Hulme, ed. Karen Csengeri. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pound, Ezra (1913) ‘A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste’, Poetry, 1 (6): 200–6. Pound, Ezra (1951) Pound to Glenn Hughes [26 September 1927], The Letters of Ezra Pound: 1907–1941, ed. D. D. Paige. London: Faber. Pound, Ezra (2005), ‘Vorticism’, Early Writings, ed. Ira B. Nadel. London: Penguin, pp. 278–91.

Christos Hadjiyiannis

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Impersonality

IMPERSONALITY The concept of ‘impersonality’ indicates a rejection of authorial structures of meaning in the production and interpretation of art. Impersonality has been placed at the centre of modernist technique. It is more immediately anticipated in literature by Gustave Flaubert’s nineteenth-century realist novels. Flaubert’s authorial objectivity is based on incipient scientific methods fully fleshed out by the naturalism of Émile Zola in Le Roman Experimental (1890). It substitutes theological ontology with biological determinism by way of sidestepping romantic subjectivity. For modernists such as Virginia Woolf, such scientific approaches are only partially successful as shown by her critique of the materialist fiction of Arnold Bennett, principally for proving unable to evoke a character’s felt experience. Even when Woolf uses the term ‘impersonality’, she only partially endorses it. In September 1918, Woolf notes in her diary that the particularity of John Milton’s Paradise Lost is ‘the sublime impersonality and aloofness of emotion’, yet she ‘scarcely feel[s] ‘Milton lived or knew men and women’. T. S. Eliot is more philosophically committed to impersonality, yet he approaches it with similar ambivalence. He famously articulated his position in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919), in which he reinterprets the artist’s personality as a ‘catalyst’ which presides over but does not intervene in art (see tradition). The use of scientific language is deliberate. What is at stake is whether impersonality truly approaches ‘the condition of science’ Eliot intends for literature, without at the same time doing it at the price of sapping the humanity out of nature, but neither does he want to concede to a metaphysical solution. Such balancing acts are apparent in the philosophical problems he had grappled with as a doctoral student and in his first published essays: ‘The Development of Leibniz’ Monadism’ and ‘Leibniz’ Monads and Bradley’s Finite Centres’ (both in The Monist, 26 (4), October 1916). Eliot is in fact exaggerating when he speaks of ‘the extinction of personality’ in his 1919 essay. Eliotic impersonality is best understood as the search for the right kind of personality, of ‘feelings’ rather than ‘emotions’. The distinction Eliot makes, however, is clumsy and not always presented as oppositional. It fantasises about human consciousness as a pure collection of feelings unpolluted by emotions, yet in fear that such physiological purification may leave nothing behind but nerves, flesh and bones; that is the trouble with 193

Impressionism the attempt to reduce selfhood to its neurological barebones. In ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, for example, the speaker fantasises about getting in touch with his feelings by literally X-raying his own etherised body, ‘as if a magic lantern threw nerves in patterns on a screen’. Eliot’s eventual concession to metaphysics, implicit in his conversion to Anglo-Catholicism in 1927, may be interpreted as the failure of the scientific goals Eliot had set himself with the Impersonal Theory of Poetry. READING Eliot, T. S. (1986) ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, in Collected Poems: 1909–1962, London: Faber & Faber. Eliot, T. S. (1999) ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, in Selected Essays. London: Faber & Faber. Woolf, Virginia (1977) The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume One 1915– 1919, ed. Anne Olivier Bell. San Diego, New York and London: Harcourt Brace & Company.

Fabio Vericat

IMPRESSIONISM The title of Claude Monet’s 1872 painting, Impression, Sunrise, featuring the port of Le Havre, is frequently cited as one of the origins of the term Impressionism. Impressionism, perhaps the last representational art movement, arose in the 1860s in France, with Edouard Manet acknowledged as its founding father, and included such artists as Camille Pissaro, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet and Auguste Renoir. The Impressionist artists’ style of painting offered sketch-like ‘impressions’ of a scene, a naturalistic and immediate response to a visual experience, using loose – and visible – brushstrokes, with a relaxed attitude to perspective and detail. In 1863 a selection of Impressionist paintings was rejected by the conventional Parisian Salon of the École des Beaux-Arts. In retaliation, the excluded artists set up their own ‘Salon des Réfusés’ in the same year in order to exhibit their works. The final Impressionist exhibition was held in 1886, after which the movement developed into what became known as post-­ impressionism, a term first coined by the British art critic Roger Fry in 1906; his 1910 exhibition, ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’, was London’s first experience of ‘modern’ art. Post-Impressionism was exemplified by the work of Vincent Van Gogh, who explained to his brother, Theo, that ‘instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I have before my eyes, I use colour more arbitrarily, in order 194

Impressionism to express myself more forcibly’. Even more than the Impressionists who preceded them, Post-Impressionists were fascinated by the effect light had on objects rather than the objects themselves. Other artists who took up the challenge of rejecting the limitations of Impressionism – and especially the need for mimetic representation – included Paul Cézanne (known as the father of the movement), Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Claude Monet, whose painting style evolved over time from Impressionist to Post-Impressionist. In 1891 Monet exhibited fifteen identical paintings of haystacks, each one using a daringly different colour palette, as if seen through a hazy mist (and thus losing any defining contour lines or rigid form), in order to depict the way light transformed the appearance of the haystacks at different times of the day. The term ‘literary impressionism’ was first used by Ferdinand Brunetière in an article he wrote on Alphonse Daudet as early as 1879, describing a new style of writing as a means whereby one can ‘[t]ranspose a systematic means of expression of an art, which is the art of painting, into the area of another art, which is the art of writing’. Impressionism as a literary form arose out of the same artistic conditions from which emerged decadence and symbolism. They were all terms which, as the Decadent poet and essayist Arthur Symons noted, ‘have been adopted as the badge of little separate cliques, noisy, brainsick young people who haunt the brasseries of the Boulevard Saint-Michel, and exhaust their ingenuities in theorizing over the works they cannot write’. Symons, in an essay called ‘Impressionistic Writing’ explained: ‘I tried to do in verse something of what Degas had done in painting. I was conscious of transgressing no law of art in taking that scarcely touched material for new uses.’ Impressionism in art had been a rejection of the principles and practices of the Establishment and as such, from the outset, its ideals had engaged the interest of writers as well as artists. Victor Hugo, Émile Zola and J. K. Huysmans all championed Impressionism as did Jules Laforgue, who related it to developments in poetry, music and philosophy, as well as literature. The painter Seurat’s obsession with form developed into his use of ‘pointillism’, thousands of tiny, individual brushstrokes of multiple colours, which when viewed from a distance revealed a complete image; the technique is frequently cited as anticipating the disintegrated, fractured society pre- and post-World war I, out of which arose literary modernism and its similar concern with form, whether in poetry or prose. 195

Impressionism Joseph Conrad is often considered one of the earliest impressionist writers. Indeed, the preface to his 1897 novella, The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, offered, perhaps for the first time, a manifesto for literary impressionism. Conrad claimed that ‘Fiction – if it at all aspires to be art – appeals to temperament . . . Such an appeal, to be effective, must be an impression conveyed through the senses.’ In a famous passage from another Conrad novella, Heart of Darkness (1899), the protagonist, Marlow, is described thus: ‘To him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine.’ Fifteen years later, in his two-part essay ‘On Impressionism’ (1914), Ford Madox Ford (then called Hueffer), overtly attempted to define Impressionism in a literary context: ‘Any piece of Impressionism, whether it be prose, or verse, or painting, or sculpture, is the record of the impression of a moment . . . not the corrected chronicle.’ For Ford, the business of Impressionism was to produce an ‘illusion’ of reality, in a similar way to Monet’s multiple misty scenes of haystacks or of Waterloo Bridge or Rouen Cathedral. Such series of images also foreshadow Virginia Woolf’s famous description of consciousness in her 1921 essay ‘Modern Fiction’, which also brings to mind Conrad’s earlier use of ‘misty halos’: ‘The mind receives a myriad impressions . . . From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms . . . [L]ife is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.’ It is this impressionistic vision which is frequently transposed into modernist writers’ fiction, where the world is perceived as not fixed or static, but fleeting, elusive, indefinite. Such writing often disregards chronology while offering streams of consciousness produced directly in the text, where we find series of ‘episodes’, glimpses into lives, places, minds, which we experience as well as visualise. There is a desire to break down the boundaries between fact and fiction, autobiography and narrative, fantasy and reality. In Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), which critics have called the first full-length novel written in an impressionistic way, it is the interior life of the characters and their myriad impressions that are presented during the course of one day: It was the moment between six and seven when every flower – roses, carnations, irises, lilac – glows; white, violet, red, deep orange; every flower 196

Interior monologue seems to burn by itself, softly, purely in the misty beds; and how she loved the grey-white moths spinning in and out, over the cherry pie, over the evening primroses!

This focus on an individual’s perception and consciousness, the gathering of impressions and the preoccupation with light and colour, turns Woolf’s novel into the literary equivalent of a Monet painting, recalling at the same time Søren Kierkegaard’s famous dictum, which encapsulates the essence of Impressionism: ‘Nothing is as swift as the blink of an eye, and yet it is commensurable with the content of the eternal.’ READING Bowler, Rebecca (2016) Literary Impressionism: Vision and Memory in Dorothy Richardson, Ford Madox Ford, H.D. and May Sinclair. London: Bloomsbury. McNeillie, Andrew (ed.) (1984) The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Volume 4: 1925 to 1928. London: Hogarth Press. Matz, Jesse (2001) Literary Impressionism and Modernist Aesthetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wolf, Norbert (2015) Impressionism: Reimagining Art. New York: Prestel.

Gerri Kimber

INTERIOR MONOLOGUE Although often conflated with stream of consciousness, interior monologue is a distinct literary technique by means of which a writer places the reader directly within the mind of a character, rendering the articulation of the thought process and giving access not only to interior psychology but to the private interiority unverbalised in the social realm. The definition of interior monologue and distinctions therein form part of the study of narratology. It is commonly accredited to Édouard Dujardin, whose 1887 novel Les lauriers sont coupés (We’ll to the Woods No More, 1938) sought to present interior life directly and without mediation through use of the technique; it grew popular in the modernist period as interest in the inner life and its depiction increased. Dujardin is commonly cited as an influence upon James Joyce, who was to become one of the foremost modernist practitioners of the technique, an oft-cited example of which is the monologue of Molly Bloom in the ‘Penelope’ episode of Ulysses (1922). Distinction can be drawn between direct and indirect interior monologue: the former is without narratorial intervention, while the latter presents the character’s psyche through narratorial insinuation 197

Isms into the narrative, whereby access to the interior monologue is mediated through the presence of the narrative voice. READING Banfield, Ann (1982) Unspeakable Sentences: Narration and Representation in the Language of Fiction. London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Tumanov, Vladimir (1997) Mind Reading: Unframed Direct Interior Monologue in European Fiction. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi.

Maria-Daniella Dick

ISMS ‘[A]ll artistic and cultural manifestations, from romanticism on, regularly tend to define and designate themselves as movements’, wrote Renato Poggioli in The Theory of the Avant-Garde (1968). Many such movements in modern art and writing came in the form of an ‘ism’, especially during the first three decades of the twentieth century when an unprecedented amount of avant-garde isms suddenly flooded the cultural field of Europe and beyond. Late nineteenth-century and turn-of-the-century precursors of this trend included symbolism, aestheticism, decadentism, naturalism, impressionism, fauvism and perhaps today lesser known movements like Parisian fumism and zutism. By far outnumbering these isms, however, are those associated with the so-called ‘historical avantgardes’ (Bürger 1984): the early twentieth-century movements of futurism, cubism, expressionism, dadaism and surrealism – and the more than fifty other avant-garde isms one critic discerned (Meschonnic 1988). Historical explanations of what incited this complex and rapid succession of isms, and of what set the various phases of this succession apart, place different accents. Yet most historians have tended to make sense of the various movements or isms in modern art and writing from a sociological perspective. Set against the background of the modern arts’ institutional history, the succession of modern isms displays an uninterrupted struggle of artists for more autonomy and freedom. The history of the plastic arts illustrates this perhaps most clearly. If Romanticism in all the arts had suggested that artists should be free to express themselves in whatever way they saw fit, painters and sculptors who did not quite meet the standards of academic art in France, for instance, had to wait for Napoleon III’s 1863 ‘Salon des Refusés’ to be offered a space by the state in which to present their work. With few exceptions all isms or movements launched during the second half the 198

Isms nineteenth century took root in institutions that developed alongside official, academic art. In fact, by the late nineteenth century various alternative, so-called ‘secessionist’ institutions had come to form themselves throughout Europe, from Paris and Brussels to Berlin and Vienna, which broke away entirely from state-run institutions and which at least in theory offered artists for the first time in history a space to produce art freely. As Cottington (2013) suggests, the many modernist avant-garde isms that emerged in the first decades of the twentieth century are to be seen as formations that further developed this trend. Less bureaucratised and less formalised than before, they installed an entirely privatised yet professional network of galleries, magazines and small publishing houses. Four features are commonly said to be shared by the diverse avant-garde movements or isms that made up this network. First, avant-garde isms generally were groups of predominantly young artists and writers belonging to the same generation. With few exceptions, including the one-man movements of sensationism (Fernando Pessoa), nunism (Pierre Albert-Birot) and instantaneism (Francis Picabia), avant-garde isms indeed were formed by groups of like-minded artists who, often for a brief stint, came to collaborate under the banner of a new art. Youth here played a key role, as those within the ranks of avant-garde isms often saw it as their task to further free their generation of externally imposed rules and fossilised orthodoxies in art. For this reason, too, avant-garde isms never quite came to form ‘schools’, which generally presuppose the criteria of tradition and authority, of a master and a single method. While internal struggles and issues of authority were certainly not alien to avant-garde isms, such struggles above all testify to isms’ cultivation of dissent and open-ended experiment rather than a tendency to centralise power or to legislate the production of art for once and for all. Second, avant-gardists pledging allegiance to an ism most often voiced their programmatic views through a specific set of media: the manifesto and the little magazine, group performances and exhibitions. French Surrealism, to take one famous example, launched its own (1924 and 1929) manifestos and ran its own magazines, the titles of which on occasion explicitly referred to their surrealist orientation, such as La révolution surrealiste and Le surréalisme au service de la révolution. In addition, the history of Surrealism is punctuated by small- as well as larger-scale performances and exhibitions that showcased experimental works by group members from different arts. Such collaborative performances and exhibitions, thirdly, not only illustrate how avant-garde isms 199

Isms were proficient professional enterprises. They also show how isms in a variety of ways often strove toward the (wagnerist) ideal of a gesamtkunstwerk or total artwork, collectively uniting different art forms (Van den Berg 2006). In some instances, as for example in Dutch constructivism (de stijl), it was considered essential that to this aim the specificity of individual art forms was first explored. Thus, in the magazine De Stijl, Dutch Constructivists first advocated the purism of media and art forms before contemplating their respective uses in more encompassing collaborative projects (White 2003). Finally, avant-garde isms proved very mobile, to a large extent because they were constrained so little by institutional concerns. Much like pop-up stores today, they could crop up anywhere provided there was a sufficient critical mass to adhere to them. Thus, while groups operating under the banner of Futurism first surfaced in Italy and Russia, other movements calling themselves Futurists emerged throughout Europe, the Americas and even in Asia, where a Japanese branch came to flourish as well. A near-global phenomenon by the 1930s (Fauchereau 2010), the spread of isms was by and large halted by the totalitarian turn in politics that incited World War II. After the war, however, other, late modernist isms would again emerge. READING Bürger, Peter (1984) Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Cottington, David (2013) The Avant-Garde. A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fauchereau, Serge (2010) Avant-gardes du XX-siècle. Arts et littérature 1905–1930. Paris: Flammarion. Meschonnic, Henri (1988) Modernité modernité. Paris: Gallimard. Poggioli, Renato (1968) The Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Gerald Fitzgerald. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Van den Berg, Hubert (2006) ‘Mapping Old Traces of the New. Towards a Historical Topography of Early Twentieth-Century Avant-Garde(s) in the European Cultural Field(s)’, Arcadia – International Journal of Literary Studies, 41 (2): 331–49. White, Michael (2003) De Stijl and Dutch Modernism. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Sascha Bru

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Jazz

J JAZZ A musical genre and art form indigenous to the United States. The word ‘jazz’ may have come into usage as early as 1915. The word ‘jass’, later ‘jazz’, turned up first in Chicago in the middle 1910s with an unprintable meaning, but later was associated in New Orleans with the notion of ‘speeding up’. The writer Ralph Ellison referred to jazz as an artistic counterpart to the American political system. New Orleans was the birthplace of jazz music and culture, and later, the music moved onwards to Chicago and New York. In New York, in neighbourhoods such as Harlem and Greenwich Village, writers and artists embraced jazz, including those associated with the harlem renaissance. Jazz pianist and composer Duke Ellington became a pivotal figure in the movement, performing in residency at the popular Harlem nightclub the Cotton Club in the 1920s, and influenced leading African American writers of the period such as Langston Hughes. The frankfurt school theorist Theodor W. Adorno provided a critique of jazz in the setting of Weimar Germany, and continued to do so throughout his career as a musicologist and philosopher of new music in exile in America, rendering it as a product of the culture industry. Jazz thrived in Weimar Germany and the quintessential metropolis of high modernity, Berlin. It was also performed extensively in cities such as Paris. The first international jazz festival was held in Paris in 1949, and featured trumpeter Miles Davis, who went on to pioneer Cool Jazz on the West Coast of the United States in cities such as Los Angeles following his return to America, setting a trend in jazz for the next decade. Bassist Charles Mingus emerged from such a musical setting in Los Angeles, and would further pioneer jazz modernism in the bohemia of New York’s Greenwich Village among beat generation poets, writers and artists. Jazz embraced the avant-garde in the second half of the twentieth century, in the works of musicians such as saxophonist and composer John Coltrane. The 1920s in the United States were known as the ‘Jazz Age’, when it embodied mass culture. Orchestral and big-band jazz became the mainstay in the 1930s. Jazz relying heavily on improvisation emerged in the 1940s with the bebop movement and its progenitors saxophonist Charlie Parker and trumpeter Dizzy 201

Jazz Age Gillespie. The latter also played a significant role in pioneering AfroCuban jazz, or jazz with distinctly Caribbean influences in rhythm and melody. Jazz played a role in the civil rights movement, and singer Billie Holiday performed one of the first songs of anti-racism and protest in jazz at Café Society in Greenwich Village in 1939, among a racially diverse audience. Duke Ellington wrote the jazz symphony Black, Brown and Beige and first performed it at New York’s Carnegie Hall in 1943, intending for it to depict the history of the modern African American experience. Jazz was often viewed as a music of democracy, especially in America and in Germany among the immediate years preceding the threat of National Socialism, as well as in other political movements and eras of totalitarianism that followed. READING Adorno, Theodor W. (2002) Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Appel, Alfred, Jr (2002) Jazz Modernism: From Ellington and Armstrong to Matisse and Joyce. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Giola, Ted (1997) The History of Jazz. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Dustin Garlitz

JAZZ AGE The period of history in the United States, and other nations, beginning in 1917 and ending in 1931. In American history, the 1920s were known as the Roaring Twenties or Golden Twenties, and those names are often used interchangeably with the Jazz Age. It was characterised by the proliferation of jazz in mass culture and among the social fabric of everyday life and public consciousness. F. Scott Fitzgerald pronounced that ‘The Jazz Age was over’ in a May 1931 letter to Maxwell Perkins. In November of that year Fitzgerald wrote an essay entitled ‘Echoes of the Jazz Age’ that reminisced over the carefree life lived by his generation in the early 1920s. It was Fitzgerald who coined the term the ‘Jazz Age’ in 1922 to describe the flashy, ‘anything goes’ era that emerged in America immediately following World war I. Fitzgerald labelled the period from the end of the war to the Great Depression as the Jazz Age, and chronicled the self-indulgence found in the era in many of his works, including The Beautiful and the Damned, The Great Gatsby and Tales from the Jazz Age. 202

Jazz Age The Jazz Age was the age of the musical soloist, and immediately followed early New Orleans Jazz. The geography of the Jazz Age places its start in New Orleans, with a move onwards to Chicago (once the jazz club Storyville closed in New Orleans’ Red Light District in 1917) and finally arrival in New York. Such was the path of Louis Armstrong. Armstrong did not arrive in Chicago until 1922, launching the Jazz Age at full maturity. Armstrong had believed that New Orleans was the capital of jazz until arriving in Chicago, where he was shocked by the level of musicianship of his colleagues and which he thought of as representing advancements in the state of the art form. In New York, two paradigmatic Jazz Age neighbourhoods were Harlem and Greenwich Village, with establishments such as the Cotton Club in the former existing as a venue where the new music was performed on a nightly basis. With the onset of the Great Depression in 1929, the cabaret and record business suffered severely, signalling the period’s decline. The Jazz Age was also a period when white patrons frequented jazz clubs to listen to African American performers such as Armstrong and Duke Ellington (in residency at the Cotton Club). In general, the Jazz Age intersected with the harlem renaissance. African American Langston Hughes was a jazz age writer and the central figure of the Harlem Renaissance. His success represented the increased role of African Americans in the era. Another popular writer of the Jazz Age was Ernest Hemingway, whose portrait of the ‘lost generation’ in novels such as The Sun Also Rises (1926) characterised the era for those living abroad. In addition to the lost generation of expatriates, performers such as Josephine Baker represented the Jazz Age abroad in cities such as Paris and was associated with one of the most vibrant and sexually liberated popular art forms of the era. READING Appel, Alfred, Jr (2002) Jazz Modernism: From Ellington and Armstrong to Matisse and Joyce. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Giola, Ted (1997) The History of Jazz. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shaw, Arnold (1987) The Jazz Age: Popular Music in the 1920’s. New York: Oxford University Press.

Dustin Garlitz

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Kino-Eye

K KINO-EYE The Russian filmmaker Dziga Vertov, chief proponent of Kino-Eye, a technique of Soviet formalist documentary, together with his filmmaker comrades, or kinocs, pioneered a cinema of accelerated montage, variable speed and innovative camera placement which eliminated script, actors and staging of any kind. In his writing and filmmaking of the mid-1920s, Vertov advocated the importance of capturing unaltered everyday life, as against the stagey illusions and bourgeois fairy tales of the narrative film. This documentary aesthetic is combined with the spirit of formal experiment sweeping through the wider Soviet avant-garde and the desire to renew perception by cross-breeding the human with the mechanical. The Kino-Eye enlarges microscopic phenomena ordinarily invisible to the human eye. It slows time, subjecting movement to close analysis, while associative montage editing carefully arranges visual material according to theme and idea. This poetic documentary filmmaking would also serve a political end, teaching the audience to see from new, unexpected perspectives the often invisible world of the everyday, and to decode social relations, labour, the body and technology. The influence of Vertov’s poetic, montage-based political documentary is most powerfully felt in post-war France, in the Cinéma Vérité of Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin, in Jean-Luc Godard’s post-Nouvelle Vague Dziga Vertov Group, and in the film essays of Chris Marker. The Kino-Eye method laid the groundwork for Vertov’s masterpiece, Man With a Movie Camera (1929), voted in the 2014 Sight and Sound poll of international filmmakers and critics as the greatest documentary ever made. READING Hicks, Jeremy (2007) Dziga Vertov: Defining Documentary Film. London: I. B. Tauris. Vertov, Dziga (1985) Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson, trans. Kevin O’Brien. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Anthony Paraskeva

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Kitsch

KITSCH The word kitsch emerged in nineteenth-century Germany, pejoratively describing sentimental, cheap and lowbrow cultural products, especially commercial, mass-produced ones. The term was taken up by American art critic Clement Greenberg in his influential 1939 essay ‘Avant-garde and Kitsch’, which attempted to relate the tendency towards abstraction in modern art to the conditions of industrial mass culture in modernity, of which kitsch was seen as symptomatic. For Greenberg, key characteristics of kitsch products are that they require little effort on the part of the viewer to understand them, that they offer only pre-digested clichéd meanings, and that they are formulaic, toothless copies of genuine culture. In contrast, according to Greenberg, modern art places greater demands of time and cultural expertise on its viewers, inevitably perplexing and alienating those who do not possess such resources, particularly the industrial working classes. In Greenberg’s account, avantgarde artists (by which he really meant formalist modernists) do not deliberately set out to alienate such viewers but rather act to preserve art’s autonomy from the debased mass culture. They do so by increasingly retreating into a concentration on the processes of artistic mediums themselves at the expense of engagement with subject matter or formal values recognisably derived from common experience. If, for Greenberg, both a sentimental magazine cover by Norman Rockwell and a cubist painting by Georges Braque are products of the same culture, they stand in his view as irreconcilably different responses to that culture, the former capitulating to its demands, the latter cutting off all associations with it, except those necessitated by financial reliance on bourgeois patronage. ‘AvantGarde and Kitsch’ was published in the marxist journal Partisan Review and was written as a contribution to the Marxist debate on modernism and realism, defending the necessity of abstraction in the absence of a genuine socialist society. A more detailed elaboration of this position was made by Theodor W. Adorno who argued that mass culture was managed by a culture industry which functioned to pacify and mislead its consumers. Walter Benjamin, though echoing Adorno’s and Greenberg’s shared view of kitsch as pre-digested mass culture (it is ‘art with a 100 percent, absolute and instantaneous availability for consumption’, he writes in The Arcades Project), nonetheless saw progressive art’s task to be the utilisation of kitsch’s closeness to mass experience while 205

Kulchur simultaneously overcoming its merely affirmative character. This line of argument, in which art and kitsch are seen as mutually implicated rather than irreparably opposed and hope is held out for mass experience, has been given credence in many accounts of kitsch produced after Greenberg and Adorno, whose views are often characterised as narrow and elitist, as overlooking the complex interconnections between modernism and mass culture, and as wrongly reading the consumption of popular culture as merely passive and hollow. If mass culture’s value has been reappraised in much critical writing since the 1960s, so kitsch returned with a vengeance in much Pop art, with its appetite for the popular and mass-produced. It loomed large too in the cultural postmodernism of the 1970s and 1980s, as part of a larger renunciation of modernist aesthetic principles and an ironic celebration of bad taste. Whether such a return is art’s revenge against the banalities of ‘the culture industry’ or represents the extension of kitsch’s empire to include high art remains subject to debate. READING Adorno, Theodor W. (1991) The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture. London: Routledge. Crow, Thomas (1996) ‘Modernism and Mass Culture in the Visual Arts’, in Crow, Modern Art in the Common Culture. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, pp. 3–37. Dorfles, Gillo (ed.) (1969) Kitsch: The World of Bad Taste. London: Studio Vista. Greenberg, Clement (1961) ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ (1939), in Greenberg, Art and Culture. London: Thames & Hudson, pp. 3–21. Huyssen, Andreas (1987) After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Varnedoe, Kirk and Adam Gopnik (eds) (1991) Modern Art and Popular Culture: Readings in High and Low. New York: Harry N. Abrams & Museum of Modern Art.

Dominic Paterson

KULCHUR The term comes directly from the title of Ezra Pound’s 1938 Guide to Kulchur, probably his major prose work. ‘Kulchur’ embodies the complexities of a concept that claims, with the tongue-in-cheek phonetic transcription, to undermine established highbrow intellectualism. A reorganisation of literary tradition along a different political and economic agenda, ‘Kulchur’ retains the initial ‘K’, 206

L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E an echo of a higher German culture, fusing the subversive and the elitist in what is Pound’s trademark take on the intellectual world. The alternative concepts of Confucian philosophy, the ideogrammic method, the emblem of the rose in the steel dust – the ‘forma, the immortal concetto, the concept, the dynamic form which is like the rose pattern driven into the dead iron-filings by the magnet’ (Pound 1952: 150) – and the didactic dimension of paideuma, mesh together to produce the master notion that emerges from Pound’s works of the 1930s and dominates the rest of his career. Linking his ‘Kulchur’ to the Kulturmorphologie of anthropologist Leo Frobenius, Pound grounds his cultural vision in the demand for a direct engagement with the concrete and the detail, an archaeological approach to documentary evidence. The belief in art as artefact underlies this process, and precedence is given to the silenced and forgotten traces and texts. However, ‘Kulchur’ is also the ‘triumph of total meaning’ (Pound 1952: 52) and the core of a totalitarian ideology in keeping with Pound’s political commitments of the time. READING Nicholls, Peter (1984) Ezra Pound: Politics, Economics, and Writing: A Study of the Cantos. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. Pound, Ezra (1952) Guide to Kulchur. New York: New Directions.

Hélène Aji

L L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E With the letters of the word spaced by equal signs, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E is primarily the title of an American avantgarde poetry founded by Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andrews and published between 1978 and 1981. The poems and essays appearing in the journal come from authors that started writing in the late 1960s, raising major questions about the conditions of writing and the emergence of master discourses. The equal signs underline the status of the letters and their combination into the formation of words. Formally, it breaks the integrity of the word and encourages the reader to become aware of the artificiality of the sign. In continuity with this questioning of the sign, and in keeping with the idea that 207

L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E an echo of a higher German culture, fusing the subversive and the elitist in what is Pound’s trademark take on the intellectual world. The alternative concepts of Confucian philosophy, the ideogrammic method, the emblem of the rose in the steel dust – the ‘forma, the immortal concetto, the concept, the dynamic form which is like the rose pattern driven into the dead iron-filings by the magnet’ (Pound 1952: 150) – and the didactic dimension of paideuma, mesh together to produce the master notion that emerges from Pound’s works of the 1930s and dominates the rest of his career. Linking his ‘Kulchur’ to the Kulturmorphologie of anthropologist Leo Frobenius, Pound grounds his cultural vision in the demand for a direct engagement with the concrete and the detail, an archaeological approach to documentary evidence. The belief in art as artefact underlies this process, and precedence is given to the silenced and forgotten traces and texts. However, ‘Kulchur’ is also the ‘triumph of total meaning’ (Pound 1952: 52) and the core of a totalitarian ideology in keeping with Pound’s political commitments of the time. READING Nicholls, Peter (1984) Ezra Pound: Politics, Economics, and Writing: A Study of the Cantos. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. Pound, Ezra (1952) Guide to Kulchur. New York: New Directions.

Hélène Aji

L L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E With the letters of the word spaced by equal signs, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E is primarily the title of an American avantgarde poetry founded by Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andrews and published between 1978 and 1981. The poems and essays appearing in the journal come from authors that started writing in the late 1960s, raising major questions about the conditions of writing and the emergence of master discourses. The equal signs underline the status of the letters and their combination into the formation of words. Formally, it breaks the integrity of the word and encourages the reader to become aware of the artificiality of the sign. In continuity with this questioning of the sign, and in keeping with the idea that 207

L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E there is an arbitrariness to the functioning of language, the texts also undermine the conventions of grammar and syntactic organisation, the composition of paragraphs and the delusions of transparent discourse. In the political context of feminism and the rise of minorities, the Language poets debunk ideologies that become enforced in the very structures of language, and attempt to evidence their surreptitious domination over the discourses prevalent in the mainstream sociocultural sphere. The poets refuse the notion of a school of Language Poetry, and function as a loose network of similarly preoccupied authors with differing poetic practices. The main poets associated with the term include Leslie Scalapino, Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, Ron Silliman, Barrett Watten, Lyn Hejinian, Bob Perelman, Rae Armantrout, Carla Harryman, Clark Coolidge, Hannah Weiner, Susan Howe, Tom Mandel, Kit Robinson, Nick Piombino and Tina Darragh, who produce texts based on disjunctive modes of writing and a focus on the materiality of the sign. Their poetics is, however, strongly linked to their modernist predecessors or nearcontemporaries, but with a preference for less central figures than Ezra Pound or T. S. Eliot; the mentors of the Language poets are rather William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, Louis Zukofsky and the objectivists, as well as, among a younger generation, Jackson MacLow. The resulting poetry is deliberately challenging since it aims at emphasising the role of the reader in the very production of a text’s meaning(s). Influenced by the methods at work at black mountain college in the 1950s, notably under the aegis of John Cage and Merce Cunningham, as well as by the experiments of the French oulipo, the Language poets frequently resort to procedural writing, along mathematical formulae or randomised modes of composition, instead of inspirational writing that would stem from the author’s presumed original genius. With the ten volumes of The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography, some of the Language poets rewrite the history of their network around the San Francisco poetry readings in which many participated in the 1970s and which were instrumental in the recognition of their works. The history is thus that of a group that bridged the East–West chasm, beyond the cosmopolitan localism of the San Francisco Renaissance or the new york school, on the aesthetic and political agenda against the common in communication and its dictatorship over the reader’s mind.

208

Late Modernism READING Perloff, Marjorie (1996) Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Silliman, Ron (ed.) (1986) In the American Tree. Orono, ME: The National Poetry Foundation. Watten, Barrett (ed.) (2006–10) The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography, 10 vols. Detroit: Mode A.

Hélène Aji

LATE MODERNISM The term ‘Late Modernism’ is relatively recent, and one for which an agreed timeframe has yet to be decided. It is generally used to denote certain experimental, avant-garde or possibly post-avantgarde literatures written between the late 1920s and the mid-to-late 1940s, in which a direct, albeit often conflicted response to the legacy of high modernism is dramatised. One of the first critics to have made the case for a distinctly ‘late’ modernist literature is Tyrus Miller, for whom lateness is as much about spiritual and intellectual belatedness and a sense of depletion as it is about chronological succession. Harold Bloom’s conception of an authorial ‘anxiety of influence’ regarding one’s literary inheritance springs to mind in this context. According to Miller, the triumphs of Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and T. S. Eliot left the sons and daughters of High Modernism with a seemingly impossible task on their hands, of how to transcend such prodigious forebears and to make literature (once again) new. Miller claims that they did so by turning their belatedness into a form of intelligent satire intended to emphasise the relative poverty of their own cultural environment, during a period of unheralded global conflict, militarisation and technocratic advancement. Satirising the redemptive and ultimately anthropocentric pieties of High Modernism (redemptive epiphany and spiritual authentication through art and form), the Late Modernists sought to debunk the myth of artistic authenticity and originality in a belated, spiritually depleted world. While Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno analysed the rise of mass consumption and mechanical reproduction in critical theory, Miller’s Late Modernists satirised the advent of a ‘generalised mimeticism’ (a process whereby imitation and replication breached the limited spheres of art and ritual to become a pervasive social principle) through literature. In the literary-philosophical culture of Late Modernism, the rise of 209

Lettrism s­ imulacra and spectacle leads to the satirical erosion of mimesis’ most basic categorical and ontological distinctions, between subject and object, living and dead, the real and the represented. A weakening of symbolic form combined with projections of liminality are symptoms of this theme. Archetypal writers in this vein include Djuna Barnes, Samuel Beckett, Wyndham Lewis and Mina Loy. A sense of loss of faith, myth and reassurance, pervades their writing. But what makes this loss idiosyncratic for Late Modernism is its ironic, wholly desublimated handling. nihilism for the Late Modernists is cause for mirthless laughter not forlorn sobbing. This is no more evident than in Beckett, where even the very contours of consciousness and self-identity are a lost illusion. Indeed the ironic snicker of the Beckettian universe encapsulates the philosophico-rhetorical core of Late Modernism, its relation to High Modernism and its successive filiation, postmodernism. In the absence of basic certainties, of a minimal moral, spiritual or ontological ground from which to stake one’s position, perceptions or opinions, even sobbing or howling are presumptuous. Self-reflexive laughter presents the broadly postmodernist knowledge that nothing is certain and that nothing can be done about it. READING Miller, Tyrus (1999) Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts Between the World Wars. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Sophie Vlacos

LETTRISM Lettrism, or Letterism, was a multimedia avant-garde art movement originating in 1940s Paris which explored the visual and sonic thresholds of language, focusing especially on invented language systems in which letters were assigned new values, and incorporating new phonetic and pictographic symbols. The movement was founded by the Romanian artist and poet Isidore Isou with Gabriel Pomerand in 1945, and was spearheaded by Isou and a shifting group of associates throughout the 1940s to the 1960s and beyond. In 1951–2 this group included Maurice Lemaître, François Dufrêne, Gil J. Wolman, Jean-Louis Brau, Guy Debord and others. Lettrism was heavily indebted to dada and surrealism, though Isou saw the movement as formally revolutionary. Notwithstanding its late status in relation to many European avant-gardes, Lettrism predicted many of the concerns of concrete poetry, and also spawned various offshoots, 210

Little magazines many of which achieved greater notoriety than the movement itself. In 1952 Debord, Wolman and others split from the group around Isou to form the Lettrist International, later incorporated into the new movement of Situationism in 1957. In the early 1950s Wolman, Dufrêne and Brau started performing vocal compositions which moved beyond the phoneme-based sound structures of Lettrism, thereby inaugurating ‘Ultralettrism’, a key movement in sound poetry in the 1950s–1970s. READING Bohn, Willard (2001) Modern Visual Poetry. Newark, DE and London: University of Delaware Press. Foster, Stephen C. (ed.) (1983) Lettrisme: Into the Present, special issue of Visible Language, 17: 3.

Greg Thomas

LITTLE MAGAZINES One of the main venues for the publishing of modernism across literature, music, drama and the visual arts. Many little magazines were also major textual examples of modernist practice, displaying experimentation and innovations both of form and content. Variations upon the format of the modernist little magazine not only appear across Europe and the United States but can also be located across the world, indicating the global nature of such publications. However, it is only relatively recently that researchers in modernist studies have begun to seriously analyse the role and significance of the magazines themselves, rather than quarrying them merely for the work of famous contributors or interpreting them solely as the vehicles of their editors. Scholars have long known that, for example, James Joyce’s Ulysses was partly serialised in The Little Review (1914–29) before book publication in 1922 or that T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land first appeared in October 1922 in the British magazine The Criterion (1922–39; also edited by Eliot) and in the same month in the American magazine The Dial (1920–9), both prior to the book publication of the poem two months later. However, reading such classics of modernism within the pages of magazines opens up these familiar texts to surprising links and associations with the rich and varied material found elsewhere in the periodicals: reading Ulysses in The Little Review (from March 1918 to December 1920) means one is reading a different textual object than the book as published by Shakespeare & Company. Little magazines are increasingly being viewed as among the primary texts 211

Little magazines of the many movements of modernism, an approach that is being encouraged by several digitisation projects devoted to making many little magazines freely available online. The Anglophone term, ‘little magazine’, seems to be a translation of the French term, petite revue. This referred to short-lived magazines associated with the symbolist movement in France in the later half of the nineteenth century and which were first discussed critically by Remy de Gourmont in an essay and bibliography of Les Petites Revues (1900). The first Anglophone use of the epithet ‘little’ to denote a specific type of periodical was F. W. Faxon’s guide to ‘Ephemeral Bibelots’ (1903), which lists hundreds of such publications in the late nineteenth century, mainly in the United States. In both instances the sense of being ‘little’ seems to have been used mainly in opposition to long-established or serious-minded literary and cultural reviews (e.g. Edinburgh Review) and which were seen to be guardians of literary taste and judgement. ‘Littleness’ thus referred both to the limited scale or aims of such magazines, as well as to their smaller circulations, formats or brief publication histories. Crucially, they were seen as oppositional to mainstream magazines and established artistic culture, becoming vehicles for unorthodox opinions and aesthetic practices. In the first decades of the twentieth century this oppositional quality came to be a key criterion for what motivated many ‘little magazines’ and, in particular, they were positioned against commercial magazines that were perceived not to be interested in publishing experimental or controversial material. Thus in magazines such as The New Freewoman/egoist (1913–19), The Masses (1911–17) or The Little Review we note an overlap between challenging literary materials and the publication of avant-garde political discussions of feminism, socialism or anarchism. Little magazines were also often used as the mouthpieces of particular artistic movements, such as Blast (1914–15) and vorticism, or Poesia (1905–9) and futurism. This tendency is most notable in European magazines, where a proliferation of such publications promoted transnational movements such as dada, e.g. 391 (1919–24) in Paris, Der Dada (1919–20) in Berlin, Cabaret Voltaire (1916) in Zurich. The geography of little magazine publication exemplifies the international spread of modernism, with Futurist magazines, for instance, appearing across Western and Central Europe. A number of little magazines in the 1920s and 1930s were also strongly linked to expatriate writers and artists, as found in American magazines 212

Little magazines published for a time in Europe (e.g. Broom (1921–4) in Rome and Berlin; Gargoyle (1921–2) and This Quarter (1925–32) in Paris), Ford Madox Ford’s transatlantic review (1924) based in Paris, or in Edward Gordon Craig’s theatre magazine, The Mask (1908–29), published in Florence. In the 1940s members of the European avant-garde were central to American magazines that developed modern art in the USA, such as André Breton’s VVV (1942–4); some American magazines also displayed strong regional affiliations, e.g. The Double Dealer (1921–9) in New Orleans or The Midland (1915–33) in the Midwest), while others saw themselves as exemplifying the international claims of the avant-garde (e.g. Eugene Jolas’s transition (1927–38)). Much recent research upon little magazines has embraced a more general historicist and materialist turn in modernist studies, and modern periodical studies have begun to outline a methodology for understanding aspects of little magazines such as advertising, illustrations and editorials, in addition to actual published contents. Such an approach considers the periodical codes (derived from Jerome McGann’s concept of bibliographic codes) of magazines as seen in features such as typeface, layout, paper quality, print runs and periodicity of publication. Another part of the thrust of current research aims to integrate the ‘little magazine’ into a wider spectrum of periodical publication within modernism, studying how modernism was discussed in mass, mainstream or middlebrow magazines (such as Vanity Fair, The Smart Set or T.P.’s Weekly) rather than being the exclusive preserve of the ‘little magazine’. Such research might also consider how certain little magazines tried to adapt strategies of publicity and advertising used by commercial magazines, as found in Mark Morrison’s work on The Masses and The Little Review. Two particular challenges for studying little magazines as the primary texts of modernism involve how to interpret multi-authored texts (and to understand how much of a controlling role the editor has in the overall vision of the magazine), and how to devise methodologies for dealing with the extensive range and size of the material generated when studying an entire run of a magazine. For example, A. R. Orage’s The New Age was an important weekly magazine between 1907 and 1922, producing thousands of pages of material and numerous contributors. The sheer number and extent of the little magazine thus ensures that research into its significance for ­modernism will provide rich resources for the future. 213

The Living Newspaper READING Brooker, Peter and Andrew Thacker (eds) (2009–13) The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, 3 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Churchill, Suzanne W. and Adam McKible (eds) (2007) Little Magazines and Modernism: New Approaches. Aldershot: Ashgate. Morrisson, Mark (2001) The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception 1905–1920. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Scholes, Robert and Clifford Wulfman (2010) Modernism in the Magazines: An Introduction. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Digital editions of modernist magazines: Modernist Journals Project Blue Mountain Project Modernist Magazines Project

Andrew Thacker

THE LIVING NEWSPAPER A popular form of political theatre in America in the 1930s. Being didactic, topical and fast-paced, it developed many ideas from the workers’ theatre movement active in Europe in the 1910s–1920s, including the Workers’ Theatre League’s productions in Germany, the Red Army performances of agitprop sketches in Russia, and the Blue Blouses troupe’s shows featuring lantern slides and snippets of film. The Living Newspaper theatre, cretated by Joseph Losey and Hallie Flanagan, was meant to discuss as objectively as possible many topical issues. Losey’s 1936 contibutions to the Federal Theatre Project Living Newspapers productions include Triple-A Plowed Under and Injunction Granted! They were inspired by Soviet theatre directors Vsevolod Meyerhold and Nikolai Okhlopkov whom Losey met in Moscow in March 1935. In order to engage the audience, Losey used the flexible space that could be altered for each production. Flanagan also popularised Russian theatrical innovations that she observed in Russia in 1926–7 and in 1931. She applied Meyerhold’s techniques, including biomechanics, to her 1931 play Can You Hear Their Voices? Her 1932 play We Demand is another example of the political drama devoted to the unemployment issue. In 1935 American journalist Morris Watson founded the New York Living Newspaper Unit to enable unemployed journalists to 214

Logopoeia work for a documentary theatre (see newspapers). Although Arthur Arent, its chief playwright, was praised for his use of dramatic symbolism and dialectical juxtapositions, the unit was short-lived. The Federal Theatre Project was also closed in 1939 by an act of Congress. READING Casson, John W. (2000) ‘Living Newspaper: Theatre and Therapy’, Drama Review, 44 (2): 107–22. Gardner, Colin (2014) ‘The Losey–Moscow Connection: Experimental Soviet Theatre and the Living Newspaper’, New Theatre Quarterly, 30 (3): 249–68. McDermott, Douglas (1965) ‘The Living Newspaper as a Dramatic Form’, Modern Drama, 8 (1): 83–94.

Alexandra Smith

LOGOPOEIA Derived from the Greek, and meaning the poetics of language, ‘logopoeia’ is one of three related terms used by Ezra Pound in his definition of poetry in ABC of Reading (1934). Related to ‘phanopoeia’ and ‘melopoeia’, ‘logopoeia’ can be seen as the third degree on a scale of increasing poetic complexity. It is preoccupied with the combination of words into clusters that will impress the reader’s imagination, and thus corresponds to Pound’s more generally associative method whereby elements that might not be commonly linked together, and that might fail to cohere into a stabilised whole, are set in a shared context and consequently produce new meanings. Taking the risk of ‘using the word in some special relation to “usage”’ (Pound 1961: 37), the poet responds to the literary demand of the highest possible charge of meaning for words. In its most radical instances, ‘logopoeia’ entails problematic syntactic practices, parataxis, and the systematic use of juxtaposition. In Pound’s writings, it also implies the exploration of languages other than English, and the insertion of foreign words into the texture of the poem. The foreign words, all the more so when they are also in a non-Roman alphabet, crystallise the mystical vision of language as endlessly generative. READING Pound, Ezra (1961) ABC of Reading. London: Faber. Rabaté, Jean-Michel (1986) Language, Sexuality and Ideology in Ezra Pound’s Cantos. London: Macmillan.

Hélène Aji 215

Machine

M MACHINE By the end of the nineteenth century, the legacy of the Industrial Revolution had turned the machine from a means of production into a sociocultural icon. To the modernist artists the machine offers itself as an impersonal model and an alternative to aesthetic convention, if also viewed with certain distrust. T. E. Hulme, for example, hailed the advent of abstract aesthetics, yet feared that machines would take too much credit for it. The machine is most explicitly embraced by the avant-garde, epitomised by futurism in Italy and vorticism in England, as a radical commitment to the future opened by technology. war did much to reinvest the perception of the machine with suspicion, turning its potential for impersonality into dehumanisation and death, both literal and cultural, but also political because complicit with the oppressive management of the human mode of production by the forces of consumer capitalism. Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936) is a poignant parody of such mechanical dehumanisation. It did not deter Ezra Pound, however, who continued to idealise machine parts in his pamphlet ‘Machine Art’ (1930) as the very natural poetic object that had eluded his imagist project. READING Hulme, T. E. (1998) ‘Modern Art and its Philosophy’ [1914], in Selected Writings, ed. Patrick McGuiness. Manchester: Carcanet Press. Lewis, Wyndham et al. (1998) ‘Long Live the Vortex’ [1918], in Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Olga Taxidou and Jane Goldman (eds), Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Pound, Ezra (1996) Machine Art and Other Writings: The Lost Thought of the Italian Years. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Fabio Vericat

MADELEINE In Du côté de chez Swann (Swann’s Way) the first volume of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time, 1913–27), the narrator recalls the experience of drinking a tisane to alleviate the winter cold, at the urging of his mother; with it is served a small scalloped cake or petite madeleine, untasted since childhood. 216

Manifesto Soaked in the tea, the taste of this morsel unlocks a fleeting sensation that is the involuntary memory of his past in Combray and from that ‘madeleine’ Proust’s epic of modernism proceeds. Involuntary memory is distinct from voluntary memory in that it arises unbidden and provides access to a different order of time in which the past can be recovered in the present. The madeleine thus signifies both the evanescence and crystallisation of involuntary memory of the past, the subsequent search for which propels the narrative across its seven volumes. Its perfume thereafter scents the century, functioning as a lure to thinkers and readers of Proust, such as Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, Maurice Blanchot, Roland Barthes, Gérard Genette, Gilles Deleuze, Julia Kristeva and Leo Bersani. Each bites the madeleine, leading to some of the most notable theoretical expositions of modernism: of the work of art, of narrative voice and of the relationship between time and memory, as well as the nature of time itself. READING Beckett, Samuel (1999) Proust: And Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit. London: Calder. Deleuze, Gilles (2000) Proust and Signs, trans. Richard Howard. London: Athlone Press. Doubrovsky, Serge (1986), Writing and Fantasy in Proust: La Place de la Madeleine, trans. C. M. Bove. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Mavor, Carol (2008) Reading Boyishly. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Maria-Daniella Dick

MANIFESTO The manifesto, or more accurately the art manifesto, an offshoot of the political genre which dates back to the sixteenth century, is a relatively recent phenomenon. Inseparable from modernity, born into an age of upheaval, it reflects the crisis and chaos even while insisting on the power of artists to bring about change in the world. The exact date of its birth is often given as 20 February 1909, the day ‘The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism’ appeared as a paid advertisement on the front page of Le Figaro. In fact its origins are less certain, and its emergence more gradual. Jean Moréas’s ‘Symbolist Manifesto’ (1886), which also appeared in Le Figaro, is one of many examples that show the art manifesto developing gradually under the auspices of late-nineteenth century movements such as s­ymbolism, 217

Manifesto and l’art pour l’art. And then further back still there is the Ur-manifesto, political or otherwise: Marx and Engels’ The Communist Manifesto (1848). But it remains true that the first manifesto of futurism, and the dozens more Futurist manifestos that followed in quick succession – on painting, photography, sculpture, cinema, literature, architecture, music, food, clothing, theatre and even lust – set the standard and established the template for the type of manifesto that would become indispensable to the twentiethcentury avant-garde for the next decade and beyond. In her introduction to Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto (1967), Avital Ronell states: ‘Sometimes you have to scream to be heard.’ F. T. Marinetti, Tristan Tzara, Wyndham Lewis and other manifesto pioneers electrified the nineteenth-century model of Marx and Engels using the prophetic voices and philosophies of Walt Whitman and Friedrich Nietzsche, Georges Sorel and Henri Bergson (see bergsonism). Each movement had its dedicated propagandist: Marinetti for Futurism, Ezra Pound for imagism, Wyndham Lewis for vorticism, Tristan Tzara for dada, André Breton for surrealism, and so on. The aim was – and is – to appear wholly original and shockingly new, to cause a violent rupture and break with the past, while at the same time ruthlessly pillaging past movements, the way that Situationism in the 1960s and punk in the 1970s appropriated Dada’s anarchocomic nihilism. Particularly in the years before and during World war I, movements were in fierce competition with one another and had to fight to carve out a niche for themselves. Each ‘ism’ set out its stall with an in-house publication – a little magazine – and the manifestos usually contained therein. If the ‘ism’ can be seen as an artistic brand, the manifesto is its marketing tool. Potential converts (for this is what the manifesto seeks, even as it appears to shock and repel) are informed of the nature and characteristics of the brand identity through the manifesto’s stated aims and embodiment of artistic values. ‘Courage, audacity and revolt will be essential elements of our poetry’, is one of the tenets laid out in ‘The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism’. Since the manifesto is a highly self-conscious, self-referential form, it also acknowledges this affinity to advertising. Dada warns (in ‘Dada Excites Everything’, 1921): ‘Beware of forgeries!’ The language and techniques of advertising were adopted by Marinetti, and other manifesto writers followed his example. He wrote of ‘the pleasure of being booed’, and in his manifestos, letters and performances, he begged his audiences and critics to attack him. Many obliged, aestheticism

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Manifesto including the members of Vorticism, turning Futurist happenings into noisy, chaotic events. Taking to heart the old adage that there is no such thing as bad press, Marinetti used provocation in the form of manifestos to generate hype. Rhetorical bombast and the tricks of advertising are two defining characteristics of the manifesto after Marinetti, but there are many other common features. In terms of length, brevity is usually preferable to loquacity: most manifestos are two or three pages long, with a preamble and a list of numbered tenets. There are examples at both extremes: Stanley Brouwn’s ‘A Short Manifesto’ (1964) and Gilbert & George’s ‘The Laws of Sculptors’ (1969) push the limits at one end, while longer manifestos often tend toward the fanaticism of Solanas or Ted Kaczinski at the other. The exceptions tend to prove the rule: as in advertising, it is important to give just enough information without losing the interest of the audience. In terms of visual effects, the Russian constructivists were among the first to use typography to help convey the radical content of their manifestos, closely followed by the bold headline typography of the Vorticist magazine Blast (1914–15). The ‘Futurist Synthesis of the War’ (1914), meanwhile, depicts a diagram of a plan of attack, with the ‘Futurist’ Allied Forces overcoming the ‘Passéist’ Axis Powers. Performance is another key element of the genre, from James McNeill Whistler’s delivery of ‘The Ten O’Clock’ lecture (1885) to genteel London theatre-goers to the declamation of the first Dada manifestos in the cabaret Voltaire (1916). The narrative preamble that begins both The Communist Manifesto (‘A spectre is haunting Europe’) and ‘The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism’ (‘We stayed up all night, my friends and I’) builds on the dramatic element to increase engagement. Finally, the distribution of manifestos extends beyond little magazines to posters, advertisements, handbills and other formats. Marinetti famously hurled his manifestos from balconies and speeding automobiles; Lars von Trier’s film collective, Dogme 95, paid homage to the Futurists by scattering leaflets printed with their ‘Vow of Chastity’ into the audience of a cinema conference in Paris. Manifesto production slowed somewhat following what Mary Ann Caws called the ‘manifesto moment’ of 1909–19. However, the continuing relevance of the genre in the 1920s may be seen in André Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism (1924) and transition magazine’s ‘Revolution of the Word’ (1929), and in the 1930s with increasingly politicised manifestos such as Breton, Diego Rivera and Leon Trotsky’s Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art 219

The Marionette (1938). Manifestos continued to proclaim movements throughout the twentieth century, and in the twenty-first century the manifesto has experienced a popular revival with the rise of social media (to which it is well suited) and the Occupy movements, and from an institutional perspective with a proliferation of scholarly studies and events such as the 2008 Manifesto Marathon at the Serpentine Gallery in London. READING Lyon, Janet (1999) Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso (2008) Critical Writings, ed. Gunter Berghaus, trans. Doug Thompson. New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux. Puchner, Martin (2006) Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant Gardes. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Solanas, Valerie ([1968] 2004) SCUM Manifesto, intro. Avital Ronell. London: Verso. Somigli, Luca (2003) Legitimizing the Artist: Manifesto Writing and European Modernism, 1885–1915. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Winkiel, Laura (2008) Modernism, Race, and Manifestos. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Julian Hanna

THE MARIONETTE The marionette has particular significance for modernist theatre and modernist writing more generally. From the early writing of Arthur Symons, William Archer and Oscar Wilde to the manifestos of futurism, constructivism and dada, the marionette becomes a trope that at once can connect modernist experiment to the irreverent, carnivalesque popular tradition and to the possibilities presented by technology, as evidenced in the many reworkings of the automaton. In a search for non-representational and non-psychological acting the marionette both becomes a model to emulate and represents a process of production that feeds into modernist schools of actor training. From Heinrich von Kleist’s seminal essay ‘On the Marionette Theatre’ (1810) to Edward Gordon Craig’s ‘The Actor and the Übermarionette’ (1909), the fascination with marionettes persists in the numerous plays for puppets written from the 1880s onwards (by Maurice Maeterlinck and Alfred Jarry among others), and in the quest for a non-self-conscious form. 220

Marxism In the visual and literary arts the marionette offers modes of figuration and character representation that do not rely on depth and psychology but on abstraction and stylisation, as evidenced in Pablo Picasso’s numerous Commedia dell’arte inspired paintings that draw on the puppet traditions of Southern Italy and on the writings on puppets in the work of Joseph Conrad and Djuna Barnes. The marionette theatres of Southern Italy, the Wayang puppets of Java, the Ottoman Karagöz shadow puppets, the Bunraku of Japan and the Punch and Judy shows, all provide sources of influence in the quest for stylised acting, and the figurative and abstract representation of the human form and character. READING Jurkowski, Henryk (2014) Aspects of Puppet Theatre. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Segel, Harold (1995) Pinnocchio’s Progeny: Puppets, Marionettes, Automata and Robots in Modernist and Avant-Garde Drama. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Taxidou, Olga (2007) Modernism and Performance: Jarry to Brecht. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Olga Taxidou

MARXISM If, as Marshall Berman maintains, ‘modernism’ is the name for the intellectual and imaginative response to the processes of modernisation and the experience of modernity, then Marxism may be the exemplary modernist movement and, with a lineage stretching back to the 1840s, it is certainly the longest-lived. The conditions of modern life on which Marxism reflects are determined by the dominant mode of production of the age: capitalism. Under capitalism, in the famous, quintessentially modernist words of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s Communist Manifesto (1848), ‘All fixed, fast-­frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air.’ Like many modernists, Marx and his intellectual inheritors are profoundly ambivalent about this process. Capitalism uproots traditional, agrarian ways of life, with their familiar patterns and rituals, and subjects individuals to new, mechanised rhythms of production; it impels more and more people to migrate to vast, anonymous cities and toil in dangerous, spirit-sapping workplaces for the minimum 221

Marxism possible reward; it alienates workers from the products of their own labour; and it installs a system of monetary value – the ‘cash nexus’ – as the overriding social principle. At the same time, however, and via the very same processes, capitalism works away at the static, stultifying hierarchies of feudalism and serfdom; it displaces hereditary entitlement as the basis of social and political authority; it drives advances in science, technology, industry and design that expand the frontiers of human knowledge and ability and bring about new comforts and pleasures; and it demonstrates the monumental capacity of humans to remake their world and themselves by harnessing the twin powers of nature and intellect. Above all, the bourgeoisie’s pioneering of capitalist development ironically prepares the ground for the class system’s eventual demise, both by putting in place the means of production on which a communist future will be based, and by constituting the working class – the proletariat – as a coherent social bloc conscious of its own latent power. Unsurprisingly, given the force and influence of its vision of capitalist modernity, Marxism was an important reference point for modernist artists and writers. avant-garde groups, with their determination to épater [shock, astonish] les bourgeois and aspiration to radically reconfigure not just art but the wider sphere of everyday life, proved to be especially receptive to Marxist ideas. surrealism, for example, aimed to channel the forces of the unconscious into a Marxist revolutionary project, with the movement’s founder, André Breton, declaring that ‘Surrealism considers itself indissolubly linked . . . to the method of Marxist thought and to that method alone’. Many Russian avant-gardists, especially futurists like Vladimir Mayakovsky, were similarly committed to Marxist ideas. After the October revolution of 1917, constructivism made a radical Marxist aesthetic virtually the official state style, at least until the institutionalisation of socialist realism in the 1930s. The epic theatre movement grouped around the German playwright Bertolt Brecht was likewise steeped in Marxist thought; indeed, Brecht went so far as to recall that, having already established himself as an important writer, it was only upon reading Marx’s Capital in the 1920s that he ‘understood [his] plays’. In the 1960s, the neo-avantgarde Situationists, led by the Frenchman Guy Debord, sought to retool Marxism for an understanding of the ‘society of the spectacle’. Marxism also had its enemies within the ranks of the avantgardes, most notably the Italian Futurists, whose leader, the fascist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, condemned the ‘economic determin222

Marxism ism’ and ‘linear causality’ of Marxism. It was, however, among certain modernists who sought to defend the individual against the will of the collective that modernist anti-Marxism was particularly prevalent. For W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis and D. H. Lawrence, Marxism was a distasteful philosophy: materialistic, abstract, homogenising, oppressive and (for Eliot and Pound) tainted by associations with Judaism, the religion of Marx’s ancestors. If modernist responses to Marxism varied considerably, Marxist literary and cultural critics have likewise diverged in their views of modernism. One of the most significant debates from a Marxist perspective was initiated in the 1930s by the Hungarian critic Georg Lukács. Taking aim initially at German expressionism but articulating a critique that he would later expand to encompass modernism more generally, Lukács challenged what he saw as an extreme subjectivism that occluded the objective historical conditions of capitalism and class struggle, conditions captured to revealing and instructive effect by realist representations. In forceful ripostes to Lukács’s attack, Brecht and the German philosopher Ernst Bloch defended Expressionism and the wider modernist movement by arguing that the alteration of social reality itself – its mounting complexity and fragmentation – demanded alternatives to the nineteenth-century-style realism endorsed by Lukács. Around the time that this ‘realism-modernism debate’ was playing out, two other major German Marxist intellectuals, Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno, conducted an exchange that would prove to be equally important in shaping the parameters of Marxist accounts of modernism. Though both affiliated with the frankfurt school, Benjamin and Adorno differed sharply in their understandings of the relationship between modernism and the new technologies of ‘mechanical reproduction’, such as the radio, phonograph and cinema. Aligning himself with the spirit of the avant-garde, especially the ethos of Surrealism, Benjamin envisioned the new technologies of mass reproduction breaking down the separation between art and the ‘masses’, with emancipatory effects. Adorno, however, saw in these systems of recording and playback merely the potential for culture to be reduced to the status of a standardised, consumable commodity – a fate against which modernist art represented one last fragile redoubt. Subsequent Marxist theorisations of modernism, by the likes of Raymond Williams, Pierre Macherey, Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton, Catherine Belsey and David Harvey, have traversed 223

Mass culture the realism-modernism and culture industry-autonomy axes in a variety of ways, and have placed a strong emphasis on the capacity of a historical materialist method to reveal the economic, political, social and cultural ‘conditions of possibility’ of modernism’s emergence. READING Adorno, Theodor W., Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht and Georg Lukács (1980), Aesthetics and Politics: The Key Texts of the Classic Debate Within German Marxism, ed. Ronald Taylor. London: Verso. Berman, Marshall (1983) All That Is Sold Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. London: Verso. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels (2002), The Communist Manifesto, trans. Samuel Moore. London: Penguin. Puchner, Martin (2005) Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Paul Crosthwaite

MASS CULTURE A prominent strain in nineteenth-century social theory proposed that as societies modernise, individuality is weakened by strengthening social processes, leading to societies characterised by conformism. In the mid-twentieth century, a variant of this view was commonly held by artists, intellectuals and cultural critics, both in Europe and the USA. Mass culture is seen as the debasement of genuine popular culture, the perverse consequence of modern political and industrial developments, and as a threat to the idea of culture itself, both in Matthew Arnold’s sense of the best that has been thought and said, and in the sense of the full harmonious flourishing of an individual personality. In broad terms, the products of mass culture lack the autonomy to which the true artwork is thought to aspire, just as the members of mass society lack the autonomy that is the ideal of the cultured individual. Although a view common to both right-wing and left-wing cultural politics, this has proved particularly difficult for marxist-inspired intellectuals as it leaves them open to the accusation of elitism. This denigration of popular culture as kitsch alongside the celebration of modern art can be seen in the work of the left-wing circle of New York intellectuals (Clement Greenberg, Dwight MacDonald). In Distinction (1979), the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu accuses critics of mass culture of the snobbish preference 224

Mass observation for one form of art rather than another, and so in effect of relapsing from social criticism into the critique of taste. READING Bourdieu, Pierre (2013) Distinction, trans. Richard Nice. London: Routledge. Greenberg, Clement (1939) ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, Partisan Review, 6 (5): 34–49. Huyssen, Andreas (1986) After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture and Postmodernism. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Leavis, F. R. (1930) Mass Civilization and Minority Culture. Cambridge: Minority Press. MacDonald, Dwight (1953) ‘A Theory of Mass Culture’, Diogenes 1 (3): 1–17.

Alex Thomson

MASS OBSERVATION A social research organisation devoted to investigating everyday life in Britain through the observation of conversations and behaviour and written records of personal experiences. Mass Observation was founded in 1937 by the poet Charles Madge, the documentary filmmaker Humphrey Jennings and the ornithologist and anthropologist Tom Harrisson. Madge and Jennings were active in avant-garde circles in the 1930s, especially British surrealism, and an early list of potential research programmes for the new organisation was skewed at a distinctly surreal angle, with topics including ‘behaviour of people at war memorials’, ‘shouts and gestures of motorists’, ‘bathroom behaviour’ and ‘beards, armpits, eyebrows’. While the surveys that Mass Observation did in fact conduct over the following decades – on themes such as air-raids, capital punishment, drinking habits, newspaper reading and shopping – were more conventionally sociological, the organisation remained interested in pinpointing the oddities, peculiarities and eccentricities of daily life. Mass Observation pursued its ‘anthropology of ourselves’ in two main ways. Much of its early research was undertaken by paid investigators tasked with recording what they saw and heard in a range of public situations, including sporting events, national celebrations and religious services. Over time, however, these notionally objective records were increasingly augmented by overtly subjective reports by a national ‘panel’ of volunteer observers who kept diaries, completed ‘day surveys’ about their experiences on particular days, 225

Mass observation and wrote responses to questionnaires or ‘directives’ concerning specific topics. These personal writings assumed particular importance during World War II, as researchers sought to gauge public opinion and morale by analysing responses to the Blitz, evacuation, rationing and other major wartime experiences. Like the work of Mass Observation in general, the impressions collected during the war years have been criticised as unrepresentative, given the disproportionately middle-class, well-educated and left-leaning profile of the organisation’s self-selecting respondents. While such statistical imbalances limit the strictly social-scientific value of the organisation’s work, the emphasis of Mass Observation was always as much on the singularity and distinctiveness of particular experiences and opinions as on aggregated measures of ‘experience’ or ‘opinion’ in the abstract. In this regard, the organisation partook of a wider modernist interest in the fine-grained texture of individual, daily life, and the processing of public events in the inner world of private experience. Indeed, as Lyndsey Stonebridge has noted, many of the wartime psychodramas described in Mass Observation reports are every bit as strange, eerie and unsettling as late modernist fictional renderings of the war by the likes of Elizabeth Bowen, Henry Green and Patrick Hamilton. Such reports have proven to be treasure troves for the many cultural and social historians who have consulted the Mass Observation Archive at the University of Sussex since its establishment there in 1970 (in 2013, these materials were transferred to the Keep, a purpose-built historical resource centre in Brighton). Since 1981, the Mass Observation resources available to researchers have undergone renewed growth, as (again under the auspices of the University of Sussex) several thousand more respondents have been recruited to reflect on directives concerning contemporary issues and events. READING Hinton, James (2013) The Mass Observers: A History, 1937–1949. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marcus, Laura (ed.) (2001) Mass Observation as Poetics and Science, themed issue of New Formations, 44. Stonebridge, Lyndsey (2007) The Writing of Anxiety: Imagining Wartime in Mid-Century British Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Paul Crosthwaite

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Mathematics

MATHEMATICS The image of mathematics as a field of certain knowledge and eternal truth received both boosts and considerable blows during a process of modernisation in the second half of the nineteenth and first decades of the twentieth centuries. Work on the basic assumptions of mathematics, designed to prove the validity of its deductions, led to important advancements but also revealed unsolvable contradictions inherent in major theories. Concern with the foundations of the field gave rise to a sense of crisis in and beyond the professional community and resulted in the opposition of two schools: formalism and intuitionism. Where the circle around David Hilbert explained mathematics as a self-referential formal system, the intuitionist school founded by L. E. J. Brouwer located its origin, truth and meaning in human intuition. Unlike the traditional realist view expressed in Galileo Galilei’s notion of mathematics as the language of the Book of Nature, both formalism and intuitionism understand it as having no direct relation to reality. The independence of modern mathematics from physical reality encouraged comparisons with fiction and art. Like the mathematician G. H. Hardy who claimed that ‘[a] mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns’ and that ‘[r]eal mathematics [. . .] must be justified as art if it can be justified at all’ (1940; Hardy 2012: 84 and 139), philosophers and writers explored notions of mathematics’ non-representational nature and creative potential and related these to the arts. Such positions employ modern mathematics as an example of breaking with traditional views of representation, frequently drawing on concepts without immediate correspondence in nature, such as non-Euclidean geometry, the fourth dimension, infinity and imaginary numbers. oulipo, a group of mathematicians and poets, began exploring the openness and potential inherent in a formalist understanding of mathematics in 1960. Members base their writing on a system of structural constraints and explore the paradox that working in a tightly regulated framework, such as mathematics, can allow for free creation. If the process of redefinition and foundational research in the first decades of the twentieth century rendered the creative potential of modern mathematics fruitful to philosophy, art and literature, mathematics also continued to be viewed as the epitome of rational thought and to feature as a prime example of rationalisation and scientification.

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Mean time READING Gray, Jeremy (2008) Plato’s Ghost; The Modernist Transformation of Mathematics. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Hardy, G. H. (2012) A Mathematician’s Apology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Henderson, Linda Dalrymple (2013) The Fourth Dimension and NonEuclidean Geometry in Modern Art. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press.

Nina Engelhardt

MEAN TIME Since there are significant differences in the timing of sunset and sunrise at different locations within even smallish nations, in the early nineteenth century individual towns in Britain and elsewhere still worked naturally enough within their own time zones, defined by local municipal clocks. Such idiosyncrasies were uncongenial to the railway companies that had developed nationwide by the 1840s: by the end of that decade a form of ‘Railway Time’ had established itself as the national standard. Shipping, telegraph and other commercial interests sought the imposition of a similar standard worldwide. The International Meridian Conference in 1884 established Greenwich as the prime meridian of longitude and the centre of world timereckoning. Resistances to this influential modern rationalisation are widely traceable in modernist literature. They figure in the assault on Greenwich Observatory described in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907) – accidentally destroying the novel’s most sympathetic character, one whose drawing of ‘endless circles’ offers symbolically an alternative, anarchic set of meridians. Further resistance appears in Conrad’s recursive, analeptic narrative. This is extended in later modernists tactics, such as Virginia Woolf’s emphasis on memory in Mrs Dalloway (1925), in her novel’s suspicion of the ‘shredding and slicing’ of Big Ben and other clocks, and the echo of an unsympathetic doctor’s name, Bradshaw, with the period’s most famous railway timetable. READING Stevenson, Randall (1998) Modernist Fiction. London: Prentice Hall.

Randall Stevenson

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Melancholia

MELANCHOLIA A term which is used to describe a range of phenomena and states relating to an individual’s or a group’s response to a loss that cannot be emotionally processed, or even cognised. In psychoanalysis and medical research, melancholia refers to a mood disorder that has appeared under labels such as ‘the black bile’, ‘depression’, ‘bipolar depression’, ‘manic depression’, ‘complicated grief’, ‘melancholia’ and ‘melancholic specifier’; it has been variably seen as an illness, a stage of illness and an umbrella term for a cluster of illnesses characterised by symptoms like apprehension, agitation, psychomotor and linguistic retardation, and cessation of interest in the outer world. Philosophers, historians and anthropologists have described melancholia as both a mental health condition and a contradictory symbolic construction: a sorrow without a cause, a disequilibrium that hinders expression, an inspired state that mysteriously triggers imagination and cognition, and, paradoxically, as a both escapist and subversive identity position. In sociology and cultural history melancholia is seen as a type of behaviour and a discourse with distinct models of enunciation and interpretation. Many of these assessments present, or significantly rely on, modernist advancements in the understanding of melancholia. The rise of discourse on melancholia marks the advent of ­modernism. Søren Kierkegaard’s mid-nineteenth century reflections on depression, Charles Baudelaire’s conceptualisation of spleen and ennui as imagined societal ‘moods’ and Friedrich Nietzsche’s discussion of loathing were followed by innumerable publications, medical reports and debates dedicated to melancholia at the century’s end. The sharp rise in suicide rates in pre-eminent modernist cities such as Vienna and St Petersburg at the turn of the century contributed to the widespread sentiment that melancholia was ubiquitous and that the epoch was bound to the paradoxes of melancholic revolt; certain philosophers (for example, William James) lamented the state of affairs while others, like Walter Benjamin, saw it as an opportunity to galvanise melancholia’s political potential. Contemporary and subsequent anthropological research has perceived modernism as a period when the guarantees of socio-symbolic order trembled and ritual, including public mourning, attenuated; in this view, the modernists’ capacity to perform mourning rites decreased just as the historical demands for mourning intensified. As a result of these and other developments, the definitional scope of melancholia expanded: the condition was no longer seen as restricted to an individual and 229

Melancholia his/her specific loss but also as a group reaction to communal or abstract losses, for instance the loss of a system of beliefs. Sigmund Freud and his circle (notably, Karl Abraham and Sándor Ferenczi) repeatedly assessed melancholia. Freud’s writings on the subject encompass a wide range. In his earliest texts on the subject Freud explains melancholia as a ‘hole’ in the psychic sphere (Freud’s letter to Fliess, 1895), in World war I essays he contemplates the links between contemporary history, melancholia and sublimation and defines melancholia as ‘anticipatory grief’, and in his influential 1917 article ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ he differentiates between the two responses to loss by the structure of the relationship established between the subject and the lost other – while melancholia ‘pathologically’ preserves or incorporates the lost object in the mourner’s ego, mourning, a ‘normative’ grief experience, takes the form of a gradual detachment from the lost object. In his writings of the 1920s, however, Freud reassesses melancholia as a universal formative experience-condition and his cultural texts of the 1930s apply his diverse cogitations on melancholia to group behaviour. Freud’s reflections on the incorporation of lost objects and his belief that aggression and guilt are vital components of the melancholic’s clinical picture decisively influenced Melanie Klein. She developed and extended Freud’s thought by an original theory where depression’s potentially beneficial, or ‘reparational’, aspects are recognised and the depressive and psychotic positions are counterposed. Most subsequent thinking about the negotiation of the object loss is indebted to these two modernist theories of melancholia. The overwhelming discursive vitality of melancholia led many modernists to make the experience of loss central to their artistic expression, their politics of historical (dis)engagement and even their life styles. In a historical environment populated by material and symbolic losses, melancholia seems to have provided a superior mode of expression to address the complex history of their time. Thus Freud was by no means alone in viewing melancholia as cognate with war neurosis and, more generally, with the effects of war losses on the mental health of both participants and non-participants. He shared this view with modernist writers and artists as different as Karl Kraus (The Last Days of Mankind, 1915–22), Virginia Woolf (Mrs. Dalloway, 1925), and Albert Talhoff and Mary Wigman (Call of the Dead, 1930). But melancholia was also seen as a relay for a more fundamental ‘change in the structure of experience’, as Benjamin put it in ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’. Modernist literature abounds in 230

Melancholia the portrayals of melancholic characters: the protagonists of Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910), James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Italo Svevo’s Zeno’s Conscience (1923) and William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929) are cases in point. Furthermore, melancholia as both a state and a stance is discursively probed in a plethora of modernist writings (for example, in Stéphane Mallarmé’s and Leopoldo Lugones’s poems, Andrei Bely’s novel Petersburg (1913, 1916, 1921), to Yokomitsu Riichi’s piece of fiction Melancholy Journey (1937–46)), and the condition of loss and despair is dwelled upon, with dismay, hope and occasionally irony, in an even wider spectrum of modernist texts, ranging from W. E. B. Du Bois’s treatise The Souls of Black Folk (1903), through T. S. Eliot’s poetry and Vladimir Nabokov’s early fiction, to Djuna Barnes’s novel Nightwood (1936). In line with this extensive and variable deployment of melancholia in modernist artistic production and thought, modernist studies themselves have used the concept of melancholia in at least two contrasting ways: to suggest the modernists’ alienation from history and agency, and to foreground its exact opposite – the distinctive modernist politics of melancholic interference, gap and lack of semantic closure or textual finitude. The last approach, as influentially practised by Giorgio Agamben, sees melancholia as opening up a sphere of social potentialities and instituting alternative kinds of agency. READING Agamben, Giorgio (1992) Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, trans. Ronald L. Martinez. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bahun, Sanja (2013) Modernism and Melancholia: Writing as Countermourning. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Benjamin, Walter ([1938–40] 2003) ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, in Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (eds), Selected Writings of Walter Benjamin, Vol. 4: 1938–1940, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 313–55. Freud, Sigmund ([1915] 1957) ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XIV, ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, pp. 239–60. James, William (1902) The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, Harlow: Longmans, Green, & Co. Klein, Melanie (1940) ‘Mourning and Its Relation to Manic-Depressive States’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 21: 125–53.

Sanja Bahun 231

Melopoeia

MELOPOEIA Derived from the Greek and meaning the poetics of music, ‘melopoeia’ is one of three related terms used by Ezra Pound in his definition of poetry in his 1934 essay ABC of Reading. Related to ‘phanopoeia’ and ‘logopoeia’, melopoeia refers to the sound dimension of poetry, and the claim that it constitutes a fundamental aspect of any great poem. According to Pound, ‘the maximum of melopoeia is reached in Greek, with certain developments in Provençal’ (Pound 1961: 42). The implicit comparison between poetry and music, which sets great value in the latter, is inspired by the Hegelian hierarchy of the arts and Walter Pater’s reinterpretation insofar as it ranks music as the highest art and an ideal aspiration for poetry. One of the reasons for this preference for music lies in the double and paradoxical demand of maximum expressivity combined with minimum self-expression. In a poetics that forbids the sentimental manifestations of the self but still prescribes a strong emotional impact on the reader, ‘melopoeia’ implies ‘melodic invention’ (Pound 1961: 43) in the tradition of Homer but with Bach and his fugues as a blueprint for poetic composition. In its more modern association with technology, ‘melopoeia’ also accounts for Pound’s fascination for the radiophonic medium. READING Pound, Ezra (1961) ABC of Reading. London: Faber. Bucknell, Brad (2001) Literary Modernism and Musical Aesthetics: Pater, Pound, Joyce and Stein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hélène Aji

MEMORY The big works of literary modernism explore human consciousness as a temporal field, inspired by a variety of intellectual forces that were coming to a head in the early twentieth century. Firstly, philosophy revisited Kantian time and space categories in the light of developments in depth psychology and the new physics (especially Einsteinian relativity); the principal philosopher interested in the exploration of time consciousness was Henri Bergson (see bergsonism). Secondly, memory became an important concern given the subjective turn prompted by the new sciences of psychiatry, psychoanalysis and the renewed interest in the problems of private states of mind in idealist philosophy (F. H. Bradley, G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell). Bergson’s lectures in particular, attended by T. S. 232

Memory Eliot, Marcel Proust and many others, revolutionised thinking about mental processes, turned modernist thinking towards memory as a key process structuring inner time. T. S. Eliot studied F. H. Bradley’s Appearance and Reality (1893/1897) after attending one of Bergson’s lectures in 1910, and the unknowability and emotive base of experience which Eliot drew from Bradley is defined in Bergsonian terms as a function of the mind’s state of suspense between ideas of memory and ideas of imagination. Memory became a key Eliotic term, from the dissolving floors of memory of ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’(1915), through the mixing of memory and desire in The Waste Land (1922), to the time-echoic spaces of ‘Burnt Norton’ (1936). Memory is figured as key to the doors of unreal and imaginary pasts, opening up textual scenes that stage nostalgia for more integrated past cultures, childhood feelings, irrecoverable centres of experience. Bergson influenced Virginia Woolf’s exploration of inner consciousness as a memory zone, temporally fluid, potentially transpersonal, a stream of creative energy. She read Matter and Memory (1896; 1912 in English) before writing Mrs Dalloway (1925) and that novel’s radical stream of consciousness merges subjectivities as the different minds creatively respond to the London day with memory sequences that challenge clockwork time, symbolised by Big Ben. For Woolf, Bergson is filtered through that other great Bergsonian, Marcel Proust, whose gigantic novel of memory, À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27) had staged moments of involuntary memory within a time-saturated central consciousness. Parallel to the Bergsonian influence is the transition from literary impressionism as practised by Ford Madox Ford and Joseph Conrad to Joycean stream of consciousness. Ford and Conrad had theorised Impressionism as an art of memory, the subjectivity of the impression being generated by the superimposition on phenomena of memory-images and memory-narratives. Much of the seductive indeterminacy of Conrad’s prose is a function of experiences as narrated by Marlow, always already mediated by memory as a fusion of subjective and conventional narrative drives. Ford’s exploration of duality in Parade’s End (1924–28) is founded on a strict sense of the mind as alternating dialectically between memory to experience, creating recall modes ranging from nostalgia to shell shock. World war I instantiated the duality of the memory-driven mind for Ford in the severity of the dissociation of civilian and combatant identities, a split explored by the war poets of the period. 233

Memory Impressionism also fostered a turn to autobiography among key modernist novelists. Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage (1915–67) is a Proustian impressionist project, staging the ways everyday objects accrue associations that draw the mind back to one’s earliest experiences. Joyce represented a fictionalised version of his own self as autobiographical Künstlerroman with Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), showing how experience is woven into powerful memory clusters of association attaching themselves to key words that govern the ways Stephen Daedalus thinks, desires and writes. D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (1913) dwells on the family dynamics structuring libidinally charged social energies in the young artist Morel, specifically the ways in which male desire is driven by memories of mother love. All three projects were clearly coloured by Freud: psychoanalysis is in many ways an art of time-reconstruction through analysis of fantasy formations designed to conceal difficult or fantasised memories. Richardson, Joyce and Lawrence constructed new narrative techniques to capture evanescent and repressed memory material, past sensations coded into everyday language. Freudian psychoanalysis concentrated on personal memory systems within oedipal family environments. Carl Jung split from Freud and theorised the unconscious as a collective field of archetypes, symbolic figures preserving species memory. race memory was important to W. B. Yeats and the vision of the celtic twilight as a literary and national revival: dreams and automatic writing were portals to the collective psychic otherworld of folk memory. Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) blends a personal and family memory system – ­governing the sexual desires of Molly, Bloom and Stephen, with stream of consciousness as technique – with a public memory system, textual and cultural, demanding an archival and historicist prose repertoire as instanced in chapters like ‘Ithaca’, ‘Oxen of the Sun’ and ‘Circe’. Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939) merges Freudian and Jungian interpretations of dream-fractured memory to generate a night language signifying simultaneously as Oedipal repression of sexual secrets and as polyvocalised race memory. H.D. was analysed by Freud in 1934 and used the analysis in her Trilogy (1946) to construct a mythology merging classical female archetypes from the collective European past with her own psychic experience in wartime London (see also mythical method). There was criticism of the memory obsession of the modernists, from the left, with Georg Lukács’s critique of Joycean modernism in his 1938 essay ‘realism in the Balance’ for its subjective and 234

Metropolis thinly abstract representations of immediate experience, merely the bourgeois mind on its way in the day; and from the right, with Wyndham Lewis’s monumental Time and Western Man (1927) with its savage denunciation of Bergsonism, time-consciousness and routine memories: Ulysses shows the characters locked within their memory systems, subject to mechanical routine, to the primitivist past of Freud and Darwin. Gertrude Stein consciously attempted to write prose uninflected by memory, preferring the continuous present to a life dominated by false remembered being. These critiques centre on the bourgeois nature of the memory work being represented, its banality, its fetishisation of commodity, its subjective inertia, its mechanisation of the mind by habit. Yet the critiques ignore the real force of time-philosophy modernism: the ways in which routine memories are suddenly broken up and transcended by powerful surges of repressed memory as liberatory, transformative, revolutionary, transpersonal and dangerously creative. READING Kern, Stephen (2003) The Culture of Time and Space: 1880–1918. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. McIntire, Gabrielle (2007) Modernism, Memory, and Desire: T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Miller, Nicholas Andrew (2002) Modernism, Ireland and the Erotics of Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Randall, Bryony (2007) Modernism, Daily Time and Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rickard, John S. (1998) Joyce’s Book of Memory: The Mnemotechnic of Ulysses. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Stevenson, Randall (1998) Modernist Fiction: An Introduction. London: Longman.

Adam Piette

METROPOLIS The metropolis, a nation’s capital or a great city, is a centre of ‘economic, political and cultural power’, which usually features prominently in the cultural imagination (Williams 1973: 279). The modern metropolis is a site where diverse people, languages, cultures, classes and economic activities gather and is seen by many urban theorists (including Edward Soja, Michel de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre) as an intensified microcosm of all human existence. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the metro235

Metropolis politan experience, full of noise, artificial light, crowds and capitalist spectacle, was thought to threaten the psychological well-being of the individual and social relationships. Georg Simmel’s ‘Metropolis and Mental Life’ (1903) argues that urban life is unhealthy: man is in an antagonistic relationship to the metropolis, which violently attacks him with relentless shocks and streams of information that require excessive mental energy to process. Over-stimulated, his only option is to dull his senses and become indifferent to the city and people surrounding him. The modern man then takes on a ‘blasé metropolitan attitude’, which threatens meaningful connections with others (1903; Simmel 1971: 329). Simmel sees urban experience as the impoverished alternative to a rural lifestyle full of meaningful relationships with other people, the land and the means of production. Furthermore, as a zone of capitalist exchange, the metropolis promotes a desire for profit, further encouraging indifference to personal relationships. It is notable that Simmel’s metropolitan inhabitant is a man – prior to the twentieth century, the city streets were seen as man’s domain, while women were to remain in the privacy of home. Many female modernists resisted this view, and authors such as Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, Jean Rhys and others represent women as metropolitan citizens with a public presence. In response to increasing urbanisation and technological, social and political change, many of the most prominent works of modernism explore the metropolis and the effects of metropolitan life on the psychology of its inhabitants. In some works, the hardness and alienation of metropolitan life stands in for the failures of modernity and the dark underside of progress. The inhabitants of T. S. Eliot’s ‘Unreal City’ of The Waste Land (1922) wander through post-World War I London like ghosts; Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) represents the city as a capitalist dystopia in which the robot double of a workingclass agitator threatens the social order; the protagonist of Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) spirals into depression as he tries to provide solace for lonely and alienated New Yorkers. However, in other modernist and avant-garde works, the metropolis is also represented as a site of promise. futurism privileged its ‘movement and aggression’ and called on ‘the great masses’ to ‘sing the multicolored and polyphonic tidal waves of revolution in the modern metropolis’ (1909; Marinetti 2009: 51). In surrealism, the multiplicity and chaos of the metropolis enables chance encounters, exemplified by André Breton meeting his muse in the streets of Paris, in Nadja (1928). In modernist literature, the metropolis is often mapped onto 236

Mimesis the psychic geography of characters. Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus roam the streets of Dublin in James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), witness to the banality of everyday life in a colonial city; in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), the anxiety of shellshocked Septimus Smith and the urban crowd’s recent memory of the horrors of war are mirrored in the sound of a backfiring car; characters marginalised by their sexuality, gender or race inhabit the dark corners and economically marginalised areas of metropolitan Paris in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1936) and Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight (1939); likewise in the metropolis of Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin (1939). In ‘What is a City?’ (1937), Lewis Mumford argues that a city is, above all else, ‘a theatre of social activity’ (185), and a wide range of modernist works appear to share this view. READING Eliot, T. S. (2002) The Waste Land and Other Poems. London: Faber & Faber. Marinetti, F. T. (2009) ‘The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism’, in Futurism: An Anthology, ed. Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi and Laura Wittman. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Mumford, Lewis (1996) ‘What Is a City?’, in The City Reader, ed. Richard LeGates and Frederic Stout. London: Routledge. Simmel, Georg (1971) ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, in On Individuality and Social Forms, ed. Donald N. Levine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Williams, Raymond (1973), ‘The New Metropolis’, in The Country and the City. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Tara S. Thomson

MIMESIS Derived from the ancient Greek word meaning ‘mime’ and usually translated as either ‘imitation’ or ‘representation’, mimesis is one of the oldest and most central categories for all art criticism and theory. Against the background of early modern theories of art as mimetic of an underlying natural order of things, the two major accounts of the emergence of modern art both depend on changing attitudes to mimesis in fundamental ways. The realist account stresses the eighteenth-century change in understanding of mimesis: no longer defined as imitation of an ideal but as imitation of the sensuous particular and hence of an individuated reality. Art should 237

Mimesis no longer deal with the typical but with the concrete. An alternative argument stresses instead the emergence of modernism in the second half of the nineteenth century as a rejection of realism. Key here is the rejection of representation by symbolist poetry and by impressionist painters, later developing into full-blown formalism and abstraction. This late romantic stress on imagination and autonomy conceives of modern art as opposed to prosaic reality, gives rise to an emphasis on artworks as distinct objects in their own right and contributes to a formalist understanding of art history in terms of developments in technique. Although the second account has become dominant in thinking about the fate of mimesis in the twentieth century, there are some significant modernist aesthetic theories which rehabilitate the concept of mimesis in valuable ways. Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis (1946) integrated modernist novelists into a continuous history of the change and development of the forms of representation in Western literature since the Odyssey and the Bible. This suggests the possibility of reading stylistic and narrative innovation in the modernist novel as greater fidelity to the complexity and obscurity of human psychological experience, and hence a turning inwards of realism, rather than a rejection of reality. Drawing on the ideas of his friend Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno saw mimesis as an innate human capacity for adaptation to their environment, manifest in the normal course of child development as part of play. For Adorno, art is closely connected to this non-instrumental and exploratory way of relating to the world, and derives from this a form of resistance to a reality increasingly dominated by rational adaptation and instrumental calculation. More recently, Jacques Rancière has argued that the inversion of mimesis into realism in the late eighteenth century can be understood as an egalitarian undoing of an older system of representation in which objects and people are assigned to appropriate places in a hierarchical system of genres. Where Auerbach sees modernism as a renewal of the Western tradition of mimetic art, and Rancière downplays modernism compared to the birth of modern realism, Adorno asks us to rethink all art and culture on the basis of modernist developments. READING Adorno, Theodor W. (1997) Aesthetic Theory, trans. Rob Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Auerbach, Erich ([1946] 1953) Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard Trask. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 238

Modernity Rancière, Jacques (2013) Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art, trans. Zakir Paul. London: Verso.

Alex Thomson

MODERNITY Western capitalist modernity was ushered in by the twin transformations of the Industrial revolution and the French Revolution. Among the most evident features of this new world order is the unprecedented appearance of cities of over one million inhabitants. Less spectacular are the features of ‘mental life’ in the modern metropolis: depersonalisation, intellectualisation and a blasé attitude (Frisby 1985; Simmel 1997). Even more profound, if still debated, are the deeper consequences of such urban modernity, not least the weakened social integration and the proliferation of unregulated desires, bringing with them increased social suffering (Durkheim 2002). Far from universal, as economists believe, ‘sober bourgeois capitalism’ is a historically unique mode of production, inaugurating ‘market-rational action’ (Weber 1978: 165–6). Two elements eroded traditional and ritualised artisan crafts: the appearance, with enclosures and clan clearances, of massive supplies of formally free wagelabourers, and a finely specialised detailed division of labour (Weber 1978: 150). Strangely, despite the ‘disenchantment of the world’ linked closely to modernity since the Enlightenment, some magical thought has lingered, specifically the fetishism with which commodities are understood. Yet if we penetrate beneath the ‘metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties’ (Marx 1976: 103) which cloak the underlying social relations, the relative value of commodities on the market can be found to be linked to the socially necessary hours of homogeneous or ‘abstract’ labour incorporated within them. Especially in conditions of overproduction and unemployment, these same commodities dominate – like fetish-figures or gods – striking fear into the very men and women who built them (Marx 1976: 165). Industrial labour is marked by a rigorous time discipline – both lengthened hours of work and the rule of the clock (Thompson 1967; Postone 1993). In a qualitative break with the agricultural labourer’s task discipline – responsive purely to natural needs, like milking – the clock becomes ubiquitous in modern factory or bureaucratic life. Moreover, industrial production is underpinned by the constant search for new forms of accumulation. In particular mechanisation, coupled with the fragmentation of habitual craftwork and 239

Modernity r­igorous time control, compels increased monotony of work from the ‘heteronomous producer’ (Weber 1978: 152–3). Forced into finely subdivided work routines, the worker is turned into a ‘crippled monstrosity’ (cited in Marx 1976: 474), or ‘an animated individual punctuation mark’ in the machine’s rhythms (Marx 1973: 470). In brief, the capitalist degradation of labour is based on the most extreme division of mental and manual labour yet known. The fundamental class cleavage in modernity stems from whether groups possess any means of production or have been divorced from them. Yet certain occupational groups acquire rare and highly rewarded attributes: managerial power or professional expertise. Historically, the readiness of such workers in contradictory locations to take part in alliances against owners is much reduced (Wright 1997: 22). Moreover, the making of a working class as a solidaristic, organised body presupposes an autonomous cultural practice. A fragile achievement in itself, it is fraught by clashing ‘visions and divisions of the world’: religious, regional, political (Bourdieu 1987). nationalist movements have served to racialise entire categories of workers as outsiders, such as Polish immigrants to France and Irish immigrants to Britain in the nineteenth century, Jews in the early twentieth century to both countries and New Commonwealth workers to Britain in the mid-twentieth century (Virdee 2014). The social relations of modernity are typically ‘transient, fleeting and fortuitous’ (Frisby 1985: 4, 27), while the ‘Chinese walls’ insulating societies from globalisation have been battered down. Yet such restless innovation and destruction of tradition has in the past been partially offset by the ‘Left Hand’ of the state: welfare provisions that served to integrate – if also to discipline – workers, cushioning them from extreme adversity (Bourdieu 2014: 358–60). Since the mid-1970s, this countervailing movement of universalistic welfare rights has been markedly reduced, while both income inequality and wealth have returned to the level of 1914 (Piketty 2014). In societies where inequality is greatest, privileged positions are more likely to be inherited (Piketty 2014: 484). In turn, those least likely to be employed at all (especially men and women of colour) increasingly find themselves marginalised – most dramatically, by incarceration. One in three adult male African-Americans in the US has been in prison at one time in their lives (Wacquant 2004: xv, 136). In brief, recent developments have challenged many citizens’ earlier belief in modernity as progress. 240

Monochrome READING Bourdieu, Pierre (1987) ‘What Makes a Social Class?’ Berkeley Journal of Sociology, 32 (1): 1–18 Bourdieu, Pierre (2014) On the State. Cambridge: Polity. Durkheim, Émile (2002) Suicide. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Frisby, David (1985) Fragments of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity. Marx, Karl (1973) Grundrisse. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Marx, Karl (1976) Capital, Vol. 1 Harmondsworth: Penguin. Piketty, Thomas (2014) Capital in the 21st Century. Boston: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Postone, Maurice (1993) Time, Labour and Social Domination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Simmel, Georg (1997) ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, in D. Frisby and M. Featherstone (eds), Simmel on Culture. London: Sage, pp. 174–85. Thompson, E. P. (1967) ‘Time, Work Discipline and Industrial Capitalism’, Past and Present, 38: 56–97. Virdee, Satnam (2014) Race, Class and the Racialized Outsider. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Wacquant, L. D. J. (2004) Punishing the Poor. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Weber, Max (1978) Economy and Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wright, E. O. (1997) Class Counts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bridget Fowler

MONOCHROME The monochromatic painting occupied a prominent place among the strategies developed by the historical avant-gardes, and because it became emblematic of modernism in visual art it has been frequently invoked, reworked or parodied by later generations of artists. Like the grid – another iconic modernist visual trope – the special historical interest of the monochrome derives in large part from the disparate, at times contradictory, claims made on its behalf. These range from the intense investment of certain modernist artists in the monochrome as a tabula rasa upon which an entirely new abstract art might be constructed to the related notion that monochromatic works purify painting, presenting its deepest essence. Accordng to this claim, such works function as vehicles to spiritual or quasi-­spiritual realms, and they range also to more worldly views in which the monochrome is a reduction to the merely material and conventional realities of painting, 241

Montage understood as no more than the application of pigment to a support of a given size and shape. For the Russian suprematist Kasimir Malevich, for instance, the black squares he painted in the first decades of the twentieth century amounted to a concentration of painting that was also a spiritual distillation. For his compatriot Aleksandr Rodchenko, however, a 1921 triptych of monochromes in red, yellow and blue amounted to a materialist declaration of the end of painting and signalled a transition to modes of production felt more appropriate to the political and technological innovations of the new Soviet era. The monochromes and near-monochromes of post-war artists as varied as Mark Rothko, Ad Reinhardt, Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Ryman and Yves Klein offer further evidence of the degree to which the very simplicity of this formal strategy lends itself to such contradictory investments: the radically different discourses which attend these artists bear this point out. Andrea Fraser and Allen McCollum’s 1991 work May I Help You? might be taken as exemplary of a broadly postmodern approach to the monochrome and its historical complexity. In this work a number of performers acting as gallery docents offered wildly divergent interpretations of McCollum’s monochromatic plaster ‘surrogates’ for paintings, which hung in monotonous succession on white gallery walls. The monochrome, in this work, has no essence of its own, but is precisely a screen for the varied hopes, convictions and distinctions which art might sustain. READING Buchloh, Benjamin H. D. (1986) ‘Primary Colors for the Second Time: A Paradigm Repetition of the Neo-Avant-Garde’, October, 37: 41–52. de Duve, Thierry (1992) ‘The Monochrome and the Blank Canvas’, in Serge Guilbaut (ed.), Reconstructing Modernism: Art in New York, Paris, and Montreal 1945–1964. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press. Krauss, Rosalind (1985) ‘Grids’, in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press.

Dominic Paterson

MONTAGE Described in Sergei Eisenstein’s book The Film Sense as the mechanical process of film that requires the cutting and juxtaposition of shots. Eisenstein considered montage as an important tool that could foreground the notion of conflict as the fundamental principle of existence of every art form. He believed that synthesis arises in film from the opposition of thesis and antithesis with the help of montage. 242

Mother Right According to Bertolt Brecht, montage could be viewed as the principle of all modern art in which organic unity became replaced by a new vision of synthesis. Prior to its wide usage in the context of theatre and cinema, montage was found in the poetry, painting and drama of dadaism, surrealism, cubism and russian futurism. In his essay ‘Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein’, Roland Barthes traces the roots of montage in the writings of Denis Diderot, the French Enlightenment philosopher, art critic and writer, who saw a pictorial tableau as an intellectual act. Several Soviet films produced between 1924 and 1930 displayed the distinctive montage style associated with the heavy use of rhetorical devices, didactic goals and propaganda messages. They employed montage in order to build a narrative, to control rhythm, to create metaphors and to articulate rhetorical points. Such prominent exponents of the montage style as Lev Kuleshov, Vsevolod Pudovkin and Dziga Vertov argued that filmic meaning should be constructed out of an assemblage of shots, so the principle of juxtaposition would ensure the formation of a new synthesis. READING Aumont, Jacques (1987) Montage Eiseinstein. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Barthes, Roland (1977) Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Noonday Press. Rohdie, Sam (2006) Montage. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Alexandra Smith

MOTHER RIGHT The theory that patriarchal modernity was preceded by a period of female political, religious and social dominance (referred to variously as ‘mother right’, ‘matriarchy’, or ‘gyneocracy’) is often associated with the Swiss jurist and classicist Johann Jakob Bachofen (1815–87; Das Mutterrecht/Mother Right, 1861). However, the idea has roots in critiques of the ‘masculine’ rationalism of the Enlightenment, in Romantic notions of the unconscious and of a mythic, archaic femininity in colonial encounters with non-Western societies, and in histories of family forms that questioned the historical precedence of the patriarchal family (in the work of John McLennan, Lewis Henry Morgan and others). Patriarchal, rational modernity is fragile and shallow; its repression of the archaic feminine has only been partly successful, and traces are left in myth, symbols and traditional 243

The mythical method cultural practices (hence the importance for psychoanalysis and for myth and ritual theorists like Jane Ellen Harrison). In particular, symbols are seen to resonate with layers of association with archaic or unconscious states of being. Friedrich Engels made the idea of matriarchy productive for marxism and feminism, where it is still controversial, while Bachofen’s rich and allusive symbolic language provided a resource for many literary writers (for example, Thomas Mann, Rainer Maria Rilke, Franz Kafka, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, D. H. Lawrence and Robert Graves). READING Bachofen, Johann J. (1992) Myth, Religion and Mother Right: Selected Writings of J. J. Bachofen, trans. Ralph Manheim. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Davies, Peter (2010) Myth, Matriarchy and Modernity: Johann Jakob Bachofen in German Culture, 1860–1945. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter. Eller, Cynthia (2011) Gentlemen and Amazons: The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory, 1861–1900. University of California Press. Engels, Friedrich (1986) The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, trans. Alick West. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Sprengnether, Madelon (1990) The Spectral Mother: Freud, Feminism and Psychoanalysis. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Peter Davies

THE MYTHICAL METHOD A term employed by T. S. Eliot in his 1923 review of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) which finds the text’s most significant feature in Joyce’s systematic use of parallels with Homer’s Odyssey. According to Eliot, the method provides ‘a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history’. Eliot summons the mythical method to the ordering of history out of a sombre (and problematically dismissive) judgement on the present. Thomas Mann in Doktor Faustus (1947) deploys the Faust myth as tragedy to articulate the rise of Nazism in relation to German history and culture since Luther. But the method’s matching and intercutting of the antique with the contemporary belongs among the key strategies of modernism. It is at its most massive in Thomas Mann’s tetralogy, Joseph and His Brothers (1933–43; first English translation 1948) which retells the biblical narrative as a historical novel but one 244

The mythical method articulated through a continual sifting and plaiting of older and later myths. Here the mythical method reaches through a story already ancient to sound what the novel’s Prelude calls ‘the bottomless well’ of the past and, simultaneously, enables individual protagonists within that story achieve an archetypal identity in response to the ‘riddling essence’ which is the Prelude’s definition of humanity. In Joyce’s Ulysses and Eliot’s The Waste Land the method can prove akin to the Augustan practice of mock-heroic. In some sections of Ulysses (e.g. ‘Cyclops’), as at points in Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock (1717), the Homeric parallels elicit a distinctive heroism of the contemporary and the mundane. The affinity of The Waste Land is with The Dunciad (1728–43), Pope’s counter-Virgilian epic of the grotesque and phantasmagoric metropolis, the inverted apocalypse of a disintegrating civilisation. David Jones’s In Parenthesis (1937) renders the experience of the Western Front in World war I from the ground-level viewpoint of a serving army private. This gives it an affinity with Frederick Manning’s classic World War I novel of such experience, The Middle Parts of Fortune (1929). But in Jones the experience is graphed by an underlying pattern of Celtic myth and legend which is, in turn, caught up in a liturgical Catholic imagination of redemption. Eliot’s Introduction to In Parenthesis groups Jones with himself, Joyce and Ezra Pound as practitioners of the mythical method. In Pound’s Cantos (1930–69), however, for all their evoking of past cultures to judge or illumine the present, the method pursues a radically different trajectory. Its chosen base is a Mediterranean-hellenist paganism (into which it builds Chinese and Egyptian myth). It works to recover a pagan sense of the world as sacred, seeking, through myth, a marriage of both the human and the non-human world with the divine in that immanent transcendence which divides a pagan religion of myth from the iconoclastic transcendence of the Abrahamic monotheisms. Much Anglophone practice of the mythical method finds a matrix in The Golden Bough, the monumental anatomy of myth (final edition, in twelve volumes, 1906–15) by the classicist and anthropologist Sir James Frazer, and in the connections Frazer, and successors like Jane Harrison and Gilbert Murray, forge, in varying degrees, between myth and ritual. Such connections underpin claims for Greek drama as issuing from ritual, or celebrate primitive ritual as expressing a primal religious sensibility, or, in extremer versions, tip into belief in a continuing occult history of its practice. (Jessie 245

The mythical method Weston’s 1920 study From Ritual to Romance, whether or not it helps elucidate The Waste Land, is a representative document here.) Those primitivist moves feed into modernist mythmaking. Eliot mobilises ritual drama in Sweeney Agonistes (1932), for instance, and his poetry and drama at large absorb and filter anthropological studies of primitive ritual (Crawford 1987). Occult histories also engage W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound. The evoking of ancient rites of initiation and fertility is central to the resplendent theophanies which constitute one axis for Pound’s Cantos, from the dionysiac metamorphosis of Canto II to the conjoined raising of poet and temple in Canto XC. Or myth and ritual can signal an archaic violence underlying the modern world of history: in the first publication (1934) of his poem on ‘Parnell’s Funeral’ Yeats intercalcates between its opening and closing stanzas a magisterial synopsis of modern Irish history to resonate with the poem’s dramatising of Parnell’s fate as a myth of sacrificial violence and renewal. Yeats’s career-long mythmaking overarches the mythical method of which Eliot’s 1923 review acknowledged him a pioneer. In the 1890s he aspires to create a mythological drama of Irish history and race identity on the model of Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound (1820). What he actually produces is a potent drama of Irish history made mythic in the iconic folktale protagonist of Cathleen ni Houlihan (1901), and his later poetry mythologises figures from recent or contemporary Irish history (see also celtic twilight). Throughout, Yeats’s mythmaking is impelled by his interest in the occult and quest for a new religion to succeed a lost Christianity. Both impulsions coalesce in the systematic historical and cosmological mythmaking – perhaps more akin to the later Blake than to Shelley – of his treatise A Vision (1926/37) whose conceptual machinery of gyres links it to vorticism. The mythical method can be defined by contrast with the motif of the displaced pagan gods returning to disrupt a medieval Christian or modern society. This is launched from within German Romanticism by Heinrich Heine’s ironical fantasy, ‘The Gods in Exile’ (1853), and from alongside French Romanticism by Prosper Mérimée’s sardonic ‘Venus of Ille’ (1837). Walter Pater modulates it towards the sinister in ‘Denys L’Auxerrois’ (Imaginary Portraits, 1887) and ‘Apollo in Picardy’ (Miscellaneous Studies, 1895). Thereafter it flourishes in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers as diverse as Arthur Machen, Vernon Lee, E. M. Forster and John Buchan. Among modernists, André Gide in Le Prométhée Mal Enchaîné (1899) turns it 246

Mythopoeia to ironic fable, and Pound distils it in a haunting early lyric, ‘The Return’ (Ripostes, 1912). The motif finds one focus in a cult of Pan which can evaporate in whimsy but can also manifest a primitivist drive (matched in the Greek studies of Jane Harrison) to move behind the mythology of the Olympian pantheon towards older, more comprehensive experiences of the sacred. D. H. Lawrence offers an incisive overview of this in the 1926 essay ‘Pan in America’. The Plumed Serpent, published in the same year, attempts a massive figuring of the return of the Aztec gods in an imaginary religio-political movement set in contemporary Mexico, and ‘The Escaped Cock’ (1929) finesses the return of a god in its rewriting of the Christian resurrection story. READING Ackerman, Robert (1991) The Myth and Ritual School: J. G. Frazer and the Cambridge Ritualists. New York and London: Garland. Bell, Michael (1997) Literature, Modernism and Myth: Belief and Responsibility in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carpentier, Martha C. (1998) Ritual, Myth and the Modernist Text: The Influence of Jane Ellen Harrison on Joyce, Eliot, and Woolf. Amsterdam: Gordon & Breach. Crawford, Robert (1987) The Savage and the City in the Work of T. S. Eliot. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Fraser, Robert (ed.) (1990) Sir James Frazer and the Literary Imagination. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Kermode, Frank (2002) Romantic Image. New York and London: Routledge. Surette, Leon (1993) The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, and the Occult. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Donald Mackenzie

MYTHOPOEIA Derived from the Greek and meaning the poetics of myth, ‘mythopoeia’ is a fourth component that can be added to the famous ‘phanopoeia’, ‘melopoeia’ and ‘logopoeia’ set of terms used by Ezra Pound in his definition of poetry in ABC of Reading (1934). However, ‘mythopoiea’ precedes the later theory, since as early as 1915, it provides a wider, less technical and more thematic foundation to a poetics that became an overall trait of modernist aesthetics in poetry and prose. Pound’s approach to the mythical method is 247

Nationalism the springboard to the definition of a useful poetry, able to express the mystery of existential experience and the limitations of understanding. The modernist work of art deploys myth insofar as it is ‘an impersonal or objective story woven out of [the artist’s] own emotion, as the nearest equation that he was capable of putting into words’ (Pound 1968: 431). This idea of the literary text as trying by all means to approximate the exact expression of experience turns all texts into new myths, and conversely accounts for a generalised reinvestment of myths by modernists in the Pound tradition. Major sources are Egyptian (Pound, H.D.) and Greek mythology (Pound, H.D., James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams – see also hellenism) and the Bible (H.D., Williams) – to mention but a few representative cases. READING Pound, Ezra (1968) Literary Essays, ed. T. S. Eliot. London: Faber. Witemeyer, Hugh (1969) The Poetry of Ezra Pound: Forms and Renewal (1908–1920). Berkeley: University of California Press.

Hélène Aji

N NATIONALISM Nationalism, defined as devotion to one’s nation or the striving after the unity, independence or interests of a nation, is not a term that readily springs to mind in relation to the study of modernism. Nationalism is more readily associated with nineteenth-­ century Romanticism, while cosmopolitanism seems more accurately to describe the interactive, aesthetic and intellectual creativity of European cities in the early decades of the twentieth century where painters, sculptors, architects, musicians and writers from a variety of national roots exchanged innovatory ideas and experimental forms. Paris was the outstanding centre for the visual arts, especially in the pre-1914 period, drawing to the metropolis artists from the French provinces as well as from other countries. German cities such as Dresden and Munich also provided a place of cosmopolitan exchange and the German language itself became a conductor of new ideas in Central Europe as the late-nineteenth-century railway system enabled easy travel between cities such as Berlin, Budapest, Munich, 248

Nationalism the springboard to the definition of a useful poetry, able to express the mystery of existential experience and the limitations of understanding. The modernist work of art deploys myth insofar as it is ‘an impersonal or objective story woven out of [the artist’s] own emotion, as the nearest equation that he was capable of putting into words’ (Pound 1968: 431). This idea of the literary text as trying by all means to approximate the exact expression of experience turns all texts into new myths, and conversely accounts for a generalised reinvestment of myths by modernists in the Pound tradition. Major sources are Egyptian (Pound, H.D.) and Greek mythology (Pound, H.D., James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams – see also hellenism) and the Bible (H.D., Williams) – to mention but a few representative cases. READING Pound, Ezra (1968) Literary Essays, ed. T. S. Eliot. London: Faber. Witemeyer, Hugh (1969) The Poetry of Ezra Pound: Forms and Renewal (1908–1920). Berkeley: University of California Press.

Hélène Aji

N NATIONALISM Nationalism, defined as devotion to one’s nation or the striving after the unity, independence or interests of a nation, is not a term that readily springs to mind in relation to the study of modernism. Nationalism is more readily associated with nineteenth-­ century Romanticism, while cosmopolitanism seems more accurately to describe the interactive, aesthetic and intellectual creativity of European cities in the early decades of the twentieth century where painters, sculptors, architects, musicians and writers from a variety of national roots exchanged innovatory ideas and experimental forms. Paris was the outstanding centre for the visual arts, especially in the pre-1914 period, drawing to the metropolis artists from the French provinces as well as from other countries. German cities such as Dresden and Munich also provided a place of cosmopolitan exchange and the German language itself became a conductor of new ideas in Central Europe as the late-nineteenth-century railway system enabled easy travel between cities such as Berlin, Budapest, Munich, 248

Nationalism Prague, Vienna and Warsaw. In Anglophone literary modernism, this seeming replacement of national concerns by cosmopolitan exchange was advanced by the development of academic criticism in the postWorld war II period, especially by the influential new criticism led by Americans Cleanth Brooks, John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate. Based on critical principles derived from the poetry of T. S. Eliot, and from the criticism of Eliot, I. A. Richards and William Empson, New Criticism developed an approach to poetry with an emphasis on impersonality, formal innovation and dislocation of language: an approach which could not readily accommodate hors texte references such as nationalism. In contrast, nationalism and modernism have in recent years been brought into communication with each other (although not without tensions) in the wake of the late twentieth-century tide of cultural theory where ideological and postcolonial studies in particular encouraged understanding that a text – literary, visual or musical – might be of interest for more than its formal qualities and that the ‘messages’ it communicated could include the national. This has resulted in a widening of perceptions in modernist studies, bringing to attention what might be categorised as alternative modernisms emanating from national peripheries as opposed to cosmopolitan centres, or arising in response to specific social or national developmental situations (see also global modernisms). This has not only brought the previously undiscovered or ignored into the family of modernisms, but has shown that in its own time, implicitly or explicitly, the social, political, or national could – and often did – have a presence alongside the formal in the work we now call modernist. An outstanding example of overt nationalism within modernism is to be found in Irish literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One of the definitions of ‘nationalism’ in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary is ‘The programme of the Irish Nationalist Party’. This Irish nationalist feeling was a source of W. B. Yeats’s Celtic Renaissance writings of the late nineteenth century, and of the movement known as the celtic twilight, which took its name from the title of Yeats’s 1896 collection of stories. Yeats’s own poetry moved on from this Celticism, but the nationalist sentiment behind his writing continued in his support of the experimental Abbey Theatre and in later poems such as ‘Easter Rising 1916’. James Joyce was more equivocal toward nationalism, especially in relation to the use of the Irish language and what he considered repression by the Catholic Church in the name of a supposed 249

Nationalism Irish purity. For Joyce the new national Free State had brought less freedom. Yet Joyce’s writing is deeply inspired and coloured by the daily life and traditions of Ireland as it is also by European influences. Nationalism is also important in the inter-war movement popularly known as the Scottish Renaissance which aspired to remove Scottish literary culture, and eventually Scotland itself, from the provincial status of ‘North Britain’ it had gained as a result of the 1707 Union with England. Hugh MacDiarmid, the instigator of this movement, was inspired not only by Irish nationalism and the revival of Irish literature, but also by his misunderstanding of Belgian nationalism and the literary society and movement of La Jeune Belgique (The Young Belgium) in the late nineteenth century. Nationalism and internationalism were two sides of the one coin for this Scottish movement, as they looked towards Europe for artistic influences and aimed to take Scotland’s culture back into the European mainstream. Ambition for self-determination encouraged artistic creativity in other small nations also, as, for example, in the newly independent Czechoslovakia after the end of World war I, where Joseph and Karl Čapek gave new life to the National Theatre in Prague with the range and innovative nature of their productions. Examples of a negative outcome of nationalism in modernism are the futurist Marinetti’s involvement with Mussolini and Italian Fascism and Wyndham Lewis’s writings in support of Hitler. National identity elements are more readily identified in verbal art but are also to be found in other art forms. In music, Béla Bartók in Hungary created a radical nationalist and modernist musical idiom through his interest in folk music. The Czech composer Janáček also embraced musical nationalism, with the premiere of his opera Jenufa given in Prague in 1916. In the visual arts, the Russian Marc Chagall drew on Russian folk tales in his compositions, while in the early optimistic period of the 1917 revolution Russian artists more generally worked to support and further the new national situation. little magazines also played a part in bringing modernist and nationalist activities together. La Revue Phénicienne, for example, was important to Lebanese nationalism in 1919. The Crisis, with its articles on Indian, Egyptian and Irish nationalism, acted as a purveyor of national and transnational cultures, thus inspiring a movement such as the harlem renaissance to create a black cultural nationalism. And in the United States more generally, Poetry Review, by its choice and presentation of new writing, encouraged a belief in the worth of modern American writers as opposed to the tradi250

Naturalism tional precedence given to those belonging to an external English tradition. READING Aji, Hélène, Céline Mansanti and Benoît Tadié (2011) Revues modernistes, revues engagés (1909–1939). Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes. Brooker, Peter, Andrzej Gasiorek, Deborah Longworth and Andrew Thacker (eds) (2010) The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kolocotroni, Vassiliki, Jane Goldman and Olga Taxidou (eds) (1998) Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Palmer McCulloch, Margery (ed.) (2004) Modernism and Nationalism: Literature and Society in Scotland 1918–1939: Source Documents for the Scottish Renaissance. Glasgow: Association for Scottish Literary Studies.

Margery Palmer McCulloch

NATURALISM Naturalism appears as a distinct literary and theatrical movement in the 1880s and is premised on the aesthetic principle of verisimilitude. Its understanding of human nature was influenced by Charles Darwin’s evolution theory, Auguste Comte’s positivism and the physiologist Ivan Pavlov’s experiments in conditioned reflexes. This emphasis on both the natural and social environment and its impact on the individual and the group helped to formulate an aesthetic of heightened realism that sometimes has been read as deterministic or even pessimistic. However, it is crucial to underline that naturalism appeared as a radical movement in its own historical context and helped to shape the democratisation of the arts. It is associated through its themes and main exponents, such as Émile Zola in the novel and Henrik Ibsen in drama, with social scandal but also with social progress. Zola’s emblematic J’accuse (1898), an open letter to the French President accusing the government of anti-Semitism and of the unlawful jailing of Alfred Dreyfus (wrongly accused of espionage), and the painter Gustave Courbet’s involvement with the Paris Commune (1871) stand out as moments when the writers and artists of naturalism align their art with their politics. Influenced by Courbet, Zola’s Experimental Novel (1888) presents itself as an exercise in naturalism and his essay ‘Naturalism in the Theatre’ (1881) as a manifesto for a New Theatre. The use of everyday language, the emphasis on the ­environment, 251

Naturalism on the impact of heredity, on the family as the laboratory for individual and collective development, on the shifting roles and ­ politics of gender, and a fascination with the animal characteristics of human nature, are all traits that characterise both the naturalist novel and the naturalist play. Arguably naturalism is formulated and codified and tested both for its possibilities and its limitations on the modernist stage. Zola himself was influenced by André Antoine’s Théâtre Libre (1887–96), a company specifically created to stage Zola’s novel Thérèse Raquin in 1887 and which had also introduced Ibsen to the Parisian audiences with a production of Ghosts (1881) at a time when the play was banned throughout most of Europe. Antoine stressed ensemble acting and everyday dialogue and strived for complete realism on the stage, using in one case real beef carcasses and mounting four walls across the stage only to decide in the course of the rehearsal which wall to dismantle for the benefit of the audience (an act which probably helped to coin the phrase ‘the fourth wall’). Traditionally known as a playwrights’ theatre, naturalism helped to reconfigure the theatre professions in equal measure; it gave rise to the figure of the director – new to modernist theatre – and helped to systematise the art of the actor. Furthermore, through the dominance of the new woman on the naturalist stage (for instance in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and Hedda Gabler, Strindberg’s Miss Julie and Chekhov’s Three Sisters), it also contributed to the professionalisation and the artistic validation of the art of the actress. Like Constantin Stanislavsky in Moscow who formulated his famous system for training actors in his attempt to understand and stage Chekhov, directors all over Europe were creating systems for training actors during the early decades of the twentieth century. Sometimes misunderstood as the representative of a bourgeois aesthetic, it nevertheless had a huge impact not only on American naturalism (Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919), Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1949) in the novel and the plays of Eugene O’Neill and the work of Clifford Odets for stage and screen), but also on modernist writers and playwrights who were not themselves practitioners of naturalism. The championing of Ibsen by both James Joyce and Bertolt Brecht is a testament to the aesthetic and political legacies of the naturalist movement. READING Innes, Christopher (2002) A Sourcebook on Naturalist Theatre. London: Routledge. 252

Négritude Lukács, George [Georg] (1950) Studies in European Realism. A Sociological Survey of the Writings of Balzac, Stendhal, Zola, Tolstoy, Gorki and Others, trans. Edith Bone. London: Hillway. Williams, Raymond (1993) Drama from Ibsen to Brecht. London: Hogarth Press.

Olga Taxidou

NÉGRITUDE Négritude emerged as a philosophical and artistic movement in Paris in the late 1920s. It was the product of the coming together of black students from Africa and the French Caribbean and was heavily influenced by the harlem renaissance, especially the works of Claude McKay and Langston Hughes. These diasporic origins are fundamental to Négritude’s vision of the black world and rejection of the imposition of white colonial subjectivity by white European and American powers. Its principal founders were Aimé Césaire from Martinique, Léon Gontran Damas from Guiana and Léopold Sédar Senghor from Senegal. It should be remembered, however, that the masculinist rhetoric of much of their writing undermines the important roles played by women, most notably Jane and Paulette Nardel (also from Martinique), who not only established the Paris salon where the group gathered and where they met McKay and Hughes, but were also central in formulating the movement’s major ideas. Négritude gained attention when the Nardel sisters launched Revue du Monde Noir (1931–2). Although this folded after six issues, it was replaced when Césaire, Damas and Senghor founded the journal L’Etudiant noir (1935–40), where Césaire used the word Négritude for the first time. The vitality of poetry written by Africans and those of African descent (and the degree to which this contrasted with what was perceived as the exhaustion of white Western culture) was celebrated in Damas’s Poètes d’expression française 1900–1945 (1947) and Senghor’s Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française (1948). Each of these texts contained an introduction that served as a manifesto for Négritude, although ‘Black Orpheus’, Jean-Paul Sartre’s preface to the latter, was probably the most influential text in terms of popularising the movement and identifying the manner in which it subverted and appropriated the language of the oppressor.

253

The Neo-Pagans READING Edwards, Brent Hayes (2003) The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sharpley-Whiting, Tracy D. (2002) Negritude Women. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Christopher Gair

THE NEO-PAGANS As an intellectual group led by the young English poet Rupert Brooke, the Neo-Pagan circle existed between 1908 and 1912 and had contacts with the bloomsbury group. Its members had a strong interest in outdoor pursuits and in the simple life of comradeship. Being largely inspired by the ideas of Edward Carpenter, a socialist and pioneering gay activist who detested the urban lifestyle, the members of the Neo-Pagan group would meet to practise a liberated, bohemian, outdoor life with no formal dogma, initiation rites or institutional affiliations. The group included several of Brooke’s friends from Cambridge University and from the fabian Society. The idea of living a ‘back-to-nature’ lifestyle existed in Brooke’s mind for some time (and was in a sense the offspring of nineteenthcentury religious movements and spiritualist groups), but it was the Olivier sisters (Brynhild, Margery, Daphne and Noël, with whom Brooke was infatuated) who helped him to materialise his ideas. The four sisters lived a liberated, outdoor life, walking, climbing and killing rabbits in the South West of England. They viewed their bond to the myth of a matriarchal golden age as the moral basis for their religious and political credo (see also mother right). Although Daphne took up Rudolf Steiner’s educational philosophy for a time, she then settled down to domestic life. Rupert Brooke, now best known as an idealist war poet, was commissioned into the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve in 1914, sailed with the British Mediterranean Expeditionary Force and died of a blood infection on 27 April 1915 in a French hospital ship moored off the coast of the Greek island of Skyros, where he was buried. By 1933 there were few Neo-pagans left. READING Delany, Paul (1987) The Neo-Pagans: Friendship and Love in the Rupert Brooke Circle. London: Macmillan. 254

Neo-romanticism Caesar, Adrian (1993) Taking It Like A Man: Suffering, Sexuality, and the War Poets. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Alexandra Smith

NEO-PRIMITIVISM A cohesive artistic movement active in Russia between 1908 and 1913, Neo-primitivism advocated a revival of primitive beliefs and simple styles. Its primitivism and return to a more natural art form was a reaction against the rapid technological advancement which Russia was undergoing in the 1900s. It attracted several prominent avant-garde artists, including David Burlyuk, Natalya Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov. Its influence was also felt in the work of such diverse artists as Marc Chagall, Aleksandr Shevchenko and Kazimir Malevich. The hallmark of the neo-primitivist paintings was vitality and forcefulness. In their 1913 public statements, neo-primitivists issued a critique of Western art and presented Russia as the real birthplace of Neo-primitivism, cubism and futurism. In her 1913 Preface to Catalogue of One-Man Exhibition, Goncharova asserted that the rediscovery of traditional Russian art forms, notably the icon, the hand-painted tray and the peasant handcoloured cartoon (lubok) enabled her and other Neo-primitivist artists to assimilate many elements of the peasant culture into their artistic code and to ‘shake off the dust of the West’. Larionov’s 1909 painting Officer at the Hairdresser’s utilises the inverted perspective and the childish distortion of objects found in the lubok and subverts the universality of classical perspective and proportion. READING Bowlt, John (ed. and trans.) (1988) Russian Art of the Avant-Garde: Theory and Criticism, 1902–1934. New York: Thames & Hudson. Brantley, Caroline (2011) Neo-Primitivism, Futurism, and Constructivism: A Guide to the Russian Avant-Garde Movement and Its Proponents, Including Ilya Golosov, Samuil Feinberg. Charleston, SC: BiblioBazaar. Warren, Sarah (2013) Mikhail Larionov and the Cultural Politics of Late Imperial Russia. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate.

Alexandra Smith

NEO-ROMANTICISM A broad tendency in the fine, decorative and literary arts (c.1925–55) that sought to amalgamate native romantic archetypes, m ­ ethodologies 255

Neo-romanticism and genres – especially the work of William Wordsworth, William Blake, Samuel Palmer, Thomas Girtin and Edward Calvert – with forms of ornamental abstraction drawn from the cosmopolitan vanguard of Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Giorgio de Chirico and Pablo Picasso. In a New Statesman and Nation article entitled ‘Painting and Humanism’ (28 March 1942), the bloomsbury critic Raymond Mortimer alighted upon a diverse and visionary cluster of British artists whom he categorised as ‘Neo-romantics’. Mortimer is credited with being one of the first Anglophone public intellectuals to deploy this term as a critical category in print. The London-based and English-born painters, illustrators and designers whom Mortimer went on to acclaim as doyens of this movement – Paul Nash, John Piper and Graham Sutherland – remodelled a modernist lexicon so as to laud an indigenous visual and textual repertoire. To adapt one of Nash’s most well-known journalistic slogans, Neo-romanticism was about ‘going modern and being British’. The isolated individual, delineated in a natural figural form and set against a numinous, stylised and frequently forbidding outdoor environment: this was, according to Mortimer, a vivid keynote of the British neo-romantic school. Although a cluster of Paris-based artists – including Eugène Berman, his brother Leonid Berman and Pavel Tchelitchew – are now treated as important forerunners of the movement, Mortimer was concerned with the emergence of a distinctively British postcubist confederacy of artists and writers committed to sketching the archaeology of Englishness and retooling the visionary rural hinterlands depicted by William Blake and Samuel Palmer as signifiers of an atavistic wish for belonging. This movement benefited from an inter-war period which saw a vocal preservationist lobby, cultural historians, academic and popularising archaeologists, filmmakers, composers and photographers united in their stress on what Paul Nash termed the genius loci – something more intense and vested in the heritage of indigenous art and the terrain that it so often memorialised. Neo-romanticism led to fresh ways of representing visually the variegated topography of Cornwall and Dorset, the south-western tip of Pembrokeshire and other ‘Celtic’ shrines in the island nation. Neo-romantic tropes spread far beyond a specialist branch of inter-war landscape painting, to imbue aerial archaeology, urban planning, popular travelogues and literature. In the realm of narrative prose fiction and poetry, this tendency shapes the work of 256

The New Apocalypse the Sussex-set works of Kipling, Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes (1926), John Cowper Powys’s Wolf Solent (1929) and A Glastonbury Romance (1933), as well as Mary Butts’s Ashe of Rings (1925) and Death of Felicity Taverner (1932). While these authors were imaginatively excavating bucolic hinterlands in search of sustaining myths for an embattled body politic exponents of the ‘English Musical Renaissance’, encouraged by the founding of Sadler’s Wells Ballet in 1931, brought a Neo-romantic emphasis to the study of folk expression in national life. Alert to the resurgence of national music in works by Edward Elgar and Sir Hubert Parry, Constant Lambert, Ralph Vaughan Williams and George Butterworth reappraised Tudor virginalists, madrigalists and Edmund Purcell. Neoromanticism was then, in its powers of selection and formalisation, in its need to salvage the forgotten foundations of sober vernacular taste, a multifaceted commentary on how British landscape and folklore could assume a deeper resonance and be adapted to a wide spectrum of divergent political or aesthetic hues. READING Harris, Alexandra (2010) Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper. London: Thames & Hudson. Wright, Patrick (2009) On Living in an Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Yorke, Malcolm (2001) The Spirit of Place: Nine Neo-Romantic Artists and Their Times. London: Tauris Park.

Andrew Radford

THE NEW APOCALYPSE An anarchist movement in poetry and prose in England during World war II centred around the poets Henry Treece and J. F. Hendry and the translator Stefan Schimanski. It first developed following the London International surrealist Exhibition in 1936, later renamed itself the ‘New Romanticism’, and used the term post-surrealism to self-describe. It was also associated with a series of anthologies and little magazines: The New Apocalypse (1939), The White Horseman (1941), The Crown and the Sickle (1945) and A New Romantic Anthology (1949) as well as the journals Kingdom Come (1939–43), Seven (1938–40) and Transformation (1943–7), the last of which was published as a book series to avoid paper rationing restrictions. The movement was anarchist from its 257

The New Apocalypse i­nception but often expressed this indirectly through reference to the concepts in Herbert Read’s The Politics of the Unpolitical (1943). It was also associated with various Celtic, Scottish and Welsh poetry movements, promoted the personal landscape poets and was centred around Charles Wrey Gardiner’s Grey Walls Press. The group’s main influences were D. H. Lawrence, the English Romantic poets, Henry Miller and Surrealism. As a movement, it was among the most active and prolific in English poetry during World War II and was seminal in expressing its anti-authoritarian vision through form and style rather than propagandistic imagery or sloganeering. When much of what had been English Surrealism reoriented to mass observation, the New Apocalypse innovated by emphasising conscious revision of materials created through automatic writing, thereby focusing attention on egoistic control of the expressions of the unconscious. The first thorough explanation of the movement came from G. S. Fraser in 1941 in The White Horseman shortly before his service in Egypt where he affiliated with the Cairo Poets while maintaining correspondence with Treece. He articulated the group’s combined emphasis on organic form, rural rather than mechanical or urban systems, conscious manipulation of surrealist metaphor, and their sense of sterility as the outcome of imposed rather than spontaneous organisation, all of which reflect Treece’s understanding of Read’s anarchism. Fraser also first expressed in print the movement’s sense of being a neo-Romantic generation after the Classicism of the Auden group, and he noted its return to Celtic and mythic materials as an expression of organicism against the ‘object-machine’ and imposed order, although these ideas were already implicit in the group’s unpublished manifesto after first meeting in 1938. These same traits also led the movement to be widely misunderstood or misrepresented, and its anarchist resistance to state socialism and urban modernism made several critics present it as reactionary, which was likely due to their dismissal of Marxism qua Christopher Caudwell. Likewise, their use of myth in a sense contrary to high modernism led to false assumptions. Like other anarchist movements in Britain at the time, most critics described the New Apocalypse in the war context as ‘quietist’ or ‘defeatist’, which further increased misunderstandings, particularly by the Auden group and the later Movement poets. The only critic outside their circle to recognise their anarchism as the impulse behind their revision to Surrealism, organicism, mythic mode and rejection of the Machine Age was Kenneth Rexroth in The New British Poets 258

New Criticism (1947). The movement largely broke up as the poets entered service during the war, several of them meeting up again in Egypt, although it continued to as late as 1949. After the war, the group and affiliated authors failed to accede to editorial positions of authority and were geographically dispersed. Treece turned to historical fantasy novels and young adult fiction, Hendry relocated to Canada, Fraser only returned to Britain after a nervous breakdown in Japan, Alex Comfort relocated to California, David Gascoyne ceased writing for several years, Ruthven Todd moved to Iowa and Schimanski became a translator. READING Gifford, James (2014) Personal Modernisms: Anarchist Networks and the Later Avant-Gardes. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press. Salmon, Arthur Edward (1983) Poets of the Apocalypse. Boston: Twayne. Tolley, Trevor (1985), The Poetry of the Forties in Britain. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press. Treece, Henry (1946) How I See Apocalypse. London: Lindsay Drummond.

James Gifford

NEW CRITICISM The New Criticism refers to a group of Anglo-American literary critics active in the first half of the twentieth century. Like many literary modernists, the New Critics were vocal in their rejection of certain nineteenth-century methods and values. Chief among their expressed targets were the seemingly arbitrary and extraneous measures of literary worth deployed by the popular critic and a critical lexicon deemed correspondingly muddled and lacking in analytic rigour. The New Critical idiom was trained towards disciplinary specialisation therefore; consciously narrow in its – largely linguistic and pragmatic – frame of reference, the mission to wrest critical practice from the psychological and historical conjectures of amateurs and journalists lent it an air of elitism as well. Nevertheless, the New Critics were not a unified movement and their viewpoints have sometimes been clouded by critical and ideological misperception. Their common edict to forget speculation in preference for ‘the words on the page’ (I. A. Richards), an expression of asocial formalism to their detractors, belies the socially committed origins of the New Critics. It was the sometime poet and critic John Crowe Ransom who endowed the movement with its name, but this was not until 1941, ten to fifteen years after its germination among fellow southern 259

New Criticism at the Kenyon and Southern Reviews. Along with Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren, Ransom disdained the bourgeois individualist ideology of the North and its potential encroachment upon an undeveloped and traditionally agricultural South. Culturally conservative in their values, they approached literature as an important cultural force, as a means through which to challenge the prevailing rationalism and instrumentalism of the North’s modernising values. Literature was thus a special mode of discourse for the Agrarians, irreducible to the language of everyday utility and rationality and for that reason worthy of serious attention. The New Critics’ most famous doctrines emerge from this insight – from the determination to show how and why poetic language is unique but to do so without taking recourse to the old aesthetic categories of Romantic individualism. While their principles do indeed sound Romantic – the elevation of irony as a singularly poetic principle (Tate), the ‘heresy of paraphrase’ (Cleanth Brooks), commitment to the work’s organic structure (Warren and Brooks) and to the work as a singular ‘verbal icon’ (W. K Wimsatt) – their explanations were consciously pragmatic. The heresy of paraphrase had nothing to do with inspiration from the Muse and everything to do with the meticulous totality of the poem’s linguistic interrelations. These interrelations justified the work’s organic and self-sufficient status, but not as an ideal form so much as an open and agonistic process between its formal, technical and linguistic aspects. Likewise the poem’s iconicity derived from these taught relations: where ordinary language re-presents preestablished content, the iconic was understood to present or instantiate new content through the totality of its formal and linguistic relations. So while the New Critics championed poetry as a distinct and privileged means to understanding, they did not relate this privilege to any kind of metaphysical framework. Their commitment to the words and form on the page was about technical and linguistic precision not idealism. Indeed, the Agrarians’ methods of analysis were at least partly indebted to works of earlier, predominantly British critics and philosophers such as T. S. Eliot, T. E. Hulme, I. A. Richards and William Empson, for whom the edict of close reading was part of a broader strategy of anti-metaphysical, language-oriented pragmatism and analysis within Anglo-American philosophy at that time. But these figures could be asocial and elitist in their persuasions. It is these germinal figures, retrospectively grouped under the banner of the New agrarians

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The New Negro Criticism, who have perhaps done most to influence the school’s archly formalist connotations. READING Jancovich, Mark (1993) The Cultural Politics of the New Criticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vlacos, Sophie (2014) ‘The Romantic Prejudice’, in Sophie Vlacos Ricoeur, Literature and Imagination. London: Bloomsbury.

Sophie Vlacos

THE NEW NEGRO The New Negro Movement had its roots in the post-Reconstruction United States of the 1890s, when the Supreme Court effectively reimposed racial segregation with their ‘separate but equal’ verdict in the 1896 case of Plessy v. Fergusson. In response to this, and to the thousands of lynchings that took place in the decade, a new generation of African Americans sought ways to distance themselves from racial stereotypes handed down from antebellum America and to celebrate African and African American culture. At the same time, European artists, such as the Czech composer Antonin Dvorák and the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso, began the turn to African American music and African art that would play such a significant roles in the development of European modernism. The New Negro Movement reached its zenith between World War I and the late-1920s, during which time it became indelibly associated with the harlem renaissance. The combination of mass migration from the south to northern cities and a growing awareness of the gulf between a wartime rhetoric of democracy and the treatment of African Americans (including returning war veterans), contributed to the emergence of a body of literature and art that rejected assimilationist models of American culture and sought new ways to celebrate and defend African Americans. The New Negro, An Interpretation anthology (1925), edited by Alain Locke (the first African American to be a Rhodes Scholar), brought together poetry, fiction, art, literary criticism and political analysis, including Locke’s own important foreword and work by (among others) Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, James Weldon Johnson and W. E. B. DuBois.

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New Objectivity READING Gates, Henry Louis, Jr and Gene Andrew Jarrett (eds) (2007) The New Negro: Readings on Race, Representation, and African American Culture, 1892–1938. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Locke, Alain (ed.) (1925) The New Negro, An Interpretation. New York: Albert & Charles Boni.

Christopher Gair

NEW OBJECTIVITY In German, Neue Sachlichkeit, New Objectivity is an art movement that originated in Germany around 1923. It is considered to be a typical manifestation of the return to realism and pragmatist ideas during the so-called Weimar Republic (1918–33). Rather than a movement with a well-defined aesthetic programme, New Objectivity refers to a heterogeneous array of post-expressionist tendencies in the visual arts, in literature and architecture. As a whole, New Objectivity is characterised by the use of realistic, sober and matter-of-fact forms which contrast with the exuberant pathos and inclination towards abstraction of expressionism. Exemplary figures include Otto Dix and George Grosz in the visual arts, Alfred Döblin and Joseph Roth in literature, and architects like Walter Gropius, the founder of the bauhaus School. Similar trends emerged outside Germany, with writers like Ilya Ehrenburg in Russia or John Dos Passos in the US, and with related ideas on architecture advocated by de stijl in the Netherlands and Le Corbusier in France. In literature, the Zeitroman (novel about contemporary issues) takes centre stage. These novels are often written in a documentary, detached and objective style, based on techniques borrowed from journalism and cinema, and they display a fascination with themes related to everyday modern life, such as technology, modern transport and business, city life, sports and lifestyle. READING Becker, Sabina (2000) Neue Sachlichkeit. Band 1: Die Ästhetik der neusachlichen Literatur (1920–1933). Cologne, Weimar and Vienna: Böhlau. Grüttemeier, Ralf, Klaus Beekman and Ben Rebel (eds) (2013) Neue Sachlichkeit and Avant-Garde. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. Plumb, Steve (2006) Neue Sachlichkeit 1918–1933: Unity and Diversity of an Art Movement. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi.

Pieter Verstraeten

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The New Woman

THE NEW WOMAN The ‘New Woman’ describes a form of emancipated and independent femininity that emerged in the 1880s and 1890s across a range of contexts and genres, including the periodical press and popular literary fiction. The advent of the New Woman needs to be understood within a broader social, political and cultural context, which includes the rise of feminism and socialism, the early suffrage movement, changes in marriage laws, increased access to education and employment, debates about sexual morality and conduct, and eugenicist concerns about the role of reproduction and the future of the race. Although competing definitions and understandings of the New Woman circulated at the turn of the century, the perceived novelty of women’s attempts to live autonomously and independently was at the heart of both celebratory and critical commentaries. Literary representations of the New Woman in novels, plays, poetry and short stories written by (largely white and middle-class) male and female authors were central in shaping these heterogeneous debates. Nora, the heroine of Henrik Ibsen’s widely produced and translated play A Doll’s House (1879), was one of the earliest models of the New Woman. Fellow playwright August Strindberg also engaged with the woman question, but tended to be more critical about women’s emancipation, viewing it as a threat to male authority. Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883), often seen as the first New Woman novel, on the other hand, suggests that female emancipation was not only a threat to male power, but could also allow men to break free from gender boundaries, experience new modes of subjectivity and develop alternative relationship models. Indeed, in the character of Gregory Rose, Schreiner depicted the ideal of the New Man, who could be caring, gentle and empathetic. Other important New Woman writers include Sarah Grand, who authored the best-selling novel The Heavenly Twins (1893) and is often credited with coining the term ‘New Woman’ in an 1894 journal article, Grant Allan, Rhoda Broughton, Mona Caird, George Egerton, George Gissing and George Moore, to name but a few. While it has been argued that at least some of these writers should be seen as early or proto-modernist, the relation between New Woman writing and mass culture, the considerable heterogeneity of genres across which New Woman authors wrote and the fact that later modernist writers rejected New Woman politics complicate this approach. This is not to say, however, that modernist authors like 263

The New York School Djuna Barnes, D. H. Lawrence, Dorothy Richardson, Rebecca West or Virginia Woolf were not strongly influenced by the New Woman. On the contrary, debates about woman’s role in society, the notion of femininity as a cultural construct rather than a natural given and the renegotiation of marriage and motherhood continued to shape strongly later modernist works. READING Ardis, Ann L. (1990) New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Heilman, Ann (2004) New Woman Strategies: Sarah Grand, Olive Schreiner, Mona Caird. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Ledger, Sally (1997) The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Richardson, Angelique and Chris Willis (eds) (2001) The New Woman in Fiction and in Fact: Fin-de-Siècle Feminisms. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Schreiner, Olive (1992) The Story of an African Farm. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Jana Funke

THE NEW YORK SCHOOL The New York School of poetry that emerged in the late-1950s and thrived in the 1960s can be characterised by its fusion of an interest in surrealism, abstract expressionism and the incorporation of American idioms and referencing of American popular culture alongside high art. Its leading exponents included Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch, Joe Brainard and Ted Berrigan. Most of these writers had close personal ties to Abstract Expressionists such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell and Grace Hartigan. O’Hara, for example, was a curator at the Museum of Modern Art and helped prepare ‘The New American Painting’ exhibition that toured Europe in 1958–9, while Ashbery was editor of the influential art magazine, ARTnews, in the 1960s. The relationship between artists and poets was extensive, including collaborations and responses, while the Tibor de Nagy Gallery published several editions of poems accompanied by artwork by Hartigan and others. Donald Allen adapted the title ‘The New American Painting’, when he published The New American Poetry, 1945–1960 (1960). The volume, which focused on poets associated with the New York School, black mountain, the beats and the San Francisco 264

Newspapers Renaissance, was highly influential and helped to introduce O’Hara, Ashbery and many others to a wider audience. The anthology served as a major influence on the next generation of American poets and, more generally, on the counterculture of the 1960s. READING Kane, Daniel (2003) All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s. Oakland: University of California Press. Lehman, David (1998) The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets. New York: Doubleday.

Christopher Gair

NEWSPAPERS Modernism implies a new engagement with the everyday. One important aspect of this engagement is its interrelation with mass culture and print journalism. symbolism was the first modernism to reflect seriously on the relations between poetry and the press. In 1874 Stéphane Mallarmé worked as the editor, designer and author of a women’s fashion magazine, La Dernière mode (The Latest Fashion). Later, in ‘Crisis of Verse’ (‘Crise de vers’, published in Divagations, 1897), Mallarmé suggests that newspapers have inaugurated the reign of a ‘universal reportage’. Marshall McLuhan credits Mallarmé with having ‘formulated the lessons of the press as a guide for the new impersonal poetry of suggestion’. Félix Fénéon adopted the fait-divers form for his Novels in Three Lines (Nouvelles en trois lignes, 1905–6) in the newspaper Le Matin. Around this time in visual art, synthetic cubism developed as Picasso and Georges Braque inserted newspaper cuttings into their canvases. Following on from these experiments, modernist poets such as Apollinaire and the exponents of dada and surrealism made a point of incorporating media and mass culture in their work. Many modernist authors saw close connections between artistic activity and journalism. This is particularly true of Anatole France and Guy de Maupassant in France; of Theodor Fontane, Heinrich Mann, Klaus Mann and Kurt Tucholsky in Germany; of Karl Kraus and Joseph Roth in Austria. An early crossover between literature and journalism occurs in Guy de Maupassant’s novel Bel-Ami (1885), which draws on his experience as Algerian correspondent for Le Gaulois in 1881, the year in which the French invaded Tunisia. Bel-Ami shows how newspapers define our knowledge of the world 265

Newspapers in pursuit of political ends. In Maupassant’s novel, the ‘world’ emerges as a fiction propagated by the ‘news’. James Joyce was well aware that newspapers had intruded into the fabric of everyday life. His short story ‘A Painful Case’ in Dubliners (1914) is ambivalent about the media, showing how the newspaper enforces social norms and intrudes into the privacy of the grieving family. Joyce compiled an archive of newspapers in order to write Ulysses (1922). Like an enormous newspaper, Ulysses recounts the events of a single day: 16 June 1904. Chapter Four, ‘Calypso’, in which Leopold Bloom appears for the first time, is packed with references to newspapers. Bloom thinks about the sunburst headpiece of The Freeman’s Journal, Dublin’s pro-Home Rule newspaper. Then, at the butcher’s, he picks up a sheet of newsprint used for wrapping, and reads about Jewish settlements in Palestine. After breakfast, he takes an old copy of Titbits from all the Most Interesting Books, Periodicals and Newspapers in the World with him to the toilet and reads it before using it to wipe himself. Chapter Seven of Ulysses, ‘Aeolus’, is set in the newspaper office where Bloom works. The chapter is divided into paragraphs, each with its own ‘headline’. Franco Moretti argues that the stream of consciousness in Ulysses is gradually superseded by the polyphony of journalistic styles. Individual consciousness recedes as it confronts the polyphony of the metropolis, with its various institutional discourses (journalism, mass culture, bureaucracy). Rebecca West and Rose Macaulay combined novel-writing and prolific journalism and considered newspapers to be a key institution of modernity. In her speech ‘The Function of the Weekly Review’ (1927) West argues that the public wants serious journalism, but it is being poorly served by the commercial marketplace. She later delivered on this promise with Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), a record of her travels in Yugoslavia. Macaulay too considers mass culture and the crowd in her work. Her novel Keeping Up Appearances (1928) suggests that the public is more intelligent than journalists tend to assume. The protagonist, Daisy Simpson, has different personae corresponding to the different social worlds in which she moves. Her Westminster friends call her ‘Daphne’, her East End family call her ‘Daisy’, and as a journalist she is known under her pen name of Marjorie Wynne. A decade later, Evelyn Waugh’s novel Scoop (1938) draws on his experience of working for the Daily Mail, which is renamed The Beast. It contains a satirical portrait of the newspaper’s owner, Lord Copper, who is modelled 266

Nihilism on Lord Northcliffe, the owner of the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror. The most significant English journalist and essayist of the 1930s and 1940s was George Orwell. Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) and The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) set new standards for documentary realism, and can be compared to the work of James Agee in the US. Around this time, a number of women writers emerged who produced prose fiction and journalism simultaneously: Dorothy Parker in the US, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Storm Jameson, Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby in England, and Annemarie Schwarzenbach and Gabriele Tergit in Germany. READING Birch, Edmund (2014) ‘Maupassant’s Bel-Ami and the Secrets of Actualité’, Modern Language Review, 104 (4): 998–1012. Blanc, Dina (1998) ‘Mallarmé on the Press and Literature: “Étalages” and “Le Livre, instrument spirituel”’, French Review, 71 (3): 414–24. Collier, Patrick (2006) Modernism on Fleet Street. Aldershot: Ashgate. McLuhan, Marshall (1969) ‘Joyce, Mallarmé, and the Press’, in McLuhan, The Interior Landscape: The Literary Criticism of Marshall McLuhan, 1943–1962. New York: McGraw-Hill. Moretti, Franco (1996) Modern Epic: The World System from Goethe to García Marquez. London: Verso. Williams, Keith and Steven Matthews (eds) (1997) Rewriting the Thirties: Modernism and After. London and New York: Longman.

Ernest Schonfield

NIHILISM As used in relation to modernist literature nihilism usually refers to one of two categories: political nihilism or existential nihilism. Nihilism as a political movement, which was often indistinguishable from the anarchism of the time, came to prominence in Russia in the 1860s and lasted more or less until the revolution of 1917. Ivan Turgenev’s 1862 novel, Fathers and Sons, with its depiction of young nihilists, contributed greatly to the movement’s popularity. The philosophy of existential nihilism, on the other hand – the idea that life has no meaning except what we as individuals bring to it – is most strongly associated, rightly or wrongly, with Friedrich Nietzsche, whose declaration that ‘God is dead’ has often been used as a slogan of nihilism. Nietzsche’s influence on existential nihilism is reflected in the writings of German philosopher Martin Heidegger and in the 267

Noh postwar French existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, among others. Nihilist themes and characters started to appear in literature outside Russia following a number of high-profile nihilist and anarchist bombings and assassinations of heads of state (‘propaganda by the deed’, as the late nineteenth-century anarchist slogan put it), including the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. Oscar Wilde’s first play, Vera; or, The Nihilists (1880), for example, depicts a failed plot on the Tsar; it actually pre-dated the assassination by several months, although it was not staged until a brief showing in New York in 1882. Other examples include W. B. Yeats’s play Where There Is Nothing (1904) and Joseph Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent (1907). After 1909, the provocations and interventions of the European avant-garde brought a strongly nihilistic approach to the practice of art itself. While Italian futurism celebrated war and destruction, Tristan Tzara’s dada used strategies of persistent negation to reflect and condemn the horrors of World War I and notions of progress and enlightenment that led to the war. A different form of nihilism appeared in the wake of World War II in the Theatre of the absurd, whose experiments in silence, repetition, farce and tragicomic horror evoked an irrational and meaningless universe, and in Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of cruelty. READING Esslin, Martin (1961) The Theatre of the Absurd. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Griffin, Roger (2007) Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning Under Mussolini and Hitler. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Weller, Shane (2011) Modernism and Nihilism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Julian Hanna

NOH Noh (or ‘Nō’, pron. ‘naw’), meaning ‘ability’ or ‘accomplishment’, is the appreciative name given to the oldest, gravest, most stylised and pious of the three serious genres of classic Japanese theatre (the other two being the more melodramatic Kabuki and the puppet-Bunraku). Already flourishing in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries – the period of three of its most often performed playwrights, Kan’ami, Zeami and Motomasa – Noh focuses on the intense spiritual/psychological state of one principal character per play: for instance, a god in 268

Noh epiphany,

an angel in benediction, a lonely lover, an anxious parent, a regretful warrior. Its plots, which largely derive from myths, legends and other old tales, are presented allusively and ceremonially rather than illusionistically, and are acted out by all-male casts that include travesti performers. For much of its length a Noh play takes the form of a dialogue between its protagonist or shité, who is generally masked and often exchanges one mask for another more extreme one during the action, and an inter-locutor or waki who is not masked. (The two are quite often supported by vocal and/or silent supernumeraries.) But as the slow, deliberate action – its dialogue delivered in an earnest speech-song – moves towards its climax, there is a change of medium: a dance by the protagonist, perhaps evocative of cosmic harmony, divine blessing or spiritual enlightenment, perhaps expressive of gratitude, consolation, release, regret, yearning, hysterical grief or jealousy. The principals’ exchanges are supported, supplemented, extended and the dance accompanied by a static onstage chorus of singers plus instrumentalists playing flute and drums. A single play runs for around an hour or rather more, but traditionally a full-length Noh performance comprises five plays: one from each of the form’s sub-genres (god plays, ghost plays, women plays, madness plays, demon plays), interspersed with four energetic contrasting comic playlets or Kyōgen. (Kyōgen actors also occasionally appear in narrative interludes within Noh.) Only interrupted for a few years at the time of the momentous Meiji Restoration in 1868, Noh has had an almost continuous history of performance and study in Japan, where in the last hundred years deep respect for its tradition has occasionally be counterpointed by re-thinkings, notably with the Five Modern Nō Plays (1950–5) of Yukio Mishima. The West discovered the form around the beginning of the twentieth century and English translations soon appeared: by Marie Stopes in 1913, Ezra Pound (after the Orientalist scholar Ernest Fenollosa) in 1916 and Arthur Waley in 1921. Time and circumstance were right for Noh to be influential, as it arrived towards the end of a fashion for Japonisme and its dramaturgy chimed with modernist concerns to move beyond naturalism in the direction of poetic and/or didactic and/or ritual drama, masked theatre, dance-theatre, cross-dressed theatre –indeed re-theatricalised theatre generally. In 1910 Vsevolod Meyerhold and Edward Gordon Craig both enthused over Noh’s staging techniques, with Craig lamenting a decade later that the West’s lack of a ‘heroic’ civilisation meant that it could achieve nothing so great, while Paul Claudel warmed 269

Objective Correlative to Noh as ‘materialised dream’ when he saw it in Japan soon afterwards. symbolists and proponents of verfremdungseffekt were equally intrigued. The range of response can be gauged by putting Pound’s own Westernised Noh piece Tristan of 1916 or the four Noh-influenced plays that W. B. Yeats published in 1921 as his Plays for Dancers (The Dreaming of the Bones especially) beside Bertolt Brecht’s Waley-derived, secularised Lehrstűuck-adaptations of 1930: Der Jasager and its Siamese twin Der Neinsager. Further, Der Jasager was set to music by Kurt Weill and so joined the slim but significant tradition of Noh-influenced opera and musictheatre running from Clarence Raybould’s Sumida River (1916) and Rutland Boughton’s Moon Maiden (1919), both based on Stopes versions, to Harry Partch’s Noh-inflected Delusion of the Fury (1969) and Curlew River, Benjamin Britten’s 1964 setting of William Plomer’s Christianised adaptation of the same mad-woman play of Motomasa’s that Raybould had used a half-century before. READING Komparu, Kumio (1983) The Noh Theatre: Principles and Perspectives. New York: Weatherhill. Miller, Liam (1977) The Noble Drama of W. B. Yeats. Dublin: Dolmen.

Roger Savage

O OBJECTIVE CORRELATIVE As defined by T. S. Eliot in ‘Hamlet’ (1919): The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.

Its role is principally related to producing art impersonally, as a technique for turning emotional excess into precise feelings grounded on external fact. It is a great example of Eliot’s early genius for the critical soundbite, but does not translate into precise critical use. Its importance lies elsewhere. Behind the cold scientific posturing of this formula crouch crucial psychotherapeutic overtones. Eliot may 270

Objective Correlative to Noh as ‘materialised dream’ when he saw it in Japan soon afterwards. symbolists and proponents of verfremdungseffekt were equally intrigued. The range of response can be gauged by putting Pound’s own Westernised Noh piece Tristan of 1916 or the four Noh-influenced plays that W. B. Yeats published in 1921 as his Plays for Dancers (The Dreaming of the Bones especially) beside Bertolt Brecht’s Waley-derived, secularised Lehrstűuck-adaptations of 1930: Der Jasager and its Siamese twin Der Neinsager. Further, Der Jasager was set to music by Kurt Weill and so joined the slim but significant tradition of Noh-influenced opera and musictheatre running from Clarence Raybould’s Sumida River (1916) and Rutland Boughton’s Moon Maiden (1919), both based on Stopes versions, to Harry Partch’s Noh-inflected Delusion of the Fury (1969) and Curlew River, Benjamin Britten’s 1964 setting of William Plomer’s Christianised adaptation of the same mad-woman play of Motomasa’s that Raybould had used a half-century before. READING Komparu, Kumio (1983) The Noh Theatre: Principles and Perspectives. New York: Weatherhill. Miller, Liam (1977) The Noble Drama of W. B. Yeats. Dublin: Dolmen.

Roger Savage

O OBJECTIVE CORRELATIVE As defined by T. S. Eliot in ‘Hamlet’ (1919): The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.

Its role is principally related to producing art impersonally, as a technique for turning emotional excess into precise feelings grounded on external fact. It is a great example of Eliot’s early genius for the critical soundbite, but does not translate into precise critical use. Its importance lies elsewhere. Behind the cold scientific posturing of this formula crouch crucial psychotherapeutic overtones. Eliot may 270

Objectivism have seen in Hamlet’s problems the diagnosis of his own impending breakdown that would soon send him to Dr Vittoz for therapy in Switzerland while writing The Waste Land (1922). It is modernist art as record of mental disorder in search of cognitive structure grounded in sensory experience. It soon, however, crystallises as the basis for a deliberate ideological position. Eliot’s insistence ‘that men cannot get on without giving allegiance to something outside themselves’ in ‘The Function of Criticism’ (1923), what he calls ‘Outside Authority’, is the political version of the objective correlative. READING Eliot, T. S. (1999) ‘Hamlet’ (1919), in Selected Essays. London: Faber & Faber. Eliot, T. S. (1999), ‘The Function of Criticism’ (1923), in Selected Essays. London: Faber & Faber.

Fabio Vericat

OBJECTIVISM Although the Objectivist poets emerged as a group in the early 1930s, William Carlos Williams’s line ‘No ideas but in things’ from the 1927 version of his long poem Paterson was already seen among his contemporaries as a summary of the main poetic experiments in the twentieth century. The Objectivists’ main literary and political views were affected by massive unemployment and social unrest in the USA and by the rise of fascism in Europe. They were also influenced by the representatives of imagism such as Ezra Pound. The four leading Objectivists – Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, Carl Rakosi and Charles Reznikoff – saw a poem as an artefact that presents the modality of things seen as an immediate structure of relations. They aspired to compose a distinct perceptual field which brings ‘the rays from an object to a focus’. Zukovsky defined a group of younger poets as Objectivist in a special issue of Poetry which appeared in February 1931. In his 1931 essay ‘Sincerity and Objectification’, Zukofsky explained that ‘in sincerity shapes appear concomitants of word combinations’ and function as precursors ‘of completed sound or structure, melody or form’. According to Zukofsky, poetry writing occurs when shapes suggest themselves and stimulate the mind. Zukofsky compares the appearance of art form as an object to the arrangement of minor units of sincerity ‘into one apprehended unit’’ Zukofsky’s 1931 tenets appear to reinforce modernist values of estrangement 271

Objectivism and autonomy. Yet his poems expose the object-status of the poem as a delusion. The dialogue between modern materialism and formalism is strongly felt in Zukofsky’s poem ‘Mantis, an Interpretation’ (1934) which criticises the alienation under modern capitalism as well as the implications of a regular, rigid form. The poem is written in free verse. In this poem, Zukofsky employs metafictional devices and describes his own compositional process, inserting in some places lines from early drafts of the poem. The poem exemplifies Zukofsky’s strong interest in the process of objectification. In his essay ‘Program: “Objectivists” 1931’, Zukofsky suggests that a poem functions in the same way as optical devices and is imbued with a desire ‘for what is objectively perfect, inextricably the direction of historic and contemporary particulars’. In 1932 Zukofsky published an anthology of Objectivist poetry in France and subsequently he set up, together with Reznikoff and Oppen, the Objectivist press. In 1934–6 it published several books written by Reznikoff, including his selection of poems Separate Way. Oppen’s 1934 collection of poetry Discrete Series was also published by the Objectivist Press. Its title derives from mathematics and highlights the fragmentary nature of Oppen’s poems in which he attempted to construct a meaning by empirical statements that invoked Imagist techniques. In his 1977 pamphlet, Reznikoff elucidated Zukofsky’s vision of the poem as the totality of perfect rest. He described the Objectivist poem as a witness to reality and defined the process of writing as a practice of providing poetic evidence. Unlike symbolist poets who aspired to see beyond the poem and words, Objectivists used concrete details and experiences in their works and claimed that they were made of what they saw. The Objectivists were unique among twentieth-century modernists in having two distinct literary lives: in the early 1930s and in the 1960s. READING Heller, Michael (2002) Convinction’s Net of Branches: Essays on the Objectivist Poets and Poetry. Berkeley: Small Press Distribution. Nicholls, Peter (2013) George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stanley, Sandra Kumamoto (1994) Louis Zukofsky and the Transformation of a Modern American Poetics. Berkeley and Los Angeles: California University Press. Zukofsky, Louis (1968) Prepositions: The Collected Critical Essays of Louis Zukofsky. New York: Horizon Press.

Alexandra Smith 272

Oedipus complex

THE OCTOBER CIRCLE Known also as the association for Artistic Labour, the October Circle was founded in Moscow in 1928. It comprised several prominent avant-garde photographers such as Boris Ignatovich, Gustav Klutsis and Aleksandr Rodchenko, who experimented with photomontage and photo-essays. Rodchenko took his photographs from unusual perspectives and angles: his 1927 photograph Pine Trees in Pushkino, for instance, featured treetops captured from a worm’s point of view. In his 1930 lecture delivered at the October circle meeting, Rodchenko stated that photography had significant advantages over more traditional media. Ignatovich also saw photography as the most contemporary realist art that depicted life in all its typical manifestations. Likewise, Klutsis’s 1930 photomontage, in which his hand was attached to the figure of a working man, suggested that the individuality of the artist should be replaced with the anonymity of the worker. The 1931 exhibition of the October Circle in Moscow displayed several of Rodchenko’s masterpieces, including Pioneer Girl and Pioneer Playing Trumpet, that represented his experiments with novel viewpoints from above and below, which radically foreshorten the perspective. They were meant to reveal Rodchenko’s commitment to the representation of Socialist facts. Yet, due to the accusations in the preoccupation with formalist aspects of photography voiced by Proletarian Photograph, he was expelled from the October Circle. READING Dabrowski, Magdalena, Peter Galassi and Leah Dickerman (1998) Aleksandr Rodchenko: Russian Revolutionary Modernist. New York: Harry N. Abrams. Dickerman, Leah (2006) ‘The Fact and the Photograph’, October, 118: 132–52. Tupitsyn, Margarita (1996) The Soviet Photograph, 1924–1937. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Alexandra Smith

OEDIPUS COMPLEX The Oedipus complex is an infantile phenomenon that comprises part of Sigmund Freud’s theory on the psychosexual development of children. Freud’s initial conceptions of the Oedipus complex 273

Oedipus complex were relatively simple and, like so much of psychoanalysis, he would return to complicate his schematising of childhood sexuality throughout his career. The literary Freud found in Sophocles’s tragic play Oedipus Rex – where the eponymous Oedipus accidentally kills his father and marries his mother – the universal theme of infantile sexuality that he first articulated in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) and then, more fully, in the published case study Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-year-old Boy (‘Little Hans’) (1909). Nineteenthcentury writers like Charles Dickens and Charlotte Brontë depicted childhood not as an age of innocence, but the time spent living under the tyrannical rule of adults. Freud delivered another fatal blow to a Victorian romanticising of the innocence of children when revealing the dark libidinal drama that all undergo. In the psychological development of a subject, the Oedipus complex occurs in the third, phallic, stage (3–5 years) of infancy when the source of pleasure transfers from the anus to the genitals, with the male child developing a libidinal attraction – object-cathexis in Freudian discourse – for the mother. The Oedipal conflict begins when the child identifying with the father as the sexual partner of the mother, desires the death of the father so that he can assume his place in the triangle. The child’s ego, in line with the reality principle, recognises that the father figure is too strong an adversary and in order to resolve this Oedipal drama, the child must accept the paternal injunction to stymie desire for the mother. This paternal injunction is then ‘introjected’ by the child in the creation of the super-ego agency that is the self-disciplining source of morality in later life. In order to progress to the latency stage, where Oedipal trauma is repressed, of psychosexual development the child must give up this attachment to the mother, as failure to do so would leave the child to become ‘fixated’ in this stage. Freud, as always, was much less convincing on the psychosexual development of women – he (in)famously referred to female sexuality as a ‘dark continent’ – and attempted to explain this economy of desire from the perspective of a daughter in terms of homosexual attraction with the mother (the Electra Complex as his disciple Carl Jung would term it). In Freudian analytical theory children experience the complexes differently: boys terrified by the father (this figure will become internalised as the super-ego) develop an anxiety linked to a punitive threat of castration; girls, in contrast, covet the male’s genitals that they assume they are anatomically lacking (penis envy). In their influential rejection of Freudian psychoanalysis, Anti274

Opera Oedipus (1972), Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari criticise Freud for installing Oedipus as the transcendental figure at the heart of his psychoanalytic project. Deleuze and Guattari, the champions of the deterritorialised, rhizomic and multiple, criticise Freud for imposing upon the unconscious a bourgeois discipline, whereby every symptom and neurosis can be genealogically traced back to the figure of Oedipus. For them, as opposed to Freud, Sophocles’s play is irreducible to the level of familial soap opera, as it is actually an ideological tale narrating regicide and the struggle for monarchical control. READING Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (2004) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane. London: Continuum. Freud, Sigmund (1953) The Interpretation of Dreams (Part I), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. IV, ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, pp. 1–338. Freud, Sigmund (1955) ‘Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year Old Boy’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. V, ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, pp. 339–626. Freud, Sigmund (1955) The Interpretation of Dreams (Part I), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. X, ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, pp. 3–148.

Robbie McLaughlan

OPERA As opera in the early twentieth century moved beyond the domination of its practice by the three major figures of the mid-to-late ­nineteenth – Wagner, Verdi and Puccini – it didn’t arrive at a uniformly modernist mode. There wasn’t even a balanced rivalry between a traditionalist operatic school and a consistently strong modernist one. Traditional opera ruled the roost and would go on doing so, both in matters of company-repertoire (where revivals of pre-twentieth-­ century work loomed very large at most houses) and in the traditionalist stance of a considerable number of the new operas that were put on. But that’s not to say that modernism didn’t enter the opera house at all. For one thing, revivals of earlier opera were often animated on stage by modernist production techniques. Notable instances were those at the Kroll Opera in Berlin under Otto Klemperer’s direction from 275

Opera 1927 to 1931 (a cubist Fidelio, a modern-dress Falstaff, etc.), at the Bayreuth Festival in the early 1950s – a Ring of the Nibelung rendered archetypal and symbolic by the composer’s grandson Wieland Wagner – and again at Bayreuth in 1976 when Patrice Chéreau staged an ‘Ibsenesque’ Ring: a sociopolitically aware reading reminiscent of Bernard Shaw’s in The Perfect Wagnerite (1898). Many more composers of note from the modernist camp wrote operas and contrived to have them staged (if in many cases for limited runs) than did not, which makes it more economical to list the six who didn’t than the dozens who did. (Charles Ives didn’t; Anton Webern didn’t; Pierre Boulez didn’t; Edgard Varèse wrote an opera in his twenties but its score was accidentally burned before it could be performed, projecting another in his forties but abandoning it; John Cage assembled several mosaic-like Europeras in 1987–94 but could hardly be said to have composed them; and Iannis Xenakis chose to make music-theatre rather than opera out of Aeschylus.) As for the composers who did have works staged, they weren’t slow in introducing techniques characteristic of new concert music into their operas along with innovations from other media. Thus extreme harmonic dissonance makes a first operatic appearance in Strauss’s Elektra (1909), free atonality over a full three-act structure in Berg’s Wozzeck (1925), something approaching musical collage in Ravel’s L’Enfant et les sortilèges (1925), neo-classicism (1920s-style) in Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex (1927), twelve-note serialism in Schoenberg’s Von Heute auf Morgen (1930), film projection in Milhaud’s Christophe Colomb (1930) – and so on to the electronics of Blomdahl’s Aniara in 1959 and the choral heterophony of Britten’s Curlew River in 1964. Again, several modernist literary lions provided operatic libretti, either writing them especially, allowing them to be derived from spoken plays of theirs, or having them posthumously co-opted for operatic use. Among the lions were Maeterlinck with texts for Debussy and Dukas, Wedekind for Berg, Hofmannsthal for Strauss (and for that burnt opera of Varèse’s), Apollinaire for Poulenc, Kokoschka and Wilder for Hindemith, Stein for Thomson, Claudel for Milhaud, Forster for Britten, Eliot for Pizzetti, Brecht for Weill (also for Sessions and Dessau) and Auden for Stravinsky (also for Britten and Henze). Further, several strands or strains of modernist concern outside the opera house can be seen as carried over into it. For instance, a Nietzschean strain from The Birth of Tragedy is echoed in the apollonian-dionysiac tensions of Szymanowski’s King Roger (1926), 276

Opera Henze’s Bassarids (1966) and Britten’s Death in Venice (1973). A Freudian one runs through the hesitant, half-lit erotic interplay of Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle (1918), not to mention the highly explicit interplay of Berg’s Lulu (1935), and through the in-depth analyses of women variously ‘on the edge’ in Elektra, Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande (1902), Schoenberg’s Erwartung (1909) and Janáček’s Makropulos Case (1926). A related strand is the thwarting of benign human impulse in the protagonists of Wozzeck, Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (1934) and Britten’s Peter Grimes (1945): frail psyches all, alienated and driven to self-destruction by the uncaring militaristic/mercantile/petit-bourgeois societies that pen them in. The marxist element in these can be felt more strongly in the satirical exposés of the corrupting influence of capital on natural feeling in Weill’s collaborations with Brecht, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1930) and The Seven Deadly Sins (1933), and in the spectacles of social and political deformation presented in Nono’s Intolleranza (1961) and Henze’s We Come to the River (1976, with Edward Bond). At the other dramatic pole are two Magic Flute-inflected fantasy-operas in which symbolic journeys between different worlds serve to promote benign human fertility: the StraussHofmannsthal Frau ohne Schatten (1919) and Tippett’s Mid-summer Marriage (1955), which embody something of a Jungian strain to go beside our Nietzschean, Freudian and Marxist ones. Just as representative of modernist concerns are the many operas which return to and see new things in core texts of the remote past. These include Schoenberg’s unfinished Moses und Aron out of Exodus (1932), Tippett’s King Priam (1962) and Dallapiccola’s Ulisse (1968) out of Homer, and re-imagined Greek tragedy in Enescu’s Oedipe (1936). Further north are similar new readings of time-honoured tales from Britain: a Dark Age saint’s life in Maxwell Davies’s Martyrdom of St Magnus (1967); a traditional puppet show and mumming play in Birtwistle’s Punch and Judy (1968) and Down by the Greenwood Side (1969); a Shakespeare romance re-thought in Tippett’s Knot Garden (1970); and two very different ‘moralities’ in 1951: Vaughan Williams’s Pilgrim’s Progress after Bunyan and Stravinsky’s Rake’s Progress after Hogarth. Birtwistle’s Punch, with its master-of-ceremonies-like Choregos, is also an instance of modernism’s self-conscious concern with the nature of the presentation of myths, legends, tales: a recurrent matter in opera, as witness the trujamán or boy-narrator of the puppet play in Falla’s Cervantes-based Retablo de Maese Pedro (1923), the dinner-jacketed speaker who 277

Orientalism guides us through the plot in Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex (1927), the Commère and Compère of Thomson and Stein’s Four Saints in Three Acts (1934), and the Male and Female Chorus (one man, one woman) who explain, interrupt and provide an overarching Christian framework for Britten’s Rape of Lucretia (1946). This concern for the telling of the tale slides into a concern with the tales’ tellers and with the makers of art more generally. Thus fictitious opera-­composers make their appearance on stage in Lulu, in Janáček’s Osud (1907) and Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos (1916), while in Strauss’s Capriccio (1942) yet another composer, a poet, their adored patroness, a theatrical director and sundry friends discuss the making of an opera – the one they are themselves in perhaps. Away from such metadrama, other artists take the stage. Actual historical composers have their predicaments made relevant to the modern world in Pfitzner’s Palestrina (1917) and Maxwell Davies’s Taverner (1972), as does the painter Matthias Grűnewald in Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler (1938). Luckily though, the petulant, manipulative, amoral Gregor Mittenhofer, poet-protagonist and monstre sacré of Henze’s Elegy for Young Lovers (1961), is sheer creation on the part of the librettists W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman. READING Cooke, Mervyn (ed.) (2011) The Cambridge Companion to TwentiethCentury Opera. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Parker, Roger (ed.) (1994) The Oxford Illustrated History of Opera. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Roger Savage

ORIENTALISM Orientalism has at least two meanings that are relevant to modernism, the first stylistic, the second ideological. Stylistic efforts to incorporate Eastern arts and fashions into the Western aesthetic antedate modernism by centuries (during the Rococo period, for example, Chinese artifacts made their way into interior design), so modernist artists and writers already had a rich orientalist heritage to draw upon by the early twentieth century. Painters such as Georgia O’Keefe, Arthur Dove and Morris Graves found inspiration in Eastern pictorial traditions earlier explored by such artists as James Abbot McNeil Whistler, Mary Cassatt and Arthur Wesley Dow. The fashion for Japonisme that began with the Goncourt brothers in the nineteenth century continued into the modernist era and found 278

Orientalism expression in the poetry of Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams and Amy Lowell, all of whom imitated – or adapted – Japanese verse forms such as the haiku and the tanka. Similarly, W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound responded to Japanese literature by writing plays in the manner of traditional noh drama. In Pound’s case, the literature of the Far East was critical to the development of imagism and, later, to his claims about the relationship of language and politics. Building on mistaken assumptions about the nature of the Chinese writing system derived from Ernest Fenollosa, Pound argued that the Chinese ‘ideogram’ represented concepts pictographically and so expressed ideas more directly and concretely than did Western languages. Pound’s ideas about the Chinese language are a clear instance of orientalism in the ideological sense because they represent Far Eastern culture from a Western perspective. This much is clear from Pound’s tract Jefferson and/or Mussolini (1935), which turns the Confucian tradition into an argument favouring fascism. While American orientalism, both stylistic and ideological, drew inspiration mainly from the Far East during the modernist period, European orientalists looked instead to the Near East of the Ottomans, Arabs and Hebrews. Here, too, the nineteenth-century provided a considerable orientalist heritage. Some of Gustave Flaubert’s novels, notably Salammbô and Hérodias, are oriental fantasies of inhuman cruelty and perverse sexuality. In painting, Lawrence Alma-Tadema and Jean-Léon Gérôme represented the Near East as an exotic, idealised world of opulent leisure and erotic excess. This world finds expression in fictional form in L’Immoraliste (1902), a short novel by André Gide about a sickly man who recovers his health while cultivating sexual relationships with Arab boys. The parallel narrative equating health with homosexuality in an oriental setting revises the pattern of European decadence in which same-sex relations are almost always configured, metaphorically, as a form of illness. In addition to Japanese, Chinese and Arabic traditions, Indic tradition also provided modernists with cultural material. The archexample in this case is T. S. Eliot, whose long poem The Waste Land (1922) draws on both Hindu and Buddhist texts to express a sense of crisis in Western civilisation. As with other modernists, Eliot’s efforts to understand Eastern culture were substantially shaped by Western tradition, notably the New England ‘Brahmin’ culture of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. But Eliot’s case is typical: orientalism invariably subjects Eastern culture to Western preconceptions. 279

Ornament READING Kearns, Cleo McNelly (1987) T. S. Eliot and Indic Traditions: A Study in Poetry and Belief. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kern, Robert (1996) Orientalism, Modernism, and the American Poem. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Qian, Zhaoming (ed.) (2003) Ezra Pound and China. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Said, Edward (1978) Orientalism. New York: Vintage. Weir, David (2011) American Orient: Imagining the East from the Colonial Era through the Twentieth Century, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

David Weir

ORNAMENT Modernists, by and large, treated ornaments and the ornamental with suspicion if not disdain – at least in their rhetoric. The stereotypically dark, cluttered and unhygienic Victorian domestic interior had abounded with ornamental objects and decorative details, and to the extent to which such spaces represented precisely what was to be reformed or rejected outright by many modernists, ornament was to be conspicuously stripped away. Similarly, the decoration of the facades of buildings with carved or moulded ornamental details, statuary or other embellishments was associated above all with historical or historicist styles of architecture and therefore regarded as anathema to the modernist style of building, with its emphasis on revealing construction and using materials efficiently. Ornament was also associated with artisanal craft and hand-manufacture (see arts and crafts), in contrast, then, to the modern materials and massproduced elements of the industrial buildings that inspired many modernist designers, artists and architects. The ornamental was, in short, suspected of being synonymous with the inessential, the merely supplementary, the antiquated, the inefficient and the deceitful (in contrast to the imperatives of ‘truth to materials’ and ‘form follows function’, ornament often rendered one material as a representation of another and concealed structural elements from view). For Le Corbusier, for instance, cultural progress is achieved by selection in favour of ‘the clear and naked emergence of the Essential’ (Toward a New Architecture). Such views were given their most vehement (and infamous) expression by Austrian architect Adolf Loos’s essay ‘Ornament and Crime’, composed in 1908 and first given as a lecture in 1910. Loos’s argument is underpinned by an appeal to the notion 280

Oulipo of cultural evolution, and progress is seen as marked by the gradual diminution of ornament from objects of everyday use. Loos’s immediate targets were the Vienna secession in particular and the decorative overdrive of art nouveau more widely, and his rhetoric is above all an ironic and polemical attack on his own contemporaries. He couched his argument in problematic terms, however, for instance using tattooing as an analogy for ornament and pointing to its ‘primitive’ origins and ‘degenerate’ contemporary uses. Though Loos’s polemic might seem to condemn ornament out of hand, he later distanced his own views from the unadorned orthodoxies of International Style architecture, and stressed that his objection was to ornament used to embellish objects of use or those designed to last, such as buildings, and that he did not wish to see it eradicated entirely from those areas of culture – such as textile production – in which it was appropriate. The seeming wholesale rejection of ornament, however, became a hallmark, indeed at times effectively a signifier, of modernism, especially in Loos’s own field of architecture. READING Loos, Adolf (1998) Ornament and Crime: Selected Essays. Riverside: Ariadne. Payne, Alina (2012) From Ornament to Object: Genealogies of Architectural Modernism. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press. Stewart, Janet (2000) Fashioning Vienna: Adolf Loos’ Cultural Criticism. London and New York: Routledge.

Dominic Paterson

OULIPO The Ouvroir de littérature potentielle [Workshop for potential literature] is a literary collective dedicated to the investigation of how artificial restrictions, generally referred to as ‘constraints’, may be used in the creation of literary works. These constraints might govern textual elements of a piece of writing, as in the case of palindromes, anagrams or acrostics; equally, however, they might organise some other aspect of the work, for example a mathematical rule or algorithm which determines the location of each scene or how characters interact with each other. Originally a subcommittee of the Collège de ’Pataphysique (see ’pataphysics), the group was founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau, already an established author, and the mathematician François Le Lionnais, its meetings held monthly over dinner at one 281

Oulipo of its members’ houses. Queneau had been active in the surrealist movement during the 1920s until being expelled by André Breton, and much of the character of the Oulipo, both in its devotion to formalism and its constitutionally enshrined geniality, can be read as an oppositional response to surrealism. Despite the presence of a number of literary celebrities in the group – members have included Marcel Duchamp, Italo Calvino, Georges Perec, Harry Mathews and Jacques Roubaud – the Oulipo have always stressed that they are not a writers’ workshop. Its emphasis is on the investigation of potential literary forms, not on the production of full-scale literary works, and the group have published a longrunning series of pamphlets, the Bibliothèque Oulipienne, outlining their experiments. Nevertheless a number of significant literary works have been published by members, constructed according to Oulipian principles. Queneau’s Cent mille milliards de poèmes (1961) represents something of a foundational text for the group. It consists of ten sonnets, printed on consecutive recto pages, with the paper between each line of poetry cut horizontally so that a single line can be turned over to reveal its corresponding line on the page beneath without disturbing the rest of the poem. The sonnets have been written so that syntax and rhyme scheme will be correct in any configuration, and the book thus functions as a machine for generating sonnets – the ‘hundred thousand billion’ poems of the title. Other key works include Perec’s La Disparition (1969) [A Void (1995)], a novel which does not use the letter e, as well as his La Vie mode d’emploi (1978) [Life A User’s Manual (1987)], which won the Prix Médicis and which incorporates a large number of constraints (for example, the order of the chapters is governed by a chess problem known as the Knight’s Tour, and each chapter has to quote from certain canonical literary texts). Having broadened its membership, particularly since the late 1990s, the Oulipo is still active today, presenting monthly readings at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. READING Levin Becker, Daniel (2012) Many Subtle Channels. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mathews, Harry and Alastair Brotchie (eds) (1999) Oulipo Compendium. London: Atlas. Motte, Jr, Warren F. (ed.) (1986) Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Dennis Duncan 282

Parataxis

P PAIDEUMA A neologism derived from the Greek and borrowed by Ezra Pound from the work of German anthropologist Leo Frobenius, ‘paideuma’ designates the deep-rooted ideas and moods specific of a historical moment. Characterised by its complexity and locality in time and space, it is akin to the Romantic zeitgeist, but Pound uses a different term to add a dynamic dimension to the notion: far from being passively absorbed, ‘paideuma’ is at the roots of ‘ideas that are in action’ (Pound 1952: 58). It is constantly being actualised into a combination of behaviours that could be deliberately changed. Thus ‘paideuma’ is closely tied to Pound’s volitionist approach to culture in the 1938 Guide to kulchur. His interest in the concept also lies in its etymological relation to paideutics, the science or art of learning and education. For Pound, ‘paideuma’ is part of a general didactic project that is embodied in the variety of his writings, from the prose of the political and economic essays to the poetic arcanes of the Cantos. From Frobenius then, Pound derives a pedagogy based on a morphology of culture that he rewrites into his theory of the luminous detail. Paideuma is also the title of the journal devoted to Pound scholarship published by the National Poetry Foundation (University of Maine at Orono) since 1972. READING Pound, Ezra (1952) Guide to Kulchur. New York: New Directions. Tryphonopoulos, Demetres P. (ed.) (2005) The Ezra Pound Encyclopedia. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Hélène Aji

PARATAXIS Although the term itself is drawn from classical rhetoric, naming the grammatical arrangement of words, phrases or clauses in sequence but without the presence of connecting terms, parataxis has been seen by critics as a characteristic technique of modernist and experimental literature. At the level of the sentence the effect of the lack of conjunctions is to leave unclear relations between phrases, where we might expect a text to indicate hierarchies of significance, cause and effect or even temporal sequence. Techniques such as collage, 283

’Pataphysics the juxtaposition of unexpected or unrelated images, and repetition might all be described as paratactic. In the critical writing of Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno, parataxis is attributed particular significance as a technique which suspends some traditional expectations of philosophical or discursive prose, in which the subject under discussion is subordinated to the logical and narrative unfolding of an argument. From this perspective, parataxis is linked to a principle of radical equality, attributing equal weight to every element in a text, and attempting to register the resistance of material reality to conceptual mastery. For other critics, parataxis is emblematic of modern or postmodern experience: the individual subject is confronted by a multitude of disconnected sense-impressions or fragments of communication, each of which claims her attention. READING Adorno, Theodor W. (1992) Notes to Literature, Volume 2, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen. New York: Columbia University Press. Jameson, Fredric (1991) Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso.

Alex Thomson

’PATAPHYSICS The term ’Pataphysics was coined by Alfred Jarry and his schoolfriends as part of their baroque mockery of their teacher, Monsieur Hébert (the model for Jarry’s 1896 theatrical grotesque, Père Ubu). Jarry gave it fuller consideration after moving to Paris to study under Henri Bergson in the early 1890s. Like Bergsonian durée, ’Pataphysics is resistant to clear definition (see bergsonism). Jarry’s fullest exposition of it is included in the posthumously published novel, Gestes et opinions de Docteur Faustroll, pataphysicien (1911) [Exploits and Opinions of Dr Faustroll, Pataphysician (1965)]. Here we learn that ’Pataphysics is ‘the science of imaginary solutions’ and that it will ‘examine the laws governing exceptions’. This contradiction in terms – that exceptions might be governed by laws – is typical of the ironic paradoxes that characterise Jarry’s brief outline. ’Pataphysics therefore represents an attack on rationalism, an anti-science, couched in the reassuring terms of its object: the eminently reasonable language of scientific definition. It is little wonder then that Jarry’s work should have found itself championed first by the dadaists and subsequently by surrealists such as André Breton and Antonin Artaud. Alongside their celebration of Jarry’s uncom284

’Pataphysics promising absurdity, René Daumal, founder of the journal Le Grand Jeu, would undertake a more serious consideration of ’Pataphysics, seeing in it a model for his own nihilistic mysticism. His essay ‘La Pataphysique et la révélation du rire’ (1929) [‘Pataphysics and the Revelation of Laughter’ (1991)] sees the black humour of Jarry’s paradoxes as the only appropriate response to a post-­Enlightenment disillusionment with all systems of knowledge: ‘the pataphysician’s laughter [. . .] is the sole human expression of despair’. During the 1930s, Daumal produced a monthly column for the Nouvelle revue française entitled ‘La Pataphysique du Mois’ [‘Pataphysics this Month’]. However, the most significant event in the popularisation of ’Pataphysics would not come until after Daumal’s death, when the Collège de ’Pataphysique was founded in Paris in 1948. Official accounts note that those present at the Collège’s formation were Oktav Votka, Maurice Saillet, Mélanie Le Plumet and Jean-Hughes Sainmont. However, typically for the Collège, there is a certain amount of dissimulation going on here, since Votka, Le Plumet and Sainmont are all pseudonyms for the same person, Emmanuel Peillet. From its outset then, the Collège has demonstrated a playfulness at odds with the bleakness of Daumal. Indeed, one of the edicts of the Collège states clearly, ‘Let there be no misunderstanding, there was never any question of affecting a mocking pessimism or a corrosive nihilism’ (Brotchie 1995: 101–2). As well as a taste for hoaxes, the Collège – whose members have included Eugène Ionesco, Umberto Eco and Jean Baudrillard – is characterised by a scholarly fastidiousness in the pursuit of what it terms ‘inutilious research’: work of determinedly little practical consequence. The Collège has its own calendar, based on Jarry’s birthday, strict rules governing the use of the apostrophe in ’Pataphysics, and a hierarchy of mock-serious titles – Transcendental Satrap, Grand Proveditor – for its members. In 1960, the Collège spawned an offshoot, the oulipo, and in 1975 it underwent a period of ‘occultation’ – a cessation of public activities – to re-emerge at the end of the millennium. READING Brotchie, Alastair (ed.) (1995) A True History of the College of ’Pataphysics, trans. Paul Edwards. London: Atlas. Hugill, Andrew (2012) ’Pataphysics: A Useless Guide. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Shattuck, Roger (1960) ‘Superliminal Note’, Evergreen Review, 4 (1): 24–33.

Dennis Duncan 285

P.E.N.

P.E.N. P.E.N., which stands for Poets, Playwrights, Essayists and Novelists, is a writers’ organisation which was set up in London in 1921 by Catherine Amy Dawson Scott, with John Galsworthy as its first president. Its significance for modernist literature and culture lies both in the fact that a number of modernist writers were key members of the organisation and in its internationalism and commitment to free speech across national borders. In particular, its creation of a world network of authors meant that it played an important role in the creation of what we might call a global modernism. Early members included prominent modernist writers Joseph Conrad, May Sinclair and W. B. Yeats, as well as more mainstream writers Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Mary Webb, Violet Hunt, Rebecca West and Radclyffe Hall. Although it was originally styled as a dining club for London writers, it quickly became an international organisation, with P.E.N. centres springing up in Europe in the early 1920s and then beyond. These centres included Chinese P.E.N. (founded in 1924), Argentina P.E.N. (founded in 1930), All India P.E.N. (founded in 1933) and Japanese and Brazilian P.E.N. (both founded in 1934), among many others. The organisation specifically aimed through its annual congresses to create dialogues between writers. Many significant global authors were involved in the organisation such as Jules Romains, Rabindranath Tagore, Sholem Ash, Ernst Toller and F. T. Marinetti, who was Italian delegate for P.E.N. in the mid-1930s. There were also a large number of writers who were more loosely affiliated to P.E.N. or gave lectures at P.E.N. events, such as Thomas Mann, E. M. Forster and James Joyce. While there were many new international organisations created after World war I, P.E.N. was unusual in its independence from governmental control. Its global literary networks produced new authorial collaborations and literary works and became a significant forum for debates about whether literary writing should be seen as a form of international property and whether writers in exile should have international rights, particularly after 1933. Galsworthy set out a number of founding P.E.N. principles in 1927, which included the claim that the organisation would steer clear of politics and that literature ‘knows no frontiers’. After 1933, when socialist and Jewish German writers were thrown out of Germany by the Nazis, this desire to step aside from political questions became more difficult. The German P.E.N. centre was officially 286

Personal Landscape expelled from the global organisation in 1933, and the first of the P.E.N. exile centres was created to represent the interests of émigré writers. In the late 1930s Storm Jameson became President of English P.E.N., and worked tirelessly to help refugee writers fleeing persecution in Europe. P.E.N. continues to play a key role in attempts to defend the universal rights of writers. READING Iriye, Akira (2002) Global Community: The Role of International Organizations in the Making of the Contemporary World. Berkeley: University of California Press. Potter, Rachel (2013) Obscene Modernism: Literary Censorship and Experiment 1900–1940. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Potter, Rachel (2013) ‘Modernist Rights: International PEN 1921–1936’, Critical Quarterly, 55 (2): 66–80.

Rachel Potter

PERSONAL LANDSCAPE A wartime little magazine published in English in Cairo from January 1942 to 1945, although the term also refers to the Cairo Poets associated with the journal. Bernard Spencer, Robin Fedden, Lawrence Durrell and Terence Tiller edited Personal Landscape, although Tiller was no longer listed as editor after the first issue and the order of editors shifted to Durrell, Fedden and Spencer after the second issue in 1942. Contributors were international with most poetry coming from British poets, but several works were in translation from Greek, French, German, Arabic and Serbo-Croat. The only Arabic translation was a paraphrasing of Shawqy by Herbert Howarth and Ibrahim Shukrallah, who both went on to co-translate Images from The Arab World (1944) the following year, and Durrell later lamented not including work by Albert Cossery and Georges Henein, two Egyptian surrealists who repudiated the entartete kunst (‘Degenerate Art’) exhibition. Translations from Greek poets were extensive due to the philhellenic interests of the editors and included George Seferis’ ‘The King of Asini’, substantial excerpts from Elie Papadimitriou’s long poem Anatolia, and several poems by C. P. Cavafy. Three sets of translations from Rainer Maria Rilke by Ruth Spiers were included. Despite the proximity of the war in North Africa and the editors’ escapes from Greece during the Nazi invasion, Personal Landscape includes virtually no references to the conflict in prose or poetry. Due 287

Personal Landscape to the conscription and service of many British poets, the journal also engaged with other literary groups. Spencer had been close with the Auden Group and co-edited Oxford Poetry with Stephen Spender but politically and aesthetically he had broken with Auden by this time. George Sutherland Fraser had been part of the anarchist new apocalypse group in England before relocating to Egypt, and John Waller edited Kingdom Come in Oxford, which was taken on by the New Apocalypse poet Henry Treece after Waller entered national service. The journal also facilitated the distribution of materials from the American anarchist Henry Miller through service libraries across the Middle East and had contact with the early San Francisco Renaissance poets, sending Cossery’s and Durrell’s works for publication in Berkeley. After the war, a collection of materials from Personal Landscape edited by Fedden was published as a book with the same title by J. M. Tambimuttu’s Editions Poetry London, which had already published correspondence and works by the Cairo Poets. Six anti-manifestos opened most issues with an ‘Ideas About Poems’ section and were an important feature of the journal. These brief essays or sets of observations were quasi-anonymous, identified only by the author’s initials rather than name. The opening of the first issue, by Durrell, presents poetry as independent of the poet, public or society, which develops into Durrell’s personal theory of the Heraldic Universe in the second issue. The third ‘Ideas About Poems’ by Spencer sets aside the propagandistic and observational approaches to poetry associated with Auden and Eliot as attitudes of separation, against which he prefers joining and enjoyment. The fourth turns to Wittgenstein-esque propositions about poetry by Tiller, and the fifth is Waller’s English post-Surrealist response in the style of Oscar Wilde’s symbolist Preface to The Picture of Dorian Grey. The sixth and final is Seferis’s invocation of his poetic alias Mathios Pascalis for ideas that separate poetry from its material conditions. READING Bolton, Jonathan (1997) Personal Landscapes: British Poets in Egypt During the Second World War. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Bowen, Roger (1995) Many Histories Deep: The Personal Landscape Poets in Egypt, 1940–45. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Gifford, James (2014) Personal Modernisms: Anarchist Networks and the Later Avant-Gardes. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press.

James Gifford

288

Photomontage

PHANOPOEIA Derived from the Greek and meaning the poetics of image, ‘phanopoeia’ is one of three related terms used by Ezra Pound in his definition of poetry in the 1934 essay ABC of Reading. Related to ‘melopoeia’ and ‘logopoeia’, ‘phanopoeia’ is the basic component in making literature and saturating language with meaning. In choosing words that project images onto the reader’s mind, the poet complies with the primary demands of poetry, since he proposes an image that will generate emotional and intellectual responses without explicitly formulating what these emotions and ideas should be. ‘Throwing the object (fixed or moving) on to the visual imagination’ (Pound 1961: 63), ‘phanopoeia’ is directly inspired from Pound’s take on the Chinese language as it is exhibited in his interpretive translation of Ernesto Fenollosa’s The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry (1920). As an ideogram, the Chinese character, in Pound’s idiosyncratic philology, evidences the production of abstract ideas from the empirical experience of concrete phenomena, so that the abstract is never divorced from the concrete and experience necessarily precedes conceptualisation. The poet’s task is to provide such images as will constitute the experiential material, leaving it for the reader to elaborate the conceptual abstractions. In privileging images over ideas, ‘phanopoeia’ is the process at the heart of imagism and later of vorticism. READING Kenner, Hugh (1991) The Pound Era. London: Pimlico. Pound, Ezra (1961) ABC of Reading. London: Faber.

Hélène Aji

PHOTOMONTAGE Initiated in the mid-nineteenth century, photomontage involves reconfiguring photographic images by cropping, insertion, painting over, resizing and/or repositioning. Adjusted images may then be rephotographed. In some instances, montage allows the photograph to show what the eye can see but the film cannot record. The Anglo-American photographer Eadweard Muybridge would add clouds and stellar objects to images to compensate for difficulties in development. In the early twentieth century, dada artists politicised photomontage, combining mass-produced images to create shock effects, often with political intentions. Three artists in particular – 289

Picaresque the Czech John Heartfield, Austrian Raoul Haussman and German George Grosz – gave the form a trenchant power. READING Ades, Dawn (1986) Photomontage. London: Thames & Hudson. Evans, David and Sylvia Gohl (1986) Photomontage: A Political Weapon. London: G. Fraser. Zervigón, A. M. (2013) John Heartfield and the Agitated Image: Photography, Persuasion, and the Rise of Avant-Garde Photomontage. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Clare M. Brennan

PICARESQUE The picaresque novel originates with The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes (La Vida de Lazarillo de Tormes, 1554). The Spanish term pícaro means ‘rogue’. The picaresque novel is an episodic narrative in which the main protagonist (often a wily rogue or a cunning servant) survives by his or her wits. The pícaro is often deracinated or déclassé, a half-outsider and a victim of circumstance. He or she moves horizontally through space and vertically up and down the social hierarchy, with working-class settings featuring frequently. The genre was popularised by Miguel de Cervantes, Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, Alain-René Lesage and Hans Jakob Grimmelshausen, before it was supplanted in the nineteenth century by the Bildungsroman and the novel of adultery. The picaresque novel re-emerges in the modernist period in fiction and in film: Charlie Chaplin’s persona ‘the Tramp’ is the most iconic pícaro in cinema history. Why did the genre resurface at this time? The traditional pícaro often expresses disenchantment with the world (in Spanish, desengaño), and this strikes a chord with the rationalist disenchantment of the world, which Max Weber sees as characteristic of modernity. Furthermore, the features of the picaresque genre (its episodic structure and skewed perspective on society) mean that it is particularly well-suited to the exploring the cultural displacements of modernity. The most famous picaresque novel of the 1920s is Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk (Osudy dobrého vojáka Švejka za světové války, 1921–3), about the misadventures of a Czech soldier in the Austro-Hungarian army during World war I. Švejk apparently obeys his superiors, but he does so in unexpected ways which subvert the official line. Švejk’s so-called ‘obedience’ is in fact profoundly subver290

Pleasure principle sive and anarchic. The novel had a great influence on the development of Bertolt Brecht’s epic theatre. The picaresque genre is also central to French modernism, most notably Blaise Cendrars’s Moravagine (1926), Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night (Voyage au bout de la nuit, 1932) and Jean Genet’s The Thief’s Journal (Journal du voleur, 1949). Examples of the picaresque novel in German are: Franz Kafka’s Amerika/The Man who Disappeared (Der Verschollene, 1927), Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf (1927), Thomas Mann’s Felix Krull (1922/1954) and Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel, 1959). Picaresque novels by American writers include Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer (1934), Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep (1934), Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March (1953) and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961). Also worthy of note is Letty Fox: Her Luck (1946) by the Australian writer Christina Stead. READING Blackburn, Alexander (1979) The Myth of the Picaro: Continuity and Transformation of the Picaresque Novel 1554–1954. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Halliwell, Martin (2006) ‘The Modernist Picaresque: Moralists without Qualities (Musil, Hesse, Hurston, Roth)’, in Martin Halliwell, Transatlantic Modernism: Moral Dilemmas in Modernist Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Malkmus, Bernhard F. (2011) The German Pícaro and Modernity: Between Underdog and Shape-shifter. London: Continuum. Schonfield, Ernest (2008) ‘Brecht and the Modern Picaresque’, in Robert Gillett and Godela Weiss-Sussex (eds), ‘Verwisch die Spuren!’ Bertolt Brecht’s Work and Legacy: A Reassessment. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

Ernest Schonfield

PLEASURE PRINCIPLE The influence of Darwinian evolutionary thought on Freud is evident in his early theorising of the pleasure principle (Lustprinzip). The pleasure principle is an obscene, primitive, injunction demanding the immediate gratification of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. It is the governing principle in the psychic life of all subjects. In contrast, the ‘reality principle’ is the deferral of that gratification in line with acceptable social conventions. In infancy the id is the dominant force (the child desires the breast of its mother, the id demands that it gets 291

Post-Impressionism the breast), but with maturity, and with the development of the ego, the child learns to delay the gratification of pleasure in line with the reality principle. As Freud writes in his Introductory Lectures on psychoanalysis (1916), an ‘educated’ ego has become ‘reasonable’ in that ‘it no longer lets itself be governed by the pleasure principle, but obeys the reality principle, which also at bottom seeks to obtain pleasure, but pleasure which is assured through taking account of reality, even though it is pleasure postponed and diminished.’ This circuitous process in which some degree of pleasure is gratified – where the ego is forced to think strategically when confronted with circumstantial reality – is given the name Umweg (literally meaning ‘detour’) in Freudian thought. READING Freud, Sigmund (1958) ‘Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. II, ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, pp. 213–27.

Robbie McLaughlan

POST-IMPRESSIONISM Between November 1910 and January 1911, art historian, critic and painter Roger Fry shocked and infuriated the British artistic establishment with his curation of the first of two Post-Impressionist exhibitions at the Grafton Galleries in London. He coined the term ‘Post-Impressionism’ ‘in a moment of exasperation before a pressing journalist’ (Watney 1980: 16) to situate the artworks on display as both a continuation of and a reaction against impressionist painting. Entitled Manet and the Post-Impressionists, the exhibition introduced to the British public the work of Henri Matisse, Paul Gauguin, Pablo Picasso, Vincent Van Gogh, Georges Seurat, André Derain, Maurice Denis, Odilon Redon and Paul Cézanne. These artists had already been influential in Europe; Cézanne in particular had been exhibited in Paris for decades, including at the Salon des Refusés (from 1863), the Salon des Indépendants (from 1884) and the Salon d’Automne (from 1903). The artists shown at the 1910 exhibition variously contributed to the development of movements such as fauvism and cubism, as well as to the popularity of primitivism in the early twentieth century. In the 1910 exhibition, the term Post-Impressionism described a particular set of stylistic and theoretical extensions and expan292

Post-Impressionism sions of Impressionist art, which had itself caused scandal by challenging classical technique in the preceding century. Exaggerating the Impressionist flattening of dimensions, abandoning Renaissance perspective, and using harmonics of bright simplified colour to create relationality between objects and spaces, Post-Impressionist art focuses on expressive design and pattern in the arrangement of forms. Fry described this in terms of ‘a music of line and colour’ (Fry 1911: 862). Foregrounding arrangement and rhythm, he asked the audience to ‘look at [the art exhibited] exactly as you would listen to music or poetry, and give up for once the exhibition attitude of mind which is so often one of querulous self-importance’ (Fry 1911: 858). Fry asserted the need to alienate vision from its associations with the objects and forms of ‘reality’ in order to restore the evocative powers of line and colour, which he posited as analogous to the effects of rhythm, tone and harmony in music. For Fry, Post-Impressionist artists displayed an instinct for form in itself rather than technically adroit mimesis. Using simplified lines and colour as expressive and emotive rather than to realistically represent a given object or scene, they attracted charges of unskilled juvenility and even degeneration. Yet Post-Impressionism also lent itself to a more doctrinaire formalism (see significant form). This aspect was more prominent in discourse around the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition curated by Fry in 1912. This time, Fry emphasised the development of PostImpressionism in the work of British, French and Russian artists, who had been influenced by the 1910 introduction of ‘the “Old Masters” of the new movement’. The exhibition featured artists mainly from Fry’s bloomsbury group circle of friends including Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, Wyndham Lewis, and Russian artists chosen by Boris Anrep, the mosaicist whose engagement with Post-Impressionist primitivism was informed by a love of Byzantine art. Although demarcated by Fry’s exhibitions, Post-Impressionism does not describe a singular movement with a manifesto: the term can embrace diverse groups of artists working in multiple configurations from 1880 onwards. It can encompass ideas and styles which emerged in other contexts such as German expressionism, multiple strands of surrealism and dada, futurism and vorticism and, later, Abstract Expressionism. The influence of Post-Impressionism as a style and aesthetic theory in early twentieth-century visual art was also present in literature of the period, for example in the writing of Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf, who placed emphasis on formal design and the plasticity of language. 293

Postmodernism READING Bullen, J. B. (1988) Post-Impressionism in England: The Critical Reception. London and New York: Routledge. Fry, Roger (1911) ‘Post-Impressionism’, Fortnightly Review, 89: 856–67. Jalard, Michel-Claude (1968) Post-Impressionism, trans. Anne J. Cope. London: Heron. Watney, Simon (1980) English Post-Impressionism. New York: Macmillan.

Amy Bromley

POSTMODERNISM Already used in a limited way in certain literary circles from the 1950s on, the term ‘postmodernism’ reached a wider audience through the efforts of the architecture critic Charles Jencks beginning in 1975, and by the late 1980s had become generally accepted as a period term for the culture of the later twentieth century. From the perspective of the 1970s and 1980s, the modernist impulse seemed to have lost momentum, and modernism appeared increasingly to have become the victim of its own success, enshrined in the literary canon and art histories, its radicalism domesticated. The conditions that bred modernism in the first place, and to which it responded, had changed; the new conditions of the post-1945 world – the Cold war and the nuclear threat, decolonisation and the loss of empire, the proliferation of new technologies of communication and new media of entertainment, the emergence of countercultures and liberation movements – called for new forms of expression. The cultural narratives of progress and emancipation upon which the modernist era had implicitly relied for validation were discredited by the horrors of World War II leading to what Jean-François Lyotard diagnosed as a general ‘incredulity toward metanarratives’ (Lyotard 1984). Especially profound in its impact was the mutation of capitalism itself into a ‘late’, globalised and (after the collapse of the Soviet bloc around 1990) nearly universal form. Famously, Fredric Jameson has characterised postmodernism as the ‘cultural logic of late capitalism’. Others, such as David Harvey, have associated postmodernism specifically with the neoliberal version of capitalism that came to dominate the world from 1978–80, with the election of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the UK and US. Not only changing external conditions, but the internal dynamics of various art forms contributed to the emergence of multiple, diverse postmodernisms. For certain forms of cultural expression, such as 294

Postmodernism architecture or dance, where a sharply defined modernist orthodoxy had come to seem oppressive, postmodernism appeared early and decisively. Narrative fiction, it has been argued (McHale 1987), underwent a ‘change of dominant’ from a modernist poetics oriented toward epistemological questions – questions about knowledge, such as ‘Who knows what, how do they know it, and how reliably?’ – to a postmodernist poetics oriented toward ontological questions – ­questions about being, such as ‘Which world is this, how is it related to other worlds, and what kinds of beings exist in it?’ Although there is no general consensus about postmodernism, two accounts of its relationship to modernism have been widely influential. The first, attributable to Lyotard, identifies postmodernism with the persistence of the avant-garde energies of the modern, leached out of modernism itself by institutionalisation and domestication. ‘A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern,’ Lyotard wrote, savouring the paradox: ‘postmodernism is not modernism at its end, but in a nascent state, and this state is recurrent’ (Lyotard 1993). Postmodernism in the sense of something both ‘nascent’ and ‘recurrent’ in modernism is exemplified by the Nouveau Roman and the radical metafictions of B. S. Johnson, Christine Brooke-Rose or Kathy Acker, by the poetry of the oulipo and the l=a=n=g=u=a=g=e schools, by conceptual art, ‘underground’ cinema and other intransigently avant-garde practices. The second account can be traced to Jencks, the architecture critic, who in turn adapted it from the observations of the architect Robert Venturi and his collaborators in their seminal book, Learning from Las Vegas (1972). Jencks’s postmodernism is populist rather than avantgarde, catering to the wider public’s desire for accessible meaning, legible symbolism and pleasure. Or rather, his postmodernism is double-coded, appealing simultaneously to a minority constituency of architects and connoisseurs, well-versed in the arcana of design, structural techniques and materials, and to a broader public of consumers. Championing architects such as Venturi, Michael Graves, Robert A. M. Stern and Frank Gehry, Jencks would later extend his analysis to the double-coded painting of the German Neoexpressionists and the Italian Transavantgardists, and to self-reflexive yet popular fictions such as John Fowles’s French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime (1975) or Umberto Eco’s best-seller, The Name of the Rose (1980), examples of a double-coded literary genre that Linda Hutcheon would subsequently label ‘historiographic metafiction’. Double-coding, in other words, reflects the erosion and ultimate 295

Postmodernism collapse of the hierarchy of high and low art (or ‘art’ and ‘kitsch’) that modernism strove to maintain in the face of the upsurge of mass culture, but that no longer seems sustainable in a world of total media saturation and consumerism. Which of these accounts one endorses makes a difference to how one construes the trajectory of postmodernism – its onset, for instance. If we see postmodernism as the continuation of the avant-garde, then we are likely to trace its onset to the immediate post-war, the literature of the beat generation, the innovations in poetry, dance and visual art radiating from black mountain college or the aleatorism of John Cage and others. Conversely, if we view postmodernism as reflecting the erosion of the high/low hierarchy in the arts, then we are more likely to date its onset to the mid-1960s, the moment of Pop Art, the counterculture and the aspirations of pop music to the condition of art in the work of Bob Dylan, the Beatles and others. By the 1990s, postmodernism, too, like modernism before it, had become the victim of its own success; associated with a whole range of contemporary developments in popular culture and new media, it had been reduced to cliché. Impatience with postmodernism, perhaps a little premature, was reflected in a somewhat inchoate desire in some quarters for some sort of ‘post-postmodernism’. Arguably, the interregnum between the end of the Cold war in 1989–90 and the shocking reorientation of global conflict on September 11, 2001 constitutes postmodern culture’s final phase. Whether or not it should now be regarded as decisively ‘over’, we have certainly acquired sufficient distance from its onset and ‘classic’ phases to be able to regard postmodernism as a historical episode, no longer contemporary. READING Harvey, David (2005) A Brief History of Neoliberalism. New York: Oxford University Press. Hutcheon, Linda (1988) A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge. Huyssen, Andreas (1986) After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Jameson, Fredric (1991) Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Jencks, Charles (1986) What Is Post-Modernism? London: Academy Editions/New York: St. Martin’s Press. Lyotard, Jean-François (1984) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 296

Pragmatism Lyotard, Jean-François (1993) ‘Answer to the Question, “What Is the Postmodern?”’ [1982], in The Postmodern Explained: Correspondence 1982–1985. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 1–16. McHale, Brian (1987) Postmodernist Fiction. New York: Methuen. Venturi, Robert, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour (1972) Learning from Las Vegas. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Brian McHale

PRAGMATISM An American school of philosophy of the second half of the nineteenth century that developed mainly around the work of Charles Sanders Peirce and William James. It establishes that philosophical questions should be tested against their ultimate practical consequences, namely whether they work. It has been argued that pragmatism may be the underlying principle behind modernist innovation, distinct from avant-garde rupture in its ‘gradualist, mediating approach’ (Schoenbach 2012). This sense of conventional novelty at the heart of modernist experimentation is perhaps best invoked by James’s subtitle to his 1907 lectures on pragmatism: ‘a new name for some old ways of thinking’. The relation between literary modernism and pragmatism is perhaps best known in terms of its trademark narrative technique, the stream of consciousness – possibly the most spectacular misnomer in literary criticism. In his Principles of Psychology (1890) William James argues that consciousness flows non-linearly by association, yet it is only an inference not directly accessible by introspection, let alone narrative technique. James’s teachings make their way into modernist literary experimentation mainly through Gertrude Stein who studied and conducted psychological experiments under his supervision while attending Radcliffe College. Stein concluded that there is no such thing as automatic writing reflecting the transcription of an unmediated stream of consciousness. Her peculiar literary technique, based on conditioned linguistic recurrence, is a rejection of that possibility. Stein’s most important literary influence, Henry James, had, in turn, met Charles Sanders Peirce, a friend of his brother William, in Paris in 1875–6. James did not particularly appreciate Peirce’s lifestyle but recognised him as man of genius. Pierce, for his part, did not think James had a philosophic turn of mind. One can only guess what Peirce and James talked about, but as Peter Brooks has argued, something happened in Paris to start 297

Primitivism Henry James on his modernist path that is not attributable solely to the French naturalist novel (Brooks 2007). Others argue that James’s pragmatism is less informed by psychology (in the William James mode) or Peircean semiotics, than by John Dewey’s ‘historicist emphasis on man as culturally embedded’ (Posnock 1991). Pragmatism has continued to make an impression on literary criticism mainly through the work of Richard Rorty whose neopragmatist anti-foundationalism has sometimes been aligned with postmodernism and its nihilist tendencies, but arguably it retains a more typically modernist hope for meaning at the expense of principles. The publication of Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels’s ‘Against Theory’ in Critical Enquiry (1982) sparked a heated debate about the continued relevance of pragmatism in literary studies reviving key questions such as those concerning intentionality and literary meaning which haunted the modernist period. READING Brooks, Peter (2007) Henry James Goes to Paris. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Meyer, Steven (2001) Irresistible Dictation: Gertrude Stein and the Correlations of Writing and Science. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Mitchell, W. J. T. (1985) Against Theory: Literary Studies and the New Pragmatism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Posnock, Ross (1991) The Trial of Curiosity: Henry James, William James, and the Challenge of Modernity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schoenbach, Lisi (2012) Pragmatic Modernism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Solomons, Leon M. and Gertrude Stein (1896) ‘Normal Motor Automatism’, Psychological Review, 3.5: 492–512. Stein, Gertrude (1898) ‘Cultivated Motor Automatism: A Study of Character in Its Relation to Attention’, Psychological Review, 5.3: 295–306.

Fabio Vericat

PRIMITIVISM An umbrella term that often carries a double resonance in studies of modernism, the first historical, the second aesthetic. As a discursive construct fashioned within the bitter political struggles of history, ‘primitive’ designates a period in the evolution of human society, one lacking signs of economic development or technological modernity. It is a peculiarly problematic historical term that has been harnessed to divergent ideologies, such as the justification by European 298

Primitivism governments of murderously destructive policies synonymous with empire. As a mode of aesthetic engagement, primitivism suggests a bracingly borderless, time-travelling phenomenon – stretching from Igor Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring (1913), Blaise Cendrars’s poem ‘The Great Fetishes’ (1922), Nancy Cunard’s Negro Anthology (1934) to Ezra Pound’s experiments with Mandarin ideograms in The Cantos – that raided and reinvented visual, sonic and textual motifs from a non-Western, medieval, aboriginal or prehistoric past. This fascination with the geographically distant, antiquated, atavistic or untutored, from the colonised cultures of Africa to Polynesia, has endued a facet of European consciousness since the Renaissance. However, primitivism in modernist cultural production, infused both by Freudian psychoanalysis and Nietzschean metaphysics, is marked by a more powerfully disturbing discontent: at bourgeois rationalism, urbanisation and the formally democratic matrix of the liberal marketplace, plus an attendant need to inhabit an ‘authentic’ uncorrupted worldview based on lyrical intuition rather than empirical truth. Modern primitivism, for its international advocates, was about more than the preservation of dignified residual or marginal cultures in Africa, Oceania and North America: it was rather a radical and oppositional aesthetic practice that affirmed how all human communities are essentially identical, though tainted by civilisation to different degrees. Frequently described as the first modern primitivist, Paul Gauguin incorporated Tahitian figurations into his painting and ceramics so as to decouple ‘primitive’ from a pejorative characterisation of a non-Western cultural heritage. He sought to demonstrate that the proper home for tribal art was the art gallery, not a dusty museum of natural history. At the same time, European anthropology propounded by E. B. Tylor, J. G. Frazer, Lucien Levy-Bruhl, Freud and Carl Jung variously questioned the habits of mid-nineteenth-century social theorists, who gauged history as a vertical continuum in which non-Western natives and their cultures were denigrated and infantilised, rooted firmly to the bottom of the social evolutionary scale that began with so-called ‘savagery’, proceeded through ‘barbarism’ and culminated in the apex of Western ‘civilisation’. Gauguin validated primitivism as a transformative cross-cultural encounter whose resources had little in common with either the unkempt profusion of organic nature or with the imperial metropolis. The French surrealists, inspired partly by Gauguin’s design acolytes, sought to transmute the ‘primitive’ from an ­irretrievable 299

Primitivism ­ evelopmental phase in the history of civilisation to a more rewardd ing mode of being; a space for anarchic sport, lampoon and subversion of their own repressive European culture’s analytic, authoritarian and hierarchical strategies. Aspiring to tap a numinous parallel dimension of dream and multiplied consciousness, they proclaimed a strong affinity for shamanic and other so-called heretical fields of knowledge. André Breton attended Haitian occult ritual, while Max Ernst immersed himself in the collection and scrutiny of totemic artefacts. Primitivism as a painterly grammar and syntax relished derailing the generic and sentimental expectations of those attuned to the familiar tropes of Western art since the Renaissance. The Dresden coterie of young expressionist painters Die Brücke (The Bridge), whose preference for vivid pigmentation and seemingly unfinished composition recalled Gauguin, were energised by the ample tribal fetishes on display at their city’s ethnographic museum, while Pablo Picasso, similarly struck by the exotic curios at the Paris Trocadéro, employed techniques of distortion, bizarre incongruity and displacement in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) as three-dimensional African masks are evoked on the flat surface of his canvas. Like Henri Matisse’s Blue Nude of the same year, Picasso’s startling evocation of the ‘young ladies’ reprogrammes conventional definitions of feminine purity, grace and natural innocence. Georges Braque and the fauves returned repeatedly to the austere design of tribal masks and ceremonial costumes so as to demonstrate how the native artefact magically alters human identity and enriches perceptual registers. For sculptors – among them Henry Moore, Constantin Brâncusi and Jacob Epstein – it was the sheer formal variety of non-Western survivals that offered hitherto uncharted expressive opportunities. In order to refresh itself, Epstein argued, art needed to recapture the beliefs, rituals and practices of the people who, it was believed, had never lost contact with the primal roots of humanity. Joan Miró’s striking compositions of biomorphic shapes conjured the eerie geometric designs of prehistoric cave etching. Paul Klee’s preoccupation in Picture Album (1937) with tribal ideographs implies an identification of the geographically exotic with a lexicon of mystical clairvoyance or visionary trance, yet his strivings to recapture a mood of dissident difference were often founded upon a conviction of pre-verbal universality. Primitivism was, then, in the hands of this European avantgarde, a means of addressing – and transgressing – what the African American cultural pundit W. E. B. DuBois called in 1903 the 300

Projective Verse problem of the ‘colour line’. So the primitive icon, for Birkin in D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love (1920) at least, transmits a uniquely visceral and unsettling potency. Such a reaction to African carving is emblematic of modernism’s conflicted disposition towards nonCaucasian cultures and how their art-forms throw into sharper relief the supposedly hypertrophied civilised consciousness canvassed by, among others, E. M. Forster in Maurice (1914). Yet in the act of pinpointing unfamiliar aesthetic and spiritual sensibilities, many modernist practitioners, as John Cournos’s acerbic novel Babel (1922) illustrates, ultimately diluted and domesticated the very foreignness they claimed to cherish. This trivialising dilettantism, also imbuing texts such as André Gide’s North Africa-set The Immoralist (1902), unwittingly replicates the reductive ethnic stereotyping which characterises much nineteenth-century ‘race science’: positioning the non-Caucasian body as the object of unwholesome, objectifying voyeurism, or as site and source of a ‘lower’, libidinal brio that can heal the refined cosmopolitan’s myriad psychic wounds. By asserting the ethnic or caste outsider’s unvarnished simplicity or closeness to the elemental rhythms of organic nature, primitivism tended to leave the indigenous other stranded in a deathly and decultured realm, on the wrong side of the human/animal divide. Moreover, Roger Griffin has shown in Modernism and Fascism (2007) that the uncritical exaltation of non-rational forces prompted myriad authors – Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis among them – to flirt with fascist politics in the inter-war years. READING Bell, Michael (1972) Primitivism. London: Methuen Gombrich, Ernst (2002) The Preference for the Primitive: Episodes in the History of Western Taste and Art. London: Phaidon. Griffin, Roger (2007) Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Harrison, Charles, Francis Fascina and Gill Perry (1994) Primitivism, Cubism, Abstraction: The Early Twentieth Century. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press

Andrew Radford

PROJECTIVE VERSE ‘Projective Verse’ is the title of an essay by Charles Olson, first published in 1950. In it, Olson sets out his conception of post-Poundian 301

Projective Verse poetics, with a particular emphasis on the breath, and – perhaps more significantly – composition by field. Although its dogmatic tones give the essay the ambience of a manifesto, some scholars have expressed doubts regarding the appropriateness of this reading. Ralph Maud, for instance, argues that, as ‘Projective Verse’ was written so close to Olson’s composition of ‘The Kingfishers’ (1949), the essay is strictly interested in describing Olson’s perceptions of the process involved with one specific poem; consequently, Maud suggests that the essay’s broader applicability to any other text is subject to question. Nevertheless, while he doubts the thoroughness of the poetics in ‘Projective Verse’, Maud still acknowledges that many of Olson’s concepts were ‘vague enough to be useful’ (Maud 1998: 60) for a new generation of poets. Indeed, the influence of ‘Projective Verse’ can be seen in the work of many of the poets associated with black mountain college, l=a=n=g=u=a=g=e poetry, the british poetry revival and elsewhere. Although ‘Projective Verse’, like imagism, is against the rhythms of the metronome and clearly indebted to the poetics of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, Olson’s essay as a whole is driven by a rejection of the alienation and impersonality that characterised the modernism of T. S. Eliot. In its early stages, the essay valorises the typewriter’s potential in accurately indicating the ‘possibilities of the breath’, i.e. the pauses and suspensions of syllables and parts of phrases, in accordance with the ‘breathing of the man who writes, as well as of his listenings [sic]’ (Olson 1997: 239). In other words, Olson wanted to utilise ‘breath’ as a tool that would allow the ‘full speech-force of language back’ into the poem. As a result, many critics have extrapolated that ‘Projective Verse’ sees poems as musical scores or scripts for a vocal performance, where the human voice is poetry’s primary element, and the position of the lines, phrases and syllables on the page represent the embodiment of breath. While these readings of ‘Projective Verse’ seemingly relate its poetics – albeit loosely – to those practised in lettrism, concrete poetry and sound poetry, others have argued that Olson’s essay presents only an ‘inflated and subsequently redundant image of the poet’s breath’ (Herd 2010), which still subordinated the vocal performance to the scanning eye. What is perhaps a more enduring thought is Olson’s spatial understanding of the poem as a ‘field [. . .] where all the lines must be managed in their relations to each other’ (Olson 1997: 243; capitals in the original). More than just a question of visual representation of the lines on the page, composition by field free verse

302

Proletkult in ‘Projective Verse’ understands the poem as a kinetic ‘high-energy construct’, where form always extends from content, and where ‘one perception must immediately and directly lead to a further perception’

(Olson 1997: 240; capitals in the original). As a result, the essay advocates for a particular form of montage, which allows for the presentation of distance and tension, and where the various objects and elements of the poem are allowed to stand in an unresolved, even conflicted, relation to one another. This ability to register tension and distance in composition by field is, at least in part, due to the stance towards reality that Olson proposes later in the essay. Rather than viewing oneself as separate from ‘other creations’ or objects ‘of nature’, the poet should approach ‘the projective act’ as ‘a participant’ in ‘the larger field’ of those ‘objects’ (Olson 1997: 247). As the end of ‘The Kingfishers’ suggests, the task of field composition is to ‘hunt among the stones’ (Olson 1987: 93): to be actively involved with the ongoing and unfolding process of the poem, as opposed to mastering it from an impersonal distance. The philosophical implications of this position are something that Olson – after his study of A. N. Whitehead’s Process and Reality (1929) – would later explore in The Special View of History (1970).

READING Fredman, Stephen (1993) The Grounding of American Poetry: Charles Olson and the Emersonian Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Herd, David (2010) ‘“From him only will the old state-secret come”: What Charles Olson Imagined’, English, 59: 375–95. Maud, Ralph (1998) What Does Not Change: The Significance of Charles Olson’s ‘The Kingfishers’. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses. Olson, Charles (1987) The Collected Poems of Charles Olson (Excluding the Maximus Poems), ed. G. F. Butterick. Berkeley: University of California Press. Olson, Charles (1997) Collected Prose, ed. D. Allen and B. Friedlander. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Juha Virtanen

PROLETKULT An abbreviation of Proletarian Culture, Proletkult was an organisation that promoted new forms of artistic expression created by proletarians for proletarians. It was founded in 1917 by the People’s Commissariat for Education with the help of Alexander Bogdanov, 303

Psychoanalysis a leader of the Forward circle within Russian Bolshevism, with the view to design and construct a new culture of, for and by the working class on the ruins of the old culture. In September 1918 the first conference of Proletkult in Moscow attracted 330 delegates and 234 guests. Despite its relative autonomy, the central Proletkult received subsidies from the government for provincial groups. Proletkult clubs and studios were popular among the urban Soviet population. In 1920 the movement comprised 84,000 members and had 500,000 followers. In October 1920 the Central Committee’s decision to integrate Proletkult into the People’s Department of Education led to its dissolution, but some periodicals continued to exist in the early 1920s, including Proletarian Culture (1918–21) and Furnace (1918–23). The Proletkult movement encountered many problems and failed to secure a proletarian leadership. Faced with the hardship and economic problems worsened by the Civil war (1918–21), workers had to rely on Russian intellectuals and specialists who had heated debates about the need to educate workers. Proletkult programmes were taught by many prominent authors, including Andrey Bely. The Proletkult ideas influenced important innovators such as filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein and futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. READING Kenez, Peter (1985) The Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization, 1917–1929. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Koenker, Diane, William Rosenberg and Ronald Grigor Suny (eds) (1989) Party, State, and Society in the Russian Civil War: Explorations in Social History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Mally, Lynn (1990) Culture of the Future: The Proletkult Movement in Revolutionary Russia. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Alexandra Smith

PSYCHOANALYSIS A term which is inextricably linked to the name of its founder and his family. Sigmund Freud produced many short histories of psychoanalysis proudly declaring that ‘psychoanalysis is my creation [. . .] no one can know better than I do what psychoanalysis is’ (Freud 1957: 7). Since its conception this psychoanalytic ‘movement’ has been dogged by claims of its impending demise: initially criticised as a Central European Jewish Cabal and lampooned as a pseudo-science, modern brain-imaging technology has once again threatened to 304

Psychoanalysis render psychoanalysis obsolete. Despite such claims of a discipline in perpetual peril, psychoanalysis continues to influence modern clinical procedure and if the nineteenth century was shaped by the political writing of Karl Marx, the twentieth century was Freudian in complexion once its ideas escaped the confines of the consulting room and were utilised by the governing classes as the means to regulate their citizens. It remains difficult to impose a disciplinary classification upon psychoanalysis: what exactly is it? Freud’s reliance on anecdotes and biographical vignettes undermine claims to research findings drawn from repeatable experimentation, and while psychoanalysis’ influence on the arts has been considerable (the literary Freud’s psychoanalytic writings represent the first psychoanalytical readings of texts), its language, methodologies and intentions are decidedly medical. Likewise, it is difficult to clearly identify the precise moment of psychoanalysis’ conception. For all that psychoanalysis has come to be associated with the twentieth century, the watermarks of the nineteenth century are imprinted upon its structural DNA. A promising career in neurology beckoned for the young Sigmund until he came under the mesmeric sway of that great nineteenth-century Adam of neurological condition, Jean-Martin Charcot. Freud sat transfixed in the auditorium in the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris as he watched Charcot mobilise hypnosis as a means to alleviate the bizarre symptomology of his patients. For Freud, however, the history of psycho­ analysis proper only begins with ‘the new technique that dispenses with hypnosis’. Freud’s ‘new technique’ of free association was not so much a clean break with the hypnotic but an evolution of it, with the influence of hypnosis discernible in the authority of the analyst and in the carefully stage-managed surroundings of the consulting room. The primal patient in the developmental history of psychoanalysis was Anna-O, who was suffering from an array of debilitating and bizarre symptoms given the catchall diagnosis of hysteria. Freud’s speculation that Anna-O’s symptoms were not neurological in nature but linked to repressed childhood memories established a logic that continues to underpin psychoanalysis: that neurotic behaviours had their origin in the process of infantile psychosexual formation. The famous rift between Freud and his crown prince Carl Gustav Jung was a schismatic moment in psychoanalytic history. Freud died in exile in London in 1939 and the movement he created was subsequently shaped by several prominent figures, whose names give definition to the different psychoanalytic schools or traditions 305

Psychoanalysis ­ perating within the unifying label of psychoanalysis. Jung incorpoo rated the mystical within his psychoanalytic schema to posit his belief in the universality of the unconscious via his concept of archetypes. Freud’s daughter, Anna, and her compatriot Melanie Klein pioneered the advent of child psychology. The English psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott examined the psychic importance of play, while continental psychoanalysis would develop under the controversial influence of Jacques Lacan. Lacan’s injunction for a methodological, if not conceptual, ‘return to Freud’ resulted in a radical reimagining of the unconscious in light of Saussurean linguistics. Replacing the Freudian tripartite structure of the unconscious with his Real, Imaginary and Symbolic, Lacan borrowed from semiotics to famously argue that ‘the unconscious is structured like a language’. His theorising of the mirror stage in the formative psychosexual development of children is often quoted, if rarely fully understood. Lacan, like Freud, turned to literature to outline his theoretical work and psychoanalysis’ relationship to literary theory has been both profound and fraught. This ambivalent relationship to theory is encapsulated in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s celebration of Freud for discovering the unconscious before immediately criticising him for imagining it as being ‘a theatre’ upon which to impose set Oedipal interpretations (see oedipus complex). The criticisms set out in their book Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972) build upon a dissenting body of mid-century clinicians and theoreticians concerned about the application of psychoanalysis as a form of disciplinary control. Propelled by the work of Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing, the Anti-psychiatry movement, as it become known, was represented by figures like Michel Foucault, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and Ken Kesey, who attacked a brand dogmatic Freudian psychoanalysis for establishing ideas of a psychological normality, which, in turn, could be ruthlessly policed and regulated by governing elites. It is ironic that the charges against psychoanalysis would find an echo in literature, as earlier in the century Freud’s theories had been eagerly received within the bohemian circles of modernist writers and artists. Virginia Woolf was a friend of the great translator of Freud into English, James Strachey, while D. H. Lawrence and Edwin Muir were writers who transposed psychoanalytic principles into their respective literary projects. The surrealists, led by André Breton, were the first artistic movement to discover in the psychoanalytic conception of the unconscious a rich symbology in which to forge a distinct visual vernacular, and quickly adopted Freud into their 306

Quantum Mechanics own avant-garde movement. The strange vistas of Salvador Dalí’s landscapes, where watches melt and grotesque animals prowl, aesthetically depict a psychoanalytic understanding of the unconscious. In popular culture too, that industry of dreams, Hollywood film, utilised psychoanalysis in the creation of a new cinematic aesthetic represented most notably by Alfred Hitchcock’s psychological thrillers; for Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945), Dalí designed a now famous central dream sequence. READING Breuer, Josef and Sigmund Freud (1955) Studies on Hysteria, The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. II, ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (2004) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane. London: Continuum. Freud, Sigmund (1957) ‘On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XIV, ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, pp. 7–67. Lacan, Jacques (2002) ‘The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud’, Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink. New York: W.W. Norton, pp. 412–45.

Robbie McLaughlan

Q QUANTUM MECHANICS Famously described by one of its founders, Wolfgang Pauli, as being Knabenphysik (‘boys’ physics’), quantum mechanics abandoned classical determinism and effected an upheaval in scientific thought and epistemology even greater than that of Albert Einstein’s relativity. Quantum theory first emerged in 1900 when Max Planck discovered that light energy is emitted in discrete units, or ‘quanta’, and not as a wave. The incompatibility of this behaviour with the laws of classical physics troubled the conservative Planck but would later be embraced, in the decade following World war I, by a new wave of younger, predominantly German-speaking, physicists. The pre-eminent centres for research in theoretical physics in the 1920s were Niels Bohr’s institute in Copenhagen and the universities 307

Quantum Mechanics own avant-garde movement. The strange vistas of Salvador Dalí’s landscapes, where watches melt and grotesque animals prowl, aesthetically depict a psychoanalytic understanding of the unconscious. In popular culture too, that industry of dreams, Hollywood film, utilised psychoanalysis in the creation of a new cinematic aesthetic represented most notably by Alfred Hitchcock’s psychological thrillers; for Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945), Dalí designed a now famous central dream sequence. READING Breuer, Josef and Sigmund Freud (1955) Studies on Hysteria, The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. II, ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (2004) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane. London: Continuum. Freud, Sigmund (1957) ‘On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XIV, ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, pp. 7–67. Lacan, Jacques (2002) ‘The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud’, Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink. New York: W.W. Norton, pp. 412–45.

Robbie McLaughlan

Q QUANTUM MECHANICS Famously described by one of its founders, Wolfgang Pauli, as being Knabenphysik (‘boys’ physics’), quantum mechanics abandoned classical determinism and effected an upheaval in scientific thought and epistemology even greater than that of Albert Einstein’s relativity. Quantum theory first emerged in 1900 when Max Planck discovered that light energy is emitted in discrete units, or ‘quanta’, and not as a wave. The incompatibility of this behaviour with the laws of classical physics troubled the conservative Planck but would later be embraced, in the decade following World war I, by a new wave of younger, predominantly German-speaking, physicists. The pre-eminent centres for research in theoretical physics in the 1920s were Niels Bohr’s institute in Copenhagen and the universities 307

Quantum Mechanics of Göttingen, Zurich and Berlin. There, amidst the troubled and unstable zeitgeist of post-war Europe, quantum theory was given a formalised mechanics and science a crisis of its own. Marking quantum mechanics as an especially radical development in thought, and causing many (including Einstein) to have difficulty accepting it, was its move away from determinism and local causality. The standard, or ‘Copenhagen’, interpretation of quantum mechanics, presented at the 1927 Fifth Solvay International Conference, concerns a probabilistic mechanics and imposes theoretical limits on our ability to fully describe subatomic phenomena. Central to the Copenhagen interpretation are Bohr’s principle of complementarity and Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Complementarity posits that differing observational results of the same phenomena need not be held as being mutually exclusive; accordingly, light can be described best in terms of a ‘wave-particle duality’. In addition to this, Heisenberg’s principle states that the more accurately you determine either the position or momentum of a particle the less you can determine about the other. This is due, in part, to the influence of the act of measurement upon the system observed. The questions being posed by quantum theory were, then, in many respects, as much philosophical as they were physical; the epistemological foundations of science itself were being challenged. Quantum mechanics experienced a less sensational public reception than relativity but it still had a notable influence upon contemporary culture of the time and captured the imagination of numerous members of the modernist avant-garde. The appeal of this new science often lay in its description of the unobservable and its reconceptualisation of our relation to the world as subjective observers. The philosophical entailments of quantum mechanics in terms of non-passive spectators fascinated the playwright and theorist Bertolt Brecht and, as is evidenced by sections of The Messingkauf Dialogues (c.1939–42) and his journals, these notions influenced the aesthetic of epic theatre. Slightly earlier, the art critic Carl Einstein contended in George Braque (1934) that cubism displays a fragmentation, discontinuity and lack of causality rooted in the epistemological upsets of quantum mechanics. Another major avant-garde movement, surrealism, also actively engaged with the new ideas emerging from physics, although it largely distanced itself post-1945. The work of Roberto Matta and Wolfgang Paalen, in particular, openly drew upon the philosophy of quantum theory in challenging previous understandings of description and ‘reality’. 308

Race READING Albright, Daniel (1997) Quantum Poetics: Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and the Science of Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Parkinson, Gavin (2008) Surrealism, Art and Modern Science: Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Epistemology. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Amos Abrahams

R RACE A highly problematic form of human categorisation that in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries may refer to bodily, cultural, geographic, historical, ethnic, linguistic and/or social difference. In relation to modernism, race can be understood as a Western formation to determine a notion of kinship that is contingent on context and unevenly applied. Since the 1990s, scholarly interest in artistic responses to empire and work on global modernisms has led to new understandings of race in modernism. Although the modernist movement is traditionally associated with the West and Western forms of representation, non-Western influences on artistic form and content, and engagement with racial discourse, theories and typologies, can be found in modernisms from all over the world. A sense of race as a constitutive aesthetic and culturally significant aspect of modernism can be found in Len Platt’s edited collection (2011) which suggests that any definition or account of modernist culture cannot be separated from discussion of race, and in work by scholars such as Michael North, Urmila Seshagiri and Carole Sweeney who read race as central to modernist art forms. Nineteenth-century Europe saw the proliferation of new sciences that engaged with, or sought to determine, race and racial difference through evolutionary, anthropological, biological and sociological methods. Some significant works include: Karl Vogt, Lectures on Man (1864); Ernst Haeckel, Generelle Morphologie der Organismen (1866); Edward Tylor, Primitive Culture (1871); and Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (1871). These texts mapped human characteristics along racial lines, enforcing a hierarchy of man in which the white European was cast as evolutionarily and culturally 309

Race READING Albright, Daniel (1997) Quantum Poetics: Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and the Science of Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Parkinson, Gavin (2008) Surrealism, Art and Modern Science: Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Epistemology. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Amos Abrahams

R RACE A highly problematic form of human categorisation that in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries may refer to bodily, cultural, geographic, historical, ethnic, linguistic and/or social difference. In relation to modernism, race can be understood as a Western formation to determine a notion of kinship that is contingent on context and unevenly applied. Since the 1990s, scholarly interest in artistic responses to empire and work on global modernisms has led to new understandings of race in modernism. Although the modernist movement is traditionally associated with the West and Western forms of representation, non-Western influences on artistic form and content, and engagement with racial discourse, theories and typologies, can be found in modernisms from all over the world. A sense of race as a constitutive aesthetic and culturally significant aspect of modernism can be found in Len Platt’s edited collection (2011) which suggests that any definition or account of modernist culture cannot be separated from discussion of race, and in work by scholars such as Michael North, Urmila Seshagiri and Carole Sweeney who read race as central to modernist art forms. Nineteenth-century Europe saw the proliferation of new sciences that engaged with, or sought to determine, race and racial difference through evolutionary, anthropological, biological and sociological methods. Some significant works include: Karl Vogt, Lectures on Man (1864); Ernst Haeckel, Generelle Morphologie der Organismen (1866); Edward Tylor, Primitive Culture (1871); and Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (1871). These texts mapped human characteristics along racial lines, enforcing a hierarchy of man in which the white European was cast as evolutionarily and culturally 309

Race superior to people from other parts of the world. Reinterpretations of evolutionary development led to theories of degeneration that intensified fears of sexual depravity, poverty, criminality and, in Britain, anxiety over losses in the Boer war. While these theories of human development and racial difference provoked concern about the possibility that Europeans could regress to a ‘lower’ form of life, they also stimulated admiration for forms of human culture attuned to simpler, ‘primitive’ ways of living. orientalism and primitivism in Western art have been the focus of various studies across various traditions, coinciding in particular with the development of postcolonial approaches to understanding art and culture. Although both Orientalism and primitivism involve the incorporation of non-Western influences into Western art, they tend to operate in binarised ways, and are intelligible primarily (perhaps only) as Western constructs designed to reflect Western concerns. Modern primitivism tends to ally geographical distance with movement back in time, and appealed to modernists who sought to revive the past as a way of ‘making new’ the future, while Orientalist discourse could be used to represent the exotic, cruel and/or sexually excessive. One of the most famous examples of European modernist interest in ‘primitive’ cultures can be seen in Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles D’Avignon (1907) which depicts five nude female prostitutes, two of whom have African mask-like faces. Picasso is often credited as a forerunner of modernism because, like other artists and sculptors such as Constantin Brancusi, Henri Matisse and Paul Gaugin, he created work inspired by research into other cultures and ‘primitive’ artefacts that he encountered in European museums and galleries in the 1890s and 1900s. These objects were often procured through colonial violence, as in the Benin Expedition of 1897 that saw the city destroyed and hundreds of artworks stolen. Modernist appropriations of non-Western forms have therefore frequently been read as cultural extensions of imperialism, in which the West ascribes particular characteristics to other races, and creates and perpetuates racialised primitivist tropes through works of art. Asian, Indian, South American, Pacific and African influences on Euro-American modernisms can be traced in the work of various writers from Europe. Some examples of modernist literature that depict racial difference or make significant use of racialised tropes include: Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out (1915); E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (1924); and D. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent (1926). These and other modernist texts responded and contributed 310

Race to positive and negative views of racial ‘Others’. African characters or primitivisms based on racial stereotypes were often depicted as brutish or bestial, remnants of a primordial past. Alternatively, they could operate in ways similar to the older literary figure of the Noble Savage, as a harking back to a past golden age, an escape from the trappings of modernity. In both cases, racialised tropes are used to reflect on white, Western culture. Perhaps the literary example that both draws on and departs from binarised accounts of racial difference is Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) where Africans are depicted as simultaneously savage and ugly, alluring and reassuring, in ways that interrogate the dynamics of centre and periphery. While early European modernist works tended to draw on primitivist tropes to bolster or critique Western culture, 1920s USA saw the emergence of modernisms from non-white cultures as part of the new negro or harlem renaissance. Some of the key figures associated with, or who responded to, this movement include poet Claude McKay, dancer Josephine Baker, jazz musicians Duke Ellington and Fats Waller, and writers and activists W. E. B. Du Bois, Nancy Cunard and Alain Locke. Sieglinde Lemke uses evidence from a range of black and white artists, musicians and authors working in the 1920s and 1930s to assert that the mixed-race American aesthetic and cultural identity is a defining feature of modernism. Modernist innovation can productively be understood as the result of connections between different cultures. Although this may still involve unequal exchange, as seen in many examples of EuroAmerican Orientalism and primitivism, not all modernisms can be read simply as the appropriation of non-Western art forms by white writers, musicians and artists. The suggestion that non-white artists, musicians and writers were key to the development of modernism in the twentieth century has gained greater currency as the result of scholarly work on global modernisms, as modernisms from outside of Europe and America engage with racial discourses in ways that seek to reclaim and revise Western aestheticisations of race. READING Lemke, Sieglinde (1998) Primitivist Modernism: Black Culture and the Origins of Transatlantic Modernism. New York: Oxford University Press. North, Michael (1994) The Dialectic of Modernism: Race, Language and Twentieth-Century Literature. New York: Oxford University Press. Platt, Len (ed.) (2011) Modernism and Race. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 311

Rayonism Seshagiri, Urmila (2010) Race and the Modernist Imagination. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Sweeney, Carole (2004) From Fetish to Subject: Race, Modernism and Primitivism, 1919–1935. Westport, CT: Praeger.

Jade Munslow Ong

RAYONISM The abstract movement of Rayonism (or Rayism) was developed by the Russian painters Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova in the 1910s. It was influenced by discussions about a fourth dimension of space initiated by British mathematician and science fiction writer Charles Howard Hinton and Russian theosophist Petr Ouspensky. Larionov’s works Rayism (1913) and Rayists and Futurists: A Manifesto and Rayist Painting (1913) describe his vision of the fourth dimension and develop Ouspensky’s ideas about psychic evolution and flashes of cosmic consciousness experienced by artists. Larionov’s ‘Pictorial Rayism’ (1914) suggests that rayist painting should depict the intrinsic life of coloured mass and create a synthetic image, one that goes beyond time and space, so that glimpses of the fourth dimension become possible. Larionov defined rayism as the painting of space revealed neither by the contours of objects nor by their formal colouring, but by the ceaseless and intense drama of the rays. Rayism’s principle of conveying intangible spatial forms and the whole world in its spiritual and concrete totality was utilised in Larionov’s and Goncharova’s works, including Portrait of a Fool, Raysist Sausage and Mackerel, Rayist Construction of a Street, Glass, Cats and Green and Blue Forest. READING Bowlt, J. E. (ed. and trans.) (1976) The Russian Avant-Garde: Theory and Criticism, 1902–1934. New York: Viking Press. Parton, Anthony (1993) Mikhail Larionov and the Russian Avant-Garde. London: Thames & Hudson. Parton, Anthony (2010) The Art and Design of Natalia Goncharova. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Antique Collectors Club.

Alexandra Smith

READYMADE The term ‘Readymade’ is inextricably linked to the artistic and intellectual oeuvre of French artist Marcel Duchamp who in the 1910s 312

Readymade pioneered the presentation of mass-produced articles as unique artworks, with little or no physical addition or alteration on the part of their author, and who used the term (itself appropriated from the existing argot of mass production) to designate such objects. The first Readymades involved making slight alterations to objects of everyday use: in 1913 Duchamp combined an ordinary wooden stool with the front fork and wheel of a bicycle, using it as a private object of distraction in his studio; the following year he purchased a bottle rack in a Paris department store – like Bicycle Wheel this would be lost after Duchamp’s move to New York in 1915 and reiterated there in a new version; in 1915 he bought a snow shovel and inscribed it with the title In Advance of the Broken Arm. Among the other quotidian items also selected as Readymades by Duchamp were a comb, a typewriter cover, a hat rack and – most famously – for his 1917 work Fountain, a urinal turned on its back, signed (pseudonymously) and dated. These activities were part of Duchamp’s deliberate detachment from the orthodoxies of modernist art production as he encountered them in the Paris milieu in which he and his brothers (also both artists) were immersed before his move to the United States, particularly the suppositions that governed the production and reception of cubist and post-Cubist painting, which retained an emphasis on originality, authenticity, the formal properties of artworks and the use of traditional artistic categories. For Duchamp, the appeal to purely visual sensation in what he disparagingly termed ‘retinal’ painting deprived art of more meaningful intellectual and libidinal content. Although the Readymades themselves usually appear sculptural in form, it has been convincingly argued that it is as a negation of painting, and of medium-specific art more widely, that they emerge in Duchamp’s thought. The first forays towards the Readymade occurred at a point in his career when he had achieved some fame for his work as a painter but wished to move beyond the conventions and limitations of the medium. In a working note of c.1915 Duchamp proposed the formula ‘use a Rembrandt as an ironing board’ for what he called a ‘reciprocal Readymade’ and among the best known of the Readymades is LHOOQ (1919), a reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa with moustache and goatee added. Duchamp would even claim in 1961 that as paint itself is now mass-produced, all modern paintings are themselves examples of ‘assisted Readymades’. Duchamp stressed, particularly in later interviews about his work, that in choosing to render certain objects 313

Readymade as Readymade artworks he was not pointing to hitherto unrealised aesthetic merits in those objects, but attempting to find things about which he felt nothing – positive or negative – and so were ‘an-aesthetic’ and free of any relationship to taste, which posed, therefore, complex questions about how art itself could be defined. On this basis the Readymade should be distinguished from the surrealist objet trouvé (‘found object’) which it otherwise might seem to resemble. It is important to note too that Duchamp’s first Readymades, despite the radical challenge they presented to existing canons of taste, did not produce notable or ­immediate scandal. Indeed, the first exhibition of Readymades in 1916 seems to have passed unnoticed. Readymades barely registered in art history except as side-notes to other avantgarde endeavours until a resurgence of interest in Duchamp in the 1950s and after, led by figures such as John Cage, Jasper Johns and Richard Hamilton, elevated him to his current status as perhaps the key figure of ­twentieth-century art. Duchamp’s own dissemination of the Readymades – for instance in overseeing a publication that explained the rejection of Fountain from a supposedly un-juried exhibition, in having the urinal photographed for purposes of publicity and posterity (it would disappear forever shortly thereafter), in authorising facsimile limited editions (to the consternation of many who thought such an act contradicted the Readymade idea), or in making scale replicas of key Readymades to include in the editioned boîtes-en-valises that served as miniature private museums of his oeuvre – cannily kept the works available for the delayed recognition that they gradually gained. Duchamp’s approach to the legacy of the Readymades also reflected his awareness of their changing reception over time. In 1950, for instance, he installed a substitute version of Fountain in an exhibition mounted on the wall, as if it could be used as a urinal; with Fountain now accepted as an artwork it could itself be reciprocally turned back into an object of use, at least implicitly. Readymade art objects, whether authored by Duchamp or by his many successors, have been seen as fundamental to the development of Neo-dada and other post-war elaborations of earlier twentiethcentury avant-gardes, to the formation of conceptual art (thanks to the emphasis on artistic intention over manual production in the Readymades), to the artistic critique of art’s institutions, and as prescient of the ironic tone and scepticism of originality in much postmodern art. For some critics, most notably Peter Bürger, the Readymade as a tactic for mocking artistic conventions cannot be repeated except as a recuperation of its initial critical efficacy. For 314

Realism others, such emphasis on Duchamp’s originality in this regard is itself ironically a recuperation of his work into the patrilinear narratives of originality and genius that sustain conventional histories of modernism. Duchamp himself claimed that the viewer contributed 50 per cent of the meaning of any artwork, and that posterity was the ultimate manifestation of this collaboration with the artist. The Readymade has indeed been accepted and endorsed by posterity (in the guise of art history and art museums) and is now encountered by audiences, artists and art students as itself a readymade category of artistic production. READING Ades, Dawn, Neil Cox and David Hopkins (1999) Marcel Duchamp. London: Thames & Hudson, pp. 146–89. Bürger, Peter (1984) Theory of the Avant-Garde. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Buskirk, Martha and Mignon Nixon (eds) (1996) The Duchamp Effect: Essays, Interviews, Round Table. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press. de Duve, Thierry (1996) Kant After Duchamp. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press. Iversen, Margaret (2004) ‘Readymade, Found Object, Photograph’, Art Journal, 63 (2): 44–57. Jones, Amelia (1995) Postmodernism and the En-Gendering of Marcel Duchamp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sanouillet, Michel and Elmer Peterson (eds) (1975) The Essential Writings of Marcel Duchamp. London: Thames & Hudson.

Dominic Paterson

REALISM The meaning of realism has never been agreed upon unanimously but its emergence as a distinct aesthetic and literary phenomenon dates back to the mid-nineteenth century, when European artists began to reject the conventions of their late Romantic predecessors. While not entirely unified in style or ambition, realism was a response to important social and epistemological developments of the age: the consolidation of modern industrial society and its urban classes, the diffusion of Marx, Darwin and Comtean positivism and a paradigmatic shift towards materialist scientific and sociological explanations in general. The realists sought to transpose these new materialisms into their own artistic practices, with painters 315

Realism e­ xpressing particular impatience towards the clichéd forms and conventional subject matter of establishment high art. For them pastoral landscapes and nudes masquerading as mythology represented a kind of painterly idealism or mannered artifice, a realm divorced from the living, breathing reality of the contemporary world. In his Realist Manifesto of 1855, the Parisian artist Gustave Courbet presents the honest depiction of his own environment, its mores, habits and local colour, as his chief intention. So for Courbet and his artistic acolytes, realism signified a mode of unmediated truth-telling or verisimilitude, a re-presentation of life’s common aspects, free from moralisation or romantic embellishment. Their favoured subjects were peasants, labourers and the body in its unvarnished corporeality, subjects politely transfigured, romanticised or allegorised as timeless, universal figures. But authentic art for Courbet and the realists was neither timeless nor universal; it was particularised and deeply historical. In the interests of a ‘living art’ true to its own time and place, the realists pursued a mode of documentary neutrality free from conventional moral and allegorical inferences. But this observational neutrality was in fact anything but. The realist’s unswerving gaze in fact bore two clear and related provocations. The first was a philosophical challenge to the Romantics’ idealist epistemology: the subordination of common-sense perception, itself deemed shifting and unreliable, to an essential hidden realm of forms or ideas. Art’s privileging in the Romantic framework stemmed from its capacity to mediate between the two realms. Yet for the realists of the 1850s, deeply influenced by modern scientific and positivist frameworks, life’s truths and inner workings were all there for the taking. Thus réalisme was not only an epistemological declaration, but also a social provocation, to look closer and to observe the reality of life’s conditions for the obscure majority commonly overlooked or sentimentalised by high art. Realism in the mid- to late-nineteenth century connoted social rather than personal transformation through sensory documentation as opposed to hidden inspiration. This ethos suffused realist literature as much as it did realist painting, but the delineation of a watershed moment in literary realist history, or clear ‘school rules’ of style and form, are harder to determine. For the literary critic and author Edmond Duranty, cofounder of the important but short-lived review Réalisme (1856–7), the movement demanded unadorned style and close attention to the details of ordinary middle and working-class life. For the critic Champfleury on the other hand, scientifically inspired observa316

Realism tion devoid of judgement was the real key. This disagreement was partly a product of the narrative medium itself. Neutral description or verisimilitude is clearly harder to define here than in a pictorial context: language is value-laden where geometry is not. Moreover, where paintings before the avant-garde still tended towards singular unified perspectives, romantic or realist, modern literary narrative was rarely expected to exercise such control. Narrative since the decline of rhetoric was invariably plurivocal, multi-perspectival or heterogeneous to use the term favoured by the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. As such, elements of the realist’s observational register had an unremarked upon precedence, as ballast to the predominantly fabulous or romantic registers of other genres. So the shock of the new realist idiom (which led to Courbet’s exclusion from the 1855 World Exhibition) was more palpable and immediate in painting than in words. Still, literary realism had its own exhilarating events. The publication of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856), with its richly researched details of mediocrity and common bourgeois affairs, was certainly one of them. The book was tried for obscenity and became a benchmark for writers of the new style: Maupassant, the Goncourt brothers and Zola were all inspired by Madame Bovary, but the principles they took from it and how they developed them varied. In 1867 Émile Zola had his own succès de scandale with the publication of Thérèse Raquin. A novel of lust and murderous enmity amid the penumbra of working-class Paris, it set the tone for Zola’s immense twenty-novel series, Les Rougon-Macquart, and his self-appointed leadership of the French realist movement. Zola’s preference for the term ‘naturalism’ over ‘realism’ reflected his faith in the spurious and deterministic science of degeneration, a theory of racial decline through hereditary pathology and criminality combined with noxious industrial environments. Where realism might document social ills for social critique or change, Zola pursued naturalism as a predictive testing ground for known degenerative characteristics and their inevitable pathological outcomes. The literary analogue to this inevitability was a style rich in gothic foreboding, which seems paradoxical given the gothic’s romantic heritage and Zola’s realist training. With his strange combination of society and psyche, Zola’s naturalism bridged the gulf between classically omniscient realisms and subsequent psychological or impressionistic modes of realism. While France dominated critical debates surrounding the meaning of realism, the genre developed its own geographical nuances 317

Realism e­ lsewhere. Besides France, the epicentres for realism in the late 1800s were Britain and Russia, where the same socio-scientific discourses circulated for similar reasons. While British realism is generally considered more polite than French realism, less taken with dirt and dissolution, Charles Dickens, George Eliot and George Sand were all convinced of their social mission, spinning densely furnished microcosms of macrocosmic forces. In Russia too, the respectability and seriousness of the genre was rarely called into question. Less concerned with theory than the French, the Russian example was multifarious, but what united Russian realists, not least the great triumvirate of Dostoyevsky, Turgenev and Tolstoy, was their highminded treatment of morality. Support from prominent liberalising critics such as Nikolai Chernichevsky and Vissarion Belinsky ensured their more decorous reputation. Realism has been historically significant for Norwegian, North and South American, Spanish and Italian literature as well. In their variety and historical specificity, they confirm the genre’s commitment to accident and context over flintily prescriptive conventions. But of course realism can be distilled to its own dominant forms, and this predicament underlines an interesting instability or ambiguity when defining the realist project. The formal and thematic attributes of classical nineteenth-century realism and some twentieth- century realism can be summarised thus: a panoramic perspective on a given milieu at a given point in time; the conscious interweaving of personal fates with worldhistorical events; commitment to the cataloguing of everyday life’s material and structural aspects, faces, furniture, methods of cooking and eating, distributions of factory or domestic labour. Inspired by marxism and positivism, realists have sought to document the interplay of historical conditions from a position of neutral observation. But what if neutral observation is simply not possible? What if, following Marx’s own doctrine of dialectical materialism, sensory impression and the forms of our observation and representation are themselves historical? Realism in its classical nineteenth-century form would have no greater purchase on reality, no greater claim to neutrality or social saliency, than other literary or painterly forms: the historicity of perception and form would reduce it to a mere stylistic convention. This, in effect, was what the avant-garde and high modernism did to classical nineteenth-century realism. Disdaining rational observation as an oppressive habit, they sought to derange perception and feeling through formal-artistic innovation. Form for 318

Realism the modernists was implicitly historical, dialectical and so constitutive of its content. In a way, avant-garde expressionists could be seen to make the very same arguments that the realists of the 1850s had made: that blind adherence to conventional forms is historically anachronistic or idealist and that new forms of experience call for new forms of representation. Modernism generally signalled the demise of classical realism in the twentieth century, but it did not diminish the broadly Marxist or Aristotelian commitment commonly championed in realism’s name. Indeed, the avant-garde prompted an energetic renegotiation of the meaning of realism among Marxist literary critics, for whom the concept of historical dialectic was of course axiomatic. Every bit as fierce as the debates of the 1850s, the seemingly narrow issue of representation invoked doctrinal disagreements relating to the correct interpretation of Marx and profound philosophical disagreements concerning truth and human ontology. The dispute between Georg Lukács, an esteemed Marxist critic and Soviet party-faithful, and the avant-garde playwright Bertolt Brecht, encapsulates this antagonism. Where Lukács promoted realism in its classical nineteenth-century form, censuring modernism for its formally driven experimentation and bourgeois interiority, Brecht pursued formal innovation as a means to socio-critical awakening. The estrangement effects of Brecht’s epic theatre testify to realism’s renegotiation as formal alienation rather than seamless representation. From the Brechtian perspective, it was Lukács’ adherence to classical realism as a trans-historical form which broke with dialectical materialism; an expression of idealism, Lukács’ stance reflected the ossified anti-Western state doctrine he pragmatically chose to serve. Literary trends of the late twentieth and earlier twenty-first centuries suggest modernism was the ultimate victor in the RealistExpressionist contest. Although there have been subsequent defenders of the classical realist cause, the Marxist critic and author Raymond Williams being an eminent example, realism today signifies two things: a discrete set of aesthetic values and practices dating back to the late nineteenth century on the one hand, it also serves as a placeholder for a historically evolving set of formal practices impelled by social and epistemological questions concerning the role of art in society, the priority of form and content, and the nature of truth and representation. 319

Reification READING Adorno, Theodor et al. (2007) Aesthetics and Politics: Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, Georg Lukács. London: Verso. Becker, George J. (1963) Documents of Modern Literary Realism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Jameson, Fredric R. (1975) ‘Beyond the Cave: Demystifying the Ideology of Modernism’, Bulletin of the Midwest Modern Language Association, 8 (1): 1–20. Lukács, Georg (1979) The Meaning of Contemporary Realism. Cambridge: MIT Press. Williams, Raymond (1958) ‘Realism and the Contemporary Novel’, Universities and Left Review, 4: 22–5.

Sophie Vlacos

REIFICATION ‘The means of production, the material conditions of labour, are not subject to the worker, but he to them’, Karl Marx stresses in Capital (1867), adding that this ‘entails the personification of things and the reification [Versachlichung] of persons’. For Marx’s disciple Georg Lukács, new processes of industrial organisation – clocking in, along with the deployment of F. W. Taylor’s ‘principles of scientific management’ – combined with the surplus value identified by Marx to impose a commodified or reified status on workers (see taylorism). By the time Lukács’s analysis appeared, in the early1920s, his concerns were already shared among modernist writers. They appear directly in D. H. Lawrence’s examination of the ‘scientific method’ and ‘pure mathematical principles’ applied to industry in Women in Love (1921), and the consequent thing-like or machine-like nature of workers. They figure more indirectly in T. S. Eliot’s depiction, in ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’ (1915), of a child as inanimate or ‘automatic’ as a mechanical toy (see automaton). Similarly denatured figures appear in Brave New World (1932), also reflecting Aldous Huxley’s awareness of the fordist production-line methods. Concerns with mechanism and reification are not altogether new in literature, figuring earlier, for example, in the ‘moving toyshop of [the] heart’ depicted in Alexander Pope’s ‘The Rape of the Lock’ (1714). The evolving conditions of industrial capitalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries nevertheless ensured they powerfully affected modernist imagination, dictating its emphases on depths of consciousness which promised some immunity from the reifying pressures of modernity. 320

Relativity READING Knapp, James F. (1988) Literary Modernism and the Transformation of Work. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Stevenson, Randall (1998) Modernist Fiction. London: Longman.

Randall Stevenson

RELATIVITY ‘Everybody catches fire at the word Relativity’, D. H. Lawrence suggested in 1923. ‘There must be something in the mere suggestion that we’ve been waiting for.’ Albert Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity (1905) had asserted that all spatial or temporal judgements were relative and dependent on the position of the observer. Interest in these ideas was greatly surpassed by the sensational response to his General Theory of Relativity, completed in 1916. This defined space and time as parts of a four-dimensional continuum whose distortion by massive objects accounted for the effects of gravity. The theory’s confirmation – on the basis of Arthur Eddington’s observation, during an eclipse, of starlight apparently bending under the effects of the sun’s gravity – provided sensational international news late in 1919. Numerous explanatory volumes – such as Bertrand Russell’s The ABC of Relativity (1926) – were quickly published to explain Einstein’s highly challenging and esoteric mathematical theories, ensuring that by the early-to-mid 1920s, these were very widely known, if loosely understood. As Lawrence also suggests, his ideas may have carried particular contemporary appeal, especially – in a time-constrained modernist society – in their denial of the existence of any absolute, universal temporality. Wyndham Lewis claimed in this way that Einstein’s popularity extended the slightly earlier appeal of bergsonism. READING Einstein, Albert (1961) Relativity: The Special and the General Theory – A Popular Exposition. New York: Crown Publishers. Lewis, Wyndham (1927) Time and Western Man. London: Chatto & Windus. Russell, Bertrand (1925) The ABC of Relativity. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner.

Randall Stevenson

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Revolution

REVOLUTION Following the French revolutions of 1789, 1830, 1848 and 1871, the modernist period was haunted by the spectre of a proletarian revolution. communism exerts a key influence on modernism: many avantgarde manifestos take their cue from the Communist manifesto of 1848. The Russian October Revolution takes place during the high tide of literary modernism, and it is linked to a whole series of modernisms including marxism, bolshevism, suprematism, proletkult, constructivism, photomontage and socialist realism. This is the most important revolution of the modernist period, but there were many other significant uprisings and demonstrations including: the Paris Commune of 1871, the St Louis general strike of 1877, the New Orleans general strike of 1892, the Russian Revolution of 1905, the Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1905–7, the Tragic Week uprising in Barcelona in 1909, the German Revolution of 1918, the Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919, the German general strike of 1920 (which defeated the Kapp Putsch), the UK general strike of 1926, the Austrian Civil war of 1934, the Spanish Civil War of 1936–9 and the Chinese Revolution of 1949. The most important modernist representations of the October Revolution are in cinematic form: Sergei Eisenstein’s silent films Battleship Potemkin (1925) and October (1928). Avant-garde Russian poets Vladimir Mayakovsky and Blok produced important work in service of the revolution, e.g. Blok’s long poem ‘The Twelve’ (Двенадцать, 1918), which features twelve Bolshevik soldiers walking through the streets of St Petersburg and talking in a working-class idiom. But Yevgeny Zamyatin’s science fiction novel We (Мы, 1921) was the first work to be banned by Soviet censorship in 1921. By the late 1920s many more Russian modernists were banned, including Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, Sergei Tretyakov and Mikhail Bulgakov. Mandelstam and Tretyakov died in the Stalinist purges of the late 1930s. In the context of revolution, writers could sometimes be canonised as heroes whose works expressed the social consciousness of the entire nation. This is the case with Maxim Gorky and Vladimir Mayakovsky in the Soviet Union, Attila József in Hungary and Lu Xun in China. This is, of course, a common practice in most nation states. Whether in a time of revolution or not, governments always tend to celebrate canonical authors, turning them into public institutions and exercises in nation-building. The Paris Commune of 1871 is one of the inaugural events of the 322

Revolution modernist period. Its revolutionary leader Louis-Auguste Blanqui is an important reference point in Baudelaire’s poetry, according to Walter Benjamin. The ending of Guy de Maupassant’s classic story Boule de Suif (1880) could, on one level, be interpreted as an allusion to the Paris Commune, as the bourgeois travellers cheerfully sacrifice their proletarian companion Boule de Suif in pursuit of their own convenience. Revolution is a key theme of literary naturalism, expressed in Émile Zola’s Germinal (1885) about a miners’ strike in the North of France, and in Gerhart Hauptmann’s The Weavers (Die Weber, 1892), about the Silesian weavers’ protests of the 1840s. Revolution is also thematised in the dramas of German expressionism, as, for instance, in Bertolt Brecht’s early play Drums in the Night (Trommeln in der Nacht, 1922), and Ernst Toller’s The Machine Wreckers (Die Maschinenstürmer, 1922) and Hoppla, We’re Alive! (Hoppla, wir leben!, 1927). The Russian revolution of 1905 is the setting for Maxim Gorky’s novel The Mother (Мать, 1907), dramatised by Brecht in 1931. The German Revolution, including the murders of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, is the subject of Alfred Döblin’s novel cycle November 1918: A German Revolution (November 1918: Eine deutsche Revolution, 1948–50). Towards the end of the modernist period, the Paris Commune features in Brecht’s late masterwork, The Days of the Commune (Die Tage der Commune, 1949). In turn of the century England, novelists were haunted by the spectre of revolution, mainly in the form of anarchism. The danger is thematised in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907), which depicts a group of anarchists distributing leaflets on ‘The Future of the Proletariat’, and in G. K. Chesterton’s metaphysical thriller The Man Who Was Thursday (1908). In the USA in the 1920s, the Italian-born anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti became a cause célèbre. After their execution in 1927 they were featured in poems by John Dos Passos and William Carlos Williams, and in novels by Upton Sinclair (Boston: A Novel, 1928) and John Dos Passos (The Big Money, 1936). Anglophone modernists had remarkably little to say about the Russian Revolution. Two exceptions were Hugh MacDiarmid, who published three ‘Hymns to Lenin’ (1931, 1935 and 1957) and Edmund Wilson, whose To the Finland Station (1940) culminates in Lenin’s arrival in St Petersburg in 1917. British cultural relations with the USSR only began to thaw very gradually in the late 1930s. This cultural shift owed much to the Left Book Club launched 323

Ritual by the London-based publisher Victor Gollancz. The club, which existed from 1936 to 1948, circulated mainly non-fiction books. Until the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939, the books frequently offered a positive view of the Soviet Union. The Left Book Club also published politically progressive modernists including George Orwell, André Malraux, Clifford Odets and Stephen Spender. READING Dove, Richard and Stephen Lamb (eds) (1992) German Writers and Politics, 1918–39. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Lewis, John (1970) The Left Book Club: An Historical Record. London: Victor Gollancz. Petrey, Sandy (1988) Realism and Revolution: Balzac, Stendhal, Zola, and the Performances of History. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Platt, Kevin M. F. (1997) History in a Grotesque Key: Russian Literature and the Idea of Revolution. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Thomson, Boris (1972) The Premature Revolution: Russian Literature and Society 1917–1946. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Ernest Schonfield

RITUAL A solemn religious practice or set of actions staged according to a prescribed order. Urgent debates about the precise function of ritual – how it defines, refines and lends ceremonial gravitas to the diurnal rhythms of human existence – powerfully shaped modernist cultural production. Decisive contributors to these debates were the ‘Cambridge Ritualists’, also known as ‘the myth and ritual school’. A small pioneering research cluster of Cambridge and Oxford hellenists and philologists, including Jane Ellen Harrison, Gilbert Murray, Francis M. Cornford and Arthur Bernard Cook, active between 1900 and 1914, they earned this moniker due to a shared interest in explicating myth and early modes of classical drama as originating in prehistoric magical fertility rites performed in reverence of a divinity who died and was reborn. Harrison’s theories about concrete language creating piercingly vivid ideas rather than exemplifying preconceived ones, her eloquent insistence on the importance of desire as a motivating force behind art, marking a decisive shift from personal to collective emotion, resonate through works by formally innovative women writers such as Hope Mirrlees in Paris, published by the Hogarth Press in 1918, Mary Butts’s Armed with Madness (1928) and H.D.’s Trilogy (1944). The ambitious compara324

Roman-fleuve tive investigation of how ceremonial seasonal killings operated to declare human subjectivity in repeated patterns, arcane symbols and ­movements – translated into a more accessible and popular idiom by Jessie L. Weston in her study of Grail lore From Ritual to Romance (1920) – also proved richly suggestive to canonical literary figures such as T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound and James Joyce, as well as to the critically neglected genre of modernist neo-Gothic, which includes Charles Williams’s War in Heaven (1930) and Many Dimensions (1931), as well as Arthur Machen’s ‘Ritual’ (1937). READING Cousineau, Thomas J. (2004) Ritual Unbound: Reading Sacrifice in Modernist Fiction. Newark: University of Delaware Press. Garrity, Jane (2003) Step-daughters of England: British Women Modernists and the National Imaginary. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Query, Patrick R. (2013) Ritual and the Idea of Europe in Interwar Writing. Aldershot: Ashgate.

Andrew Radford

ROMAN-FLEUVE The term roman-fleuve (French, meaning ‘river novel’ or ‘flowing novel’) describes a long novel comprised of a series of shorter novellength texts or, alternatively, a series of self-contained novels which form part of a single larger text. While the related family saga form flourished in the mid-nineteenth century, the roman-fleuve emphasises the focus on the rendering of interior ‘flow’ in later texts. Its origins are traced to Romain Rolland’s preface to the seventh volume of his ten-volume work Jean Christophe (1904–12) where he asserts that his protagonist ‘m’est toujours apparu comme un fleuve’ (‘has always seemed to me like a river’). By ‘deemphasizing linear plot, eschewing closure, and privileging synchronic development’ (Felber 1995: xi), the roman-fleuve may be seen as exemplary of the modernist aesthetic. Writers such as Marcel Proust and Dorothy Richardson used the form to permit extended and intensive exploration of an individual human consciousness, in particular the workings of memory (see also bergsonism). Proust’s seven-volume À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27) has become the most celebrated of all romans-fleuves, as the mature narrator reflects on his youth through descriptions of both voluntary and involuntary memory, the latter most famously expressed in the madeleine episode. Both Proust’s novel and Richardson’s 325

Roman-fleuve ­thirteen-volume Pilgrimage (1915–67) – about which the phrase stream of consciousness was first used in a literary context, though Richardson herself despised the concept – can also be categorised as Künstlerromane (artist’s novels) as the protagonist of each develops and emerges as a writer. The extent of these texts enables these authors to investigate the workings of inner time and the effect of memory and repetition over extended periods not only in the lives of the protagonists, but in the experience of the reader him or herself. They also offer detailed and vibrant accounts of their particular social context: for Marcel, the artistic circles of upper-class and aristocratic French society around the turn of the century; for Richardson’s protagonist Miriam – a young, educated working woman – bohemian London over a similar period. The Parade’s End tetralogy (1924–8) by Ford Madox Ford, while also focused around a single central character, could just as well be described as having an event – the Great war – as its protagonist. Ford’s techniques of delayed decoding and the impressionist time-loop are crucial to his depictions of the visceral experience of warfare, as well as of the personal and political reverberations of this geopolitical crisis. Anthony Powell’s twelve-volume A Dance to the Music of Time (1951–75), while arguably more an anti-modernist than modernist text, was nevertheless influenced by Proust and other modernist innovators such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and James Joyce. As commentators on modernist temporality have observed, the phenomenon of the modernist roman-fleuve in some ways emerges from the same impulse as do the canonical one-day novels Mrs Dalloway (1925) and Ulysses (1922). That is, both forms challenge the normative view that novels should be event-driven; indeed, to a large extent they challenge the notion of the ‘event’ itself (Sayeau (2013) and Olson (2009)). READING Felber, Lynette (1995) Gender and Genre in Novels Without End: The British Roman-Fleuve. Gainesville: University of Florida Press. Olson, Liesl (2009) Modernism and the Ordinary. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rolland, Romain (1909) Dans la maison. Paris: Société d’Éditions Littéraires et Artistiques. Sayeau, Michael (2013) Against the Event: The Everyday and the Evolution of Modernist Narrative. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Bryony Randall 326

Romanticism versus Classicism

ROMANTICISM VERSUS CLASSICISM The distinction between Romanticism and Classicism occupies a central position in Anglo-American literary modernism, specifically the modernisms of T. E. Hulme, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. In the broadest sense possible, Romanticism is associated with the expression of beauty through imagination and powerful emotions. Classicism is associated with restraint and order, control and detachment. Understood in this sense, the modernisms of Hulme, Pound and Eliot are ‘classic’, ‘classical’ or ‘classicist’ (terms they used interchangeably), insofar as they reject (or purport to reject) ­sentimentalism and idealism. The origins of the distinction in its modern usage can be traced back to the German Romantic poet, critic and scholar Augustus Schlegel. Building on his younger brother Friedrich’s definition of Romanticism in the Athenaeum Fragments (1798) as the art that is subject to no rules, Augustus juxtaposed klassich and romantisch. In a series of lectures and articles in 1804–8, Augustus popularised the notion that Classical literature tends towards purity of genres and is devoted to the present and the finite, as opposed to Romantic literature which is more contemplative and devoted to the infinite. Augustus’s dichotomy caught on, and it became a commonplace for German critics and journalists throughout the nineteenth century to contrast das Romantische with das Klassische. In France, Germaine de Staël helped to spread the distinction even further in De l’Allemagne (1813). In England, it was taken up by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his Lectures on Literature (1808–19) and later on by Walter Pater in Appreciations (1889). The distinction entered Anglophone modernism chiefly through the writings of Hulme, where the distinction is imbricated with both literary and political connotations. In ‘Romanticism and Classicism’ (1911–12), Hulme defines the ‘classical’ view as the belief that ‘man . . . is intrinsically limited, but disciplined by order and tradition to something fairly decent’, and compares it to the ‘romantic’ view and its supposed belief in human perfection and progress (Hulme 1994c: 61). Hulme uses the distinction as a blueprint for how modern poetry must break from nineteenth-century verse. Unlike his romantic counterpart, the modern classical poet recognises human limitations and produces poetry that is correspondingly finite: ‘He remembers always that he is mixed up with earth. He may jump, but he always returns back; he never flies away into the circumambient gas’ (62). Modern ‘classical’ poetry thus eschews the emotional, the ornate and 327

Romanticism versus Classicism the ideal in favour of the impersonal, the concrete and the definite. Ultimately, Hulme associates the modern ‘classic’ poet with the modernist imagist poet who ‘holds on through infinite detail and trouble’ so as to present ‘things as they really are, and apart from the conventional ways in which you have been trained to see them’ (69). As various critics have pointed out, Hulme’s demand for unity of the poet with his emotions renders his ‘anti-Romanticism’ very ambiguous: for this unity is also the defining characteristic of the very Romantic theory of Imagination he purports to reject. What partly explains the ambiguity of Hulme’s literary classicism is his insistence in the lecture that he is using the terms ‘romantic’ and ‘classic’ in a political sense. As a self-proclaimed ‘Tory by disposition’ (Hulme 1994b: 155), Hulme was inspired by the success of the royalist movement L’Action Française in France in recruiting young socialist intellectuals. The leaders of this right-wing group, Charles Maurras and Pierre Lasserre, had been campaigning in favour of royalist/nationalist ‘classicism’ and against the ‘malaise’ of democratic/ republican ‘romanticism’ in France since the turn of the century. In proselytising for literary classicism, Hulme is not so much rejecting the romantic theory of Imagination, but the ideology on which, in his view, Romanticism is based, and which he sees as underwriting liberal, progressive politics. Hulme associates classicism with British Conservatism most explicitly in his political essays for the short-lived conservative weekly The Commentator (1910–13). As he explains in ‘A Tory Democracy’, the value of the term ‘classicism’ is that it ‘join[s] up together in some kind of logical sequence all the epithets that one naturally uses in expressing a certain attitude, such as “order”, “discipline”, “tradition”’ (Hulme 1994a: 235). Hulme was not the first to employ the distinction in this context. The poet and critic Edward Storer had introduced the distinction in the same newspaper as early as January 1911, when he announced that ‘a classical reaction against a century of Romanticism gone mad in art, letters and politics is beginning to arise’ (Storer 1911: 171). As did Hulme soon after him, Storer associated ‘classicism’ with Imagist poetics, in his Introduction to his edition of William Cowper’s poetry (1912). J. M. Kennedy, another staunch Conservative in Hulme and Storer’s circle, also used the terms (in Tory Democracy, 1911) in a literary-political sense, but did not explicitly associate Classicism with modern poetics. Following Storer, Kennedy and Hulme, Eliot adopted the distinction in his own work. In Eliot, the antithesis captures an absolute difference between ‘the complete and the frag328

Sapphic modernism mentary,

the adult and the immature, the orderly and the chaotic’ (1975: 70). For Eliot, the distinction carries a distinctly political and religious valence: the Classicist, Eliot writes, must ‘profess an allegiance to principles, or to a form of government, or to a monarch; and if he is interested in religion, and has one, to a Church’ (Eliot 1975: 71). Pound (in Guide to kulchur, 1938), Richard Aldington (in ‘Parochialism’, Egoist, December 1914), and Wyndham Lewis (in Men Without Art, 1934) all invoked the distinction to different ends. The binary continues to feature centrally in modernist scholarship: Michael Levenson (A Genealogy of Modernism, 1984); David Ayers (‘Literary Criticism and Cultural Politics’, The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Literature, 2004); and Edward P. Comentale (Modernism, Cultural Production, and the British Avant-Garde, 2004) have all used it to read the cultural politics of modernism. READING Eliot, T. S. (1975) ‘The Function of Criticism’ [1923], Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode. London: Faber. Hulme, T. E. (1994a) ‘A Tory Philosophy’ [1912], The Collected Writings of T. E. Hulme, ed. Karen Csengeri. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hulme, T. E. (1994b) ‘Bergson Lecturing’ [1911], The Collected Writings of T. E. Hulme, ed. Karen Csengeri. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hulme, T. E. (1994c) ‘Romanticism and Classicism’, The Collected Writings of T. E. Hulme, ed. Karen Csengeri. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Storer, Edward (1911) ‘The Romantic Conception of History’, Commentator, 25 January, pp. 170–1.

Christos Hadjiyiannis

S SAPPHIC MODERNISM Coupling the notoriously unstable term ‘modernism’ with the equally overdetermined ‘lesbian’ or ‘sapphic’ serves to draw attention to the pervasive links between modernist textual production and same-sex desire between women. Sapphic modernism does not necessarily describe a clearly defined literary or artistic subgenre produced exclusively by women who identified as lesbian or bisexual or who are known to have had sexual relations with other women. Rather, sapphic modernism can refer to a wide range of cultural productions 329

Sapphic modernism mentary,

the adult and the immature, the orderly and the chaotic’ (1975: 70). For Eliot, the distinction carries a distinctly political and religious valence: the Classicist, Eliot writes, must ‘profess an allegiance to principles, or to a form of government, or to a monarch; and if he is interested in religion, and has one, to a Church’ (Eliot 1975: 71). Pound (in Guide to kulchur, 1938), Richard Aldington (in ‘Parochialism’, Egoist, December 1914), and Wyndham Lewis (in Men Without Art, 1934) all invoked the distinction to different ends. The binary continues to feature centrally in modernist scholarship: Michael Levenson (A Genealogy of Modernism, 1984); David Ayers (‘Literary Criticism and Cultural Politics’, The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Literature, 2004); and Edward P. Comentale (Modernism, Cultural Production, and the British Avant-Garde, 2004) have all used it to read the cultural politics of modernism. READING Eliot, T. S. (1975) ‘The Function of Criticism’ [1923], Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode. London: Faber. Hulme, T. E. (1994a) ‘A Tory Philosophy’ [1912], The Collected Writings of T. E. Hulme, ed. Karen Csengeri. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hulme, T. E. (1994b) ‘Bergson Lecturing’ [1911], The Collected Writings of T. E. Hulme, ed. Karen Csengeri. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hulme, T. E. (1994c) ‘Romanticism and Classicism’, The Collected Writings of T. E. Hulme, ed. Karen Csengeri. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Storer, Edward (1911) ‘The Romantic Conception of History’, Commentator, 25 January, pp. 170–1.

Christos Hadjiyiannis

S SAPPHIC MODERNISM Coupling the notoriously unstable term ‘modernism’ with the equally overdetermined ‘lesbian’ or ‘sapphic’ serves to draw attention to the pervasive links between modernist textual production and same-sex desire between women. Sapphic modernism does not necessarily describe a clearly defined literary or artistic subgenre produced exclusively by women who identified as lesbian or bisexual or who are known to have had sexual relations with other women. Rather, sapphic modernism can refer to a wide range of cultural productions 329

Sapphic modernism that were enabled or structured by an awareness of the possibility (rather than the actual experience) of same-sex desires and relations between women. It is the exploration of the various intersubjective, political and aesthetic implications of such desires and relations that constitutes sapphic modernism. Negotiations of same-sex desire in the modernist period were shaped by sexological and psychoanalytic models of sexual development and sexual identity (see sexuality), and writers like Bryher, Radclyffe Hall, Olive Moore or Dorothy Richardson engaged creatively with these ideas. However, as the term ‘sapphic’ usefully indicates, there was a rich array of alternative literary, cultural and historical traditions on which authors could draw to express samesex desire. H.D.’s work, for instance, demonstrates the aesthetic and erotic possibilities opened up by the intertextual engagement with the legacies of Sappho herself. The representational field within which same-sex desire between women could be articulated was also constituted by the languages of religion and spirituality, citizenship, race, class and age, creating multiple links between sapphic modernism and other topical early twentieth-century discourses, such as eugenics, hellenism and feminism. Anglophone sapphic modernism emerged against the backdrop of lesbian scandals and trials. The widely publicised 1918 ‘Cult of the Clitoris’ scandal erupted after actress Maud Allan sued British MP Noel Pemberton Billing for writing an article in which he implied that Allan was a lesbian and involved with German wartime conspirators. Ten years later, the publication of Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness (1928) led to a series of obscenity trials as a result of which the book was banned in Britain. While this climate of censorship restricted expressions of same-sex desire, it also facilitated textual innovation, as is illustrated by highly experimental texts such as Djuna Barnes’s Ladies Almanack (1928) and Nightwood (1936), Hope Mirrlees’s Paris (1918), Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons (1914) and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928). Other publications, such as Valerie Ackland and Sylvia Townsend Warner’s jointly authored Whether a Dove or Seagull: Poems (1934) or Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) expressed lesbian erotics through collaboration or by challenging traditional models of authorship. Re-evaluating modernism as lesbian or sapphic serves to illuminate such diverse representational strategies and to expand the meaning of modernism itself. At the same time, it opens up to interrogation the terms ‘sapphic’ and ‘lesbian’ themselves. 330

Science fiction READING Doan, Laura (2001) Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. Doan, Laura and Jane Garrity (eds) (2006) Sapphic Modernities: Sexuality, Women and National Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave. English, Elizabeth (2014) Lesbian Modernism: Censorship, Sexuality and Genre Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Hackett, Robin (2004) Sapphic Primitivism: Productions of Race, Class and Sexuality in Key Works of Modern Fiction. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Medd, Jodie (2012) Lesbian Scandal and the Culture of Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Jana Funke

SCIENCE FICTION Although stylistic experimentation is typical of ‘New Wave’ (1960s) and postmodern science fiction, modernism plays only a marginal role in traditional critical accounts of the genre. Yet science fiction is a genre of modernity par excellence, concerned with speculation about the future and other worlds, scientific development and technological innovation. Although science fictional elements may be isolated in a range of works from the Renaissance onwards, including utopias, fantastic voyages and contes philosophiques, it was in the nineteenth century, with the popular adventure narratives of Jules Verne in France and the scientific romances of H. G. Wells in Britain, that the genre took on its recognisably modern form. Wells, though the most famous, was by no means the only late nineteenthcentury writer to codify the now-familiar tropes of time and space travel and to make technological prediction and utopian/dystopian speculation a feature of science fiction. Many of the genre’s hallmarks appear in the socialist, anarchist, feminist and conservative utopias, dystopias and romances of the time. In the first half of the twentieth century in Britain, David Lindsay, W. Olaf Stapledon and C. S. Lewis developed the genre along philosophic speculative lines, while Aldous Huxley and George Orwell contributed to the tradition of science fictional dystopias. In America, the pulp magazines of the 1920s–1930s simultaneously popularised and ghettoised the genre, and the technological progress-focused ‘Golden Age’ writing of the 1940s and 1950s cemented the association between science fiction and Americanised modernity and mass culture. 331

Science fiction However, other countries, such as France, Germany and Russia, also produced thriving indigenous traditions of science fiction, which both followed and diverged in significant respects from the Anglophone line of generic development. Evgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924), a stylistically innovative anti-totalitarian dystopia that was influenced by Wells and in its turn influenced Orwell, is only the most famous product (in the West) of the Soviet science fictional flowering of the 1920s, represented by authors as different as Aleksey Tolstoy and Mikhail Bulgakov. In the second half of the twentieth century, the Eastern Bloc produced social and philosophical science fiction to match the best of what Britain and the USA had to offer. Science fiction made a strong showing in early cinema, and it was here rather than in literature and in Europe rather than in Britain or America that avant-garde influences were most apparent. Although some continental writers of science fiction had links with symbolism, expressionism and surrealism, and a number of Wells’s scientific romances and utopias were adapted for the screen in the inter-war period, it took Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) – a German Expressionist film that depicted a Wellsian-style futuristic dystopia and drew on the new robot trope introduced by Karel Čapek’s 1920 play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) – to offer a genuine fusion of modernism and science fiction. Three years earlier, Tolstoy’s tale of Martian revolution, Aelita (1923) was turned into a Soviet silent film complete with constructivist sets and costumes. The machine aesthetic of Constructivist design and theatre, and the wider technological focus of avant-garde movements such as futurism, were obviously part of the same zeitgeist that produced iconic works of science fiction, while the Russian formalists’ theory of defamiliarisation, or Bertolt Brecht’s verfremdungseffekt, may be seen as modernist variations on the kind of ‘cognitive estrangement’ that, according to Darko Suvin, defines the poetics of the genre. READING Aldiss, Brian and David Wingrove (1986) Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction. London: Gollancz. Luckhurst, Roger (2005) Science Fiction. Cambridge: Polity. Marcus, Laura (2007) The Tenth Muse: Writing About Cinema in the Modernist Period. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Suvin, Darko (1979) Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Telotte, J. P. (1999) A Distant Technology: Science Fiction Film and the Machine Age. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press. 332

Secession Williams, Keith (2007) H. G. Wells, Modernity, and the Movies. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

Anna Vaninskaya

SECESSION The end of the nineteenth century saw groups of artists in a number of European cities secede from official institutions that set and enforced aesthetic criteria and that, crucially, often held sway over the content and character of exhibitions. The most notable of these secessions took place in Munich (1892), Vienna (1897) and Berlin (1898). For many adherents of modern movements in the visual arts, the dominance of established institutions – or of conservative factions within them – limited the opportunities to present their work to the public and to do so in sympathetic settings. Importantly, secessions of such artists from official bodies were not carried out in opposition to institutions per se, nor did they inevitably marginalise the artists who undertook to withdraw from existing organisations. Rather, the artists involved founded new bodies that in several instances quickly established their own pre-eminence. Such was the case in Vienna, where the Secession (officially named the Union of Austrian Artists) could count major figures such as Josef Hoffman, Koloman Moser, Joseph Maria Olbrich and Gustav Klimt (its first president), among its members. Through its eminent participants and their aesthetic interests the Vienna Secession had strong links to international movements including symbolism, expressionism and Jugendstil. The creation of Olbrich’s temple-like Secession building in 1898 gave material proof of the ambition and resources of this group. Its pristine yet flexible interior architecture was innovative and purposely designed to be hospitable to modern art. The striking building, with relatively austere and illegible facades, topped with a gilded laurel-leaf dome (and quickly nicknamed the ‘golden cabbage’ as a result), was funded in large part by the industrialist Karl Wittgenstein and built on a site donated by the city authorities. The Secession’s importance was demonstrated too in the presentation of a series of ambitious exhibitions in the early years of the twentieth century, often international in scope and ground-breaking in design. Though important aesthetic differences can be noted between its members – leading to a schism in 1905 – general characteristics of the Vienna Secession include: a belief in the necessity and possibility of spiritual and aesthetic renewal (signalled in the name of its journal: 333

Semiology/Semiotics Ver Sacrum, or ‘Sacred Spring’); affinities with several formal aspects of art nouveau with which it is often grouped, though these were often given a more sombre and sober inflection in Vienna; an interest in using the artwork as one element in a larger ensemble and in the creation of the gesamtkunstwerke or ‘total works of art’ (seen, for example, in the elaborate staging of an exhibition devoted to Beethoven in 1902); and an intense involvement in the applied arts as well as in architecture, painting and sculpture. Olbrich’s Secession building bore two mottoes that capture the tenor of the movement’s modernism: at the entrance, an inscription read ‘To each age its art, to art its freedom’ while as part of a stainedglass window designed by Moser were the words ‘The Artist Shows His World of Beauty, Born with Him, That Never Was Before nor Ever Will Be Again’. In keeping with the latter sentiment the Vienna Secession proved to be a relatively transient manifestation of the hope for an integrated, cosmopolitan modern art that could both express its own freedom and serve modernity, but like other parallel secessions it achieved real changes in the institutions of art and contributed individual works of lasting importance. READING Barr, Hermann (1897) ‘Our Secession’, in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (eds) (1998), Art in Theory 1815–1900: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 914–16. Paret, Peter (1980) The Berlin Secession: Modernism and Its Enemies in Imperial Germany. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Varnedoe, Kirk (1986) Vienna 1900: Art, Architecture and Design. New York: Museum of Modern Art. Vergo, Peter (1993) Art in Vienna 1898–1918: Klimt, Kokoschka, Schiele and Their Contemporaries. London: Phaidon.

Dominic Paterson

SEMIOLOGY/SEMIOTICS Semiology is defined as a ‘science that studies the life of signs within society’ by its modern-day founder, the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, in his lecture notes, posthumously published in 1915 under the title Cours de linguistique générale (Course in General Linguistics). Semiology derives its name from the Greek word sēmeion, meaning ‘mark’ or ‘sign’, invoked by the ancient Stoics and, earlier still, Aristotle to refer to words and the representation of a thought or thing. Aristotle’s De Interpretatione (16a 6), in particu334

Semiology/Semiotics lar, proved a major influence on later theorists of the sign, from the medieval Scholastics to seventeenth-century rationalist and empiricist philosophers. However, semiology as the science of signification gained prominence in twentieth-century literary and cultural criticism, yielding both a substantial interdisciplinary body of theory of a primarily epistemological nature and a sophisticated method of reading linguistic and all other systems of communication. Primarily associated with the work of Saussure in the Francophone world, ‘semiology’ is often interchangeable with the Anglophone term ‘semiotics’, pioneered by American logician Charles S. Peirce who developed a theory of the sign and the process of ‘semeiosis’ (sign activity) at different points from the late 1860s to 1910. Unlike Saussure’s more systemic approach to meaning, Pierce creates a typology of signs – divided into symbols, indexes and icons – on the basis of their relation to the object which can be an idea, a thing or a different signifier, also taking historical circumstances and the act of reception/interpretation into consideration. However, both contemporaries stress the metaphysical hollowness of all signification and the representational productiveness of the sign. Originating in the structural, that is synchronic, study of language, modern semiology is largely coterminous with structuralism whose different disciplinary versions are typically modelled on or at least inspired by Saussurian linguistics. Semiological investigation into ‘what signs consist of and what laws govern them’ (Saussure 1966: 16) tends to bracket off the empirical referent, instead locating the production of meaning in the relationship between the two components of the sign, the signifier and the signified, as well as the relations of difference among signs within the same system. Once the relationship of the signifier, a sound image, to the signified, being the concept evoked by that sound image in a particular language, is proved arbitrary, the significance of form is highlighted, thus challenging the received notion that linguistic form is a mere vehicle expressing a pre-existing, essential content. In Saussure’s own words, ‘our thought – apart from its expression in words – is only a shapeless and indistinct mass’, as ‘there are no pre-existing ideas, and nothing is distinct before the appearance of language’ (Saussure 1966: 111–12). The idealist, neo-Kantian view underlying semiology that categories of language shape understanding, on the one hand, and, on the other, the emphasis on difference instead of a transcendental consciousness as the generator of meaning, have become central to 335

Semiology/Semiotics much twentieth-century thought on language, art and communication. However, the semiological focus on the materiality of language and the significance of the signifier are also particularly relevant to the contemporaneous modernist and avant-garde self-reflexive experiments with language as sound, technique and a world-creating system, which unsettle and thus highlight the phonetic, grammatical and syntactical laws of sign combination that ensure intelligibility. Semiology proved a fruitful method of immanent analysis of the literary artefact uncovering its richness as a self-referential object, irreducible to external factors, while attaching scientific rigour to the discipline of literary criticism. Structural linguistics prompted the attempt to define ‘literariness’ in terms of techniques responsible for the internal organisation of the art object developed in Russia by the school of formalism and the Opojaz group (‘The Society for the Study of Poetic Language’), associated with futurism and constructivism in the first two decades of the twentieth century. The focus on the formal aspects of the literary work was shared by the American proponents of new criticism that developed at around the same time without employing semiotic terminology. The Prague School of Semiotics, founded in the 1930s by members of the Russian formalist group which dissolved in the late 1920s, continued this work by further focusing on the systematic application of the model of sign to the analysis of art, especially drama, pictorial art and folk culture. In the 1960s, two strands of semiology developed, one in France and the other in the Soviet Union. Despite the latter’s turn to issues of cybernetics and mechanical languages, both semiotic trends of the 1960s sought to expand the legacies of Saussure and the Formalists to issues of ideology and history, also drawing on the marxisminformed semiotic work of the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin and his circle in the 1920s. In France, semiologists such as Algirdas Julien Greimas, Gérard Genette and Tzvetan Todorov developed a special interest in narratology, rhetoric and genre criticism, contributing to the establishment of a ‘poetics’ of literature, while two prominent literary theorists, Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva, proved instrumental in establishing semiology’s dominance in twentieth-century thought on language, literature, the subject and wider cultural phenomena. Importantly, their semiological analyses of modernist works revived modernism’s aesthetic and political import. They associated the technical complexity, ambiguity and self-reflexivity of modernist texts with political subversiveness, contrasting their signifying processes with the naturalising mimetic ideology of classic 336

Serialism realism.

Kristeva, in particular, developed the concept of the ‘semiotic’, a pre-discursive, pre-oedipal mode of signification revealed in modernist poetry’s rhythmical, tonal and intertextual patterns and movements which radically disrupt ‘symbolic’ representational logic. Although the methodology of semiology is typically rooted in linguistics, the French theorists adopted an interdisciplinary perspective drawing on psychoanalysis especially in order to read popular culture and everyday life phenomena, such as fashion and advertising, alongside literature and the arts. READING Barthes, Roland (1987), Mythologies, trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill & Wang. Blonsky, Marshall (ed.) (1985) On Signs: A Semiotics Reader. Oxford: Blackwell. Eco, Umberto (1978) A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kristeva, Julia (1984) Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia University Press. Peirce, Charles Sanders (1994) Peirce on Signs: Writings on Semiotic, ed. James Hoopes. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Saussure, Ferdinand de (1966) Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye in collaboration with Albert Riedlinger, trans. with an introduction and notes by Wade Baskin. New York, Toronto and London: McGraw-Hill.

Angeliki Spiropoulou

SERIALISM Serialism is a method of musical composition which works with fixed ‘series’ of musical elements. Although it has links with methods to be found in forms from earlier centuries (e.g. the isorhythmic motet, the cantus firmus mass, fugue, the ‘classical’ variation), serialism is essentially a twentieth-century phenomenon, and although composers such as Nikolai Roslavetz and notably Josef Hauer experimented with serial ideas, it was Arnold Schoenberg who in the early 1920s evolved what was for decades by far the most influential and fertile serial method. He did so in order to give opportunities for large-scale development to the intricate procedures of ‘free atonality’ that he and his pupils Alban Berg and Anton Webern had been pioneering in the previous dozen years. Though atonality had taken over elements from earlier ‘tonal’ music, it had rejected the key-centres and triadic ­domination 337

Serialism that provided the forcefields in that music. The rejection allowed for the development of a new and highly expressive chromatic idiom, but it was one that was largely restricted to epigrammatic, aphoristic or spasmodic musical statements or to battening off borrowed forms (a poem to set, a dramatic scene to illustrate). To move beyond these towards extended autonomous composition, Schoenberg developed a method whereby a piece could be given a firm basis by the composer’s fixing the twelve notes of the now-democratised octave in a particular order for its duration: in other words by establishing a ‘dodecaphonic series’ (or note-row) for the piece. Used ‘horizontally’, this series would provide a resource for melody in single lines or in polyphony; used ‘vertically’, it would provide one for chordal harmony. The series could be transposed upwards or downwards at will, and since Schoenberg considered that the musical space it inhabited was viewable from any direction, it could also operate back-to-front ( = ‘in retrograde’), upside-down ( = ‘in inversion’) or both at the same time (‘retrograde inversion’). Thus a variety-in-unity could be established that differed from but was equivalent to that which had characterised the tonal system of Western music of previous ages. Though the Viennese troika of Schoenberg, Webern and Berg didn’t turn their backs wholly on traditional tonality as a means for modern composition – indeed, Schoenberg once declared that there was still much fine music to be written in the key of C major – they wrote works based in the twelve-note-serial method for the rest of their lives, producing pieces as various and as personal as Schoenberg’s String Trio (1946) and opera Moses und Aron (1932), Webern’s Concerto for Nine Instruments (1934) and cantata Das Augenlicht (1935), and Berg’s Lyric Suite (1926) and opera Lulu (1935). Some other composers joined them in using the technique: notably Nikos Skalkottas, Luigi Dallapiccola, Elizabeth Lutyens, Roberto Gerhard, Humphrey Searle and Milton Babbitt. Around 1950, two further serialist groupings came about. One comprised composers who would on occasion use aspects of the method in some of their pieces alongside more traditional or free-atonal techniques: for instance, Roger Sessions, Aaron Copland, Benjamin Britten, Hans Werner Henze and in the early 1950s Igor Stravinsky (though he moved in his very last works to a more thorough-going commitment). Several of the other group were tearaway pupils of Olivier Messiaen in Paris, among them Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Messiaen wrote a set of Etudes de rhythme for piano in 1949–50, one of which, the ‘Mode de valeurs et d’intensités’, added 338

Sexuality other types of fixed series – of note-length, of attack and of volume – to the twelve-note melodic series. (Babbitt around this time was extending his serialism along similar lines in America.) Intrigued, Messiaen’s students, some of them already impressed by related extensions of serial technique in some of Webern’s later works, for a while saw ‘total serialism’ as music’s way ahead: a way that would be enterprisingly explored in the 1950s by Boulez, Stockhausen, Babbitt and others including Luigi Nono, using not only traditional instruments but the new electronic ones as well. Since then, serialism has neither carried all before it nor died a death, but in various modes and degrees of strictness has become a resource the modern composer may exploit if he or she so wishes. READING Griffiths, Paul (1995) Modern Music and After. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Whittall, Arnold (2008) The Cambridge Introduction to Serialism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Roger Savage

SEXUALITY Modernism emerged in a historical moment associated with radical shifts in the understanding and conceptualisation of sexuality. Over the course of the nineteenth century, sexuality came to be seen as a natural object of scientific study. Medical doctors and scientists working in a range of disciplines, such as criminal anthropology, neurology and, especially, psychiatry, began to classify various forms of sexual behaviour and labelled human beings as types on the basis of their sexual desires. This new scientific field, which is often called sexology or sexual science, led to an increased interest in sexual deviance and perversion, and facilitated the creation of sexual identity categories, most notably the homosexual (see also uranianism). Sexological discourse also fed into debates about shifting understandings of marriage, reproduction, pregnancy, non-marital heterosexual relations, birth control and eugenics at the turn of the twentieth century. Following on from nineteenth-century sexology, the relation between sexual desire and personal identity, homosexuality and heterosexuality, and sexual norms and deviance, was widely discussed in a range of influential discourses, such as Freudian psychoanalysis. Modernist artists and writers engaged differently, and often 339

Sexuality critically, with such models of sexuality. Djuna Barnes, H.D. and Virginia Woolf, who are linked to sapphic modernism, for instance, would emphasise sexual indeterminacy and fluidity to counter the perceived fixity of sexological taxonomies. They also drew on a range of alternative non-sexological figurations of sexuality provided, for example, by Victorian hellenism, fin-de-siècle decadence, and religious and spiritual discourse. While sexology did not therefore offer the most influential or authoritative account of sexuality, modernist writers were still influenced by the idea that sexual desire was a crucial component of the human experience and indispensable to an accurate and thorough understanding of the human mind. The ‘dark places of psychology’, as Virginia Woolf called them in her essay ‘Modern Fiction’ (1919; published 1921) were assumed to be intimately linked to sexual experience, and it is worth noting in this context that the most eminent English sexologist, Havelock Ellis, also positioned himself in the field of psychology, publishing his most important work as Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1897–1928). The increased interest in ‘sex psychology’ among modernist writers and artists was a key driving force behind the search for novel means of representation, which were meant to illuminate these ‘dark places’ of the human mind. The depiction of sexual desires and behaviours that had supposedly been regarded as taboo in the past was also part of the larger modernist project to break with social convention or tradition and it resulted in a shared history of censorship that includes literary authors such as Kate Chopin, James Joyce, Henry Miller, D. H. Lawrence and Radclyffe Hall. READING Bauer, Heike (2009) English Literary Sexology: Translations of Inversion, 1860–1930. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Boone, Joseph A. (1998) Libidinal Currents: Sexuality and the Shaping of Modernism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Peppis, Paul (2014) Sciences of Modernism: Ethnography, Sexology, and Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schaffner, Anna Katharina (2011) Modernism and Perversion. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Stevens, Hugh and Caroline Howlett (2000) Modernist Sexualities. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Jana Funke

340

Shell shock

SHELL SHOCK The term coined by the English physician and psychologist Charles S. Myers in 1915 (in an article in The Lancet) to describe a new form of post-traumatic illness he witnessed in soldiers returning from the battlefield during World war I. Although Myers’s initial hypothesis was that the illness was caused by shell explosions, it soon became clear that causes (as well as symptoms) were numerous and varied: for example, some soldiers exhibited signs of shell shock without ever being directly exposed to combat. Symptoms were said to include depression, insomnia, hallucinations, nightmares and panic attacks. During the early years of the war, many cases of shell shock were misdiagnosed and stigmatised as cowardice or moral weakness, or as a kind of male ‘hysteria’ akin to the pervasive (mis-)diagnosis of hysteria in women. By the end of the war, tens of thousands of shell-shock cases had been recorded. Characters exhibiting signs of shell shock are present in a number of modernist texts. Perhaps the most famous example is Septimus Warren Smith in Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway (1925). Septimus, who ‘went to France to save an England which consisted almost entirely of Shakespeare’s plays and Miss Isabel Pole in a green dress’, returns from the war with his idealism shattered, unable to feel and plagued by hallucinations of his dead friend and commanding officer Evans. Finding no help for his illness from an ignorant and bullying medical establishment (represented by the doctors Holmes and Bradshaw), Septimus eventually leaps to his death to escape what he perceives to be their relentless pursuit. Sufferers of shell shock (or ‘neurasthenia’) were not limited to fictional characters, but also included modernist writers themselves: the poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, for example, met in 1917 at Craiglockhart War Hospital for Officers near Edinburgh, which specialised in treating the illness. READING Bonikowski, Wyatt (2013) Shell Shock and the Modernist Imagination. Surrey: Ashgate. Reid, Fiona (2010) Broken Men: Shell Shock, Treatment and Recovery in Britain 1914–30. London: Continuum. Valentine, Kylie (2003) Psychoanalysis, Psychiatry, and Modern Literature. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Julian Hanna

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Significant form

SIGNIFICANT FORM The concept of ‘significant form’ was devised by the bloomsbury group painter Clive Bell. He used the phrase in his introduction of ‘The English Group’ in the catalogue to Roger Fry’s Second postimpressionist exhibition (1912), and made it central to his aesthetic theory in his 1914 study Art. ‘Significant form’ describes the arrangement of forms – particularly line and colour – which express the artist’s emotion or provoke aesthetic emotion in the viewer. Bell makes this affective capacity and its inescapably subjective nature central to the definition of a work of visual art (including architecture and decorative objects) and to the ‘problem of aesthetics’ more broadly. In the exhibition catalogue, Bell highlights the primacy of form, giving the example of a mundane object – ‘a coal-scuttle’ – under the gaze of a Post-Impressionist painter who would ‘[regard] it as an end in itself, as a significant form related on terms of equality with other significant forms’. He uses the art of the exhibition to define significant form, and vice versa, describing both as inhering in the artist’s attempt ‘to express great emotions and to provoke them’. Although different emotions may be produced in different people by the same work of art Bell nevertheless posits significant form as a unifying concept: ‘What quality is common to Sta Sophia and the windows at Chartres, Mexican sculpture, a Persian bowl, Chinese carpets, Giotto’s frescoes at Padua, and the masterpieces of Poussin, Piero della Francesca and Cézanne? Only one answer seems possible – significant form. In each, lines and colours combined in a particular way, certain forms and relations of forms, stir our aesthetic emotions’ (Bell 1914: 8). While in some ways Bell’s theory makes the work of art accessible to anyone who is moved by it, it also suggests that one would have to be able to recognise and accept significant form as the source of aesthetic emotion. As Jane Goldman puts it, the ‘doctrine’ of significant form makes aesthetic emotion ‘a spiritual experience for the initiated’ (Goldman 1998: 123). READING Bell, Clive (1914) Art. London: Chatto & Windus. Bullen, J. B. (1988) Post-Impressionism in England: The Critical Reception. London and New York: Routledge. Goldman, Jane (1998) The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf: Modernism, Post-Impressionism and the Politics of the Visual. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Amy Bromley 342

Silence

SILENCE In ‘Aesthetics of Silence’ (1966) Susan Sontag argues that silence can never be ‘achieved’ in an artwork, the existence of which precludes silence being its sole element. Even the most direct artistic interrogations of silence are bound to expression. For Sontag, modernist preoccupations with silence are more readily thinkable as ‘various moves in the direction of an ever-receding horizon of silence’ (Sontag 2009: 6). Stéphane Mallarmé’s poems from the 1870s onwards, as Roger Pearson has argued, are driven by the desire to ‘translate’ the silence of a world from which God has withdrawn, ‘to confer upon that some kind of lasting pattern’ (Pearson 2004: 5). Nietzsche’s proclamation of God’s death during Mallarmé’s most productive years seems instructive in this regard, and anticipates theories of modernism foregrounding nihilism, negation and the withdrawal of meaning, alongside silence. Silence is a significant point of orientation in the development of modernist music too. Anton Webern persistently brushed sound against silence in his crystalline, fragmentary compositions, especially following his adoption of Arnold Schoenberg’s twelve-tone system (see serialism) in the 1920s, organising ‘the contamination of music by an unfathomable silence’, in Alain Badiou’s words (Badiou 2009: 85), and anticipating further elaborations of the relation between sound and silence from the late 1950s onwards in the music of György Kurtág and later Arvo Pärt, and in the works of contemporary composers like Rebecca Saunders. In the early 1950s, American composer John Cage would listen to his body resound in an anechoic chamber, exploring this intervention of sound upon silence famously in his 1952 piece 4’33”: the members of the orchestra play only rests so that everyday sounds come to fill an otherwise empty form. Perhaps the most protracted, difficult artistic engagements with silence occur at what some would claim the terminal point of modernist literature: in the 1960s Samuel Beckett’s late prose and the German-Jewish poet Paul Celan’s poems conduct divergent though similarly committed investigations of the tension between silence and speech, meaning, language and its beyond. In his ‘Meridian’ speech (1960), Celan argues that ‘the poem clearly shows a strong tendency towards silence’ (Celan 2003: 48), the sole path available to a German-language poet following the Holocaust, to which he lost his parents. For Theodor W. Adorno, Celan’s poems ‘want to speak of the most extreme horror through silence [. . .] They imitate a 343

Socialist realism language beneath the helpless language of human beings [. . .], that of the dead speaking of stones and stars’ (Adorno 2004: 405). Similarly, Adorno reminds us that Beckett, to whom he intended to dedicate Aesthetic Theory, thought the artwork ‘a desecration of silence’ (177). For Adorno, both writers exemplify a negative imperative for the artwork following the historical experience of Auschwitz and late-capitalist reification: in order to adequately think their own time artworks must disavow positive, meaningful declaration and persist, through the formal interrogation of silence, as negations of the world in which they emerge. READING Adorno, Theodor W. (2004) Aesthetic Theory, trans. R. Hullot-Kentor. London: Continuum. Badiou, Alain (2009) Logics of Worlds, trans. A. Toscano. London: Continuum. Celan, Paul (2003) Collected Prose, trans. R. Waldrop. Manchester: Carcanet. Pearson, Roger (2004) Mallarmé and Circumstance: The Translation of Silence. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sontag, Susan (2009) ‘The Aesthetics of Silence’, Styles of Radical Will. London: Penguin. Weller, Shane (2011) Modernism and Nihilism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Wolosky, Shira (1995) Language Mysticism: The Negative Way of Language in Eliot, Beckett and Celan. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Tom Betteridge

SOCIALIST REALISM A method of artistic expression formulated in the 1932 April decree abolishing all independent associations of writers and announcing the creation of the Union of Soviet Writers. The term also appeared on 17 May 1932 in a speech delivered by Ivan Gronsky, the President of the Union of Writers’ Organisational Committee. Maksim Gorky, the first Secretary of the Soviet Writers’ Union, and other leading writers discussed the new method at the First Plenum of the Organisational Committee in October 1932. During the First Congress of the Writers’ Union held in August 1934 the method was further defined in the speeches written by Gorky and Andrei Zhdanov, the Chief representative of the Soviet communist Party’s Central Committee. Both Gorky’s 1933 collection of essays and 344

Socialist realism Lenin’s 1905 article ‘Party Organisation and Party Literature’ laid the foundation for the canonical formulation of the method that survived until the break up of the Soviet Union in 1991. On 5 June 1934 the leading Soviet newspaper Pravda (‘The Truth’) published this definition of the new method: Socialist realism, the basic method of Soviet artistic literature and literary criticism, demands truthfulness [pravdivost’] from the artist and a historically concrete portrayal of reality in its revolutionary development. Under these conditions, truthfulness and historical concreteness of artistic portrayal ought to be combined with the task of the ideological remaking and education of labouring people in the spirit of socialism. (Brooks 1994: 977)

One of the main tenets of the new method was ‘party-mindedness’ (partiinost). The Soviet socialist writer was expected to be devoted to the construction of a socialist society and become an engineer of human souls, as the novelist Yuri Olesha and Joseph Stalin himself put it. The writer’s goal was to glorify the country’s heroes and legitimise state myths promoted by Soviet ideologists and policy-makers. Socialist realist literature focused on the positive hero whose biography and outlook were supposed to be emulated by Soviet readers. The two-dimensional psychology of its heroes was subordinated to the achievement of collective goals and impersonality, aligned with the Marxist-Leninist ideology. The plotting and style of socialist realist novels were formulaic and appeared to be constructed out of pre-fabricated parts. Most Soviet socialist novels followed the master plot in accordance with which the positive hero was expected to overcome any spontaneous and elemental forces in order to attain his mastery through highly rationalised behaviour and political maturity. His exemplary behaviour derived from the recognition of the importance of public values to the life of Soviet citizens. The depiction of events in the style of the Bildungsroman (novel of formation) promoted political consciousness and achievements related to the restructuring of Soviet society. All socialist realist narratives were expected to celebrate the positive hero’s attainment of a higher order of consciousness and were oriented towards a utopian future. Since the representation of reality was often entwined with elements of romanticism, socialist realist novels often oscillated between a realist rendering of everyday life and an optimistic survey of a hyberbolically heroic world populated by the positive heroes whose extraordinary feats were presented by Soviet writers as inspirational. 345

Sound poetry Many socialist realist novels included political sermons and speeches delivered in high-flown rhetorical language. The list of canonical works that exhibit the particular conventions associated with the socialist realist tradition include Dmitrii Furmanov’s 1923 novel Chapaev, Maksim Gorky’s The Life of Klim Samgin (1925–36), Nikolai Ostrovsky How the Steel Was Tempered (1934) and Mikhail Sholokhov’s novels Quiet Flows the Don (1928–40) and Virgin Soil Upturned (1932–60). Not all Soviet novels followed the master plot, however, and as Regine Robin has argued, due to its theoretical contradictions, socialist realism may be seen as ‘an impossible aesthetic’. READING Brooks, Jeffrey (1994) ‘Socialist Realism in Pravda: Read All about It!’, Slavic Review, 53 (4): 973–91. Clark, Katerina (1981) The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Robin, Regine (1992) Socialist Realism: An Impossible Aesthetic. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Alexandra Smith

SOUND POETRY Sound poetry is poetry, music or sound-art in which the sonic qualities of language or vocal utterance are of central importance and in which semantic meaning may be complicated, downgraded or erased as a result. Though generally understood as a twentieth-century phenomenon, by many accounts it emerges from ancient, trans-cultural traditions of oral performance, ritual and play, and is related to the perpetuation of those traditions, notably in non-Western and folk communities. Nineteenth-century precedents include much of the literature of French symbolism, which aspired towards the qualities of music, and Victorian nonsense verse. But the most striking steps towards defining a poetry based on sound were connected to Italian and Russian futurism. In 1912 F. T. Marinetti published his ‘Technical manifesto of Futurist Literature’, defining the concept of parole in libertà (‘words in freedom’), wherein words would be freed from conventional grammatical structures, leading to the use of telegraphic syntax, onomatopoeia and typographic experiment. The following year, Velimir Khlebnikov and Aleksei Kruchenykh published Declaration of the Word as Such, calling for a poetry of trans-rational language later defined as ‘zaum’ language, involving sonically charged neologisms. These conceptions, expressed in works 346

Sound poetry such as Marinetti’s Zang Tumb Tumb (1912–14) and Kruchenykh’s ‘Dyr bul schyl’ (1913), were iconically advanced in the first performances of the Zurich dada poets, including Hugo Ball and Tristan Tzara, at the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916. Their recitals, including cacophonous ‘simultaneist’ poems of layered vocal noise, relied like much subsequent Dada sound poetry upon shock and spontaneity. However, a more orchestrated monument to the energies of early twentieth-century sound poetry was the German Dadaist Kurt Schwitters’s Ursonate or ‘Ancient Sonata’ (1922–32), a symphonic, fully scored work in four movements. Much early twentieth-century sound poetry made use of buried, multi-lingual semantic suggestion and pseudo-grammatical structures: it was thus a fundamentally literary art, overlapping with sonically preoccupied modernist works such as James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). However, a distinct renaissance of sound poetry occurred during the 1950s–1970s, as a result of which the term was concertedly defined and historicised for the first time. Germinal to this reemergence was the obscure French movement of lettrism, launched in 1945, which re-engaged with language’s aural and visual qualities. In the early 1950s the Lettrist poets François Dufrêne, Gil J. Wolman and Jean-Louis Brau started creating vocal compositions surpassing syllabic and phonemic sound structures, an imperative pursued under the banner of ‘Ultralettrism’, and aided from the mid-1950s by the poet Henri Chopin’s use of tape recorders to manipulate and overlay vocal noise. Across the 1960s, correspondences for the Ultralettrists’ nonlinguistic, technologically augmented sound poetic sprang up across North America and Europe, notably in Sweden, where the artist Öyvind Fahlström’s early 1960s sound compositions influenced the ‘text-sound’ studio compositions of Lars-Gunnar Bodin, Bengt Emil Johnson and others. In London from around 1965, the poet Bob Cobbing’s Writers Forum became a hub of sound-poetry-related activities, including improvisatory group compositions incorporating extra-linguistic utterances and gestures which mirrored the activities of Toronto-based poets such as Steve McCaffery and bpNichol. A peak of cultural visibility was reached in the 1970s, with twelve International Sound Poetry Festivals held across Europe and North America during 1968–80. This new sound poetry occupied the interstices of literature and other media, especially music, more fundamentally than its predecessors, and was thus related to 1960s intermedia and Fluxus art, and to contemporaneous experimental 347

Southern Agrarians music, notably musique concrète. It was also related to, and often conflated with, concrete poetry, because of the comparable attention it placed on language’s non-semantic substance, and to cut-up poetry in its use of collage techniques. One might posit an essential dichotomy in all sound poetry between primitivist and futuristic traits: those intended to recapture an atavistic sense of human subjectivity or community, and those intended to pay homage to the augmentation of modern sensory experience by new technologies of communication, travel, information transmission, war and so on. READING Janacek, Gerald (1996) Zaum: The Transrational Poetry of Russian Futurism. San Diego: San Diego University Press. Kahn, Douglas (1999) Noise Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press. McCaffery, Steve (1997) ‘From Phonic to Sonic: The Emergence of the Audio-Poem’, in Adelaide Morris (ed.), Sound States: Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Technologies. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Perloff, Marjorie and Craig Dworkin (2009) The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wurth, Kiene Brillenburg (2013) ‘Speaking of Microsound: The Bodies of Henri Chopin’, in Keith Chapin and Andrew H. Clark (eds), Speaking of Music: Addressing The Sonorous. New York: Fordham University Press.

Greg Thomas

SOUTHERN AGRARIANS The Southern Agrarians were a group of US writers and academics from the former Confederate states, among them John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren. Born between 1881 and 1903 and raised in the postbellum South, they were much influenced by the traditionalism of Southern society and the legacy of the Confederacy’s defeat, including a sense of cultural marginality. In response to criticisms of Southern culture, the ‘Twelve Southerners’ published an essay collection, I’ll Take My Stand (1930), advocating an agrarian economy and way of life, which they saw as threatened by industrialism and urbanisation expanding from the North. In spite of this reactionary stance, many of the Agrarians were progressive in other fields. Ransom, Penn Warren and Tate were modernist poets and exponents of the new criticism (although its 348

Speed anti-historicism has been seen as a reaction to the South’s military defeat); as teachers and exemplars they greatly influenced subsequent poets and critics such as Robert Lowell and Randall Jarrell. Despite the disappointment of their Agrarian hopes and the controversy of some members’ racist politics, the group’s influence on Anglophone literary culture ramifies beyond the parochial world of the Old South they emerged from and idealised. READING Murphy, Paul V. (2001) The Rebuke of History: The Southern Agrarians and American Conservative Thought. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Ransom, John Crowe et al. (1930) I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition. New York: Harper & Bros.

Henry King

SPEED Complaints about reckless speed date back as far as the early nineteenth century, as toll roads and better suspension brought fast stagecoaches. But it is the explosive dynamism of technology enabled by fossil fuels that moved speed beyond the biological scale after 1850. Speed competitions involving the train, car and aeroplane were popular throughout the modern era: by 1927 the land-speed record had reached 200 m.p.h., the air-speed record almost 300 m.p.h. More generally, a web of technologies created the sense of a speeded-up world: cheaper watches, timetables, taylorist industrial processes, instant communication via telegraph and telephone, a faster churn of information, news and ideas. The result was an urban experience where the individual marches at the increased pace demanded by technological systems. In the novel messages arrive from all quarters; characters restlessly move across rail networks and oceans; they drive out to Sussex or the Hamptons; aeroplanes zoom overhead. Cars feature particularly in the 1930s: Gatsby’s car, ‘bright with nickel’ and the yellow HispanoSuiza in Michael Arlen’s The Green Hat (1924) signal glamour and, ultimately, death linked to a lifestyle that is too ‘fast’. In George M. Beard’s influential late nineteenth-century psychology, this speed becomes pathological: the human nervous system cannot keep up and the result is ‘neurasthenia’ or nervous exhaustion. Beard’s work, and later that of Georg Simmel, influenced later accounts of experience in Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin and others in which the 349

Spiritualism individuals must armour themselves against the shock effects produced by the sheer pace of modern life. Modernist movements react ambivalently to speed. Italian futurism makes it central to its aesthetic, celebrating automobiles and airplanes, crashes and war. Velocity crashes through the established order and challenges human limits; speed-writing outpaces the conventional mind. Similarly, technology is exploited formally to exceed human limits in American composer Conlon Nancarrow’s use of the player-piano to play faster than any human. For the filmmaker Dziga Vertov, the overwhelming of the slow human perceptual apparatus is formally encoded in cinematic montage and the kino-eye. Paradoxically, one result of the speed of registration of the new technologies was slowness: the slow-motion footage of chronophotography enabled Eadweard Muybridge to look at a horse’s gait, and in a parallel way many modernist works slow time radically in response to speed: James Joyce and Virginia Woolf dwelling on a single day, or the microscopic movement of prose in Gertrude Stein, or the automaticity of registration in Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage. To understand modernity, we need to see a linked compression and expansion of temporal scales and velocities produced by technology. READING Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich (1997) In 1926: Living at the Edge of Time. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Schapp, Jeffrey T. (1999) ‘Crash (Speed as Engine of Individuation)’, Modernism/Modernity, 6: 1–50. Schivelbusch, Wolfgang (1986) The Railway Journey: The Industrialization and Perception of Time and Space. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tomlinson, John (2007) The Culture of Speed: The Coming of Immediacy. London: Sage. Wills, David (2006) ‘Technology or the Discourse of Speed’, in Marquard Smith and Joanne Morra (eds), The Prosthetic Impulse. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Tim Armstrong

SPIRITUALISM Modern spiritualism emerged in Europe and America in the 1850s and quickly became a significant and genuinely popular cultural phenomenon, disseminated by numerous journals, pamphlets and other 350

Spiritualism publications, and by both public and private meetings of its many adherents. The key tenet of spiritualist belief was the ­possibility – indeed the reality – of meaningful communication with the dead, who were understood to maintain an interest in, and care for, the affairs of the living from their place in a heavenly afterlife. Crucial to spiritualist practice was the role of particularly sensitive and adept ‘mediums’ who were able to manifest or ‘channel’ voices or other emanations from the beyond. Such mediums – often women, who it was claimed were especially suited to the task – usually conducted their work through seances in domestic settings, and these gatherings might involve ‘table-rapping’ (the production of knocks or taps on a table, supposedly originating from an ethereal source in response to questions posed) or the channelling of voices, perhaps via a ‘spirit guide’; they might even include acts of levitation, telekinesis or the production of ‘ectoplasm’. An astonishing range of visual material was produced in efforts both to prove and to disprove the reality of such phenomena, and scientific and pseudo-scientific discourses attended to these matters in great detail. Although many noted literary and artistic figures partook of spiritualism in its first heyday, and again as part of a significant resurgence in the aftermath of World war I, its particular influence on modernism is perhaps less direct than that of the related movement of theosophy. A direct link can certainly be noted with surrealism, however, which borrowed the seance as a means to induce marvellous visions and uninhibited literary production, particularly during the so-called ‘period of the sleeping fits’ in the early 1920s, in which Robert Desnos proved especially adept at playing the role of medium. Beyond such links, however, spiritualism has a central connection to a key question modernism asked in relation to modernity, namely what impact would technological innovations have on existing belief structures. Spiritualism often borrowed scientific concepts and language to explicate its own beliefs, for instance coining the term ‘the spiritual telegraph’ to describe the means by which disembodied voices or other sounds found their way into the world of the living; it suggested that technology and spiritual belief were not incompatible. Spiritualism also established a space of relative autonomy for women within the otherwise highly circumscribed cultural context in which technological modernity was discussed and received. For both these reasons, contemporary artists and contemporary scholars alike have been interested in reassessing spiritualism’s place within modernity and in relation to artistic modernism, as it offers not 351

Spleen only a range of truly remarkable textual and visual productions, but also a s­ ubversive counter-discourse to mainstream accounts of the progress of scientific rationality and enlightenment, to which modernists – or at least certain kinds of modernists – often appealed. READING Braude, Ann (2001) Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth Century America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Breton, André (1922) ‘The Mediums Enter’, in Laurence Rainey (ed.), Modernism: An Anthology. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 742–5. Sconce, Jeffrey (2000) Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Warner, Marina (2006) Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-first Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Dominic Paterson

SPLEEN Traditionally meaning to be of bad temper, spleen came to signify melancholic ennui in the literature and art of late nineteenth century decadence. This ennui, underpinned by a ‘disgust with life’ (Waldrop 2006: xx), is intimately connected to capitalist urban experience and if embraced ultimately leads to ruin and death. Charles Baudelaire was the exemplary thinker of spleen, which he explored in his poetry collections The Flowers of Evil (Les Fleurs du Mal, 1857) and Paris Spleen (Le Spleen de Paris, 1869). The first section of The Flowers of Evil, ‘Spleen and Ideal’, portrays spleen as the modern individual’s natural state. One can perhaps overcome this melancholic ennui by seeking the Ideal (beauty and truth), or one can accept and embrace it. However, when the anti-hero of decadent literature and art embraces spleen, it ultimately leads him to moral decay, evil and a morbid death. In decadent literature, living with spleen demands a commitment to profane pleasures and an aestheticist privileging of artificial beauty over bourgeois morality. Spleen, and its accompanying moral decay, is echoed in many later works of decadence and modernism, including Joris Karl Huysmans’s Against Nature (À Rebours, 1884), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) and Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1936). In Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen, the Ideal is dropped, and the prose poems that constitute the volume are a commentary on life in the city of Paris, in which spleen is portrayed as the inevitable state of being in a modern metropolis. There is some ambiguity in 352

Statelessness the collection as to whether spleen is a response to perceived external ruin, or if external ruin is a projection of the inner life of spleen. READING Baudelaire, Charles (1970) Paris Spleen [1869], trans. Louise Varèse. New York: New Directions. Baudelaire, Charles (2006) The Flowers of Evil [1857], trans. Keith Waldrop. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Waldrop, Keith (2006) ‘Translator’s Introduction’, in The Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire, trans. Keith Waldrop. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

Tara S. Thomson

STATELESSNESS If cosmopolitanism can be thought of as an enriching facet of the experience of migration, statelessness might be seen as its obverse. Statelessness has a more specific connotation than exile, because those affected lack an effective nationality and are not recognised as a citizen of any country. Its emergence as a category is tied to the rise of ideologies such as communism, fascism and nationalism under the sway of which refugees were vulnerable to being classed with suspicion as ‘enemy aliens’ by nation states. Events in the opening decades of the twentieth century such as the Armenian genocide, the Russian revolution and the rise of fascism and political antiSemitism in European countries made the plight of stateless persons a recurrent one and prompted huge growth in their numbers. In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) the philosopher Hannah Arendt, who had herself been stripped of her German nationality in 1937, argued that stateless persons were effectively rendered speechless by their diminished political existence; in fact, the loss they had to endure was as much ontological as political, since they were deprived of the social context into which they were born and which made their actions and speech meaningful. A considerable number of writers and artists were affected by the phenomenon. Having earlier fled the Russian Revolution, the novelist of Russian Jewish origin, Irène Nemirovsky, author of Suite française (2004), was arrested in Paris in 1942 as a ‘stateless person of Jewish descent’ and taken away to Auschwitz, where she died; after Germany’s annexation of Austria in 1938, the Jewish writer Stefan Zweig had his Austrian passport confiscated and was obliged to apply for British naturalisation; Igor Stravinsky and Vladimir 353

Stream of Consciousness Nabokov were both holders of ‘Nansen passports’, an ­internationally recognised travel document issued to Russian Civil War refugees and later extended to other groups; the novels Liebe deinen Nächsten (Flotsam, 1939) and Arc de Triomphe (Arch of Triumph, 1945) by Erich Maria Remarque both feature stateless protagonists; Armen Lubin was an Istanbul-born member of the Armenian diaspora who emigrated to France in 1922 in the wake of the Armenian genocide and produced a body of poetry in French exploring in oblique ways the ruptures and traumas peculiar to the experiences of statelessness and illness; lastly, the French-language work of Gherasim Luca, a Romanian-born writer of Jewish origin, who for most of his life deliberately eluded the possibility of naturalisation as a French citizen, enacts in spectacular fashion the condition of linguistic dispossession through a poetics of stammering. READING Arendt, Hannah (1951) The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, Brace. Butler, Judith and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (2007) Who Sings the Nation-State? Language, Politics, Belonging. Oxford: Seagull Books. Chalk, Bridget T. (2014) Modernism and Mobility: The Passport and Cosmopolitan Experience. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Greg Kerr

STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS Before entering into the lexicon of literary studies, stream of consciousness came to prominence as a psychological phenomenon. In his 1890 work Principles of Psychology, William James identified the life of the mind as a flow wherein thoughts merged one into the other, terming this a ‘stream of consciousness’. When used in literature the term denotes the technique whereby the experience of the mind is represented in a mimesis of the myriad associative and nonlinear impressions, thoughts and sensations of inner life. It thereby also reflects a shift in thinking of the period, from a conception of the world and the self as stable entities to a conception of them as plural. Use of the term in a modernist context is attributed to May Sinclair, who proposed it as a feature of ‘startling’ originality and true rendition of ‘reality’ in her appreciative review of ‘The Novels of Dorothy Richardson’ for The Egoist in April 1918. Richardson herself did not find the term appropriate, and though it is often used to describe the style of, among others, James William Faulkner, James Joyce 354

Structuralism and Virginia Woolf, the technique of interior monologue may be a more accurate designation for its narrative effects. In 1957, Georg Lukács launched a critique of stream of consciousness and the movement it symbolised in his essay ‘The Ideology of Modernism’, claiming that, in concentrating on subjective interiority, modernism eschewed social reality. READING Cohn, Dorrit (1978) Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Friedman, Melvin (1955) Stream of Consciousness: A Study in Literary Method. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Humphreys, Robert (1954) Stream of Consciousness in the Modern Novel. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Maria-Daniella Dick

STRUCTURALISM Structuralism is an intellectual movement that sees human cognition, behaviour and culture in terms of an interrelationship between elements that form a conceptual framework and have an implied order. It deploys the methodologies of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss who asserted that any spoken utterances should be viewed as the manifestation of the rules of a system. The structuralist approach was applied to various branches of cultural and sociological study from the 1950s to the 1970s by literary theorists Roland Barthes, Tsvetan Todorov, Julia Kristeva and Mikhail Lotman, psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser. Historically, structuralism derives from formalism and from the writings of the Prague Linguistic Circle which operated between 1926 and 1952. Roman Jakobson, one of the original Formalists and member of the Prague Linguistic Circle, met Lévi-Strauss in New York during World war II and encouraged him to view culture as a form of communication like language. In his 1949 book Elementary Structures of Kinship, Lévi-Strauss suggested that ‘primitive’ cultures maintained peace between social groups by using women as tokens in inter-tribal marriages. He also discovered that myths had the same kernel narratives, despite their heterogeneity. Saussure’s model of the linguistic sign is central to structural anthropology and semiology. Barthes maintained that a work of literature should be seen as an assemblage of signs that function 355

Structuralism in certain ways to create meaning. Barthes explored the association between films, commodities, events and images with certain signs in his books, including Degree Zero (1953), Mythologies (1957), Critical Essays (1964), Elements of Semiology (1965) and S/Z (1970). He also identified the existence of two semiological systems in myth that he saw as a linguistic system based on the relationship between language and object and metalanguage in which one speaks about the foundational system. The link between French Structuralism and Russian Formalism is clear in Tsvetan Todorov’s 1965 collected translations of the Formalists’ study Theory of Literature, an important anthology of Russian Formalist writings which features Jakobson’s Preface. Todorov used the structuralist concept of narrative in his 1971 analysis of Henry James’s stories in ‘The Structural Analysis of Narrative’, where he argues that James’s stories revolve around a missing centre. The French philosopher Michel Foucault highlighted the role of language in the conceptual frameworks (epistemes) that are used in different epochs for representing human knowledge about the world. In his seminal 1969 study The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault suggests that the notion of knowledge changes with time and, subsequently, the role of language in defining knowledge becomes modified. According to Foucault’s thesis, many assumptions in culture are maintained by language practices that employ a common tool for cognising the world and for constructing it. He believes that physical and institutional realities are rendered discursively, so the world we live in is shaped not only by our perception but also by language. Similarly, Jacques Lacan is interested in the language of the Symbolic and provides a semiotics of the subject in a way that locates psycho­ analysis within semiotics. In the 1970s structuralism’s ahistorical approaches to literary and historical narratives and its rigid views on linguistic and symbolic systems based on binary oppositions were superseded by the ideas developed in the works of French poststructuralists who rejected the notion of self-sufficiency of the structures in favour of more nuanced interpretations of literary texts that foreground intertextuality, performativity and the decentring of the author. READING Culler, Jonathan D. (2002) Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature. New York: Routledge. Hawkes, Terence (2003) Structuralism and Semiotics. London: Routledge.

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Suffrage movement Scholes, Robert (1974) Structuralism in Literature: An Introduction. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Alexandra Smith

SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT The right of women to vote in political elections was one of the central aims of first-wave feminism. The Anglophone suffrage movement emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century and drew on a wide range of tactics and strategies to pursue the fight for the vote. In Britain, partial enfranchisement was gained in 1918. Full enfranchisement, allowing men and women to vote on equal terms, was won in 1920 in the United States and 1928 in Britain. The last phase of the suffrage movement, beginning in 1905, was marked by increased activism and, in Britain, militancy and violence. It resulted in a split between the peaceful and constitutional suffragists and the more radical and aggressive suffragettes, represented in particular by the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), founded by Emmeline Pankhurst and her elder daughter Christabel. These developments within the women’s movement coincide historically with the emergence of modernism. While often critical of the militant suffragettes, modernist writers, such as D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, reflected on suffrage politics in novels like Sons and Lovers (1913), Night and Day (1919) and The Years (1937). In addition, the quest for suffrage resulted in the creation of various literal and figurative spaces that allowed female voices to find expression, for instance through the creation of organisations such as the Women Writer’s Suffrage League or the Artists’ Suffrage League, women’s presses and bookshops, and journals and periodicals. The feminist journal The Freewoman (founded in 1911), for instance, was co-edited by feminist activists Dora Marsden and Mary Gawthorpe, and addressed a wide range of topics related to gender and sexuality, including abstinence, birth control, divorce, free love, homosexuality and prostitution. The struggle for suffrage was a key concern, but many contributors to the journal also engaged critically with the suffrage movement and even rejected the vote. Overall, suffrage writers and artists sought to develop and promote new models of independent femininity, such as the new woman, and often worked and collaborated across a range of literary and non-literary genres and forms, including plays (Cicely Hamilton, Evelyn Glover, Christopher St John, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sophie Treadwell), novels (Constance 357

Suprematism Elizabeth Maud, Elizabeth Robins, Sarah Grand, May Sinclair), poems (Marianne Moore, Edna St. Vincent Millay), short stories (Gertrude Colmore, W. L. Courtney, Evelyn Sharp), autobiography (Emmeline Pankhurst, Constance Lytton, Hannah Mitchell), journalism (Mona Caird, Mary Leigh, Rebecca West) and song and opera (Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ethel Smyth), to name but a few. With regard to literary production, suffrage authors tended to rely on popular genres, such as romance fiction, to popularise their ideas, but they also drove modernist innovation in terms of content and form, thus troubling the supposed distinctions between popular propaganda and high art. READING Chapman, Mary (2014) Making Noise, Making News: American Suffrage Print Culture in Modernism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Delap, Lucy (2007) The Feminist Avant-Garde: Transatlantic Encounters of the Early Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Green, Barbara (1998) Spectacular Confessions: Autobiography, Performative Activism and the Sites of Suffrage, 1905–1938. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Joanou, Maroula and June Purvis (eds) (1998) The Women’s Suffrage Movement: New Feminist Perspectives. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Miller, Jane E. (1994) Rebel Women: Feminism, Modernism and the Edwardian Novel. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Jana Funke

SUPREMATISM Kazimir Malevich’s 1915 booklet From Cubism to Futurism to Suprematism: The New Realism in Painting described suprematism as a new movement and underscored its supremacy over the past. The suprematist paintings, displayed at the exhibition of futurist art in December 1915 in Petrograd, comprised geometrical forms and floating images. According to Malevich, suprematism was inspired by stage designs used for the 1913 Futurist opera Victory over the Sun. The 1915 suprematist group also included such artists as Ivan Puni, Olga Rozanova and Ivan Klyun. Malevich presented his 1915 work Black Square painted on a black canvas square surrounded by a white margin as a breakthrough both in his career and in the history of art in general. The exhibition also included his abstract painting Four Squares. By placing two black squares next to the white squares, Malevich suggests that white appears from the back358

Suprematism ground and occupies the same position as black. It erases any distinction between background and foreground. Malevich’s 1920 solo exhibition, which opened in March 1920 in Moscow, displayed many non-objective paintings, including White Square. Some paintings featured abstract human shapes in open fields painted in bright colours. Since suprematist artists valued concepts as much as colour and forms, Malevich considered a painted surface to be a real living form. He saw art as a non-utilitarian activity opposed to the practical culture of religion and science. His 1920 painting Suprematism of the Mind de-astheticises colour and transforms it into a pure philosophical concept represented by a white square inserted into the centre of a suprematist cross. The notion of white appears in Malevich’s poetry and manifesto-like prose: it is subordinated to the idea of pure creation as discussed in his 1920 article ‘On Pure Act’. Malevich’s work Suprematism: World as Non-Objectivity or Eternal Rest characterises the notion of nonobjectivity as an absence of difference and locates man outside any culture and laws of movement. Malevich’s works produced in 1915–35 were left unframed because he wanted to redefine spatiality through foregrounding the space around painting. His solo exhibitions in Warsaw and Berlin and in Moscow in 1927 and 1929 respectively, attracted considerable attention by German and French artists, including Jean Arp, Naum Gabo, Le Corbusier and Kurt Schwitters. The close contacts with German artists led to Malevich’s arrest in 1930 and to the destruction of many of his manuscripts by the Soviet authorities. In 1922 the painter and designer El Lissitsky, one of the disciples of Malevich, published the book Suprematist Tale of Two Squares in Berlin. It included ten plates with various suprematist designs and contained hardly any text. The first tale was meant to explain to children how a catastrophe on the planet Earth caused by a black storm would lead to the creation of a new order. Subsequently, Lissitsky’s employment of suprematist forms and ideas in graphic design and architecture sparked the emergence of the constructivist movement. READING Drutt, Mathew and Vassili Rakitin (2003) Kazimir Malevich: Suprematism. New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications. Neret, Gilles (2003) Kazimir Malevich and Suprematism: 1978–1935. Cologne: Taschen.

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Surrealism Shatskikh, Aleksandra and Marian Schwartz (2012) Black Square: Malevich and the Origin of Suprematism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Alexandra Smith

SURREALISM Surrealism is one of the most significant and influential of the international movements associated with modernism. Emerging from the dissolution of Paris dada in the early 1920s and retaining the antipathy to mainstream bourgeois culture of that group, surrealism was radically innovative in the fields of literature, poetry, painting, sculpture, photography, film and exhibition design. In applying concepts such as ‘automatism’, ‘mad love’, ‘the marvellous’ and ‘objective chance’ to their own experiences and their artistic practices, in celebrating and highlighting sexuality, in mining the potential value of outmoded or overlooked forms and in deriving startling works of varied kinds from all these ideas, the surrealists subverted the formalist, rationalist and teleological projects characteristic of much modernism. As Hal Foster succinctly puts it, surrealism functioned as ‘the site of an agonistic modernism within official modernism’. Moreover, true to the avant-gardist aim of bringing art into disruptive contact with life, members of the surrealist group intervened in larger political debates, affiliating themselves with communism and Trotskyism at times, and offering dissenting views of ethnography and colonialism, for instance. Not for nothing would the first key journal of the movement be named La Révolution surréaliste and its successor Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution. While its attempts to seed political revolt met with little success and were relatively short-lived, surrealism itself proved a contagious and long-lasting proposition, with outposts emerging in Belgium, Britain, Mexico, North and South America, and many other nations, its official activities continuing well into the second half of the twentieth century. Although World war II produced a significant surrealist diaspora, displacing several central protagonists to the United States and breaking up the movement in Europe, a greater diasporic spread of the its key ideas, terms and visual forms can be detected in contemporary art, contemporary cinema and even in the tropes of advertising today. Surrealism began, however, in a specific geographic location and historical juncture, and within a particular cultural milieu. For some of its adherents, Dada in Paris had become mired in the contradictions inherent in producing art that aimed to destroy art. Seeing this 360

Surrealism project as collapsing into nihilism, a number of artists and (particularly) writers wished to regroup under a more positive banner, and after a period (c.1922–4) in which the character and composition of this nascent movement remained in flux, surrealism coalesced under the de facto leadership of poet and writer André Breton, the coeditor, with Philippe Soupault and Louis Aragon, of the avant-garde magazine Littérature. The ‘First Manifesto of Surrealism’ (1924), penned by Breton, announced surrealism and set out its principles at some length. Helpfully, Breton clarified the origin and meaning of the new movement’s name in the course of his manifesto. Guillaume Apollinaire had coined the word ‘surrealism’ in 1917 in programme notes for the ballet Parade, Breton acknowledged, but while the adoption of this name was intended as a tribute to a sympathetic avant-gardist forerunner, Breton saw his own use of the term as original and as giving it ‘currency’ for this first time. Lest there be any doubt as to the meaning of his version of ‘surrealism’, Breton offered to define it ‘once and for all’. He did so in the form of mock dictionary and encyclopaedia entries, which are quoted in full here: SURREALISM, n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express – verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner – the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern. ENCYCLOPEDIA. Philosophy. Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends to ruin once and for all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principal problems of life. The following have performed acts of ABSOLUTE SURREALISM: Messrs. Aragon, Baron, Boiffard, Breton, Carrive, Crevel, Delteil, Desnos, Eluard, Gérard, Limbour, Malkine, Morise, Naville, Noll, Péret, Picon, Soupault, Vitrac.

Certain key characteristics of surrealism can be highlighted in these two definitions. Firstly, in contrast to the more destructive, anarchist tenor of Dadaism (especially in its Parisian incarnation), surrealism sought to reintegrate seemingly opposed categories, seeing no contradiction between the real and imaginary, waking thoughts and dreams, art and life, and aiming at the synthesis of these states on a higher plane of reality. Hence Breton’s apparently hyperbolic claim that surrealism was engaged in an attempt to solve ‘all the principal problems of life’ is to be taken seriously. Secondly, ­surrealism 361

Surrealism had an important root in psychoanalysis and its investigations into the unconscious, as signalled in Breton’s reference to ‘psychic automatism’ and clarified by direct reference to Sigmund Freud in the ‘First Manifesto’. Breton and Aragon had both worked as medical auxiliaries during World War I and encountered techniques of free association, hypnosis and dream analysis used to treat shellshocked soldiers. The surrealists would turn these into means to access the creative force of the unconscious and to produce ‘marvellous’ literary and visual forms. ‘Marvellous’ became a crucial term of approbation for Breton as he gradually elaborated his definition of surrealism. Elicited by a ‘convulsive beauty’ produced in the confusion of animate and inanimate, or in a sudden arresting of motion, or equally by the workings of ‘objective chance’, the marvellous – an irruptive force disturbing natural and logical order – displaced traditional notions of disinterested aesthetic contemplation in Bretonian surrealism. The term’s connotations of spiritualism, of gothic and alchemical archaisms, are indicative of the conscription of outmoded or outré modes to the surrealist cause: psychoanalytic accounts of hysteria, paranoia and other maladies took their place alongside these modes in the surrealist canon. Surrealism took vital inspiration too from Freud’s emphasis on the fundamental place of sexuality in psychic life. Though his theories of sexuality often had disruptive or scandalous force in a broadly conservative cultural context, Freud sought to restore his patients to ‘normal’ life, and believed that civilised life depended on the sublimation of sexual drives into art or other forms of social decorum and self-control. The surrealists, in contrast, saw the conditions from which psychoanalytic patients ostensibly suffered as effectively admirable and true expressions of human desire, free from repression by social norms. The celebration of ‘the actual functioning of thought’ and the rejection of its taming by aesthetic, moral, or rational categories and norms was central to surrealism, and strongly differentiated it from psychoanalysis. Breton’s much-anticipated encounter with Freud in 1921 was not a meeting of minds, and the two subsequently viewed each other with suspicion. Finally, in the definitions cited above – and indeed in the ‘First Manifesto’ as a whole – it should be noted that the primary model for surrealism at its inception was poetic and literary, and more specifically derived from the shared concerns of a certain French constellation of writers, as the list of those credited with acts of ‘absolute surrealism’ shows. Visual productions were initially tacked onto surrealism in 362

Surrealism a rather haphazard manner, often by the claiming of various nonaffiliated artists – Picasso perhaps being the most prominent of these – for its ranks. Breton was in fact prone to baptising those he admired as surrealists ‘avant la lettre’, and this practice was not limited to painting by any means, as seen in the adoption of nineteenth-century poet the Comte de Lautréamont’s memorable phrase ‘beautiful as the chance encounter between a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table’ as a motto of sorts for surrealism. Lautréamont’s use of disparate elements in juxtaposition provided an important precedent for surrealist writing but also underpinned explorations in visual forms, as seen in visual versions of the cadavre exquis (‘exquisite corpse’), in the many surrealist collage and photomontage works made using heterogeneous elements, and notably in a 1920 sculpture by Man Ray in which a sewing machine is wrapped in a blanket secured with string and given the title The Enigma of Isadore Ducasse (Lautréamont being the pseudonym of Ducasse). The notion that the so-called ‘objective chance’ seen in such juxtapositions (and also in surprising encounters with other persons or in the discovery of enigmatic found objects) functioned as a means of reconciling external reality with subjective perception and unconscious desire was critical to the development of Breton’s surrealism in particular. Given its literary beginnings, the question of whether there could in fact be a truly surrealist painting quickly became a topic of much debate, as it seemed to some that there was no possibility of producing spontaneous paintings of psychic states or dreams given the degree of conscious deliberation required in executing such works. Breton would take up the theoretical defence of surrealist painting in later texts, and in practice the works of artists as diverse as Leonora Carrington, Giorgio de Chirico, Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, René Magritte and André Masson (among many others) make their own case that the seeming contradiction between automatism and painting need not be a terminal stumbling block for visual forms of surrealism. That said, as surrealism’s significance to any satisfactory account of modernism has been increasingly acknowledged, so too has scholarship placed greater weight on those of its products that go beyond automatism and beyond the relatively conservative categories of literature and painting altogether. The photographic surrealism of Man Ray and Claude Cahun, for example; the found objects which prompted some of Alberto Giacometti’s most important sculpture; Meret Oppenheim’s 1936 fur-lined teacup and saucer; the uncanny, highly fetishistic dolls made and photographed by Hans Bellmer; the 363

Surrealism journals and exhibitions which provocatively disseminated surrealist ideas: all these have been shown to be among the most radical of surrealism’s productions. The self-understanding and self-presentation of the surrealists has also been increasingly subject to critical revision in regard to its gender and sexual politics, which tended to implicitly relegate women to the role of muse or object of desire, despite the presence of women artists of the stature of Cahun, Carrington or Oppenheim within their milieu. Breton’s claim, quoted above, to have defined surrealism ‘once and for all’ might – like his appropriation of the rationalist, categorising apparatus of the dictionary entry itself – seem satirical, but he did indeed police surrealism’s membership and ideology to such an authoritarian degree that he would become known to his detractors as the ‘Pope of surrealism.’ He did not go unchallenged, however, with schisms in the movement apparent by 1929. In recent years increasing attention has been paid to the work of a rival grouping, including Georges Bataille, Roger Caillois, Carl Einstein and other surrealists excommunicated by Breton (Robert Desnos and Michel Leiris prominent among them). Bataille’s chief point of dissension with regard to Bretonian surrealism emerged from his view that it remained idealist and effectively sublimatory in its view of art, despite its proclamations to the contrary. Bataille’s commitment to a violently anti-idealistic desublimation was expressed in the transgressive literature he produced (most notably perhaps the pseudonymously published Story of the Eye of 1928), in quasi-anthropological and ethnographic studies of gift exchange and sacrifice (including The Accursed Share, 1949), and in the heterogeneous contents of the magazine Documents which was published under his co-editorship in fifteen issues in 1929–30 (see also collège de sociologie). In a definition of his key term informe (‘formless’), included within Documents’ ‘Critical Dictionary’, Bataille wrote that a dictionary would begin from the point at which it no longer rendered the meanings of words but rather their tasks. Thus formless is not only an adjective with a given meaning but a term which declassifies, generally requiring that each thing take on a form. That which it designates has no claim in any sense, and is always trampled upon like a spider or an earthworm.

If Breton wished to define surrealism, Bataille’s contrasting dictionary entry suggests that declassification not definition might be the more truly surreal operation. Bataille’s theorisation of base mat­ 364

Syllabic verse and of a desublimatory formlessness that dethrones the human subject from the central position claimed for it by humanist philosophy not only set out a fundamental difference from Breton’s surrealism, but found echoes in both poststructuralist theory and postmodern art and literature. Today the work of Bataille and other dissident surrealists provides a significant complexity to the ongoing reception of surrealism, such that any definition of the movement and its influence can only be provisional. erialism

READING Ades, Dawn (1978) Dada and Surrealism Reviewed. London: Arts Council of Great Britain. Ades, Dawn and Simon Baker (2006) Undercover Surrealism: Georges Bataille and DOCUMENTS. London: Hayward Gallery. Allmer, Patricia (2009) Angels of Anarchy: Women Artists and Surrealism. New York and London: Prestel. Benjamin, Walter (1929) ‘Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligensia’, in Walter Benjamin (1999), Selected Writings Volume 2: 1927–1934. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 207–21. Breton, André (1969) Manifestoes of Surrealism. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Chadwick, Whitney (ed.) (1998) Mirror Images: Women, Surrealism and Self-representation. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press. Foster, Hal (1993) Compulsive Beauty. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press. Hollier, Denis (1989) Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press. Hopkins, David (ed.) (2016) A Companion to Dada and Surrealism. Oxford: Blackwell. Krauss, Rosalind (1985) L’Amour Fou: Photography and Surrealism. New York: Abbeville Press. Lomas, David (2000) The Haunted Self: Surrealism, Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press.

Dominic Paterson

SYLLABIC VERSE Up to the beginning of the twentieth century, metrical (as opposed to ‘free’) verse in English was almost always either ‘accentual’, with metres involving regular patterns of stressed syllables attended by varying numbers of unstressed, or ‘accentual-syllabic’ with patterns of stressed syllables attended by fixed numbers of unstressed. Partly under the influence of Continental versification and partly as a result of 365

Symbolism a fashion for the seventeen-syllable Japanese haiku, the early twentieth century added purely ‘syllabic’ metres quite without patterned stress. These metres might feature a consistent number of syllables per line throughout a poem, or they might form indented stanzas, rhymed or unrhymed, made up of lines of differing syllable-counts. (A simple example would be a haiku-like stanza-sequence in which each threeline stanza consisted of five, then seven, then five syllables.) Robert Bridges was the pioneer of the former type of metre, notably with the ‘syllabic hexameters’ of his Testament of Beauty in 1929, though by then syllabics had been taken further in some of the work of his daughter, Elizabeth Daryush, and – ­apparently coincidentally – in some of that of the markedly different American modernist poet Marianne Moore, who came to specialise in complex syllabic stanzas of ‘unaccented rhyme’, as she termed it (e.g. in ‘The Pangolin’ and ‘Spenser’s Ireland’). From the late 1930s on, poets such as W. H. Auden and Dylan Thomas, though accentual or accentual-syllabic in most of their work, felt free to write pure syllabics à la Moore on occasion, e.g. in Auden’s ‘In Memory of Sigmund Freud’ and Thomas’s ‘Poem in October’. As a result the stanzaic technique became much more widely known. READING Fuller, Roy (1971) ‘An Artifice of Versification’, Owls and Artificers: Oxford Lectures on Poetry. London: Deutsch, pp. 44–68. Winters, Yvor (1960) ‘The Influence of Meter on Poetic Convention’, In Defence of Reason. London: Routledge, pp. 103–50.

Roger Savage

SYMBOLISM Symbolism began as a literary movement in France. Its ideas quickly spread following the publication of Jean Moréas’s manifesto ‘Le Symbolisme’ in the 18 September 1886 edition of Paris’s largestcirculating daily newspaper, Le Figaro. Symbolism arose in response to the perceived superficiality of the movements dominant in the midnineteenth century – naturalism and realism – whose purposes were to record rapidly changing land- and cityscapes in an era of unprecedented urbanisation, industrialisation and demographic shifts. To some, this neglected both the most significant transformations occurring at the time – the psycho-emotional states and physical health of individuals – as well as the spiritual truths and universal laws that lay beyond sense perception. Symbolism, then, sought to redress the incomplete expression of modern life presented by naturalism, 366

Symbolism realism and impressionism (an outgrowth of naturalism) by conveying interior states of mind, products of the imagination and perceived universal truths. Just as socialism sought to dismantle boundaries in the social sphere, Symbolism sought to dissolve boundaries in the aesthetic sphere: between consciousness and unconciousness, imagination and reality, the physical world and what lies beyond. In his article ‘A Symbolist Painter’ published in the April 1887 edition of L’Art moderne, Belgian art critic Emile Verhaeren asserted that symbolism’s goal was to repair naturalism’s ‘fragmented’ portrayal of the world. Moréas’s manifesto responded to the recently published article by the Polish literary critic Téodor de Wyzéwa in the first symbolist little magazine, La Vogue, in which Wyzéwa declared that ‘Everything is a symbol, every molecule contains the handwriting of the universe . . . and art, the expression of all symbols, ought to be an idealized drama, summarizing and annulling the naturalistic representations whose deepest meanings are found in the soul of the poet.’ Thus artist-poets (choreographers, composers, painters, performers, sculptors, writers) had a special ability (genius) to discern the truths underlying the physical world and should present them in their work. Genius was considered by some a curse, because of the inability of average individuals to understand the cryptic expressions of the symbolists. Others considered genius a divine gift enabling artist-poets, like God, to create objects from the raw materials of insight and imagination. For some, this singular ability entailed an obligation to use it for the general good, for others it simply designated them as an elite superior to their fellows. Symbolist ideas first emerged in the 1857 poetry collection of Charles Baudelaire Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil), which glorified erotic fantasies, self-indulgence and synaesthetic experiences. Baudelaire’s poems, along with Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories, which Baudelaire translated into French in the 1850s, formed a bridge from Romanticism’s more straightforward descriptions of emotion and spirituality to the often more disillusioned and mystical character of symbolist suggestion and allusion that is found in the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine and Stéphane Mallarmé or the art of Edvard Munch, James Ensor and Odilon Redon. Scientific advances in the late nineteenth century confirmed the fact that unaided human senses could perceive only a fraction of reality and sparked an interest in the mind. Recent developments in physics – the debut of Thomas Edison’s telegraph and phonograph in 367

Symbolism the 1880s and Wilhelm Röntgen’s discovery of X-rays in 1895 – as well as Robert Koch’s germ theory of disease and escalating investigations into dreams and mental states, instigated a broad general interest in intangible entities, spiritualism and the occult. After all, if sound waves and microbes were real yet invisible to the naked eye, who was to say that the souls of departed loved ones weren’t also circulating beyond the reach of sense perception or that dimensions of reality existed that were inaccessible to normative perception, as theosophists like Madame Blavatsky maintained? Perhaps the nonWestern cultures that believed in the fluidity between wakefulness and dreaming or between life and death were right. Symbolism was a fundamentally neo-Platonic movement that assumed that natural objects were signs denoting ideas; it was influenced by the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, whose writings were translated into French in the 1870s. In The World as Will and Representation (1818) Schopenhauer argued that there were as many realities as people to imagine them – an idea attractive to symbolists. His conviction that music was superior among the arts because of its intangibility and direct appeal to the emotions and imagination inspired artists and writers to devise similarly suggestive strategies. With art liberated from the shackles of description, symbolist artists experimented with a broad range of imagery and visual languages in order to best embody their divergent goals. Paul Gauguin, for instance, experimented with ceramics, mixed-media sculpture and printmaking techniques. Similarly, the symbolist plays of Henrik Ibsen, Maurice Maeterlinck, August Strindberg, W. B. Yeats and Oscar Wilde experimented with costume, diction, gesture, lighting, sound and staging to emphasise the dreams, fantasies, feelings and thoughts of their protagonists. The Théâtre de l`Œuvre, founded in Paris by Lugné-Poe in 1892, was a key venue for symbolist theatre, with most tickets distributed for free in order to popularise experimental drama. Symbolists fell into two broad categories: optimists and pessimists. Symbolists pessimistic about the state of human society resigned themselves to the degeneration of Western civilisation and tended either to wallow in and celebrate hedonistic behaviour or to take refuge in escapist fantasies. Symbolists optimistic about the future produced works intended to inspire and reform and were often affiliated with progressive political movements such as anarchism and socialism. Symbolist ideas circulated widely and rapidly in the media-rich milieu of the late nineteenth century. The Parisian La Revue indépendante, founded in 1887, was particularly energetic 368

Taboo in promoting symbolism; it retained foreign correspondents (for instance, Octave Maus, the Brussels-based founder of the artists’ group Les XX [The Twenty]) and held exhibitions of Auguste Rodin, Georges Seurat and Vincent van Gogh. The twin necessities of camaraderie and developing a market for their art works inspired many symbolists to create groups. Some groups, such as that meeting at Mallarmé’s Paris apartment on Tuesday evenings, were informal in nature, while others such as Les XX in Brussels or the Nabis and Rose+Croix in Paris were highly organised, with exclusive membership and collective statements of purpose. Some groups were ideologically cohesive while others concerned themselves primarily with attracting customers and patrons. In Scandinavia and Central/Eastern Europe, symbolism often merged with national Romantic movements in order to generate national ‘schools’ of art dedicated to the articulation and promotion of generic national identities. Significantly, symbolist imperatives to express ideas and experiment with technique influenced a broad range of twentieth-century art movements: expressionism, cubism, abstraction, dada and surrealism. READING Balakian, Anna (1977) The Symbolist Movement: A Critical Appraisal. New York: New York University Press. Dorra, Henri (1995) Symbolist Art Theories. A Critical Anthology. Berkeley: University of California Press. Facos, Michelle (2009) Symbolist Art in Context. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lövgren, Sven (1959) The Genesis of Modernism: Seurat, Gauguin, van Gogh and French Symbolism in the 1880’s. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell. Michaud, Guy (1947) Message poétique du Symbolisme. Paris: Librairie Nizet.

Michelle Facos

T TABOO Sigmund Freud, the great sexual democrat of the early twentieth century, relies upon the speculative field of nineteenth-century 369

Taboo in promoting symbolism; it retained foreign correspondents (for instance, Octave Maus, the Brussels-based founder of the artists’ group Les XX [The Twenty]) and held exhibitions of Auguste Rodin, Georges Seurat and Vincent van Gogh. The twin necessities of camaraderie and developing a market for their art works inspired many symbolists to create groups. Some groups, such as that meeting at Mallarmé’s Paris apartment on Tuesday evenings, were informal in nature, while others such as Les XX in Brussels or the Nabis and Rose+Croix in Paris were highly organised, with exclusive membership and collective statements of purpose. Some groups were ideologically cohesive while others concerned themselves primarily with attracting customers and patrons. In Scandinavia and Central/Eastern Europe, symbolism often merged with national Romantic movements in order to generate national ‘schools’ of art dedicated to the articulation and promotion of generic national identities. Significantly, symbolist imperatives to express ideas and experiment with technique influenced a broad range of twentieth-century art movements: expressionism, cubism, abstraction, dada and surrealism. READING Balakian, Anna (1977) The Symbolist Movement: A Critical Appraisal. New York: New York University Press. Dorra, Henri (1995) Symbolist Art Theories. A Critical Anthology. Berkeley: University of California Press. Facos, Michelle (2009) Symbolist Art in Context. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lövgren, Sven (1959) The Genesis of Modernism: Seurat, Gauguin, van Gogh and French Symbolism in the 1880’s. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell. Michaud, Guy (1947) Message poétique du Symbolisme. Paris: Librairie Nizet.

Michelle Facos

T TABOO Sigmund Freud, the great sexual democrat of the early twentieth century, relies upon the speculative field of nineteenth-century 369

Taylorism to illuminate his findings in Totem and Taboo (1912). The etymology of taboo bears witness to the history of European imperialism (although a secular Jew, Freud retained a quiet pride in Austria’s empire) entering the English language via colonial explorers and sailors. A taboo (originally tabu) within indigenous tribal life of Africa and the South Sea Islands referred to a system of self-imposed prohibitions relating to a sacred object, around which tribal life was organised. Anyone deemed to have transgressed a taboo, touching a consecrated object for example, was also considered taboo, thus demonstrating how taboos carried a potency linked to contagion. The most important injunction in ‘primitive’ cultures, according to Freud, was the taboo prohibiting the ‘horror of incest’ and the killing of the totemic animal. Freud observed that some of the rituals associated with taboos ‘still exist among us’, discernible in the peculiarly ritualistic symptoms of the obsessional neurotic. The ambivalence generated by the sacred object is internalised to become a source of fear within the psychology of both the group and the individual. The main difference, however, is that taboos are adopted by the tribal collective as a means to structure society so that it functions for the benefit of the greater good. anthropology

READING Freud, Sigmund (1955) Totem and Taboo, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XIII, ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, pp. 1–165.

Robbie McLaughlan

TAYLORISM The term refers to the system of scientific management pioneered by the American mechanical engineer Frederick W. Taylor with the goal of maximising the productivity of industrial labour. Taylor divided tasks into their constituent motions, analysed the speed and efficiency of these motions and excluded any unnecessary elements so as to arrive at the optimal routines for individual tasks. Workers were instructed to perform these routines repetitively, incentivised by the linkage of output to remuneration. Two masterpieces of modernist cinema, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) and Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936), powerfully portray the dehumanising effects of Taylorist-style industrial workplaces. More broadly, Taylorism is cited as one of the many factors that tended to render human experience in the early 370

Technology twentieth century linear, machine-like and fragmented, and against which modernist celebrations of organic temporality, the stream of consciousness and the mysteries of memory, reverie, dream and epiphany were arrayed. As Tim Armstrong notes, however, the rising incomes that Taylorism promised, and the mass production it sought to unfetter, opened up ‘the spaces of leisure and desire which in some senses [became] the place of modernist activity . . . [I]n attempting to map the limits of technology, to work creatively with waste, fatigue, and resistance, modernism shares a paradigm with Taylorism’ (Armstrong 2005: 131). READING Armstrong, Tim (2005) Modernism: A Cultural History. Cambridge: Polity Press. Cobley, Evelyn (2009) Modernism and the Culture of Efficiency: Ideology and Fiction. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Heise, Ursula (1997) Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative, and Postmodernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Paul Crosthwaite

TECHNOLOGY Technology is bound into our understandings of modernity for reasons which are both historical and conceptual. The modern world is created by technology – by the expansion of navigation and transport technologies, by the transformative power of industry and the capital relations it engenders, by technologies of communication and data storage. The modern self is remodelled in dialectically connected ways: regularised, objectified and observed within technological processes and media; expanded and subject to new intensities and pleasures. At the same time, technological development broadly ­considered – the evolution of technique, the restless expansion of power and production – provides the conceptual underpinning for accounts of modernity as cultural evolution, shock and change. For this reason there is a potential circularity in ‘accounting for’ modernity in terms of technology, and even that which lies outside the technological – a scribbled poem, say – is configured by the fact that all communication is, in the modern view, a form of technological media. Jacques Ellul defines modernity in terms of the progressive technologising of all aspects of life, their penetration by techne or instrumental reason. That penetration includes the meta- and even counter-narratives of modernity, whether they reject 371

Technology t­ echnology, posit a reality beyond its reach or embrace its values with enthusiasm. The idea of an efficient, engineered society was pervasive in the period between the wars: in the influence of Thorsten Veblen and the Technocracy movement in America; in communism, fascism and other political movements like Social Credit and the eugenics movement. Popular self-reform programmes liken the mind and body to a machine or a factory, aiming to optimise its efficiency, power, profit. In a similar manner, various forms of modernism in architecture and the visual arts sought to express a utopian vision of a rationalised, streamlined society, a perfected bio-mechanics, or a near instantaneous, technologically mediated communication. In literary modernism it is harder to find an equivalent to movements like Technocracy or the bauhaus, but certainly some modernist movements work in this mode: Italian futurism celebrates aviation, cinema and radio and imagines a prosthetic self; the imagists and William Carlos Williams compare the precision of the poem to a well-engineered cutting machine; Gertrude Stein likens her technique to cinema; John Dos Passos reimagines the novel as a multimedia stream. For Blast’s authors, one of the factors differentiating vorticism from Futurism was its refusal of a naive machine-worship they associate with the programme of Italian national renewal of the Futurist leader F. T. Marinetti. Yet Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis both convey a sense of the self as technologically located, and Pound often sees the poem as a form of communication technology, akin to radio in its radiant energies. But for all that there is a romance of self-transcendence attached to identification with the machine, the reality of technological modernity mandated a more ambivalent response. World War I is the moment when technology’s impact on historical experience reaches is apogee in mass-killing, a denatured landscape and shell shock. As Walter Benjamin memorably wrote in ‘The Storyteller’ (1936), ‘A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body.’ Technology in this mode, whether in the war or in a regimented urban experience generally, often seems to undermine and diminish the human. The Romantic anti-technology that has its origins in William Blake or John Ruskin has a focus that is quite separate from the extension of human capacities and power: 372

Technology the ‘machine’ becomes a metaphor for a social totality in which the individual is ‘a mere cog in an enormous organization of things’ (as Georg Simmel put it in 1903), torn by its power, or rendered virtual by intensities distributed between persons and technologies, like Henry James’s telegraphist in ‘In the Cage’ (1898). Between these two possibilities, modernist texts often deal with the extension and alienation of the self produced by technology, whether in the dystopian science fiction of E. M. Forster’s ‘The Machine Stops’ (1909), or the alienated, mass-produced pleasures of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), or the swooping panoramic eye of the aviator in W. H. Auden, or Virginia Woolf’s warplanes roaring darkly overhead in Between the Acts (1941), a text which nevertheless uses the gramophone as part of its fragmenting and connecting aesthetic. Indeed, the incorporation of technological aesthetics into texts which seek to offer a critique of technology is a feature of modernist texts. Muriel Rukeyser’s poem ‘The Book of the Dead’ (1938) uses the metaphors of photographic registration and collage, for example, in its analysis of the Gauley Bridge mining disaster. The X-ray serves to imagine an excavated interiority in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924), a text which nevertheless ends in the battlefields of World War I. Perhaps most cogently of all, the various projects associated with Eugene Jolas’s little magazine transition imagined both a heightened romanticism – a stress on dream-like and animal ­intensities – and a technological mediation represented by projects like James Joyce’s ‘Work in Progress’, Bob Brown’s ‘readies’ and a general fascination with the re-engineered word. In texts like these, we see technology as the inescapable ground of all human communication. READING Armstrong, Tim (1998) Modernism, Technology and the Body. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Benjamin, Walter (1968) ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ and ‘The Storyteller’, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Harcourt, Brace. Biers, Katherine (2013) Virtual Modernism: Writing and Technology in the Progressive Era. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Danius, Sara (2002) The Senses of Modernism: Technology, Perception and Modernist Aesthetics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Ellul, Jacques (1964) The Technological Society, trans. John Wilkinson. New York: Random House. Murphet, Julian (2009) Multimedia Modernism: Literature and the AngloAmerican Avant-Garde. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 373

Theory North, Michael (2005), Camera Works: Photography and the TwentiethCentury Word. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Simmel, Georg ([1903] 1997) ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, in David Frisby and Mike Featherstone (eds), Simmel on Culture. London: Sage. Tichi, Cecilia (1987) Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature and Culture in Modernist America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Tim Armstrong

THEORY A continuation of modernism by other means. Thinkers such as Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous and others were inspired by, emulated and reinvented modernist aesthetic strategies. They took up in a new register key modernist concerns with form, subjectivity, gender and sexuality, politics, ideology, the human and, of course, modernity. Theory shares with modernism a pedigree that extends back to Immanuel Kant, through G. W. F. Hegel, Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche. Many of the most influential twentieth-century precursors to theory proper are, broadly speaking, modernists themselves: Ferdinand de Saussure, Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Sigmund Freud, Claude Lévi-Strauss. Their influence on theory is matched by the intellectual and aesthetic experiments of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad, André Breton and Gertrude Stein, among many others. When in 1966 Jacques Derrida argued that the history of Western philosophy was a series of ‘transcendental signifiers’, he partly took up the modernist notions that reality is the product of language games and that humans produce the illusions by which they are constructed and consoled. Derrida demonstrated that these transcendental signifiers were just words, referring only to other words in an infinite regress without ever approaching a transcendental Truth. Derridean ‘deconstruction’ showed how all systems solicit their own collapse. Derrida’s and other interrogations of the conceptual apparatus of liberal humanism, as well as the critique of the systematicity of structuralist thinking, were also infused with the radical political thinking of the upheavals of 1968 in France and the world. A recall of the polemical spirit of the historical avantgarde and a renewal of interest in some of the heroic damned figures of literary modernism (such as Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire, 374

Theory Antonin Artaud and Ferdinand Céline) underlay the approach of theorists such as Derrida, Barthes, Kristeva, Cixous, Philippe Sollers and others and the production of a heady blend of literary, scientific, psychoanalytical and philosophical discourses and methodologies. The move of the French theorists to the USA, led by Derrida (Yale and later University of California at Irvine) brought those discourses to the North American academe, challenged the hegemony of analytical philosophy and blazed new disciplinary trails. Literary modernism was more often than not the battleground or laboratory for the deployment of these new disciplinary contestations: feminist and queer theory aligned some of their approaches with the formal explorations of language and subjectivity by Woolf and Joyce while revisiting the history of Western philosophy and contemporary sexual politics. Kristeva, Cixous, Luce Irigaray and others advanced the notion of ‘écriture féminine’ based upon the precedent set by Joyce, Jean Genet and Stéphane Mallarmé. Monique Wittig challenged the notion of essential masculinity and femininity, as had Radclyffe Hall, Djuna Barnes and Stein before. Others, such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, argued that gender and sexuality categories obscure the full continuum of human expression and behaviour, illegitimately marking some out as ‘normal’ and acceptable, and marginalising others, as Barnes had shown so powerfully in her writing. Postcolonialism drew upon the legacy of modernist engagements with imperialism such as E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India and Foucault’s reworking of the Nietzschean notion of genealogy to address the legacy of European imperialism. Edward Said, whose early career focused on Joseph Conrad, practically invented the field of postcolonialism with Orientalism (1977). Said argued that the notion of the Orient is a tool of empire: there is no authentic Orient, only a record of its production as a means of control (see orientalism). Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak applied deconstruction’s insights to ­(post-)­colonial settings to explore colonisation’s psycholinguistic aftermath. Homi K. Bhabha, R. Siva Kumar, Dipesh Chakraborty and Achille Mbembe similarly drew upon modernist works to explore the intricacies of imperialism. Critical race theorists stand on the shoulders of American modernist writers of race and racism such as W. E. B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, Claude MacKay and Zora Neale Hurston to consider how categories such as race are constructed and enforced. Writers such as Paul Gilroy, Gloria Anzaldúa, bell hooks, Houston Baker, Henry 375

Theory Louis Gates Jr, Lisa Lowe and Cherie Morága have outlined and exposed the fundamental incoherencies of racist thought, often borrowing aesthetic strategies from their modernist precursors to make subtle theoretical points. Marxism and historical materialism are themselves modernist phenomena, deeply embedded in its intellectual and aesthetic roots. Theorists and researchers of the frankfurt school understood modernism as a powerful critique of capitalist modernity. By contrast, others, such as Georg Lukács, saw it as capitalism’s aesthetic expression. Fredric Jameson’s career has been marked by a simultaneous distaste for the ‘ideology of modernism’ (as first set out by Georg Lukács in The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, 1957, 1962) and appreciation of particular modernists’ works. Louis Althusser, Pierre Macherey, Etienne Balibar, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, and Terry Eagleton have all drawn upon modernist explorations of modernity’s modes of control in their analyses. Driven in large part by a modernist absorption in the psychological and material consequences of modernity, Marxist theory has produced deeply incisive theorisations of economic inequality, cultural production and globalisation. Like Marxism, psychoanalysis is full-bloodedly modernist in its emergence and lasting influence on theory. Sigmund Freud’s writings are explorations of unstable and fluid subjectivity and Jacques Lacan learned as much from the surrealists as he did from Freud. Lacan’s inheritors have continued his modernist interest in the unconscious, particularly its linguistic effects, and in subject formation as a function of narrative (e.g. Juliet Mitchell, Shoshana Felman, Laura Mulvey, Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jean-Michel Rabaté and Peter Brooks). More recently, Slavoj Žižek has explored psychic life under late capitalism and reflected on violence and waste. Alain Badiou has revived interest in mathematics, ontology and political subjectivity. Object-oriented ontologists such as Quentin Meillassoux and Ian Bogost theorise objects independently of their perception by humans. Affect theorists such as Brian Massumi, Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, Elspeth Probyn and Ben Highmore investigate how emotions and feelings outside consciousness function. Cary Wolfe, Nicole Shukin, Derrida, Giorgio Agamben and Donna Haraway explore the tensions around the human/animal divide, while Paul Virilio, Bruno Latour, N. Katherine Hayles and Francisco Varela explore the interrelationships between humans and technology. In both form and 376

Theosophy substance, these investigations carry on theory’s modernist – and modernism’s theoretical – enterprise. READING Drucker, Johanna (1996) Theorizing Modernism: Visual Art and the Critical Tradition. New York: Columbia University Press. Giles, Steve (ed.) (1993) Theorizing Modernisms: Essays in Critical Theory. New York: Routledge. Melville, Stephen (1986) Philosophy Beside Itself: On Deconstruction and Modernism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Riddel, Joseph (1996) The Turning Word: American Modernism and Continental Theory. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Ross, Stephen (ed. and intro.) (2009) Modernism and Theory: A Critical Debate. New York: Routledge.

Stephen Ross

THEOSOPHY Theosophy is often described as an alternative spiritualist tradition. Some scholars claim that, despite its close resemblance to certain forms of Mahayana Buddhism, it should not be seen as a form of esoteric Buddhism and suggest viewing it as the first cultural movement in the West imbued with many elements of Buddhist and Hindu spirituality. William Q. Judge and Helena Petrovna Blavatsky founded the original Theosophical Society in 1875 in New York. Its aims included the formation of the nucleus of a Universal brotherhood of Humanity without distinction of race and colour; the promotion of the study of Aryan and other Eastern literature and religions; and the investigation of the hidden mysteries of nature. The society’s goals were shaped by Henry Steel Olcott and Helena Blavatsky’s encounters with India in 1878–9 that turned them into strong advocates of a pan-religious Universal Brotherhood of Humanity. Subsequently, the Theosophical Society grew into an eclectic and pluralistic organisation devoted to the validation of Asian religious traditions and inter-religious unity. While their pupil Robert Crosbie founded the United Lodge of Theosophists in Los Angeles in 1909, the United Lodge of Theosophists was established in London only in 1925. Theosophy had a considerable impact on many British, European and American writers, including Lewis Carroll, W. B. Yeats, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, T. S. Eliot, Kurt Vonnegut, D. H. Lawrence, Maurice Maeterlinck and James Joyce. 377

Totem READING Ellwood, Robert S. (1986) Theosophy: A Modern Expression of the Wisdom of the Ages. Wheaton, IL: Quest Books. Faivre, Antoine (2000) Theosophy, Imagination, Tradition: Studies in Western Esotericism, trans. Christine Rhone. Albany: SUNY Press. Lavoie, Jeffrey D. (2012) The Theosophical Society: The History of a Spiritualist Movement. Boca Raton: Brown Walker Press.

Alexandra Smith

TOTEM Sigmund Freud reinterpreted the Augustinian idea of original sin by attaching it to a scene from J. G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890) with the death of Christ replaced by the killing of a primal father. According to Freud, at the very beginning of human life there was an original grouping of humanity – the primal horde – in which two sons resented the authority of the father and his prohibition of incest, so they eventually murdered and cannibalised him. Their eating of the flesh parallels Adam and Eve’s consuming of the apple in the Garden of Eden. Their paradoxical feelings of guilt and remorse experienced after the killing is invested into the totemic animal, so that, psychologically, the totem becomes a substitute for the father. Individual identity is then formed in relation to the totem. Those identifying with one totem are forbidden from procreating with someone from the same totem and must look beyond the group for a sexual partner (exogamy). This, for Freud, is the founding law from which all others derive and represents the earliest form of religion. Unlike taboos which still perform a function today, totems have been replaced by newer forms. READING Freud, Sigmund (1955) Totem and Taboo, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XIII, ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, pp. 1–165.

Robbie McLaughlan

TRADITION Not to be confused with the concept of a ‘canon’ or convention in its modernist reincarnation. This term is of particular significance because, if anathema to the avant-garde principles of aesthetic rupture, high modernism sought reciprocity rather than either 378

Translation rejection of or subjection to the past. T. S. Eliot argues in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ that tradition is a particular type of temporality. His ‘historical sense’, which is ‘a perception, not only of the pastiness of the past but of its presence’, implies a participation in the constant re-alignment of tradition by any new contribution worthy of this ideal order. The aim is synchronic contemporaneity. Modernist traditionalism is best expressed by Eliot as the ‘mythical method’, which manipulates ‘a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity’ to give significance ‘to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history’, as he put it in his 1923 essay on James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). In that sense, other modernist examples may be invoked, including H.D.’s poetic hellenism or the primitivism of Pablo Picasso in painting and Eugene O’Neill in drama. Marxist critics such as Walter Benjamin hold such aesthetisation of history and culture as ideologically suspect. This is particularly relevant to Eliot, whose classicism is the political expression of an aesthetic traditionalism which cannot but proclaim its allegiance to Western Christian culture, even at the expense of non-conformists such as the Puritan seventeenth-century poet John Milton (see romanticism versus classicism). READING Benjamin, Walter (2008) ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’, in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Eliot, T. S. (1975) ‘Ulysses, Order and Myth’ (1923), in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Eliot, T. S. (1999) ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919), in Selected Essays. London: Faber & Faber.

Fabio Vericat

TRANSLATION Much of Anglophone modernism was constituted by translation. imagism was created in the wake of F. S. Flint’s 1912 accounts of French post-symbolist poetry; vorticism in reaction to F. T. Marinetti’s Italian futurism; Ford Madox Ford’s English Review and T. S. Eliot’s Criterion as calques of the Mercure de France. There is the debt owed by Eliot’s criticism to Charles Maurras and Remy de Gourmont; the depth of Ezra Pound’s immersion in Italian history and culture; Katherine Mansfield’s and Virginia Woolf’s reading 379

Translation in Henri Bergson, Marcel Proust and Anton Chekhov; bloomsbury aesthetics and its debt to French post-impressionism; D. H. Lawrence’s attachment to German expressionism; the role of little magazines in forging a European and transatlantic avant-garde; Edward Gordon Craig’s theatre and its relation to Italian Futurist drama, Constantin Stanislavsky and Vsevolod Meyerhold; James Joyce’s debt to Henrik Ibsen, Édouard Dujardin, Victor Bérard and his experiences as European exile; relations between W. B. Yeats and Maurice Maeterlinck and the French symbolistes; Mina Loy’s experiments in Italian Futurist drama; the role of inter-war Paris in the development and practice of American expatriate modernists such as Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes and Ernest Hemingway. Stephen Dedalus is a creature of Joyce’s trip to Paris in 1903, the first step made in the lifelong project to bypass English culture’s paralysing effect on Irish consciousness. Mansfield developed many of her haunting short stories about deracination from memories of her stay in the German pension at Bad Wörishofen in 1909. Eliot’s career was launched after his year in Paris in 1910–11, absorbing the influences of Maurras, Bergson and Charles-Louis Philippe. Pound’s travels in Spain, France and Italy in 1907–8 concretised his life as a translator and lie behind A Lume Spento (1908) and The Spirit of Romance (1910). Wyndham Lewis’s travels in Holland, Spain and Germany and life as a bohemian artist in Paris and Brittany between 1902 and 1908 were formative, exposure to Bergson, Georges Sorel, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse shaping Tarr and his cubist-vorticist paintings. Mina Loy’s poems and plays are self-consciously futurist exercises in tourism, with Lunar Baedecker based on developing the expatriate experiences as art student in Europe and her life in Florence between 1907 and 1916. Pound’s versions of Cavalcanti, Li Po, Propertius, his translations and imitations from Greek, Old English, Italian, Provençal and French, and the translatory fragments embedded in the Cantos, testify to a lifetime’s attempt to embody in English the power of his source texts and cultures. Much of the output of Woolf’s Hogarth Press was original translations of foreign literature, notably their own versions of Ivan Bunin and Dostoyevsky. The Hogarth Press published the papers of the International psycho-analytical Institute, edited by Ernest Jones, including Freud’s Collected Papers (1924–5), Theodor Reik’s The Unknown Murderer (1936) and Anna Freud’s The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (1937). Eliot, aside from translating himself, notably the poetry of St 380

Translation John Perse, as editor of The Egoist 1917–19, founder and editor of The Criterion 1922–39, and literary editor at Faber & Faber 1925–65, commissioned translations of Jean Cocteau, Paul Valéry, Proust, Hermann Hesse, Eugenio Montale, as well as critical studies of Gourmont, Arthur Rimbaud and Maurras. Joyce was primarily interested in translation of his own work into other languages, famously supervising translations of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. He helped Georg Goyert on the 1927 German translation of Ulysses. He worked with Nino Frank on the Italian translation of ‘Anna Livia Plurabelle’. One of Samuel Beckett’s early and most difficult jobs was the translation of ‘Anna Livia Plurabelle’ into French. Other modernists were similarly caught up in the work of translation. Arthur Symons translated Emile Verhaeren, Guy de Maupassant, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Charles Baudelaire and Émile Zola. Richard Aldington, as editor of the periodical Egoist, contributed essays on French poetry and philosophy from 1914 to 1917 and translations from Greek and Latin in collaboration with H.D. Yeats translated Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex. Robert Graves translated Homer, Lucan, Terence, Apuleius, Manuel de Jesús Galván and Pedro de Alarcon. Louis and Celia Zukovsky did a phonemic translation of Catullus; Roy Campbell did translations of Federico Garcia Lorca and St John of the Cross; Basil Bunting translated Persian and Horace’s Odes; John Cournos was a prolific translator from Russian, mainly of Soviet writers; Gilbert Cannan published translations of Tatyana Aleksinskaya, Julien Benda, Romain Rolland, Valery Larbaud, Heinrich Heine’s Memoirs and Chekhov’s short stories (with S. S. Koteliansky). William Carlos Williams, following his trip to Paris in 1927–8, translated Philippe Soupault, in collaboration with his mother. Hugh MacDiarmid translated Blok into Scots as ‘A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle’ (1926), as well as a version of Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera. Edwin and Willa Muir’s translations of Franz Kafka between 1930 and 1948 were influential in the dissemination of his work. Louis MacNeice translated Aeschylus, Euripides and Goethe’s Faust. Among the many translations by W. H. Auden are: poems by St John Perse, C. P. Cavafy, Andrei Voznesensky, Cocteau, Brecht, Goldoni and Norse poetry. Beckett not only translated his own work, but undertook important translating projects before the war, including Mexican Poetry, and nineteen of the contributions to Henry Crowder and Nancy Cunard’s 1934 Negro: An Anthology. The evolution of Anglophone modernism was punctuated and 381

Translation heavily influenced by important translations: Arthur Symons’s translations of symbolist poetry and Baudelaire; William Archer’s Ibsen; Lady Gregory’s Cuchulain of Muirthemne; Arthur Walley’s translations from Chinese and Japanese; Scott Montcrieff’s Proust; Strachey’s Freud; Oscar Levy’s Nietzsche; translations of Bergson appearing in 1910 and 1911; Constance Garnett’s Dostoyevsky and Chekhov; the Muirs’ Kafka; Dorothy Bussy’s André Gide; Helen Lowe-Porter’s Thomas Mann; Mannheim’s and Willett’s Brecht; Mary Richards’ 1958 translation of Antonin Artaud’s Theatre and Its Double. Translation played a role in fostering differences between rival schools. The spur to the reactionary modernism of Eliot and Pound was undoubtedly T. E. Hulme’s polemical articles about art and culture which veered away from early advocacy of Bergson (and translation of Introduction to Metaphysics in 1913) towards a rhetoric of hard ‘clarity’ of representation. Similarly, Wyndham Lewis’s anti-Bloomsbury campaign is nurtured through satirical imitation of Proust in Apes of God (1930). Mina Loy’s radical feminism is defined in parodic opposition to Marinetti’s misogynistic Futurism. T. S. Eliot’s adoption of satirical free verse in his early years was indebted to readings (through translation) of the Baudelairean symbolists Jules Laforgue, Corbière, Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé. READING Benjamin, Walter (1923) ‘The Translator’s Task’, Illuminations, trans. Steven Rendall; (1998), TTR: traduction, terminologie, redaction, 10 (2): 151–65. Caneda Cabrera, M. Teresa (2008) ‘Polyglot Voices, Hybrid Selves and Foreign Identities: Translation as a Paradigm of Thought for Modernism’, Atlantis, 30 (1): 53–67. Clej, Alina (1997) ‘The Debt of the Translator: An Essay on Translation and Modernism’, symploke, 5 (1–2): 7–26. O’Neill, Patrick (2005) Polyglot Joyce: Fictions of Translation. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Patterson, Ian (2011) ‘Time, Free Verse, and the Gods of Modernism’, in Jan Parker and Timothy Mathews (eds), Tradition, Translation, Trauma: The Classic and the Modern. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Piette, Adam (2003) Introduction to Special Issue on Modernism and Translation, Translation and Literature, 12 (1): 1–17. Venuti, Lawrence (2008) The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. London: Routledge. Xie, Ming (1999) Ezra Pound and the Appropriation of Chinese Poetry: Cathay, Translation, and Imagism. London: Routledge. 382

Turn Yao, Steven (2002) Translation and the Languages of Modernism: Gender, Politics, Language. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Adam Piette

TURN The ‘turn’ as concept and term has it all: as noun, such as a turn in the road, some swerve or other leading somewhere else or a shift in intellectual direction, it denotes change and action. Gyration makes form, makes meaning. The verbal sense of the monosyllable may keep one returning to an original idea, it might deepen from those layerings or then exhaust itself in its whir. In W. B. Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’ (1919), the spinning both announces and defers an unsettling revelation: ‘Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold’. Turning toward, or away from, or into, calls for radical form changing – take James Joyce’s post-Homeric Circe turning men into animals and Leopold Bloom into a woman in one of the hallucinatory chapters of his Ulysses (1922), or reluctant bourgeois son Gregor Samsa turning ‘into a monstrous vermin’ in Franz Kafka’s 1915 novella Metamorphosis. In modernism, the most everyday of turns may lead to a furiously exciting result or epiphany, through outside means and agency, inner, voluntary or involuntary compulsions, or chance. Within those turns are couched the most ultimate of gestures in their emotional action: in Joyce’s ‘The Dead’, concluding story of Dubliners (1914), Gabriel Conroy’s personal and political defeat of sorts is marked by such a subtle swerve: ‘A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward.’ Recurrent in scenes generated by dream, desire and memory, turning gestures stand out in imaginative and visual space, momentarily arresting time: thus the young Tadzio in Lucchino Visconti’s 1971 cinematic adaptation of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (1912) looking towards Gustav von Aschenbach and then pointing out to the sea, or Marcel Proust’s narrator in À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27) as he reaches towards the hawthorn bush, turns away, and then once again turns in its direction. Residing in the ‘turn’, then, is a sense of play, never quieted, within the spiralling 383

The Uncanny meaning: pointing towards and away, that doubling gesture that sets the text and the gaze and the head to spinning. In that sense, the turn may also be the swerve or inclination towards freedom of all selfmoving things as expressed by the ancient concept of the clinamen adapted by modernist writers and theorists or embodied in modern dance. The turn is a noun that contains its own verb: taking a turn for the better or worse captures the sense of alteration, while the verb itself can gesture towards either outcome. Turning to French, the tour (turn), retour (return) and détour (detour) exemplify the power of language as thought in action. In a stronger sense, the late avant-garde technique of détournement (rerouting, hijacking), developed in the 1950s by the Paris-based lettrists and adapted by the Situationist International harnesses the modernist energies of the turn against tradition and the culture industry’s recuperation of radical forms. READING Caws, Mary Ann (2018) ‘Turnings’, in Julian Wolfreys (ed.), New Critical Thinking: Criticism to Come. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Debord, Guy and Wolman, Gil J. (1956) ‘A User’s Guide to Détournement’, trans. Ken Knabb, in Ken Knabb (ed.), Situationist International Anthology, rev. edn. Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets.

Mary Ann Caws

U THE UNCANNY The uncanny is a term that troubles definitions. Ernst Jentsch’s 1906 essay ‘On The Psychology of the Uncanny’ [Zur Psychologie des Unheimlichen] ventured an equation of the uncanny with the unfamiliar, but it was Sigmund Freud who both popularised the term for modern usage and uncovered its ambiguity in his 1919 essay ‘The Uncanny’ (Das Unheimliche). Freud shows that heimlich contains its own duality, as it means both the familiar, or homely, and the secret, or hidden: its ambivalence of meaning thus develops and coincides with the unheimlich, the unhomely. That paradox of the uncanny thus unfolds first in language and is captured in the signifier in which the concept is formalised. Taking E. T. A. Hoffmann’s 384

The Uncanny meaning: pointing towards and away, that doubling gesture that sets the text and the gaze and the head to spinning. In that sense, the turn may also be the swerve or inclination towards freedom of all selfmoving things as expressed by the ancient concept of the clinamen adapted by modernist writers and theorists or embodied in modern dance. The turn is a noun that contains its own verb: taking a turn for the better or worse captures the sense of alteration, while the verb itself can gesture towards either outcome. Turning to French, the tour (turn), retour (return) and détour (detour) exemplify the power of language as thought in action. In a stronger sense, the late avant-garde technique of détournement (rerouting, hijacking), developed in the 1950s by the Paris-based lettrists and adapted by the Situationist International harnesses the modernist energies of the turn against tradition and the culture industry’s recuperation of radical forms. READING Caws, Mary Ann (2018) ‘Turnings’, in Julian Wolfreys (ed.), New Critical Thinking: Criticism to Come. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Debord, Guy and Wolman, Gil J. (1956) ‘A User’s Guide to Détournement’, trans. Ken Knabb, in Ken Knabb (ed.), Situationist International Anthology, rev. edn. Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets.

Mary Ann Caws

U THE UNCANNY The uncanny is a term that troubles definitions. Ernst Jentsch’s 1906 essay ‘On The Psychology of the Uncanny’ [Zur Psychologie des Unheimlichen] ventured an equation of the uncanny with the unfamiliar, but it was Sigmund Freud who both popularised the term for modern usage and uncovered its ambiguity in his 1919 essay ‘The Uncanny’ (Das Unheimliche). Freud shows that heimlich contains its own duality, as it means both the familiar, or homely, and the secret, or hidden: its ambivalence of meaning thus develops and coincides with the unheimlich, the unhomely. That paradox of the uncanny thus unfolds first in language and is captured in the signifier in which the concept is formalised. Taking E. T. A. Hoffmann’s 384

Uranianism ‘The Sandman’ [Der Sandmann] as a case study, Freud demonstrates how what returns in the uncanny encounter with the Sandman, who threatens to remove children’s eyes, is the suppression of a childhood fear of blinding resulting in the castration complex. The essay brings together psychoanalysis and aesthetics in a literary reading that excavates Friedrich Schelling’s definition, quoted by Freud, of the uncanny as a revelation of that which is hidden coming to light; building on Jentsch, Freud designates the uncanny not as the unfamiliar but as the affective sensation evoked by that class of things that are at once strange and known: objects and experiences of the uncanny retain a fundamental ambivalence, revealing in the frightening a repression of that which has already been. READING Freud, Sigmund (2001) The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XVII, ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: Vintage, pp. 217–56. Masschelein, Anneleen (2012) The Unconcept: The Freudian Uncanny in Late Twentieth-Century Theory. New York: SUNY Press. Royle, Nicholas (2003) The Uncanny. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Weber, Samuel (1973) ‘The Sideshow, or: Remarks on a Canny Moment’, MLN, 88 (6): 1102–33.

Maria-Daniella Dick

URANIANISM The German jurist and homophile campaigner Karl Heinrich Ulrichs first coined the terms ‘Uranier’ and ‘Urning’ in the 1860s. Drawing on the discussion of Uranian love in Plato’s Symposium, Ulrichs sought to offer an affirmative explanation of same-sex desire between men. He maintained that Urnings differed from ‘true’ men (so-called ‘Dionäer’ or ‘Dionings’) in that they belonged to a third sex and combined male and female physical and psychological characteristics. Ulrichs’s terminology was introduced into English by John Addington Symonds in his privately published A Problem in Modern Ethics (1891). Edward Carpenter’s Intermediate Sex (1908) helped to popularise the term further among an English audience that included authors like D. H. Lawrence and members of the bloomsbury group, such as E. M. Forster and Lytton Strachey. In its various appropriations, Uranianism served to describe different spiritual and physical attachments between men, which were often linked to forms 385

Utopia of androgyny. Uranian love, understood more narrowly as the relationship between an older man and a younger man or boy, was also celebrated by the so-called ‘Uranian poets’, including William Johnson Cory, George Cecil Ives and Charles Kains Jackson. More rarely, Uranianism was also appropriated in a feminist context, for instance by the editors of the radical inter-war journal Urania. READING D’Arch Smith, Timothy (1970) Love in Earnest: Some Notes on the Lives and Writings of English ‘Uranian’ Poets from 1889 to 1930. New York: Routledge. Dowling, Linda (1994) Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Kennedy, Hubert (1997) ‘Karl Heinrich Ulrichs: First Theorist of Homosexuality’, in Vernon A. Rosario (ed.), Science and Homosexualities. New York: Routledge. Oram, Alison (1998) ‘“Sex is an Accident”: Feminism, Science and the Radical Sexual Theory of Urania, 1915–40’, in Laura Doan and Lucy Bland (eds), Sexology in Culture: Labelling Bodies and Desires. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Jana Funke

UTOPIA Meaning both an ideal place and no place, utopia is the name of a literary genre going back to Thomas More in the sixteenth century, and as a philosophical experiment designed to challenge aspects of present social organisation it can be traced back to Plato’s Republic. Since the time of the French revolution, modernism in political thought has been defined positively as the attempt to realise an ideal vision of society and negatively as the imposition of abstract plans onto the complexity of reality. The avant-garde desire to break with history and tradition involves the same ambiguity – and has been closely linked to political and social renewal. Post-war social theory tended to identify utopia with totalitarianism. More defensively, after 1945 art is repeatedly linked to utopia through accounts of its autonomy: its difference, however construed, from the social world. For the frankfurt school, the artwork signals an unachievable promise of a better world that can be connected to the mimetic impulse at the basis of the work of art. Philosophers such as Ernst Bloch and Paul Ricœur have rehabilitated utopia as an essential aspect of human existence: our hopes for a 386

Verfremdungseffekt better future, present in our desires and the products of our imagination, and forming a spur to our critique of the present. READING Bloch, Ernst (1986) The Principle of Hope, 3 vols, trans. Neville Plaice, Steven Plaice and Paul Knight. Oxford: Blackwell. Bloch, Ernst (2000) The Spirit of Utopia, trans. Anthony A. Nassar. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Buck-Morss, Susan (2000) Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Levitas, Ruth (2013) Utopia as Method: The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society. London: Palgrave. Ricoeur, Paul (1986) Lectures on Ideology and Utopia. New York: Columbia University Press.

Alex Thomson

V VERFREMDUNGSEFFEKT The Verfremdungseffekt is the basis of the performance technique of Bertolt Brecht’s epic theatre, and is employed to distance the actor from his or her character in order to shift the spectator’s attention away from empathy and identification and towards an engagement with the characters’ social and political circumstances. During Brecht’s visit to Moscow in 1936, the Soviet playwright Sergei Tretyakov introduced Brecht to the Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky’s concept ostranenie, or ‘estrangement’, of which Brecht’s term is a part translation (dungs is Old German for ‘strange’). The word has been variously translated into English as ‘defamiliarisation effect’, ‘distanciation’ and ‘alienation effect’. Brecht first used the term in his essay ‘Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting’ (1936), where he describes the effect of witnessing the formal distance between the actor and her emotions in Mei Lan-Fang’s Beijing Opera Company. In Brecht’s method, the actor shows, narrates or quotes his character; the actor would demonstrate the role, often directly addressing the audience, observing his or her character as though in the third person. Stage design, lighting and music also contribute to the Verfremdungseffekt by exposing the fictive, constructed nature of the play. The overall effect would break the hypnotic spell of 387

Verfremdungseffekt better future, present in our desires and the products of our imagination, and forming a spur to our critique of the present. READING Bloch, Ernst (1986) The Principle of Hope, 3 vols, trans. Neville Plaice, Steven Plaice and Paul Knight. Oxford: Blackwell. Bloch, Ernst (2000) The Spirit of Utopia, trans. Anthony A. Nassar. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Buck-Morss, Susan (2000) Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Levitas, Ruth (2013) Utopia as Method: The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society. London: Palgrave. Ricoeur, Paul (1986) Lectures on Ideology and Utopia. New York: Columbia University Press.

Alex Thomson

V VERFREMDUNGSEFFEKT The Verfremdungseffekt is the basis of the performance technique of Bertolt Brecht’s epic theatre, and is employed to distance the actor from his or her character in order to shift the spectator’s attention away from empathy and identification and towards an engagement with the characters’ social and political circumstances. During Brecht’s visit to Moscow in 1936, the Soviet playwright Sergei Tretyakov introduced Brecht to the Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky’s concept ostranenie, or ‘estrangement’, of which Brecht’s term is a part translation (dungs is Old German for ‘strange’). The word has been variously translated into English as ‘defamiliarisation effect’, ‘distanciation’ and ‘alienation effect’. Brecht first used the term in his essay ‘Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting’ (1936), where he describes the effect of witnessing the formal distance between the actor and her emotions in Mei Lan-Fang’s Beijing Opera Company. In Brecht’s method, the actor shows, narrates or quotes his character; the actor would demonstrate the role, often directly addressing the audience, observing his or her character as though in the third person. Stage design, lighting and music also contribute to the Verfremdungseffekt by exposing the fictive, constructed nature of the play. The overall effect would break the hypnotic spell of 387

Vorticism identification in the minds of the audience, forcing them rationally to consider how the character’s plight is fundamentally an aspect not of a self-contained fictive world but of real social, political and economic institutions, and to instill the desire to imagine alternative structures. The influence of the Verfremdungseffekt on both theatre and cinema is an aspect of the wide-ranging legacy of epic theatre. READING Brecht, Bertolt (1964) Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett. London: Methuen. Robinson, Douglas (2008) Estrangement and the Somatics of Literature: Tolstoy, Shklovsky, Brecht. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Anthony Paraskeva

VORTICISM Vorticism was a pan-artistic avant-garde movement that flourished briefly in London during 1913–15, with an attempted revival in 1919. The main organising force behind the movement was the Canadian-born artist and writer Wyndham Lewis, supported by the considerable energies of the American poet and promoter Ezra Pound, who abandoned imagism for the new project. Working under the banner of Vorticism were a number of painters and sculptors, including Lewis himself, Edward Wadsworth, Helen Saunders, Cuthbert Hamilton, Frederick Etchells, William Roberts, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Jacob Epstein, David Bomberg, Jessica Dismorr and Kate Lechmere. The philosopher, critic and sometime Imagist poet T. E. Hulme contributed to the movement’s theoretical foundation, while the American photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn was a late adherent, exhibiting a series of groundbreaking ‘Vortographs’ at the Camera Club in London in 1917. Although at the time Vorticism was viewed by some critics as merely an English offshoot of futurism, it is more accurately described as an adoption and synthesis of, as well as a reaction to, a whole range of ‘isms’ which also included cubism and expressionism. The resulting blend of abstraction, geometric shapes and a machine Age aesthetic made Vorticism one of very few examples of an original avant-garde movement in twentieth-century Britain. In terms of its substantial (if not always consistent) theoretical foundations, Vorticism shares many of its aesthetic principles with the earlier Imagism. The common denominator for both movements, besides Pound, is Hulme, who in the pre-war years gave lectures, 388

Vorticism wrote art criticism for The New Age, and acted as a conduit (and translator) for the ideas of leading European theorists such as Henri Bergson (Creative Evolution), Georges Sorel (Reflections on Violence) and Wilhelm Worringer (Abstraction and Empathy). Hulme forcefully rejected the Victorian past that still lingered in London, promoting instead the Classicism, abstraction, and hard, ‘masculine’ aesthetic that were characteristics of both Imagism and Vorticism. (It was Hulme, along with Lewis and other Vorticists, who disrupted the Italian Futurist leader Marinetti’s poetic re-enactment of the Battle of Adrianople at the Doré Galleries in June 1914 with heckling and fireworks, causing the night to end in violence.) The literary and theoretical dimension which Hulme, Pound and Lewis lent to Vorticism and which was exemplified in the little magazine Blast (1914–15) set the movement apart from other groups on the scene at the time, including the Camden Town Group and the London Group. In addition to the contributions of Hulme, several other major landmarks in the development of Vorticism are worth noting. The first is stylistic: in the summer of 1912 Lewis’s paintings and drawings, including his decorations for Frida Strindberg’s Cave of the Golden Calf night club and the large canvas Kermesse (now lost), began to show signs of the cubo-futurist synthesis of dynamism and abstract geometrical shapes that would define his Vorticist works of the next three years. Another turning point was the sudden departure in October 1913 of Lewis and other future signatories of the Blast manifesto from Roger Fry’s Omega Workshops following a dispute. Pound coined the name Vorticism as early as 1913, but it was not until the spring of 1914 that the new ‘ism’ appeared publicly in print. For Pound, the ‘vortex’ suggested a literary or artistic image ‘from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing’. It also represented the urban metropolis of London: ‘the point of maximum energy’. In March 1914 Lewis persuaded Kate Lechmere to provide financial backing for the movement’s headquarters: the Rebel Art Centre, located at 38 Great Ormond Street, not far from ‘Mr. Fry’s curtain and pin cushion factory’ in Bloomsbury. The final step to a fully fledged avant-garde movement was taken on 2 July 1914, when the first issue of Blast, with its lurid pink covers and expletive title in all capital letters, appeared on London newsstands. The date of publication is significant, as it came only a few days after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo and a month before Britain declared war on Germany, effectively putting an end to the avant-garde that had flourished 389

Vorticism in Europe for the previous decade. Originally intended to be a quarterly, Blast appeared only twice: once in 1914 and once more with the khaki-coloured ‘War Issue’ that appeared on 15 July of the following year. Despite its brief run, the two issues of Blast, like the manifestos of Italian Futurism, are arguably the movement’s most lasting contribution to twentieth-century art. First there is the striking appearance, the layout and typography, which made an indelible imprint on modern graphic art and publishing. The content, while uneven (as Lewis himself admitted), includes not only a wealth of visual art and manifestos but also poems by Pound and T. S. Eliot, a highly experimental play by Lewis (‘Enemy of the Stars’), and fiction by Rebecca West and Ford Madox Hueffer (later Ford), whose ‘The Saddest Story’ is an excerpt from The Good Soldier (1915). Most famous of all are the ‘blasts’ and ‘blesses’, which follow the ‘construction’ / ‘destruction’ and ‘merde aux . . .’ / ‘rose aux . . .’ lists of Guillaume Apollinaire’s highly visual manifesto-poem, ‘L’Antitradition futuriste’ (1913). The idiosyncratic and iconoclastic lists of people and places lauded or damned (in some cases both) in the pages of Blast anticipate the nihilistic humour of dada and paint a vivid picture of pre-war London society as a place of claustrophobic intimacy. As Lewis would later recall, it was a time of relative innocence when everyone felt ‘safe as houses’ and even an artist could become a celebrity – a state of things that ended quickly with the outbreak of war. As World War I drew on, the experiments of the avant-garde were put on hold, for the most part indefinitely. Gaudier-Brzeska was killed in the trenches before the second issue of Blast came out, followed by the death of Hulme in 1917. Lewis enlisted as a gunner and bombardier in 1916. He and Bomberg went on to join a Canadian regiment as war artists in 1917, and Wadsworth oversaw the painting of ‘dazzle’ camouflage on warships in 1917–18. The Vorticists managed to put on one group show in London, at the Doré Galleries in the summer of 1915; a second show was organised by Pound and the collector John Quinn in New York in 1917. After the war Lewis, supported by Pound (who wrote an article refuting ‘The Death of Vorticism’ in The Little Review), attempted to revive the movement with a third planned issue of Blast and a manifesto entitled The Caliph’s Design: Architects! Where Is Your Vortex? (1919). Lewis organised an exhibition of Group X, comprised mainly of Vorticists, at the Mansard Gallery in London in 1920, but soon thereafter abandoned all collective activities in favour of a solitary 390

Wagnerism existence and new identity as ‘The Enemy’, while Pound abandoned London for Paris. READING Antliff, Mark and Vivien Greene (eds) (2010) The Vorticists: Manifesto for a Modern World. London: Tate. Cork, Richard (1976) Vorticism and Abstract Art in the First Machine Age, 2 vols. London: Fraser. Lewis, Wyndham (1981 [1914–15]), BLAST 1 and BLAST 2. Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow. Wees, William C. (1972) Vorticism and the English Avant-garde. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Julian Hanna

W WAGNERISM Richard Wagner was arguably the most important figure in ­nineteenth-century opera. He was certainly the most controversial, especially when it came to his theoretical and polemical prose, to the ambitious stage-pieces that occupied the last thirty-five years of his life (Tristan and Isolde, The Mastersingers, the four-opera Ring cycle and Parsifal) and to his establishment in 1876 of the Festival Theatre at Bayreuth in Bavaria for the performance of his works. Factions pro and con formed and skirmished, with the composer’s admirers coming to be known as ‘Wagnerites’, ‘wagnéristes’ and so on. Their Wagnerism – a term already current in English in the 1860s – was of several often-overlapping stripes. For many of the music-lovers among them, the appeal lay simply in Wagner’s music as such: the ‘unending melody’, the new harmonic richness, the ‘Leitmotifs’, the apocalyptic climaxes. Some of its admirers (to the annoyance of Wagner himself) called it ‘the music of the future’, and its influence on other composers could be heard in a host of scores for opera house and concert hall from roughly the 1870s to the 1910s. For other Wagnerites the appeal lay in the achievement of their composer-librettist hero in annexing the resources of the ‘grand opera’ and nascent national opera of previous decades, transforming them through an intense, quasi-‘Greek’ focus on the action, characters and momentous issues of the plot, and so creating engrossing ‘music 391

Wagnerism existence and new identity as ‘The Enemy’, while Pound abandoned London for Paris. READING Antliff, Mark and Vivien Greene (eds) (2010) The Vorticists: Manifesto for a Modern World. London: Tate. Cork, Richard (1976) Vorticism and Abstract Art in the First Machine Age, 2 vols. London: Fraser. Lewis, Wyndham (1981 [1914–15]), BLAST 1 and BLAST 2. Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow. Wees, William C. (1972) Vorticism and the English Avant-garde. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Julian Hanna

W WAGNERISM Richard Wagner was arguably the most important figure in ­nineteenth-century opera. He was certainly the most controversial, especially when it came to his theoretical and polemical prose, to the ambitious stage-pieces that occupied the last thirty-five years of his life (Tristan and Isolde, The Mastersingers, the four-opera Ring cycle and Parsifal) and to his establishment in 1876 of the Festival Theatre at Bayreuth in Bavaria for the performance of his works. Factions pro and con formed and skirmished, with the composer’s admirers coming to be known as ‘Wagnerites’, ‘wagnéristes’ and so on. Their Wagnerism – a term already current in English in the 1860s – was of several often-overlapping stripes. For many of the music-lovers among them, the appeal lay simply in Wagner’s music as such: the ‘unending melody’, the new harmonic richness, the ‘Leitmotifs’, the apocalyptic climaxes. Some of its admirers (to the annoyance of Wagner himself) called it ‘the music of the future’, and its influence on other composers could be heard in a host of scores for opera house and concert hall from roughly the 1870s to the 1910s. For other Wagnerites the appeal lay in the achievement of their composer-librettist hero in annexing the resources of the ‘grand opera’ and nascent national opera of previous decades, transforming them through an intense, quasi-‘Greek’ focus on the action, characters and momentous issues of the plot, and so creating engrossing ‘music 391

War dramas’ somewhat akin in performance to religious ritual and hence magically appropriate to ‘temple’ ambiences like that of Bayreuth. (Wagner’s wizardry in this had an especial appeal for French and Russian symbolists.) A third Wagnerism gave priority to one issue that was to be found in differing forms throughout the later operas: the overthrow or purification of an inadequate old order, impelled by hopes for some kind of regeneration-renewal-redemption. This was read in various ways. Some admirers, such as Bernard Shaw in his account of the first three Ring operas (The Perfect Wagnerite, 1898), saw it as an image of social/socialist revolution reflecting Wagner’s own leftist revolutionary activities of half a century before. The Russian poet Alexander Blok similarly felt in 1918 that ‘when revolution begins to sound in the air, Wagner’s art resounds in response’. But others, among them the composer’s associate Hans von Wolzogen and son-in-law Houston Stewart Chamberlain, saw it as an inspiration for fervid Teutonic nationalism and an idealistic cleansing of the race. Adolf Hitler would come to revere Chamberlain, and would lay a wreath on Wolzogen’s grave. READING Furness, Raymond (1982) Wagner and Literature. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Large, David L. and Weber, William (eds) (1984) Wagnerism in European Culture and Politics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Roger Savage

WAR high modernism straddles and includes World War I – it is the war which draws into its future maelstrom the avant-garde movements from 1909 to 1914, infecting them with the militarism and masculine bravado of an already propagandising war culture. Thus we have the ‘glorification of war’ and ‘contempt for women’ of F. T. Marinetti’s futurist Manifesto of 1909; the geometrical war machines and bullyboy rhetoric of Wyndham Lewis’s Blast; the drum-taps and strutting implicit in Ezra Pound’s translations; and the pre-war Browningesque dramatic monologues with their identification of hard, tough composition with military bravura. These Nietzschean texts draw energy from the surrounding fever of nations preparing themselves for war, seduced by the imperial posturing of the Triple Entente as they outfaced the provocations of the Central Powers in Morocco and the Balkans. As war approached, prose writers zeroed

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War in on the militarism theme and the idea of an intimate enemy. D. H. Lawrence’s ‘A Prussian Officer’ (1914) stages the homoerotic death lust of an aristocrat officer for his orderly, the ‘gratification of his passion’ at war with ‘a counter-action’ within, this division miming the struggle between the two men. Lawrence’s staging of the orderly’s revolt and murder of his officer imagines the revolutionary potential of war (warfare arms and trains the lower ranks while exposing the unreality and injustice of class control systems); at the same time the story explores the psychosexual motivations structuring war energies. It does both things, though, as a targeted probing of the enemy’s psyche, Prussian warmongering revealed as secret homoerotic death wish. With the war underway, modernist writers split into rival camps: those who embraced the war as propagandists or pro-militarists (T. E. Hulme or Ford Madox Ford, for instance); those who enlisted or were conscripted, observing the war with dispassion or mounting horror (Wyndham Lewis, the war poets, Isaac Rosenberg, David Jones); non-combatants and women experiencing the home front (T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf); and conscientious objectors (John Rodker, D. H. Lawrence). The war exposed the military bluster of the pre-war avant-garde as egregious sham, most notably revealing the war machine as an extraordinarily hellish materialisation of the Futurist celebration of technology. The ironies were admitted by those caught up in the industrial state apparatus of death, Lewis in his memoir Blasting and Bombadiering (1937) noting how his own blasts at Victorian culture had been coopted as artillery battery skills, blasting the German lines with real ordinance. Literary life of a sort scrawled on with combatant writing alongside city modernist intellectuals. The second number of Blast (1915) reflected on the conflict as irrelevant to the modernist project (as Gaudier-Brzeska argues), yet Lewis himself in the editorial pieces is alarmed and impressed by the ‘blood-letting [. . .] so impressive and appalling’, admiring and fearing the ways the war had spread ‘under the ground, up in the air and [. . .] down to the bed of the ocean’, and at the same time attacking critics who saw the war as terminating modernism. Gaudier-Brzeska attempts to distinguish between his purely aesthetic interest in ‘lines and planes’, yet admits to a ‘nasty feeling’ seeing the German hill of ‘gentle slopes [. . .] broken by earth-works’. The unconscious of modernist aesthetics traces the militarisation of lines and planes in a war-technologised enemy world. Similarly, John Rodker’s poetry of conscientious objection, ‘A C.O.’s Biography’, 393

War explores erotic fantasy of the mind alone in its cell, fantasy that is mixed in with fears of incarceration within war culture’s systems (‘a miserable gannet caught by wire’). The primitivism of the bloodletting in the trenches infiltrates the imagination of combatant and non-combatant alike, establishing a zone of the political unconscious of militarised-erotic memory and desire. The shell shock suffered by soldiers and tracked in poems and memoirs of the war (e.g. Owen’s ‘Mental Cases’, Sassoon on Craiglockhart) is mimed by the hallucinations endured by non-combatants, like Katherine Mansfield seeing the ghost-body of her dead brother crawling out of her lawn at night. This unholy merging of war and dream was exacerbated if anything by the hideous censorship and John Bull patriotic bullying of the warfare state. Lawrence in Kangaroo (1923) notes the ways the state humiliated objectors, and signalled the emergence of a police state in Britain after 1916. That state emerges in dream form in the writing of the period – modernism embraces paranoia in its wake, not only in the anti-establishment rhetoric of the war poems (Rosenberg witnessing the civilian conscript crunching under the ‘rushing wheels’ of the war machine in ‘Dead Man’s Dump’), but also in the hysteria of the sexual politics (Eliot’s ‘Hysteria’ dreams of stopping the ‘shaking of her breasts’ as the enemy woman laughs) and the emergence of ­surrealist visions of European battlefields (the Dardanelles in The Waste Land, for instance). Intimations of the relationship between historical change and war were magnified by the Irish Rebellion in Easter 1916 and the Russian Revolution in 1917. The former established, for W. B. Yeats, a mythologising of the ‘terrible beauty’ of war-generated change, and drew the Irish Revival into Irish modernism as a rapt contemplation of violent history. The Russian Revolution prepared the ground for the emergence of revolutionary extreme politics on the right and left expressed by ex-combatant fanatics. The inter-war years saw the emergence, too, of war modernism as an aftermath and proleptic form of writing. As aftermath, World War I lived on as trauma in the minds of the silent men wracked by trench experience, as explored by Eliot in The Waste Land (1922), Virginia Woolf in Mrs Dalloway (1925) and Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End (1924–8), with its extraordinary rewrite of the divisions of the mind studied in modernist impressionism become shell-shocked trauma under war conditions. Memoirs followed, notably Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That (1929), as well as novelised memoirs of combat (e.g. Frederic Manning’s Her Privates We (1930), John Dos Passos’s Three Soldiers 394

War (1920)) and accounts of conchie resistance (Rodker’s Memoirs of Other Fronts (1932)). Though Yeats famously banished the war poets from The Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936) (‘passive suffering is not a theme for poetry’), it is now clear that images of the trenches enter deep into modernist inter-war projects as memory and nightmare. David Jones’s In Parenthesis understands the waste land as the trenches and explores the enmeshing of lethal technology with history and myth. Ernest Hemingway’s short stories looked back at his experience on the Italian Front and gauged the obsession with violence, broken speech patterns and masculinity as symptoms of the war. In many ways what ‘lost’ the Lost Generation was the bloodletting at the fronts, replayed as hunting, sex, war and bullfight in the aftermath. As a proleptic, World War I pointed the way to World War II, just as the extremist politics of Soviet communism and Italian and German fascism grew out of the combatant populations. As modernism suffered its political turn in the 1930s, intellectuals took increasingly extreme positions on the future war, as anti-fascist struggle with the Popular Front, or as fascist revolution with sympathisers such as Pound and Roy Campbell. Woolf’s Three Guineas (1938) argued that the war impulse was fascistic and patriarchal. Auden’s 1930s poetry merged psychoanalysis and politics and staged modes of neurosis as guerilla resistance movements in the home state become the enemy’s country. With the sickness visible at Munich in 1938 and with the Nazi-Soviet Pact and the disaster of the Spanish Civil War, novels such as Stevie Smith’s Over the Frontier (1938) and Rex Warner’s The Professor (1938) pondered the contradictions of fascist, anti-fascist and revolutionary war as deep neurosis, miming the deep trance-like inwardness of a population sleepwalking to war. Modernism moved inwards, with Surrealist texts identifying violent history with dream – surrealism dreamt of war and destruction in its paranoid phase: David Gascoyne’s work, particularly Poems 1937–1942, envision war as a powerful deep drive; and the first recognisably late modernist texts, James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939) or Beckett’s Watt (1953), cross the terrible war-scarred Irish historical landscape of the twentieth century (the war for independence and the civil war) with the inner wordscapes of the imagination deranged and asleep, drifting towards the general psychosis of World War II.

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Woman Question READING Cole, Sarah (2003) Modernism, Male Friendship, and the First World War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gilbert, Sandra M. (1999) ‘“Rats’ Alley”: The Great War, Modernism, and the (Anti)Pastoral Elegy’, New Literary History, 30 (1): 179–201. Hynes, Samuel (1991) A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture. New York: Atheneum. McKay, Marina (2007) Modernism and World War II. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Peppis, Paul (2000) Literature, Politics, and the English Avant-Garde: Nation and Empire, 1901–1918. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sherry, Vincent (2003) The Great War and the Language of Modernism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, Angela K. (2000) The Second Battlefield: Women, Modernism and the First World War. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Tate, Trudi (1998) Modernism, History and the First World War. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Adam Piette

WOMAN QUESTION An expression that refers to the issue of women’s rights and exploration of women’s ‘nature’ which gained prominence from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. Significant studies on the Woman Question from the period include: John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women (1869); Theodore Stanton (ed.), The Woman Question in Europe: A Series of Original Essays (1884); Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics (1898); and Olive Schreiner, Woman and Labour (1911). The Woman Question incorporated concerns such as contraception, the policing of women’s sexuality, including prostitution and the Contagious Diseases Acts, marriage and divorce, ‘rational’ dress, employment, legal and property rights, and votes for women. Increased interest in gender relations and moves towards sex reforms were concurrent with the development of sexology (the science of sex), suffragism and the emergence of the new woman. The sense of urgency and impact of the Woman Question continued well into the twentieth century. In 1928 all women in the United Kingdom over the age of 21 were given the vote, and a year later Virginia Woolf published A Room of One’s Own (1929), in which she stated: ‘No age can ever have been as stridently sex-conscious as our own’ (Woolf 1992: 129). 396

Word and image READING Ardis, Ann (1990) New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Crawford, Elizabeth (1999) The Women’s Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide 1866–1928. London: University College London Press. Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar (1994) No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, 3 vols. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Woolf, Virginia (1992) A Room of One’s Own/Three Guineas. Oxford: Oxford University Press (first published 1929).

Jade Munslow Ong

WORD AND IMAGE During the Enlightenment, the German dramatist and philosopher Gottfried Ephraim Lessing had declared that verbal and visual media should be seen as constitutively different from each other. In analysing painting and poetry in his Laokoon oder über die Grenzen der Mahlerey und Poesie (1766) (Laocoon: or, The limits of Poetry and Painting), he was led to the conclusion that these two media impose necessary constraints on their respective representative capacities. For Lessing, the terrain of poetry was that of action and time; painting, on the other hand, was fundamentally an art grounded in space. Modernism, however, in many ways sought to dismantle the apparently binary distinctions of word and image implied by such definitions. The poets and artists of such avant-garde movements as dada and futurism exploited the necessary switches of attention involved in reading that lead from looking at the graphic outline of individual characters on the page to discerning patterns of meaning among verbal signs in phrases and sentences and at the level of whole texts. Texts were a vehicle for meaning, but they could henceforth also be understood as a series of visible marks in print and aural sounds which offer themselves up to playful and subversive forms of fragmentation and re-composition. Where they were combined, word and image could offer a playful reciprocal commentary on one another, extending and amplifying possibilities of signification. The French Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé’s ‘Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard’ (‘A throw of the dice will never abolish chance’, 1897) can be considered as inaugural in this respect. Words are scattered across the page in a work which exploits elements such as a double-page format, the two-dimensionality and whiteness of the 397

Word and image page and the distinctive visual characteristics of no less than eleven different typefaces. This practice of spatialisation allows the latent, unconscious implications of language to emerge, as is conveyed by the poem’s concluding formula: ‘Toute Pensée émet un Coup de Dés’ (‘Every Thought emits a Throw of the Dice’). Although the increasing imbrication of the verbal and the visual is undoubtedly associated with movements of the avant-garde, it also bound up strongly with popular experience and the growth of mass culture. Guillaume Apollinaire’s collection calligrammes: Poèmes de la paix et de la guerre 1913–1916 (Calligrammes: Poems of Peace and War 1913–1916, 1918) explores the ways in which the spatial disposition of words in often non-linear ways across the page can create visual images. In the poem ‘Du Coton dans les oreilles’ (‘Cotton in your ears’), for instance, abrupt variations in typeface convey the exploding of shells and other auditory and visual sensations associated with the experience of war. Likewise, the Italian futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s poem ‘Zang Tumb Tumb’ (1914) is a visionary typographic rendering of gunfire and explosions witnessed at the Siege of Adrianopole during the First Balkan war. Marinetti’s influential concept of ‘parole in libertà’ (‘words in freedom’) dispensed with conventional syntax and urged investigation into the acoustic and pictorial dimensions of language. Italian Futurist texts often featured mathematical symbols or onomatopoeic renderings of audible sounds. Type also emerged as an expressive medium in the work of the Russian futurist Ilya Zdanevich whose published play ЛидантЮ фАрам (Ledentu as Beacon, 1923) attempted to correlate pronunciation and typographic presentation. Futurists of the Russian school, moreover, issued prodigious numbers of highly individualised handmade books as if to scorn the culture of mass print. Hungarian bauhaus artist Lázló Moholy-Nagy combined original approaches to the illustrated book, photography and typesetting in Malerei, Fotografie, Film (Painting, Photography, Film, 1925). In the visual arts, the emergence of the practice of collage marks a point of transition in works by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso from analytical cubism to the movement’s later synthetic phase. The movement of vorticism in British art and poetry associated with Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis rejected a static, mimetic understanding of the image and embraced instead the ‘moving energies’ released through visually derived processes of fragmentation and juxtaposition. Berlin dada artists John Heartfield (born Helmut Herzfeld) and 398

Working class Hannah Höch incorporated newspaper cuttings into their practice of photomontage, recognising the opportunities it presented for satirising capitalist, fascist and Nazi targets and subverting the conventions of the mass press. While the arresting graphic characteristics of the newspaper are one fertile source of inspiration for the period, poster design also encouraged visual experiments in poetry, notably in the ‘poèmes-affiches’ (‘poster-poems’) of the French poet and dramatist Pierre-Albert Birot, such as ‘Je vous dis que ce gris est rose . . .’ (‘I tell you this grey is pink . . .’). One possible angle of approach to the field of word-image relations in modernism is offered by semiology/semiotics. Whereas linguistics is specifically the scientific study of language and its structure, semiotics is concerned with signs and symbols. Semiotics offers various analytical tools for deconstructing any given combination of word and image and thinking about how it works in relation to broader systems of meaning in the form of ideology. READING Bohn, Willard (2001) Modern Visual Poetry. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses. Drucker, Johanna (1994) The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909–1923. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Game, Jerome (ed.) (2007) Porous Boundaries: Texts and Images in Twentieth-Century French Culture. Oxford: Peter Lang. Mitchell, W. J. T. (1996) ‘Word and Image’, in Robert Nelson and Richard Shiff (eds), Critical Terms for Art History. London: University of Chicago Press, pp. 51–61. Scott, David (2010) Poetics of the Poster: Rhetoric of Image-Text. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

Greg Kerr

WORKING CLASS Working-class figures tend to be at the margins of literary representation around 1900. Exceptions are Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895), Gerhart Hauptmann’s The Weavers (1892), Jack London’s The People of the Abyss (1903) and the early fiction of Maxim Gorky. Despite this marginalisation, forms of working-class culture and mass culture are present at the birth of modernism. Thomas Crow argues that Édouard Manet’s paintings of the 1860s (e.g. Olympia, 1863) draw their subversive force from their depictions of Parisian lowlife. According to 399

Working class Crow, modern artists continually adopt low-cultural forms in order ‘to displace and estrange the deadening givens of accepted practice’. From impressionism onwards, time and time again we encounter bourgeois modernist subcultures which define themselves through stylistic and behavioural transgression as a means to reinforce group identity. For Crow, this ‘dissonant mixing of class signifiers’ is central to the formation of the avant-garde. Modernists from Picasso and Braque onwards appropriate elements of mass culture and workingclass culture by means of collage. The technique of collage allows for the inclusion of working-class voices and idiom into modernist literature. Many bourgeois modernists adopt a vernacular register in their work. Working-class speech enters forcefully into the poetry of Rudyard Kipling, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Alexander Blok, into the modernist fictions of James Joyce and Alfred Döblin, and into the modernist plays of Bertolt Brecht. In France, the use of Parisian argot in Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s picaresque novel Journey to the End of the Night (Voyage au bout de la nuit, 1932) made a big splash. English modernists, too, found inspiration in vernacular idioms. The landmark anthology The Poet’s Tongue (1935), edited by W. H. Auden and John Garrett, contains a selection of ‘plebeian’ texts including ‘The Ballad of Casey Jones’, hymns, pop songs and comic opera (W. S. Gilbert). More influentially, George Orwell cultivated a plain, down-to-earth prose style, modelled on his nineteenth-century predecessor, the journalist William Cobbett. Orwell set out his reflections on the importance of plain English in his essay ‘Politics and the English Language’ (1946). Having considered the adoption of working-class language by bourgeois writers, let us now turn to a consideration of modern classics produced by genuinely working-class writers. The Scottish modernist Hugh MacDiarmid (real name Christopher Murray Grieve) was the son of a postman. Mainly self-educated, he produced landmark poetry in Scots including the collection Sangschaw (1925) and the long poem A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926). Decades later, in the ‘Third Hymn to Lenin’ (1957), MacDiarmid takes a swipe at rival poets W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender who experimented with communism in the 1930s. MacDiarmid dismisses Auden and Spender as ‘yellow twicers’ and comments: ‘Unlike the pseudos I am of – not for – the working class.’ Another working-class writer of this period was Walter Greenwood, with his novel Love on the Dole (1933). The original ‘angry young man’ was Leslie Paul, the founder of the Woodcraft Folk, with his influential biography Angry Young Man (1951). 400

Working class In the 1920s a new class of proletarian intelligentsia developed in the Soviet Union, fostered by proletkult, the institute of proletarian culture. Working-class Soviet poets of this decade include Mikhail Gerasimov, Vladimir Kirillov and Andrei Platonov. Other experiments in the development of working-class culture at this time include ‘Red Vienna’ (1919–34) and Weimar Berlin (1918–33). Berlin in the late 1920s and early 1930s was home to large numbers of agitprop theatre groups affiliated to the German Communist Party (KPD). Agitprop groups included the Agitators, Column Left, Red Blouses, Red Dancers, the Red Hammer, Red Megaphone, Red Wedding and the Riveters. They played in tenement courtyards, in the countryside and at factory meetings. Much that is considered typical of Weimar culture was either produced with a working-class audience in mind or originated with the working class itself. Four working-class writers who are particularly worthy of note are: (1) Marieluise Fleißer, a blacksmith’s daughter and a Bavarian playwright who influenced Bertolt Brecht. Her two most famous plays are Purgatory in Ingolstadt (1926) and Pioneers in Ingolstadt (1929); the latter caused a scandal when it premiered in Berlin. During the Third Reich her works were banned. She returned to Bavaria and spent over two decades running a tobacconist’s shop. (2) The Hungarian poet Attila József, the son of a laundress. His poetry delivers a stunning fusion of marxism and psychoanalysis. (3) Arturo Barea, also son of a laundress. His three-volume autobiography The Forging of a Rebel (La Forja de un Rebelde, 1941–6), first published in English translation, is one of the seminal accounts of the Spanish Civil war. (4) The greatest working-class novel of the 1920s is arguably Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk (Osudy dobrého vojáka Švejka za světové války, 1921–3), which depicts the picaresque adventures of a Czech conscript in the Austro-Hungarian army during World War II. READING Auden, W. H. and John Garrett (eds) (1935) The Poet’s Tongue: An Anthology. London: Bell. Bodek, Richard (1997) Proletarian Performance in Weimar Berlin: Agitprop, Chorus, and Brecht. Columbia: Camden House. Crow, Thomas (1996) ‘Modernism and Mass Culture in the Visual Arts’, in Crow, Modern Art in the Common Culture. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press. Gruber, Helmut (1991) Red Vienna: Experiment in Working-Class Culture 1919–1934. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 401

The World’s Fair Linehan, Thomas (2012) Modernism and British Socialism. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Parrott, Cecil (1982) Jaroslav Hašek: A Study of Švejk and the Short Stories. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rose, Jonathan (2010) The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press. Steinberg, Mark D. (2002) Proletarian Imagination: Self, Modernity, and the Sacred in Russia, 1910–1925. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press.

Ernest Schonfield

THE WORLD’S FAIR The World’s Fair was opened by Franklin D. Roosevelt on 30 April 1939. The Fair was constructed on a 1,200-acre former ash dump at Flushing Meadow in the Borough of Queens, New York, and was visited by around 44 million people during its two seasons, before closing on 27 October 1940. Conceived at the height of the Depression, the Fair was designed to offer visitors a sight of the ‘World of Tomorrow’, a theme encapsulated as much by buildings such as the Trylon and the Perisphere as by what they contained. Thus, for example, the Perisphere’s City of Tomorrow was viewed from a moving walkway, from which spectators could witness the wonders of a technology-driven future of universal prosperity. Elsewhere, it was possible to experience the future of transportation and communications and attend international pavilions hosted by foreign governments, although, with World war II already underway in Europe, some of these did not reopen for the 1940 season. Despite its utopian overtones, the Fair had always been conceived as a business venture, with visitors strongly encouraged to purchase products and, during the second year, increased focus was placed on the Fair’s Amusement Area in efforts to boost revenue. While the principal focus of the Fair was on science and technology, it also offered visitors the opportunity to see impressive collections of high cuture. Salvador Dalí designed one of the pavilions and major works of art and sculpture were prominently displayed. While the Fair occupies a unique position in terms of its representations of, and impact upon, American and global modernity, it can also be viewed as part of a more extended process, including the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition (staged in Chicago), the Paris Exhibition of 1900 (memorably recorded as a pivotal marker of the 402

Zaum onset of modernity in ‘The Dynamo and the Virgin’ chapter of The Education of Henry Adams (Adams 1918), the 1964 New York World’s Fair (staged on the site used in 1939) and Disneyland. READING Adams, Henry ([1918] 1995) The Education of Henry Adams. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Hart, Jeffrey (1985) ‘Yesterday’s America of Tomorrow’, Commentary, 80: 62–5. Kuznick, Peter J. (1994) ‘Losing the World of Tomorrow: The Battle Over the Presentation of Science at the New York World’s Fair’, American Quarterly, 46 (3): 341–73. Schnaffer, Ingrid (2002) Salvador Dali’s Dream of Venus: The Surrealist Funhouse from the 1939 World’s Fair. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Smith, Terry (1993) Making the Modern: Industry, Art and Design in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Christopher Gair

Z ZAUM The

avant-garde

movement of poetry (and visual arts, art manifestos, art theory, theatre, graphic design) in Russia that peaked during World War I. Its politics were clearly anti-war. The term was coined by the poet Aleksei Kruchenykh, and its prime exponents were Kruchenykh and Velimir Khlebnikov. A composite word, the prefix meaning ‘beyond, behind’, followed by a noun meaning ‘the mind’, it has been translated variably as ‘transreason’, ‘transration’, ‘transsense language’ or ‘beyonsense’. The pre-eminent modern scholar of the movement, Gerald Janecek, prefers to define Zaum as ‘indeterminacy in meaning’. Kruchenykh also wrote essays clarifying Zaum and arguing for ‘a transrational language’ that ‘allows for fuller expression’. Notable areas of experimentation were the ‘symbolism of sound’ and the ‘creation of language’. Zaum was contemporary with dada, but its close link to metaphysics meant that, unlike Dadaism, it was full of seriousness, either dipping into the sound symbolism of the lost primeval Slavic mother-tongue or nationalistic mysticism. It influenced many later styles and movements, from surrealism to Pop Art. 403

Zaum READING Janecek, Gerald (1984) The Look of Russian Literature: Avant-Garde Visual Experiments 1900–1930. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Janecek, Gerald (1996) Zaum: The Transrational Poetry of Russian Futurism. San Diego: San Diego State University Press.

Spilios Argyropoulos

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Amos Abrahams is a Wolfson Scholar at the University of Edinburgh. His PhD project examines the relationships between avant-garde theatre and physics, especially the philosophical entailments of quantum mechanics, in the first half the twentieth century. His research focuses on the work of Gertrude Stein, Bertolt Brecht and Samuel Beckett. Hélène Aji is Professor of American literature at University Paris Nanterre, Dean of the School of Foreign Language and Cultures, and President of the Société française d’études modernistes. She is the author of Ezra Pound et William Carlos Williams: Pour une poétique américaine (2001), William Carlos Williams: Un plan d’action (2004) and a book-length essay on Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (2005). Recently she co-edited two volumes on the poetry of H.D. (2014). At Nanterre’s University Press, she co-directs the book series ‘Intercalaires’. Spilios Argyropoulos is a psychopharmacologist and poet. As a member of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, he worked in clinical and academic posts in the UK and is currently based in Athens, Greece, where he has published eight folios and volumes of poetry, along with critical essays on modern and avant-garde poetry in Greek literary magazines. Tim Armstrong is Head of the Department of English at Royal Holloway, University of London. His publications include The Logic of Slavery: Debt, Technology and Pain in American Literature (2012), Modernism: A Cultural History (2005), Haunted Hardy: Poetry, History, Memory (2000) and Modernism, Technology and the Body (1998). He edits the Edinburgh University Press series Edinburgh Critical Studies in Modernist Culture. His current project is a study of modernist localism, Micromodernism. 405

Notes on Contributors Sanja Bahun is Professor of Literature and Film at the University of Essex. She is the author of Modernism and Melancholia: Writing as Countermourning (2013) and the co-editor of ten books, including The Avant-garde and the Margin: New Territories of Modernism (2006), Violence and Gender in the Globalized World: The Intimate and the Extimate (2008, 2015) and Language, Ideology, and the Human (2012). She has published articles and book chapters on a variety of subjects concerning modernism, world literature, psychoanalytic theory and intellectual history. Günter Berghaus is a Senior Research Fellow at the MDRN/ University of Bristol and has been Guest Professor at Brown University, Providence/RI and the State University of Rio de Janeiro. He has published over twenty books on various aspects of theatre and performance studies and has directed many plays from the classical repertoire and the historical avant-garde. He is a leading expert on Futurism, on which he published The Genesis of Futurism: Marinetti’s Early Career and Writings, 1899–1909 (1995), Futurism and Politics (1996), Italian Futurist Theatre (1998), International Futurism in the Arts and Literature (2000), F. T. Marinetti: Selected Writings (2006), Futurism and the Technological Imagination (2009), Futurism in Eastern and Central Europe (2011), Iberian Futurisms (2013), Women Artists and Futurism (2015). He currently serves as general editor of the International Yearbook of Futurism Studies, Handbook of International Futurism, and of International Futurism 1945–2015: A Bibliographic Handbook. Tom Betteridge completed his PhD thesis on Alain Badiou, Paul Celan and Samuel Beckett in 2015 at the University of Glasgow. His research on Badiou, Heidegger and Celan has been published in Textual Practice and Evental Aesthetics, and he is the regional editor of The International Journal of Badiou Studies. His current research focuses on the Glaswegian experimental poet Peter Manson and the poetics of secrecy. His own poems appear in print and online in Datableed, Hix Eros, Intercapillary Space, Scree and ZARF, with a short selection forthcoming from Sine Wave Peak Press. Clare M. Brennan writes about and practises theatre. She is currently undertaking a part-time PhD at the University of York on the interactions between science, technology, politics and economics and the arts from the close of the nineteenth century to the early 406

Notes on Contributors decades of the twentieth, focusing on the relation of instantaneous photography and chronophotography to theatre and film in France and Russia/Soviet Union. Her remaining time is divided between reviewing theatre throughout the UK for the Guardian/Observer and assisting with professional theatre projects. She holds an MA in English Language and Literature from the University of Edinburgh and a Diploma in Mask, Mime, Movement and Theatre from L’École Jacques Lecoq, Paris. Amy Bromley’s AHRC-funded PhD thesis in English Literature at the University of Glasgow considers Virginia Woolf’s Monday or Tuesday as a collection of literary sketches. She is co-editor, with Elsa Högberg, of the collection of essays Sentencing Orlando: Virginia Woolf and the Morphology of the Modernist Sentence (2018). Sascha Bru teaches modern literature and theory at the MDRN/ University of Leuven. He has produced over ten books devoted to avant-garde and modernist art and writing, including The European Avant-Gardes, 1905–1935 (forthcoming), Democracy, Law and the Modernist Avant-Gardes: Writing in the State of Exception (2009), The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, Vol III: Europe 1880–1940 (co-edited, 2013), Regarding the Popular: Modernism, the Avant-Garde and High and Low Culture (co-edited, 2011) and The Invention of Politics in the European Avant-Garde, 1906–1940 (co-edited, 2006). Mary Ann Caws is Distinguished Professor Emerita of English, French, and Comparative Literature, Graduate School, City University of New York, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, past President of the Modern Language Association, of the American Comparative Literature Association, of the Association for Dada and Surrealism, and of the Association of Literary Scholars. She is the author and editor of numerous studies and collections of modernist literature and art, including: The Surrealist Look: An Erotics of Encounter (1997), Surrealist Love Poems (2001), Surrealist Painters and Poets (2001), Surrealism (2004), Robert Motherwell: What Art Holds (1996), Picasso’s Weeping Woman: The Life and Art of Dora Maar (2000), Women of Bloomsbury (1990), Vita Sackville-West: Selected Writings (2002), Glorious Eccentrics: Modernist Women Writing and Painting (2006), biographies of Henry James, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, Blaise Pascal, 407

Notes on Contributors and catalogues for numerous exhibitions. She has also edited the Yale Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poetry (2008) and selections from the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé, René Char, Pierre Reverdy and St-John Perse. Paul Crosthwaite is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. His publications include Trauma, Postmodernism, and the Aftermath of World War II (2009), articles in Angelaki, Cultural Critique, Cultural Politics, New Formations, Public Culture, The Review of Contemporary Fiction and Textual Practice and, as editor, Criticism, Crisis, and Contemporary Narrative: Textual Horizons in an Age of Global Risk (2011) and Show Me the Money: The Image of Finance, 1700 to the Present (2014). He is currently completing a monograph entitled Conversion Narratives: Fidelity and Dissent in Contemporary Financial Fictions. Peter Davies is Professor of Modern German Studies at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of Myth, Matriarchy and Modernity: Johann Jakob Bachofen in German Culture, 1860–1945 (2010), and has published widely on the interfaces between myth and German nationalism. His current project is concerned with Translation and Holocaust Testimony, and his most recent publication (with Jean Boase-Beier, Andrea Hammel and Marion Winters) is Translating Holocaust Lives (2017). Maria-Daniella Dick is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Glasgow and has research interests in continental theory, modernism and modernity, and Irish and Scottish Literature post-1900. With Julian Wolfreys, she is the author of The Derrida Wordbook (2013). Dennis Duncan is Munby Fellow in Bibliography at the University of Cambridge, where he is writing a history of the book index from the Middle Ages to the present. He has published articles on the Oulipo, Joyce, Mallarmé and novels with indexes, and his collection Tom McCarthy: Critical Essays appeared in 2016. As a translator he has published work by Michel Foucault, Boris Vian and Alfred Jarry, as well as a book-length translation of the modernist little magazine Le Grand Jeu. Nina Engelhardt is a lecturer at the University of Cologne. She received a doctoral degree from the University of Edinburgh and 408

Notes on Contributors held positions as a Career Development Fellow at the University of Edinburgh and as a Research Fellow at the University of Cologne and the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh. Michelle Facos is Professor of Art History at Indiana UniversityBloomington. Her books include: Nationalism and the Nordic Imagination: Swedish Art of the 1890s (1998), Symbolist Art in Context (2009), An Introduction to Nineteenth-Century Art (2011) and Symbolist Roots of Modern Art (2015, co-edited with Thor J. Mednick). She is currently editing a volume for Wiley-Blackwell, A Companion to Nineteenth-Century Art (2017) and researching a monograph on the Danish Art Academy c.1800. Her interests centre on issues of identity and on Scandinavian and Central European art; her research has been supported by Fulbright, the American Philosophical Society, the American-Scandinavian Foundation, the Humboldt Foundation and the Mercator Foundation. Bridget Fowler is an Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Glasgow. She specialises in social theory and the sociology of culture. Long interested in Bourdieu, she has taken up his ideas in The Alienated Reader (1991), Pierre Bourdieu and Cultural Theory: Critical Investigations (1997), The Obituary as Collective Memory (2007) and an edited book, Reading Bourdieu on Society and Culture (2000). More recently, she has written on Bourdieu’s former collaborator, Luc Boltanski, and is currently working on developments in the sociology of culture by his student, Gisèle Sapiro. Jana Funke is Senior Lecturer in Medical Humanities at the University of Exeter. Jana has published widely on the history of sexuality, modernist literature and sexual science and medicine. Books include The World and Other Unpublished Works by Radclyffe Hall (2016) and Sex, Gender and Time in Fiction and Culture (2011, co-edited with Ben Davies). From 2014–15, Jana was part of the New Generations in Medical Humanities programme. In 2015, she was awarded a Wellcome Trust Joint Investigator Award (with Kate Fisher) to direct a five-year project on the cross-disciplinary history of sexual science. Christopher Gair is Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Associate Director of the Andrew Hook Centre for American 409

Notes on Contributors Studies at the University of Glasgow. He is the author of Complicity and Resistance in Jack London’s Novels (1997), The American Counterculture (2007) and The Beat Generation (2008) and is the editor of Beyond Boundaries: C. L. R. James and Postnational Studies (2006). He is the editor of Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (2000) and Jack London’s South Sea Tales (2002). He has published essays in journals including Modern Fiction Studies, Journal of American Studies, Western American Literature, Studies in the Novel and Studies in American Literature and is founding editor of Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary and Cultural Relations. Dustin Garlitz is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at the University of South Florida. He is an Article Editor of the London School of Economics-supported journal Critical Contemporary Culture and a Section Editor of the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Educational Philosophy and Theory. As an author, he has contributed to Multicultural America, Theory in Social and Cultural Anthropology and Music in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. He is a contributor to the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism, Sage Encyclopedia of Music and Culture, Sage Encyclopedia of Theory, International Encyclopedia of Communication Theory and Philosophy and Encyclopedia of Social Theory. James Gifford is Associate Professor of English at Fairleigh Dickinson University, Director of the University Core and Director of Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. His research combines international modernism with theoretical perspectives from anarchism, critical theory and psychoanalysis. His book, Personal Modernisms (2014) outlines anarchist literary networks of the 1930s and 1940s. He edited The Henry Miller–Herbert Read Letters: 1935–58 (2007), three critical editions of Lawrence Durrell’s works, Archives and Networks of Modernism (2013) and eleven other editions or collections. His next monograph, A Modernist Fantasy, combines late modernism, anarchism and fantasy fiction. He was a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada doctoral and postdoctoral fellow. Christos Hadjiyiannis is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Cyprus and previously a Research Fellow in English Literature at Wolfson College, Oxford. He has published work on T. E. Hulme, 410

Notes on Contributors Edward Storer, Ezra Pound, Richard Aldington and J. M. Kennedy and is finishing a book project about modernism and conservative politics. Julian Hanna is Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities at the Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute, Portugal. He has written on modernist and avant-garde culture, with a particular focus on movements and manifestos, for such publications as the Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies, the Journal of Modern Literature, the European Journal of English Studies, Modernism/Modernity and The Atlantic, and in a book Key Concepts in Modernist Literature (2008). In recent years his research has expanded to include critical futures, digital storytelling and other creative facets of human–computer interaction. Colin Herd is a poet and Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow. His thesis explored the work of the poet Charles Bernstein in relation to the Greek Sophists, in particular Gorgias. His poetry collections include too ok (2011), Glovebox (2014) and Oberwilding – with S. J. Fowler (2015). In 2016, he co-organised Outside-in/Inside-out: A Festival of Outside and Subterranean Poetry, which took place at the University of Glasgow, CCA, Glasgow Women’s Library, Lighthouse Gallery and other venues across the city. Julia Jordan is Lecturer in English at University College London. Her research focuses on chance, late modernism, experimental literature of the 1960s and 1970s, and the avant-garde from 1945. She has particular expertise in the work of Samuel Beckett, B. S. Johnson, Thomas Pynchon, Christine Brooke-Rose and Ann Quin and is the author of Chance and the Modern British Novel (2010). She is currently working on a study of accidents and narrative form. Greg Kerr is Lecturer in French in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Glasgow. His research interests include poetry and the textual and visual culture of nineteenthcentury French utopianism. He is the author of Dream Cities: Utopia and Prose by Poets in Nineteenth-Century France (2013) and co-editor of Aesthetics of Dislocation in French and Francophone Literature and Art: Strategies of Representation (2009). 411

Notes on Contributors Gerri Kimber is a Visiting Professor in English at the University of Northampton, a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and Chair of the Katherine Mansfield Society. She is co-editor of Katherine Mansfield Studies, the peer-reviewed annual yearbook of the Katherine Mansfield Society published by Edinburgh University Press. She is the author of Katherine Mansfield: The Early Years (2016), Katherine Mansfield and the Art of the Short Story (2015) and Katherine Mansfield: The View from France (2008). She is the Series Editor of the four-volume Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield (2012–16). Gerri is also co-editor of a further nineteen volumes in addition to numerous journal articles and reviews, notably for the Times Literary Supplement. Henry King was an AHRC-funded PhD candidate at the University of Glasgow. His essays, poetry and translations have appeared in Paideuma, Stand, PN Review, Modern Poetry in Translation and elsewhere. He currently teaches at Malmö University, Sweden. Vassiliki Kolocotroni is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Glasgow. She is co-editor (with Olga Taxidou and Jane Goldman) of Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents (1998); (with Efterpi Mitsi) In the Country of the Moon: British Women Travelers in Greece 1718–1932 (2007) and Women Writing Greece: Essays on Hellenism, Orientalism and Travel (2008); (with Spilios Argyropoulos) Nicolas Calas, 16 French Poems and the Correspondence with William Carlos Williams (2002); and Nicolas Calas: The Interview for the Archives of American Art, 1977 (Ypsilon 2012). She has published extensively on modernism and theory, on Virginia Woolf and other hellenising moderns, and is currently completing a book on the subject, entitled Still Life: Modernism and the Hellenist Turn. Allana C. Lindgren is an Associate Professor and the Chair of the Department of Theatre at the University of Victoria. She is the co-editor with Stephen Ross of The Modernist World (2015). She is also the Dance Subject Editor for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism and the co-editor with Kaija Pepper of Renegade Bodies: Canadian Dance in the 1970s (2012). In addition, her research has appeared in a variety of journals and collections, including Contesting Bodies and Nation in Canadian History, The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Ethnicity, Dance Research Journal, 412

Notes on Contributors Theatre Research in Canada and the Quarterly Review of Film and Video. Margery Palmer McCulloch is Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the University of Glasgow. Her recent books include Modernism and Nationalism (2004), Scottish Modernism and Its Contexts (2009), and the co-edited Edinburgh Companion to Hugh MacDiarmid and Scottish and International Modernisms (both 2011). She was co-editor of Scottish Literary Review from 2005 to 2013. She is currently working on a joint biography of Edwin and Willa Muir and their Scottish and international (especially European) contexts. Research towards the biography was funded by a Leverhulme Emerita Fellowship 2013–15. Brian McHale is Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor of English at the Ohio State University. A co-founder of Ohio State’s Project Narrative, which he directed in 2012–14, he is also a founding member and former president of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP). He is the author of four books on postmodern literature and culture, including Postmodernist Fiction (1987) and The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodernism (2015). He has co-edited four volumes on twentieth-century literature, experimentalism and narrative theory. In July 2015 he was appointed editor of the international journal Poetics Today. Donald Mackenzie is a retired Lecturer in English Literature and an Affiliate of the School of Critical Studies, University of Glasgow. He is the author of The Metaphysical Poets (1991); he has edited Rudyard Kipling’s Puck of Pooks Hill and Rewards and Fairies (1993) and co-edited with Andrew Hook Walter Scott’s The Fair Maid of Perth (1999). He has reviewed for Literature and Theology, The Review of English Studies and Translation and Literature and has published articles on various authors and topics including Fulke Greville, Bunyan, Stevenson, Lawrence, Ford Madox Ford, ‘Borderlands of Tragedy’ on the Bacchae and Othello, ‘The Psalms’ in The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, Volume 2 (2010) and (with Stuart Gillespie) ‘Lucretius and the Moderns’ in The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius (2007). Robbie McLaughlan is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Newcastle. He is the author of Re-Imagining the ‘Dark Continent’ 413

Notes on Contributors in Fin de Siècle Literature (2012) and numerous articles on Freudian psychoanalysis, Marxism and postcolonialism. Jade Munslow Ong is Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of Salford. She has published articles in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing and Journal of Commonwealth Literature and a monograph entitled Olive Schreiner and African Modernism: Allegory, Empire and Postcolonial Writing (2016). Peter Nicholls is Henry James Professor of English and American Letters at New York University. He has published widely on twentieth-century writing, with books including Ezra Pound: Politics, Economics and Writing (1984), Modernisms: A Literary Guide (1995), George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism (2007) and many articles and essays on literature and theory. He has co-edited a number of volumes, including The Cambridge History of TwentiethCentury English Literature (2004), Ruskin and Modernism (2000), On Bathos (2010) and How Abstract Is It? Thinking Capital Now (2015). He is currently US associate editor of Textual Practice. Anthony Paraskeva is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Roehampton. He is the author of The Speech-Gesture Complex: Modernism, Theatre, Cinema (2013) and Samuel Beckett and Cinema (2017). Dominic Paterson is Lecturer in History of Art, and Curator of Contemporary Art at the University of Glasgow. He has lectured and published widely on contemporary art and art theory, including writing art criticism for MAP and The Burlington Magazine. Among his recent publications are essays on artists Scott Myles, Jimmy Robert and Georgina Starr. With The Common Guild gallery, Glasgow, he is the co-organiser of the ‘Primer’ talks series which has featured discussion events with artists such as Karla Black, Gerard Byrne, Jimmie Durham, Simon Starling, Corin Sworn and Hayley Tompkins. Adam Piette is Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Sheffield. He is the author of Remembering and the Sound of Words: Mallarmé, Proust, Joyce, Beckett (1996), Imagination at War: British Fiction and Poetry, 1939–1945 (1995) and The Literary Cold War, 1945 to Vietnam (2009). He co-edited The Edinburgh Companion to 414

Notes on Contributors Twentieth-century British and American War Literature (2012) and is co-editor of the poetry journal Blackbox Manifold. Rachel Potter is Professor of Modern Literature at the University of East Anglia. She has written on many aspects of modernist literature and culture, with a particular focus on politics, literary censorship and freedom of expression. Her books include Modernism and Democracy (2006), Obscene Modernism (2013) and The Edinburgh Guide to Modernist Literature (2012), as well as two co-edited collections, The Salt Companion to Mina Loy (2010) and Prudes on the Prowl (2013). She is currently working on a new project on literature, freedom of expression and non-governmental writers’ ­organisations, 1921–1948, with a particular focus on International P.E.N. Jean-Michel Rabaté has been Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania since 1992 and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2008. A co-founder and a curator of Slought Foundation in Philadelphia, and one of the editors of the Journal of Modern Literature, he has authored or edited more than thirty-five books on modernism, psychoanalysis, contemporary art and philosophy. Recent publications include The Pathos of Distance: Affects of the Moderns (2016), Think, Pig! Beckett at the Limit of the Human (2016) and Les Guerres de Derrida (2016). Andrew Radford lectures in English Literature at the University of Glasgow. His research focuses primarily on British inter-war women writers and the occult revival. His publications include the books Thomas Hardy and the Survivals of Time (2003), Franco-British Cultural Exchanges 1880–1940 (2012), Mary Butts and British Neo-Romanticism: The Enchantment of Place (2016) and Modernist Women Writers and Spirituality: A Piercing Darkness (2017). Bryony Randall is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Glasgow and works on modernism, particularly textual editing, women’s writing, and literature and the everyday. She is coeditor with Laura Marcus of the Cambridge Edition of The Collected Short Fiction of Virginia Woolf (forthcoming) and is an editorial board member and volume editor for the forthcoming Oxford University Press edition of the work of Dorothy Richardson. Key publications include her monograph Modernism, Daily Time and 415

Notes on Contributors Everyday Life (2007), and as co-editor with Jane Goldman, Virginia Woolf in Context (2013). Calum Rodger is a Glasgow-based poet, scholar and performer. He holds a PhD in Scottish Literature from the University of Glasgow for his thesis ‘From Stonypath to Little Sparta: Navigating the Work of Ian Hamilton Finlay’, and has published prize-winning research in the field of digital poetics. His work explores experiment and innovation in modernist and postmodernist poetry at the intersections of print, sculpture, performance and new media. He lectures and tutors on poetry and poetics at the University of Glasgow and gives talks and poetry performances throughout Scotland. Stephen Ross is an Associate Professor of English and Cultural, Social, and Political Thought at the University of Victoria, British Columbia. He is the General Editor of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism (2016) and co-editor of The Modernist World (2015), among other edited, co-edited and authored books and articles. He is Director of the Modernist Versions Project and of Linked Modernisms, both digital humanities approaches to modernism. Roger Savage is an Honorary Fellow in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh, having taught at that university from 1966 to 2000. He is the author of a book of essays on early twentiethcentury music theatre, Masques, Mayings and Music Dramas (2014) and of numerous articles on Renaissance court entertainments, radio drama, the Greco-Roman heritage in operatic staging, and works of Dowland and Purcell, Swift and Pope, Metastasio and Rameau, Stravinsky and Auden. He has broadcast for BBC Radio 3 on baroque opera, theatre architecture and Asian musics in the twentieth century. Ernest Schonfield is Lecturer in German at the University of Glasgow. He has taught previously at University College London, where he did his PhD. His research interests are nineteenth- and twentieth-century German and European literature, with an emphasis on social politics. His publications include Art and Its Uses in Thomas Mann’s Felix Krull (2008), and a co-edited volume, Alfred Döblin: Paradigms of Modernism (2009). He has published essays on Bertolt Brecht, Heinrich Heine, James Joyce, Edwin Morgan and Emine Sevgi Özdamar. He is the editor of a website on German literature: . 416

Notes on Contributors Alexandra Smith is Reader in Russian Studies at the University of Edinburgh. She is author of The Song of the Mocking Bird: Pushkin in the Work of Marina Tsvetaeva (1994), Montaging Pushkin: Pushkin and Visions of Modernity in Russian Twentieth-Century Poetry (2006) and numerous articles on Russian literature, and film, theatre and comparative literature. Angeliki Spiropoulou is Associate Professor of Modern European Literature and Theory at Peloponnese University and a Visiting Research Fellow at the IES-School of Advanced Studies, University of London. Her research focuses on English and European modernism, history and critical theory. Her publications include: Virginia Woolf, Modernity and History: Constellations with Walter Benjamin (2010), History of European Literature: From 18th to 20th Century (co-author, 2008), Walter Benjamin: Images and Myths of Modernity (2008) and the special issue of EJES on ‘Gender Resistance’ (coedited, 2013). More recently, she contributed to the volume 1922: History, Politics, Culture (2015). She is a member of the Executive Committee of the European Network for Comparative Literary Studies. Randall Stevenson is Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature at the University of Edinburgh and general editor of The Edinburgh History of Twentieth-Century Literature in Britain series. His books include Modernist Fiction (1998), Oxford English Literary History, Vol. 12, 1960–2000: The Last of England? (2004), which won a Saltire Prize, The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century Literatures in English, edited with Brian McHale (2006), and Literature and the Great War (2013). His Reading the Times: Studies in Twentieth-Century Narrative, History and Temporality will be published in 2017. Olga Taxidou is Professor of Drama and Performance Studies at the University of Edinburgh and series editor of The Edinburgh Critical Studies in Modernism, Drama and Performance. She is co-editor (with Vassiliki Kolocotroni and Jane Goldman) of Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents (1998), with John Orr of Postwar Cinema and Modernity (2000) and author of The Mask: A Periodical Performance by Edward Gordon Craig (1998), Tragedy, Modernity and Mourning (2004) and Modernism and Performance: Jarry to Brecht (2007). 417

Notes on Contributors Andrew Thacker is Professor of Twentieth Century Literature at Nottingham Trent University. He is the author or editor of several books on modernism, including the three volumes of The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines (2009– 13) and the monograph, Moving Through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism (2003). He was a founder member and the first Chair of the British Association for Modernist Studies and is an editor of the long-running interdisciplinary journal, Literature and History. Greg Thomas is an independent scholar. Between 2014 and 2017 he was a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, where he completed a research project on the Scottish poet, visual artist and gardener Ian Hamilton Finlay. His recent publications include a book chapter on concrete poetry and architecture in Spatial Perspectives: Essays on Literature and Architecture (2015), a review article on the Scottish Sixties for Studies in Scottish Literature 40 (2014), and articles on Edwin Morgan and Bob Cobbing for Scottish Literary Review 4.2 (2012) and the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, 4.2 (2012). He is currently preparing a book manuscript on concrete poetry in Britain, based on his PhD research. Alex Thomson is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of Deconstruction and Democracy (2005) and Adorno: A Guide for the Perplexed (2006) and has published journal articles and book chapters on critical theory, modernist literature and Scottish studies. Tara S. Thomson is Lecturer in English and Film at Edinburgh Napier University. She has co-edited scholarly editions of Dorothy Richardson’s Pointed Roofs (2014) and The Tunnel (2014), while her monograph Modernism, Feminism and Everyday Life is forthcoming from Routledge (2018). She has also published articles and chapters in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities and the edited collections The Routledge Handbook of Spatial History and Research Methods for Digitising and Curating Data in the Digital Humanities, and is a co-Investigator on the AHRC-funded ‘Lit Long: Edinburgh’ project. 418

Notes on Contributors Anna Vaninskaya is Senior Lecturer in Victorian Literature at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of William Morris and the Idea of Community: Romance, History and Propaganda, 1880– 1914 (2010), as well as over forty articles and book chapters on topics ranging from nineteenth-century socialism, education, popular reading and historical cultures to Anglo-Russian cultural relations and fantasy literature. Her current projects include a monograph on time and death in early fantasy and an edited translated anthology of Edwardian-era London-based Russian journalism. Fabio L. Vericat lectures in the English Literature Department at Universidad Complutense de Madrid. He is assistant editor of Complutense Journal of English Studies. His current research interests focus mainly on the sound of writing with particular reference to the impact of modern media technologies on the acoustic production and reception of the written word. He writes mainly on T. S. Eliot and Henry James, and has published a monograph on T. S. Eliot’s critical writings (2004) and more recently ‘Letting the Writing Do the Talking: Denationalizing English and James Kelman’s Translated Accounts’ in the Scottish Literary Review (2011) and ‘Her Master’s Voice: Dictation, the Typewriter and Henry James’s Trouble with the Speech of American Women’ in the South Atlantic Review (2015). Pieter Verstraeten is a postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. His main research interests are the history of literary criticism, its metaphors and concepts, and the history of the modern Dutch novel. Recent publications include Het discours van de kritiek ([The Discourse of Criticism], 2011) and the co-edited special issues The Changing Vocabulary of Literature (Arcadia, 2015) and Interiors and their Temporalities: Etching Time into Modernist Materiality (Interiors, 2015). He is currently involved in a research project on Dutch middlebrow literature in the interwar years, funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research. Juha Virtanen is a Lecturer in Contemporary Literature at the University of Kent. He has published articles and essays on various contemporary poets, post-war writers and modernist figures. He is currently completing his monograph Event and Effect: Performances during the British Poetry Revival. His poetry collection Backchannel 419

Notes on Contributors Apraxia was published by Contraband Books in 2014 and he coedits the poetry journal DATABLEED together with Eleanor Perry. Sophie Vlacos is a Lecturer in post-1900 Literature at the University of Glasgow. She is the author of Ricoeur, Literature and Imagination (2014) and the co-editor of Creation, Ethics and Environment (2011). David Weir is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York City. His books address several figures and topics from the fin de siècle period and the era of modernism, including decadence, anarchism, orientalism and the works of James Joyce. His most recent books are Jean Vigo and the Anarchist Eye (2014) and Ulysses Explained: How Homer, Shakespeare, and Dante Inform Joyce’s Modernist Vision (2015). His current project is a book entitled Decadence: A Very Short Introduction (2018). Tom Willaert is a research librarian at KU Leuven specialising in digital scholarship in the humanities. He is currently preparing a book on the reception of the phonograph and gramophone in Dutch literature (1877–1935).

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