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Critics often present Eliot as a poet who emphasizes subjective states or moods as concrete elements of a readily delineable interiority. Such a view suggests that Eliot perceives inwardness as a stable, substantive essence constitutive of individuals' sense of self. But to essentialize the self in this way necessarily constructs an oppositional relation between the self (the inner) and the "reality" external to that self (the outer). However, as his graduate work in philosophy and social theory makes clear, Eliot in fact perceives interiority and exteriority in mutually constitutive dialectical tension with one another. Neither term exists in isolation; each roots itself constitutively in relation to the other. Eliot's poetry from this early period reflects these views as well. In "Portrait of a Lady," one of his first mature poems, Eliot portrays subjectivity dialectically, as a product of subject/object interrelations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What are the stakes of writing and publishing, of moving from intimate writing to the public sphere? Examining this question in the case of Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams, read here as an autobiographical text, this paper explores the intricate nexus of ambition, death and writing. Freud is possessed by the possibility of becoming famous, a public persona, immortal. His route to achieving this is the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams. He aspires to greatness, and yet the very project that is supposed to secure it is fragile and insecure; the very project entails a risk. The same text that could secure one's immortality becomes the locus of one's absence. Publishing renders the most intimate text public and at a distance from oneself. The wish for glory cannot be assuaged through a published text, which is a public affair. One cannot make a name for oneself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Elizabeth Bowen's Collected Impressions (1950), out of print since soon after its initial appearance , has been wrongly disregarded by Bowen's readers and critics. The volume, comprising over fifty pieces of criticism, models Bowen's distinctive critical process—a process that is characterized by self-reflection, by deliberate and artful arrangement of her essays, and by her strategic revisionary return to a decade's worth of her nonfiction. Archival research at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin reveals that Bowen develops a "scrap screen" approach to writing criticism in an effort to make of her literary impressions something permanent. Besides re-envisioning nostalgia as part of her critical process, Bowen composes a text that serves as a unifying record of her development as a literary critic, despite her self-doubt regarding her legacy as a critic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Flashes from the Dark was the 1941 debut by Jamaican poet Ferdinand Levy, published in Dublin while he was a medical student. It brought something of the Harlem Renaissance to Lower Baggot Street. Despite favorable reviews by Irish poets such as Austin Clarke and others, Levy has vanished from literary posterity. His many passions—literary, political, musical—situate him at a properly intersectional literary history of mid-century Dublin, and he critiques the particular structure of systemic racism in 1930s and '40s Ireland. Levy's "decolonial cosmopolitanism" mounts a challenge to nationalist tendencies within the mainstay of Irish postcolonial thinking, a factor in his occlusion. His awkward poetics—wavering between a belated signature of the Harlem Renaissance and parodies of English sonnets and ballads—constitutes "mimicry" in Homi Bhabha's sense—destabilizing white discourse with "flashes from the dark." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Five types of emotional engagement with fiction may be identified in relation to the formal innovations of modernist novels. Two recent novels that owe their stylistic distinctiveness in part to the heritage of Joyce's Ulysses draw on these possibilities in very different ways: Lucy Ellmann's Ducks, Newburyport and Tom McCarthy's The Making of Incarnation. The former inventively develops the style of the "Penelope" episode at great length, inviting the reader to share the protagonist's dismay at several features of contemporary American culture, while the latter may be seen as the heir of the "Ithaca" episode, evoking an emotional response by indirect means rather than through a direct appeal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An experiment in what Elizabeth Bowen calls "creative criticism," this co-written fictional dialogue explores the figure of the heart in Bowen's work. Special attention is given to The Death of the Heart and to the short story "A Queer Heart," both first published in 1938. Drawing on correspondences with the fiction of Sheridan Le Fanu and E.M. Forster, the poetry of W.B. Yeats, and the philosophical thinking of Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Luc Nancy, we dramatize an understanding of the value and importance of Bowen's work in embodying a new and singular modernist conception of the heart as other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

D. H. Lawrence is not usually viewed as a writer who was much concerned with, or sympathetic to, shyness. But shyness is structurally crucial to his exploration of emotion. His work echoes then-contemporary models for understanding shyness—from William James's "tender-mindedness" to Jung's "introversion," to the physiologist Angelo Mosso's idea of the "inner blush." Lawrence, suggesting the cognitive richness implicit in shyness, emphasizes the insights it offers into emotion, selfhood, and embodiment, even while he indicates that it might be too painful a state to be borne indefinitely. Although his own personal shyness became a quality that he had to discard as a writer, his work captures what it is to be at once invested in shyness and attempting to move beyond it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reframes Jean Rhys's critique of bourgeois culture in her second novel, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, in terms of theories of the gift. On the one hand, Mackenzie genders the ideological separation of gifts and exchanges that Marcel Mauss argued was peculiar to Western culture and works to counter the concomitant failure of reciprocity between the sexes. On the other hand, the novel echoes Derrida's revision of Mauss, rendering the gift and especially its male and female characters' desire for the gift impossible. Ultimately, gift theory helps us to rethink motifs in and beyond Mackenzie, such as Rhys's 'masochism' and her representation of men and women as victims, and to illuminate the paradoxes at the heart of gifts of money and contractual relations more generally in her fiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Joseph Schumpeter's term "creative destruction" can be employed to examine Joyce's representation of the rise of the modern city in "Finnegans Wake." The "Wake" re-enacts the story of how the modern city, with its straight streets and busy thoroughfares, opened up the closed world of the medieval city, with its crooked streets and organic tangle of lanes and alleys. This paper examines Joyce's use of 11th Edition of the "Encyclopedia Britannica" in his depiction of the division of the city into poles of poverty and privilege in the modernizations of Belfast, London, and Budapest. Baron Haussmann's plan for the regularization of Paris is also contrasted with Camillo Sitte's championing of the medieval values in his opposition to the geometrization of Vienna. Finally, Marshall Berman is employed to demonstrate Joyce's ambivalent relation to modernism—both deploring its destructions of the past while celebrating its dynamic novelty in creating the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In reading James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, two of the many shapes that phenomenology as a method has taken during and since the twentieth century come to light. The first is its use in constructing phenomenologies of reading; the second, its use as a critique of its own methods in the form of critical phenomenology. Bringing these two strands together and using the Wake as an illustration can help us imagine what a critical phenomenology of reading might look like. The three sections following the introduction respectively "pilot" three forms of critiques of reading: the phenomenological, which is often purely descriptive and does not change our ways of reading; the critical-phenomenological, which can fall into absolute skepticism and ennui toward the text; and the one provisionally termed "new," which can be imaginative yet impossible as an academic exercise. Together, they speculate upon possibilities for new ways of bringing phenomenology into literary critique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the idea of cash payments to African Americans has been seriously discussed as a feasible way to make reparations for slavery. However, Go Down, Moses (1942) suggests the inadequacy of monetary reparations by depicting the troubled relationship between former slave owners and their unacknowledged Black relatives in the Southern plantation. Reading the economic exchanges between the two races in the novel reveals not only an institutional violence that still manipulates Blacks' (physical) properties in the postbellum era, but also the agency of Black characters who struggle in the White-centered plantation system. This interpretation sheds light on multiple Black perspectives that discussions of monetary reparations often ignore. Ultimately, Faulkner's Go Down, Moses critiques the one-sidedness of modern attempts at racial reconciliation by describing an ethics that originated in Blacks' politically complicated interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Colm Tóibín's residence in several Hispanic nations has influenced his literary production, in particular his novels The South (1990), set predominately in 1950s Catalonia, and The Story of the Night (1997), which takes place in Buenos Aires during and after the Argentine military dictatorship. His time abroad as well as his knowledge of both Spanish and Catalan inform his writing and enable him to bring to the forefront the results of division, conflict, trauma, and identity that have marked Spain, Argentina, and Catalonia in the aftermath of oppressive governmental regimes. As a result, Tóibín functions as an intercultural and interlingual communicator between these nations and his Anglophone readership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his third novel, Five Star Billionaire , Tash Aw presents an account of globalization that ostensibly proclaims China's accelerating economic might and wealth in the new millennium with Shanghai as the global city par excellence as he traces the lives of five Malaysian Chinese characters seeking success there. Using metafictional strategies and a satirical play on the self-help genre however, Aw interrogates the possibility of re-invention as a fundamental implication of globalization. He undermines the idea of re-authoring one's identity by emphasizing instead the impossibility of total control due to the contingent nature of reading and the precarity of meaning. In this way too, Five Star Billionaire disrupts linearity and future-oriented subjectivities in favor of other temporalities that serve to counter the world of neoliberal globalization it deliberately invokes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent (1907), the anarchists do not do anything, yet they let things happen. Conrad develops a trope of the fat anarchist, into which he instills a set of questions about the political potentiality of passivity or lack of agency, in order to critique the implicitly agential activeness of politics. In doing so, his novel anticipates the concerns of an emerging weak modernist studies. Examining Conrad's depiction of fatness through a wide-ranging lens, combining turn-of-the-century degeneracy discourse, twenty-first century moral panics about obesity, and affect theory, I extract a conceptual triad of passivity-impassivity-impasse to illuminate the different kinds of agency and non-agency imbricated in the novel. Juxtaposing explosion with dissipation, and agency with passivity, Conrad ultimately leaves us with the question of who or what is the "secret agent" of history that moves us toward a future, if a future at all. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tom McCarthy has been singled out more than once as a model for the future of the novel, but he is rarely discussed in terms of his national context, except as an avant-garde exception to a persistent narrative of British national and literary decline. In his novel Satin Island, however, McCarthy addresses his Britishness and the problem of his literary exceptionalism through the figure of the writer-as-anthropologist, through which he maps an ethico-political relationship to the history of British imperialism. This in turn shines a light on the disavowed, depoliticized melancholias of pre- and post-Brexit Britain as they circulate within the field of contemporary British literature. McCarthy spatializes and materializes post-colonial melancholy and makes it readable as shame. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have suggested that William Styron's Nathan in Sophie's Choiceis insane or depraved-a character whose motivations lack rationality at best and are unambiguously evil at worst. Elie Wiesel, the author of the famous Holocaust memoir Night, has been very critical of Styron's novel. Ironically, by using the Yiddish version of Wiesel's memoir Night, it is possible to demonstrate that Nathan's behavior is more 'logical' than scholars have previously understood. This approach offers us a new way of reading and interpreting Styron's novel by clarifying how Nathan's character functions within a well-established tradition of sociopolitical outrage about racial oppression, which is best exemplified in James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time, a text that Styron strategically references in Sophie's Choice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sarah Cole argues that violence in modernist literature challenges aesthetic, rhetorical and formal practices to both spur innovation and invigorate convention. Presenting violence, modernists negotiated between the poles of disenchantment (materialist reduction) and enchantment (idealist plenitude). The book addresses a variety of texts from the international dynamite novels of the fin de siècleto independence literature in Ireland and war writing in Britain. At the VioletHour supplements trauma theory, arguing that violence elicits creativity, presenting itself as an origin story, a raison d'ětrefor writing. Cole argues that violence and literary form 'intersect and produce one another,' suggesting that violence elicits a literary kind of communication and that this literary expression itself produces another kind of violence. Not since Richard Slotkin's monumental Regeneration through Violencehas a literary critic so effectively expanded our understanding of literary violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Festivity has long been a central concern of literary critics wishing to track the formal, social, and cultural relation of literature and play. In accounts from Bakhtin onwards, carnival excessfosters renewal of the social realm. Yet the "festive vision" of restoration and rebirth offered by a Bakhtinian critique fails to account for the divergent nature of party literature in the period after World War I. During the interwar period, satirical novels from both sides of the Atlantic represented the decay of modern sociability. When play is transformed into work, a carnival vision becomes untenable; the party is no longer a source of social, emotional, or sacral renewal, but instead the site of what Sianne Ngai has theorized as ugly feelings. In representative novels by Anthony Powell and Carl Van Vechten, disgust and boredom, rather than pleasure and interest, dominate the festive landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the writings of Katherine Mansfield, metaphors of temperature are connected to modernist technique. Her letters and book reviews reveal a tendency to conceive of the difference between established modes of fiction and more experimental works in terms of light and heat. I analyze this correlation and consider the ways in which it applies to Mansfield's own fiction. Thermal tropes in stories such as 'Bliss' and 'At the Bay' work towards a 'warm modernism,' a modernist strategy that Mansfield perceives as being necessary both for representing reality in a postwar environment, and for staving off the emotional and spiritual dislocation that the war produced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the connection between body, history, and nation in Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient (1993). The novel dramatizes and responds to questions concerning national belonging and community, while at the same time it longs to escape or transcend nation and history. The dialectical push and pull of this desire to escape and return is animated through the way that The English Patient imagines the body as a contested and contesting space, a conduit into the past and the means through which that past might be reclaimed. As a consequence, I hope to nuance political assessments of the novel and of Ondaatje's contribution to historiographical metafiction more broadly, as well as his dual status as both a postmodern and postcolonial writer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stephen Kern's The Modernist Novel: A Critical Introduction provides a comprehensive overview of European and American novels of the period. The book is organized around a discussion of ten 'master narratives' that modern novelists reworked or subverted. Kern argues the artistic narrative was the only one of these that represented a site of unchallenged value. Kern's most original contribution to modernist studies is his discussion of a perplexing formal feature found in many modernist novels: weak plots that defy causality and focus on seemingly trivial events. His analysis also offers speculations about how the modernist novel is a site for reflecting on the writing of human history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critical reaction to the 'The Camp,' the final chapter of D.M. Thomas's The White Hotel, has been vexed and largely negative because many readers conclude that the chapter posits the reality of a quasi-Christian deity and afterlife, a position they find both intellectually and tonally at odds with what has come before. However, the key to seeing 'The Camp' as both consistent with, and conclusive of, the rest of the novel lies in reading its religious overtones as an extended metaphor for the regenerative powers of literature itself. Once this move from the theological to the aesthetic is accomplished, the last chapter can be seen to claim nothing that the text's previous sections have not already prepared us for. One corollary of this reading is that any attempt to see The White Hotel as a postmodernist text must be abandoned, since its ultimately integrative structure marks it as reflecting a belated, but unapologetic, modernist sensibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay uses Paul Ricoeur's concept of the '(as yet) untold story' to consider the relationship between James Joyce's 1904 short story 'Eveline' (in Dubliners) and Colm Tóibín's award-winning 2009 novel, Brooklyn. Although Tóibín has denied the influence of Joyce in general, there are many similarities in the storyworlds of the two protagonists, Eveline Hill and Eilis Lacey: Eveline wishes to leave her father's home in Dublin but stays, whilst Eilis would prefer to remain at home but is forced to emigrate. Both act according to their perception of their mother's wishes and the rightness of their decisions has preoccupied readers. Through close analysis of thought and speech presentation, this essay shows that interpretive responses to the actions of Eveline and Eilis are inextricably linked to the formal qualities of each text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marianne Moore treats humor as a means of both recognizing commonality and creating mutual understanding between individuals. In two comparatively minor poems, ''A Prize Bird'' (1915) and ''The Wood-Weasel'' (1942), Moore uses humor as a test of friendship, and suggests that sympathetic laughter constitutes a distinctively American approach to collaborative artistic creation. Humor in ''The Pangolin'' (1936), like the artists' tools Moore discusses in the poem, is both an end in itself and a means to ever-greater things: it becomes the marker of shared humanity and a medium for uniting the human with the divine. Throughout Moore's work, her humor can be read as a kind of ars poetica, modeling the synthesis of diverse components that she performs in her poetry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines modernist genealogy in Alice Notley's 1992 poem "The Descent of Alette." Notley's central speaker finds herself riding on a nightmarish subway ruled by a male tyrant who controls all artistic form. This article argues that the subway can be understood as an ongoing public to which poets since Pound have returned to experiment with impersonal poetic form. In Notley's poem, the subway signals vexed poetic lineage as well as the passageway to a new collective formal space. However, this article suggests, we must ask whether the poem's emphasis on private poetic speech qualifies the poem's feminist poetic imagination, or whether Notley's formal experimentation, particularly her use of citational quotation marks, leads to a workable notion of collective voice as the object of quest. Reading "Alette" against ''Doctor Williams' Heiresses,'' Notley's early experimental historiography, the article situates the question of private speech within the larger question of modernism's ''after-affects'' in postwar women's poetry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay analyzes Amiri Baraka's Afro-Modernist epic, "Wise Why's Y's: The Griot's Song" ("Djeli Ya") throughout its composition process, within the contexts of Classical epic traditions, early twentieth-century American modernist long poems, and the griot traditions of West Africa. "Wise" is an Afro-Modernist epic that is unique in several respects: the epic shifts from the individual hero traditionally seen in the epic form to the collective, and displays a transnational, diasporic worldview opposed to a unitary national consciousness. Baraka uses the genre of the epic that at foundation coalesces national identity to question those very foundations. "Wise" does not follow the traditional narrative of the epic journey; the African American collective is unable to return to a physical location called ''home.'' Instead, "Wise" improvises a home for the African American collective through the act of performance, creating a jazz text combining poetry, music and visual art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although James Schuyler's poems are often understood as celebrations of ordinary experience, this essay argues that some longer lyrics point to the uncanny and dangerous potential of ordinary language. By distinguishing between the use of literary and non-literary speech—the latter often signaled by quoted or spoken voices within the poems themselves—Schuyler's poems suggest how the ordinary can suppress urgent social and political dimensions of experience. For this reason, this essay also argues that Schuyler's work is significantly more politically engaged than it is sometimes given credit for being. Finally, the essay demonstrates that Schuyler's orientation toward the ordinary shares more with Continental, and less with Pragmatist, ideas of ordinariness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a literary criticism of the works of Virginia Woolf. Her endeavor to render the inner working of the mind; Suggestions that her work is poetic; Author's assertion that Woolf's modernism is not purely concerned with recording the subjective mind or heightened experience, but is deeply invested, stylistically and ideologically, in representing the ordinary; Lack of attention from the critics about her commitment to ordinary experience.

Presents literary criticism of the essay "The Freudian Thing, or The Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis," by Jacques Lacan. Role of psychoanalysis in establishing the bridge between modern man and ancient myths; Denouncement of the influence of Freud on American psychoanalysts; Lacan's views on the limitations of the science of psychoanalysis; Use of the myth of Actaeon to examine Freud's premises.

Focuses on the errors in the identification of the historical models for the characters of 'To the Lighthouse', the novel based on Virginia Woolf's childhood remembrances. Mis-identification of John Ferguson's 'A Sea Change: Role of the characters Thomas De Quincey and Mr. Carmichael in the novel; Symbolic significance of Carmichael's character.

Analyzes the relationship between different interpretations of the 'theory of civilization,' as expressed in Clive Bells's 'On British Freedom' and 'Civilization,' with Virginia Woolf's 'Mrs. Dalloway.' Information provided by Bell theory of civilization; Family relationship between Bell and Woolf; Reasons behind the existence of association between their works.

Analyzes the use of symbols to depict life in Malcolm Lowry's novel 'Under the Volcano.' Significance of using symbols in the novel; Textual existence of the characters of the novel; Different representations of reality given through separate discourses in the novel; Emphasis on destiny and chance in the novel; Infusion of comic element in the book through presentation of verbal errors.

Discusses the comparison between the styles of Samuel Beckett and Jasper Johns in their book 'Foirades/Fizzles.' Interaction between art and its roots in commerce; Role of typography in contradicting the implicit aesthetic goals of both Beckett and Johns; Definition of the word Fizzles; Stylistic asceticism in the novel; Motive of the authors in the novel; Choice of narrative strategies and images by the authors.

Discusses the inspiration and method of portrayal of the Quat'z Arts Ball scene in Sherwood Anderson's 'Dark Laughter.' Treatment of the theme of sexual repression in the novel; Freudian insight into the novel; Presentation of Anderson's dilemma about life in the novel; Foundation of the character Rose Frank on American journalist Rose Wilder Lane; View of Lane on the novel.

Provides information on books on criticism of poetry. 'Self and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry,' by Charles Altieri; 'Poet's Prose: The Crisis in American Verse,' Stephen Fredman; 'The Weather for Poetry: Essays, Reviews, and Notes on Poetry, 1977-1981,' by Donald Hall.

Provides information on several books about literary history. 'Assault on Mount Helicon: A Literary Memoir,' by Mary Barnard; 'The Royal Shakespeare Company: A History of Ten Decades,' Sally Beauman; 'Uncle Sam Presents: A Memoir of the Federal Theatre, 1935-1939,' by Tony Buttita and Barry Witham.

Collaborative Dubliners: Joyce in Dialogue presents paired readings of each Dubliners story. This unique project, undertaken by editor Vicki Mahaffey and featuring a wide range of Joycean scholars, seeks 'to produce a new way of doing literary criticism based on dialogue, interplay, and an explicit acknowledgment of a range of possible ways of 'framing' interpretations' and considers the stories themselves as 'parabolic narratives' (2). This notice considers the pedagogical usefulness of this method and how its dialogic centrality offers to expand our understanding of the stories individually and the collection overall, while reminding us that every reading is a dialogue between the reader and text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]