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The first public performance of Auguste and Louis Lumière’s newly patented Cinématographe, which took place in the Salon Indien of the Grand Café in Paris on December 28, 1895, has been heralded by film historians as the birth of public cinema. However, on that early winter day in the last decade of the nineteenth century, it was by no means clear that an artistic revolution was in the offing. Some three years before, on the other side of the Atlantic, Thomas Edison had successfully launched the Kinetoscope, a “peep show” machine that enabled one paying customer at a time to view a single short moving picture. By the time the Lumières screened their modest program of ...

The classic Hollywood Western is generally taken to be the antithesis of avant-garde art, a popular genre unaffected by modernism. However, John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) provides an illustrative example of middlebrow American modernist cinema. Influenced by French literary naturalism and German expressionism, Ford’s Western obliquely engages with the ills of modern urban existence and the interrelated “crises of modernity” that characterized the interwar years, when the global viability of liberal democracy was cast into doubt. In Stagecoach, the problems of modernity are treated (diegetically), though not fully cured, by a transformative if dangerous journey into the American Wild West. By integrating the formal innovations of F. W. Murnau’s expressionist style with his own epic and monumental vision of the American west, Ford epitomized an underappreciated form of American vernacular modernism that emerged across the arts in the 1910s, flourished in the 1920s and 1930s, and survived into the post-WWII era.

Modernism, Postcolonialism, and Globalism examines how first- and second-generation postcolonial writers responded to the experience of modernism within the context of an increasingly globalized world. The introduction traces the critical reception of modernism over roughly the last forty years, highlighting Edward Said’s and Fredric Jameson’s highly influential critiques of it. In response, some scholars challenged the claim that modernism was necessarily complicit with colonialism and imperialism—as Begam and Moses did in Modernism and Colonialism (2007)—while others, following Mao and Walkowitz’s “The New Modernist Studies” (2008), reconceived the field, temporally and spatially expanding its boundaries beyond Europe and the 1890–1950 period. The canoncial realignments that the New Modernism Studies inspired have generally taken place under four broad rubrics: Geomodernisms, Transnational Modernisms, Global Modernism and Planetary Modernisms. This Introduction examines all these critical approaches, as well as David James and Urmila Seshagiri’s response to them in their influential essay “Metamodernism” (2014).

This chapter considers V. S. Naipaul as a belated modernist who exhibits what Harold Bloom terms an acute anxiety of influence. Naipaul denies any debt to Anglophone modernism and is widely considered a Dickensian realist. Focusing on The Enigma of Arrival (1987) and A Way in the World (1994), the chapter examines Naipaul’s postcolonial redeployment of Conrad’s delayed decoding, Joyce and Woolf’s hypersubjectivized first-person narration, Kafka’s expressionistic and de Chirico’s surrealistic antirealism, and Proust’s manipulation of narrative chronology. Naipaul’s lack of interest in modernism is a feint, a mark of his sense of belatedness in relation to modern European culture and of an artistic ressentiment both crippling and empowering. The chapter contends that Naipaul’s sly use of modernism embraces inauthenticity as the basis for redefining modernity itself. Naipaul casts himself as the New World subject: a modern, self-made individual constantly reinventing himself and his world with only the found artifacts of an “alien” cultural legacy at his disposal.

Directed by Neill Blomkamp. Written by Neill Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell. Produced by Peter Jackson and Carolynne Cunningham. Co-produced by Philippa Boyens. Executive Producers Bill Block, Elliot ...

Summary This article analyses the multi-generic and protean formal properties of Elizabeth Costello (2003) in order to illustrate how Coetzee's experiments with literary form constitute a distinctive intervention in contemporary political, philosophical and aesthetic debates.

From the time of Eadweard Muybridge’s first successful experiments with stereoscopic fast motion photography in 1878, the history of cinema has been indissolubly linked with those of modernity and modern art. The rapid development of the new medium by Muybridge, William Friese-Greene, William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, Thomas Edison, and Auguste and Louis Lumiere in the 1880s and 1890s occurred during a period of artistic ferment and formal innovation in literature, painting, sculpture, architecture, opera and music. Even as the ‘cinematograph’ of the Lumiere brothers (and Jean Aime Le Roy), the ‘Vitascope’ of Edison, and the ‘Bioscop’ of Emil and Max Skladonowsky enjoyed their initial public triumphs in Paris, New York and Berlin in the mid-1890s, a bewildering variety of new movements in the arts – naturalism, symbolism, aestheticism, impressionism, decadence, modernismo, art deco, modernisme (the Catalan architectural movement) and verismo, to name only a few of the most prominent – flourished in Europe and the Americas. The subsequent worldwide success first of the silent movie and then after 1927 of the sound film significantly coincided with what has been traditionally regarded as the heyday of literary (and more generally artistic) modernism. At a time when the traditional boundaries of modernist studies are undergoing a radical and decisive remapping, and when the emergence of new media prompts us to reconsider the relationships among new technologies, cultural production and artistic expression, it seems altogether appropriate, and a matter of critical and theoretical importance, to pose (once again) the question of what the relationship is (or was) between modernism and cinema. The contributors to this issue of Modernist Cultures – the first to be published by Edinburgh University Press – have both raised and responded to this question in different ways; but for all their differences in disciplinary perspective, methodological approach and

Acknowledgments ix Introduction / Richard Begam and Michael Valdez Moses 1 Part 1: Victorian Backgrounds 1. Colonialism and Popular Literature at the Fin de Siecle / Nicholas Daly 19 Part 2: Modern British Literature 2. Disorientalism: Conrad and the Imperial Origins of Modernist Aesthetics / Michael Valdez Moses 43 3. Virginia Woolf's Colony and the Adolescence of Modernist Fiction / Jed Esty 70 4. War, "Primitivism," and the Future of "the West": Reflections on D.H. Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis / Andrzej Agsiorek 91 5. T.S. Eliot, Late Empire, and Decadence / Vincent Sherry 111 6. Romancing the Stump: Modernism and Colonialism to Forster's A Passage to India / Brian May 136 7. "A tangle of modernism and barbarity": Evelyn Waugh's Black Mischief / Rita Barnard 162 Part 3: Ireland and Scotland 8. Joyce's Trojan Horse: Ulysses and the Aesthetics of Decolonization / Richard Begam 185 9. Yeats, Spengler, and A Vision after Empire / Nicholas Allen 209 10. Elizabeth Bowen's Troubled Modernism / Maria DiBattista 226 11. "Upon the thistle they're impaled": Hugh MacDiarmid's Modernist Nationalism / Ian Duncan 246 Part 4: Toward the Postcolonial 12. Postcolonial Modernism? / Declan Kiberd 269 13. Modernist Bricolage, Postcolonial Hybridity / Jahan Ramazani 288 Contributors 315 Index 319

In what is generally taken to be his most explicit formulation of a personal aesthetic, Samuel Beckett envisions and endorses an art that would be "the expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express" (Disjecta 139). Beckett sees in the paintings of his contemporary Bram Van Velde not only the first authentic attempt to undermine representational art but also the first effort to assert the impossibility of artistic expression in general.1 In his own work Beckett has consistently striven for the literary equivalent of Van Velde's painting. But just as Van Velde has necessarily employed the most basic tools and techniques of his own medium, so also Beckett has relied upon time-honored literary forms and conventions in his tireless efforts to break completely with the tradition of literary expression.