Author: Allison Schachter
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 0199812632
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 209
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Book Description
Diasporic Modernisms illuminates the formal and historical aspects of displaced Jewish writers--S. Y. Abramovitsh, Yosef Chaim Brenner, Dovid Bergelson, Leah Goldberg, and others--who grappled with statelessness and the uncertain status of Yiddish and Hebrew.
Author: Allison Schachter
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199812640
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 209
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Book Description
Pairing the two concepts of diaspora and modernism, Allison Schachter formulates a novel approach to modernist studies and diasporic cultural production. Diasporic Modernisms illuminates how the relationships between migrant writers and dispersed readers were registered in the innovative practices of modernist prose fiction. The Jewish writers discussed-including S. Y. Abramovitsh, Yosef Chaim Brenner, Dovid Bergelson, Leah Goldberg, Gabreil Preil, and Kadia Molodowsky--embraced diaspora as a formal literary strategy to reflect on the historical conditions of Jewish language culture. Spanning from 1894 to 1974, the book traces the development of this diasporic aesthetic in the shifting centers of Hebrew and Yiddish literature, including Odessa, Jerusalem, Berlin, Tel Aviv, and New York. Through an analysis of Jewish writing, Schachter theorizes how modernist literary networks operate outside national borders in minor and non-national languages. Offering the first comparative literary history of Hebrew and Yiddish modernist prose, Diasporic Modernisms argues that these two literary histories can no longer be separated by nationalist and monolingual histories. Instead, the book illuminates how these literary languages continue to animate each other, even after the creation of a Jewish state, with Hebrew as its national language.
Author: Pavlina Radia
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004314431
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 252
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Book Description
This book argues that Djuna Barnes and Jane Bowles counter the critical trend associating American modernity primarily with urban spaces, and instead locate the nomadic thrust of their times in the (post)colonial history of the American frontier.
Author: Samantha A. Noël
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478012897
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 202
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Book Description
In Tropical Aesthetics of Black Modernism, Samantha A. Noël investigates how Black Caribbean and American artists of the early twentieth century responded to and challenged colonial and other white-dominant regimes through tropicalist representation. With depictions of tropical scenery and landscapes situated throughout the African diaspora, performances staged in tropical settings, and bodily expressions of tropicality during Carnival, artists such as Aaron Douglas, Wifredo Lam, Josephine Baker, and Maya Angelou developed what Noël calls “tropical aesthetics”—using art to name and reclaim spaces of Black sovereignty. As a unifying element in the Caribbean modern art movement and the Harlem Renaissance, tropical aesthetics became a way for visual artists and performers to express their sense of belonging to and rootedness in a place. Tropical aesthetics, Noël contends, became central to these artists’ identities and creative processes while enabling them to craft alternative Black diasporic histories. In outlining the centrality of tropical aesthetics in the artistic and cultural practices of Black modernist art, Noël recasts understandings of African diasporic art.
Author: Susan Stanford Friedman
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231539479
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 466
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Book Description
Drawing on a vast archive of world history, anthropology, geography, cultural theory, postcolonial studies, gender studies, literature, and art, Susan Stanford Friedman recasts modernity as a networked, circulating, and recurrent phenomenon producing multiple aesthetic innovations across millennia. Considering cosmopolitan as well as nomadic and oceanic worlds, she radically revises the scope of modernist critique and opens the practice to more integrated study. Friedman moves from large-scale instances of pre-1500 modernities, such as Tang Dynasty China and the Mongol Empire, to small-scale instances of modernisms, including the poetry of Du Fu and Kabir and Abbasid ceramic art. She maps the interconnected modernisms of the long twentieth century, pairing Joseph Conrad with Tayeb Salih, E. M. Forster with Arundhati Roy, Virginia Woolf with the Tagores, and Aimé Césaire with Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. She reads postcolonial works from Sudan and India and engages with the idea of Négritude. Rejecting the modernist concepts of marginality, othering, and major/minor, Friedman instead favors rupture, mobility, speed, networks, and divergence, elevating the agencies and creative capacities of all cultures not only in the past and present but also in the century to come.
Author: Xavier Kalck
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1949979512
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 300
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Book Description
Modernist Objects: Literature, Art, Culture is a unique mix of cultural studies, literature, and visual arts applied to the discrete materiality of modernist objects. Contributors explore the many tensions surrounding the modernist relationship to objects, things, products and artefacts through the prism of poetry, prose, visual arts, culture and crafts.
Author: Jeremy Braddock
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press+ORM
ISBN: 1421410044
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 558
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Book Description
“How African-American artists and intellectuals sought greater liberty in Paris while also questioning the extent of the freedoms they so publicly praised.” —American Literary History Paris has always fascinated and welcomed writers. Throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century, writers of American, Caribbean, and African descent were no exception. Paris, Capital of the Black Atlantic considers the travels made to Paris—whether literally or imaginatively—by black writers. These collected essays explore the transatlantic circulation of ideas, texts, and objects to which such travels to Paris contributed. Editors Jeremy Braddock and Jonathan P. Eburne expand upon an acclaimed special issue of the journal Modern Fiction Studies with four new essays and a revised introduction. Beginning with W. E. B. Du Bois’s trip to Paris in 1900and ending with the contemporary state of diasporic letters in the French capital, this collection embraces theoretical close readings, materialist intellectual studies of networks, comparative essays, and writings at the intersection of literary and visual studies. Paris, Capital of the Black Atlantic is unique both in its focus on literary fiction as a formal and sociological category and in the range of examples it brings to bear on the question of Paris as an imaginary capital of diasporic consciousness. “Demonstrate[s] how Black writers shaped history and contributed to conflicting notions of modernity hosted in Paris . . . The wide range of writers and scholars from American and Francophone studies makes this collection very original and an exciting adventure in concepts, movements, and ideologies that could be acceptable to non-specialists as well.” —American Studies
Author: Jennifer M. Wilks
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807133644
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 276
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Book Description
Race, Gender, and Comparative Black Modernism revives and critiques four African American and Francophone Caribbean women writers sometimes overlooked in discussions of early-twentieth-century literature: Guadeloupean Suzanne Lacascade (dates unknown), African American Marita Bonner (1899--1971), Martinican Suzanne Césaire (1913--1966), and African American Dorothy West (1907--1998). Reexamining their most significant work, Jennifer M. Wilks demonstrates how their writing challenges prevailing racial archetypes -- such as the New Negro and the Negritude hero -- of the period from the 1920s to the 1940s, and explores how these writers tapped into modernist currents from expressionism to surrealism to produce progressive treatments of race, gender, and nation that differed from those of currently canonized black writers of the era, the great majority of whom are men. Wilks begins with Lacascade, whom she deems "best known for being unknown," reading Lacascade's novel Claire-Solange, âme africaine (1924) as a protofeminist, proto-Negritude articulation of Caribbean identity. She then examines the fissures left unexplored in New Negro visions of African American community by showing the ways in which Bonner's essays, plays, and short stories highlight issues of economic class. Césaire applied the ideas and techniques of surrealism to the French language, and Wilks reveals how her writings in the journal Tropiques (1941-45) directly and insightfully engage the intellectual influences that informed the work of canonical Negritude. Wilks' close reading of West's The Living Is Easy (1948) provides a retrospective critique of the forces that continued to circumscribe women's lives in the midst of the social and cultural awakening presumably embodied in the New Negro. To show how the black literary tradition has continued to confront the conflation of gender roles with social and literary conventions, Wilks examines these writers alongside the late twentieth-century writings of Maryse Condé and Toni Morrison. Unlike many literary analysts, Wilks does not bring together the four writers based on geography. Lacascade and Césaire came from different Caribbean islands, and though Bonner and West were from the United States, they never crossed paths. In considering this eclectic group of women writers together, Wilks reveals the analytical possibilities opened up by comparing works influenced by multiple intellectual traditions.
Author: Jill Darling
Publisher: punctum books
ISBN: 1685710123
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 221
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Book Description
Geographies of Identity: Narrative Forms, Feminist Futures explores identity and American culture through hybrid, prose work by women, and expands the strategies of cultural poetics practices into the study of innovative narrative writing. Informed by Judith Butler, Homi Bhabha, Harryette Mullen, Julia Kristeva, and others, this project further considers feminist identity politics, race, and ethnicity as cultural content in and through poetic and non/narrative forms. The texts reflected on here explore literal and figurative landscapes, linguistic and cultural geographies, sexual borders, and spatial topographies. Ultimately, they offer non-prescriptive models that go beyond expectations for narrative forms, and create textual webs that reflect the diverse realities of multi-ethnic, multi-oriented, multi-linguistic cultural experiences. Readings of Gertrude Stein's A Geographical History of America, Renee Gladman's Juice, Pamela Lu's Pamela: A Novel, Claudia Rankine's Don't Let Me Be Lonely, Juliana Spahr's The Transformation, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictée, Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera, and Layli Long Soldier's WHEREAS show how alternatively narrative modes of writing can expand access to representation, means of identification, and subjective agency, and point to horizons of possibility for new futures. These texts critique essentializing practices in which subjects are defined by specific identity categories, and offer complicated, contextualized, and historical understandings of identity formation through the textual weaving of form and content.
Author: D. Konzett
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230107532
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 202
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Book Description
This study explores a new understanding of modernism and ethnicity as put forward in the transnational and diasporic writings of Anzia Yezierska, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Rhys. In its selection of three modernists from apparently different cultural backgrounds, it is meant to make us rethink the role of modernism in terms of ethnicity and displacement. Konzett critiques the traditional understanding of the monocultural 'ethnic identity' often highlighted in the studies of these writers and argues that all three writers are better understood as ironic narrators of diaspora and movement and as avant-garde modernists. As a result, they offer an alternative aesthetics of modernism which is centered around the innovative narration of displacement. Her analysis of the complexities of language and form and impact of the complex and ambiguous formal styles of the three writers on the history of their reception is a model of the effective integration of formalist, historicist, and theoretical perspectives in literary criticism.
