Satirizing Modernism

Author : Emmett Stinson
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 192 pages
File Size : 53,5 Mb
Release : 2017-06-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781501329104

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Satirizing Modernism by Emmett Stinson Pdf

Satirizing Modernism examines 20th-century novels that satirize avant-garde artists and authors while also using experimental techniques associated with literary modernism. These novels-such as Wyndham Lewis's The Apes of God, William Gaddis's The Recognitions, and Gilbert Sorrentino's Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things-were under-recognized and received poor reviews at the time of publication, but have increasingly been acknowledged as both groundbreaking and deeply influential. Satirizing Modernism analyzes these novels in order to present an alternative account of literary modernism, which should be viewed neither as a radical break with the past nor an outmoded set of aesthetics overtaken by a later postmodernism. In self-reflexively critiquing their own aesthetics, these works express an unconventional modernism that both revises literary history and continues to be felt today.

Author : Kevin Rulo
Publisher : Liverpool University Press
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 54,6 Mb
Release : 2021-04-19
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781949979909

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Satiric Modernism by Kevin Rulo Pdf

In this book, Kevin Rulo reveals the crucial linkages between satire and modernism. He shows how satire enables modernist authors to evaluate modernity critically and to explore their ambivalence about the modern. Through provocative new readings of familiar texts and the introduction of largely unknown works, Satiric Modernism exposes a larger satiric mentality at work in well-known authors like T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, and Ralph Ellison and in less studied figures like G.S. Street, the Sitwells, J.J. Adams, and Herbert Read, as well as in the literature of migration of Sam Selvon and John Agard, in the films of Paolo Sorrentino, and in the drama of Sarah Kane. In so doing, Rulo remaps the last hundred years as an era marked distinctively by a new kind of satiric critique of and aesthetic engagement with the temporal fissures, logics, and regimes of modernity. This ambitious, expansive study reshapes our understanding of modernist literary history and will be of interest to scholars of twentieth century and contemporary literature as well as of satire.

Author : Jonathan Greenberg
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 239 pages
File Size : 44,8 Mb
Release : 2011-09-15
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781139501514

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Modernism, Satire and the Novel by Jonathan Greenberg Pdf

In this groundbreaking study, Jonathan Greenberg locates a satiric sensibility at the heart of the modern. By promoting an antisentimental education, modernism denied the authority of emotion to guarantee moral and literary value. Instead, it fostered sophisticated, detached and apparently cruel attitudes toward pain and suffering. This sensibility challenged the novel's humanistic tradition, set ethics and aesthetics into conflict and fundamentally altered the ways that we know and feel. Through lively and original readings of works by Evelyn Waugh, Stella Gibbons, Nathanael West, Djuna Barnes, Samuel Beckett and others, this book analyzes a body of literature - late modernist satire - that can appear by turns aloof, sadistic, hilarious, ironic and poignant, but which continually questions inherited modes of feeling. By recognizing the centrality of satire to modernist aesthetics, Greenberg offers not only a new chapter in the history of satire but a persuasive new idea of what made modernism modern.

Author : Mark Perrino
Publisher : MHRA
Page : 184 pages
File Size : 55,5 Mb
Release : 1995
Category : Modernism (Literature)
ISBN : 0901286524

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The Poetics of Mockery by Mark Perrino Pdf

This study reconsiders Wyndham Lewis's adversarial role in the modernist movement through a close reading of his prodigious satire of 1920s cultural politics. It presents a new interpretation of The Apes of God as a Menippean satire, with attention to its style, characterization, allegory, and historiography, and to Lewis's polemics of the period. Previous studies have emphasised Lewis's external method of visual narration and the personal attacks on the London art world. This one also treats the rhetorical and parodic elements in his mechanistic caricatures of literary impressionism and its proponents, besides the theory of participation and the player behind his schizoid image of the modern subject. The study reinterprets the apprenticeship plot as a carnivalesque discrowning based on the primitive themes of the shaman and the scapegoat. It explores the ways in which the discursive broadcasts - on the social exploitation of a subjectivist aesthetic, publicity as imposture, cultural levelling - are dramatized in the sado-masochistic bond between impresario and naif and in the contradiction of carnival institutionalized. Lewis is shown using his rivals' mythic method to implicate the avant-garde itself in nascent mass culture. The study includes an analysis of the scandal surrounding Lewis's private edition of The Apes and the defence of non-moral satire presented in his subsequent pamphlet Satire and Fiction. Drawing upon unpublished manuscripts and correspondence, it demonstrates how Lewis's own devious publicity campaign re-enacted the crux of the novel and epitomized his conflicts with his contemporaries.

Author : Frank T. Boyle
Publisher : Stanford University Press
Page : 262 pages
File Size : 43,8 Mb
Release : 2000
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780804764186

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Swift as Nemesis by Frank T. Boyle Pdf

With much of the intellectual discourse of the last several decades concerned with reconsiderations of modernity, how do we read the works of Jonathan Swift, who ridiculed the modern even as it was taking shape? The author approaches the question of modernity in Swift by way of a theory of satire from Aristotle via Swift (and Bakhtin) that eschews modern notions that satire is meant to reform and correct. Linking satire to Nemesis, the goddess of righteous vengeance, "Swift as Nemesis" develops new readings of Swift's major satires. From his first published work, Swift associates the modern with the new science and represents modernity as a pernicious strain of narcissism that devalues humanistic discourse. In his early satires, he compiles a profane history of the modern in which the new philosophy is an extension of the methodology of alchemists, the debased Roman Catholic Church, and the various Puritan sects. This history culminates in "A Tale of a Tub" with an assault on the intellectual basis of that most formidable of all modern works, Newton's "Principia." In "Gulliver's Travels," Swift attacks modern culture while aiming at individual readers. Novelistic identification with Gulliver's narcissism (beginning with masturbation and encompassing various scatological observations) implicates readers in the larger cultural critique in which Gulliver, paralleling Narcissus, rejects cultures he encounters until he embraces a cultural image that destroys him. The wider cultural implications of Swift's work are evident in the way he uses travel as a metaphor to link the inhuman consequences of European imperialism with the discoveries of the new science. Finally, Swift's works, like the mirror Nemesis uses to destroy Narcissus, are shown to return the narcissistic projections of critics. Recognizing that Narcissus and Echo have become important to the critique of modernism, the author argues that readers will find it useful now to turn to the contextualizing role of Nemesis. She emerges from Swift's critically irreducible satire with an ironic claim on modernity itself.

Author : Matthew Stratton
Publisher : Fordham Univ Press
Page : 304 pages
File Size : 52,6 Mb
Release : 2013-11-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780823255467

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The Politics of Irony in American Modernism by Matthew Stratton Pdf

Shortlisted for the 2015 Modernist Studies Association Book Prize This book shows how American literary culture in the first half of the twentieth century saw “irony” emerge as a term to describe intersections between aesthetic and political practices. Against conventional associations of irony with political withdrawal, Stratton shows how the term circulated widely in literary and popular culture to describe politically engaged forms of writing. It is a critical commonplace to acknowledge the difficulty of defining irony before stipulating a particular definition as a stable point of departure for literary, cultural, and political analysis. This book, by contrast, is the first to derive definitions of “irony” inductively, showing how writers employed it as a keyword both before and in opposition to the institutionalization of New Criticism. It focuses on writers who not only composed ironic texts but talked about irony and satire to situate their work politically: Randolph Bourne, Benjamin De Casseres, Ellen Glasgow, John Dos Passos, Ralph Ellison, and many others.

Author : Alberto Godioli
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 176 pages
File Size : 42,7 Mb
Release : 2017-12-02
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781351191012

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Laughter from Realism to Modernism by Alberto Godioli Pdf

"As best exemplified by the works of Pirandello, Svevo, Palazzeschi, and Gadda, Italian modernist fiction is particularly rich in bizarre and ludicrous characters, whose originality is often derided by a uniform society. On the other hand, laughter can also be used by the author (or by the misfits themselves) as a reaction to the levelling pressure of social life - Pirandello's umorismo, Svevo's irony, Palazzeschi's controdolore, and Gadda's satire are all good cases in point. Looked at from this perspective, early 20th-century Italian fiction can set the basis for an innovative reflection on broader comparative themes. What is the role of laughter and individual diversity in international Modernism? How is modernist eccentricity related to the representations of originality in the 18th and 19th centuries, from Sterne to Balzac and Dostoevsky? And what does it tell us about the fear of homogenisation as a crucial aspect of the modern social imaginary? Building on the analysis of a large corpus of short stories and other major works by the Italian authors at issue, as well as on a series of previously undetected intertextual links with the classics of European Realism, this book is the first systematic attempt at answering such questions. Alberto Godioli is Teaching Fellow in Italian at the University of Edinburgh."

Author : Peter Edgerly Firchow
Publisher : LIT Verlag Münster
Page : 356 pages
File Size : 46,5 Mb
Release : 2002
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 3825859622

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Reluctant Modernists by Peter Edgerly Firchow Pdf

The essays collected here deal with modernist writers who, on the whole, felt 'reluctant' about their modernist status because they believed that it was just as important to look backward as it was to look forward. Indeed, for most of them looking backward was more important because it was only through the past that one could understand one's proper place in the present and in the future. That is why in Huxley's Brave New World it is the rejection of the past in the future - and by implication in the present - that makes its satire so penetrating. Modernism, in other words, means for these writers not a radical break with the past but a continuing search for what still connects them (and us) vitally with it. Peter Firchow, Professor of English at the University of Minnesota, is the author of several books on modern and modernist literary subjects, including books on Huxley, Conrad, and Auden. The publication of some of his hitherto uncollected essays in this volume is intended to honor

Author : Shawn Holliday
Publisher : Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers
Page : 176 pages
File Size : 54,9 Mb
Release : 2001
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : UOM:39015053477843

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Thomas Wolfe and the Politics of Modernism by Shawn Holliday Pdf

Once one of the most popular fiction writers in all of American literature, Thomas Wolfe now stands in a tenuous position in the American literary canon. This book combats the academic and critical inertia that currently surrounds Wolfe by exploring his complex relationship to modernism. The experimental nature of Wolfe's fiction, his troubling associations with other writers and artists, his complicated publishing practices, and the development of his late political conscience are analyzed to reestablish his importance to this historically avant-garde literary movement and to twentieth-century American literature.

Author : James McNaughton
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 552 pages
File Size : 55,8 Mb
Release : 2006
Category : Electronic
ISBN : UOM:39015063180981

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On the "Utopian Scrap-heap" by James McNaughton Pdf

Author : Graham Matthews
Publisher : A&C Black
Page : 210 pages
File Size : 54,6 Mb
Release : 2012-05-03
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781441140074

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Ethics and Desire in the Wake of Postmodernism by Graham Matthews Pdf

Reading the work of 6 contemporary satiric novelists through contemporary theory, this book explores the possibility of reading and criticism after postmodernism.

Author : George McCartney
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 236 pages
File Size : 49,7 Mb
Release : 2017-09-18
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781351311021

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Evelyn Waugh and the Modernist Tradition by George McCartney Pdf

In Evelyn Waugh and the Modernist Tradition, George McCartney argues that unlike traditional satirists, Evelyn Waugh was not primarily concerned with correcting morals and manners. Instead, he laid siege to the cultural and metaphysical assumptions of his time. McCartney demonstrates that the one constant in Waugh's work was his lively engagement with contemporary intellectual fashion. It was especially his response to modernism, the zeitgeist of his formative years, that gave his fiction its distinctive energy. McCartney shows how at every turn Waugh's writing pays parodic tribute to modernist esthetics. Although he deplored many of the movement's philosophical premises, he nevertheless admired its methods, borrowing them freely whenever it suited his purposes. In effect, Waugh developed an alternate modernism. Whether it was his playful reworking of Bauhaus and Futurist theory, or his borrowings from film technique, he was determined to take his place in what he called "the advance-guard" despite his avowedly "antique" tastes. Part aesthete, part traditionalist, he appropriated the strategies of experimental art in order to defeat its metaphysical implications. McCartney provides evidence that this ambivalent regard for modernism reveals not only Waugh's interest in aesthetics and philosophy, but also his personal conflicts. For a man who prized rationality, he was remarkably, even notoriously impulsive. McCartney concludes that Waugh's satire sprang not only from his dismay with contemporary intellectual fashions but also from an inward struggle between his orthodox and wayward selves, a struggle that registered the cultural conflicts of his time with uncanny accuracy. In McCartney's reading, Waugh's personal and intellectual ambivalence enabled him to become a prescient critic of our age. The result was a body of work that remains as vital today as when it was written.

Author : M. D. Fletcher
Publisher : Lanham, MD : University Press of America
Page : 216 pages
File Size : 50,8 Mb
Release : 1987
Category : Political satire
ISBN : UCSC:32106007772319

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Contemporary Political Satire by M. D. Fletcher Pdf

Author : Anne Quéma
Publisher : Bucknell University Press
Page : 248 pages
File Size : 49,9 Mb
Release : 1999
Category : Aesthetics, British
ISBN : 0838753922

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The Agon of Modernism by Anne Quéma Pdf

"Lewis's political writings present ambiguities: his stated belief in the autonomy of art from life is contradicted by other statements he made and by his critical analyses of writers; and his political writings blur any a priori generic distinction between art and non-art. Given this blurring between art and life, artistic genre and non-artistic genre, Quema claims that Lewis's political texts present characteristics usually attributed to avant-gardism. However, this radicalism has to be balanced against Lewis's conservatism. Thus his political writings can be read as allegories with two pragmatic aims: to organize the life of the polis from an artistic standpoint and to persuade the reader to adhere to authoritarian politics."--BOOK JACKET.

Author : Leonard Diepeveen
Publisher : University of Toronto Press
Page : 442 pages
File Size : 40,9 Mb
Release : 2014-01-01
Category : Art
ISBN : 9781442644823

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Mock Modernism by Leonard Diepeveen Pdf

How was the modernist movement understood by the general public when it was first emerging? This question can be addressed by looking at how modernist literature and art were interpreted by journalists in daily newspapers, mainstream magazines likePunch and Vanity Fair, and literary magazines. In the earliest decades of the movement – before modernist artists were considered important, and before modernism's meaning was clearly understood – many of these interpretations took the form of parodies. Mock Modernism is an anthology of these amusing pieces, the overwhelming majority of which have not been in print since the first decades of the twentieth century. They include Max Beerbohm's send-up of Henry James; J.C. Squire's account of how a poet, writing deliberately incomprehensible poetry as a hoax, became the poet laureate of the British Bolshevist Revolution; and theChicago Record-Herald's account of some art students' “trial” of Henri Matisse for “crimes against anatomy.” An introduction and headnotes by Leonard Diepeveen highlight the usefulness of these pieces for comprehending media and public perceptions of a form of art that would later develop an almost unassailable power.