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The Everyday and the Evolution of Modernist Narrative investigates how a modernity famed for temporal acceleration—from Benjamin’s “shock” and “distraction” to the postmodern loss of historical consciousness diagnosed by Jameson—generated fictions defined, strangely enough, not just by the “new” but just as forcefully by everyday depletions of stasis and repetition, a flood of sameness in modern life. With close attention to the novels of Flaubert, Wells, Conrad, and Joyce, Against the Event relates this aspect of modernity to modernist and proto-modernist problems of narrative form, in particular the banalizing effects of genre, the threatening necessity of closure, and the obsolescence of the coherent narrator. In doing so, Against the Event is also an intervention into one of the pressing philosophical and theoretical issues of our time, that of the nature of the ‘event.’

The book conceives the literary and cinematic category of “noir” as a way of understanding the defining conflict between authenticity and consumer culture in post–World War II America. It analyzes works of fiction and film in order to argue that both contribute to a “noir tradition” that is initiated around the end of World War II and continues to develop and evolve in the present. All of noir’s evolutions have taken place as responses to consumer culture; in the postwar era this consumer culture has become conflated with American citizenship, and the noir tradition presents itself as an “authentic” alternative to this republic of consumption. In order to see how noir and its descendants stage the confrontation between consumer culture and authenticity, my analysis is concentrated on how the texts that I write about represent various kinds of American commercial spaces. This analysis has a three-part structure, organized around the three key moments in the development of the noir tradition that I identify: (1) the postwar moment, as represented by classic film noir and hard-boiled detective fiction; (2) the sixties era, during which noir film and fiction are transformed and take the new form of the conspiracy narrative; and (3) the post-eighties period of dominant postmodernism, in which noir themes and aesthetics are revived, with a difference, to facilitate ways of responding to the phenomenon of global capitalism.

American Obscurantism argues for a salutary indirection in U.S. culture. From its earliest canonical literary works through films of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the most compelling manifestations of America’s troubled history have articulated this content through a unique formal and tonal obscurity. Envisioning the formidable darkness attending racial history at nearly every stage of the republic’s founding and ongoing development, writers such as William Faulkner and Hart Crane, and directors like the Coen brothers and Stanley Kubrick, present a powerful critique of American conquest, southern plantation culture, and western frontier ideology. American Obscurantism engages the basis of these explorations in Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville, each of whom present notable occlusions in their characters’ racial understanding, an obtuseness or naivety that is expressed by a corresponding formal opacity. Such oblique historicity as the book describes allows a method at odds with—and implicitly critical of—the historicizing trend that marked literary studies in the wake of the theoretical turn. The book thus restores an emphasis on aesthetic and medium-specific features to argue for a formalist historicity. Working through challenges to an implicitly white, bourgeois, heteronormative polity, American Obscurantism posits an insistent, vital racial otherness at the heart of American literature and cinema. It examines this pattern across a canon that shows more self-doubt than assuredness, arguing for the value of openness and questioning in place of epistemological or critical certainty.

Time matters to all of us. It dominates everyday discourse: diaries, schedules, clocks, working hours, opening times, appointments, weekdays and weekends, national holidays, religious festivals, birthdays, and anniversaries. But how do we, as unique individuals, subjectively experience time? The slowness of an hour in a boring talk, the swiftness of a summer holiday, the fleetingness of childhood, the endless wait for pivotal news: these are experiences to which we all can relate and of which we commonly speak. How can a writer not only report such experiences but also conjure them up in words so that readers share the frustration, the excitement, the anticipation, are on tenterhooks with a narrator or character, or in melancholic mourning for a time long since passed which we never experienced ourselves? This book suggests that the evocation of subjective temporal experience occurs in every sentence, on every page, at every plot turn, in any narrative. It offers a new template for understanding narrative time that combines close readings with analysis of the structural overview. It enables new ways of reading Thomas Mann, but also suggests new ways of conceptualizing narrative time in any literary work, not only in Mann’s fiction and not only in texts that foreground the narration of time. The range of Mann’s novels, novellas, and short stories is compared with other nineteenth- and twentieth-century works in German and in English to suggest a comprehensive approach to considering time in narrative.

Art, History, and Postwar Fiction explores the ways in which novelists responded to the visual arts from the aftermath of the Second World War up to the present day. If art had long served as a foil to enable novelists to reflect on their craft, this book argues that in the postwar period, novelists turned to the visual arts to develop new ways of conceptualizing the relationship between literature and history. The sense that the novel was becalmed in the end of history was pervasive in the postwar decades. In seeming to bring modernism to a climax whilst repeating its foundational gestures, visual art also raised questions about the relationship between continuity and change in the development of art. In chapters on Samuel Beckett, William Gaddis, John Berger, and W. G. Sebald, and shorter discussions of writers like Doris Lessing, Kathy Acker, and Teju Cole, this book shows that writing about art was often a means of commenting on historical developments of the period: the Cold War, the New Left, the legacy of the Holocaust. Furthermore, it argues that forms of postwar visual art, from abstraction to the readymade, offered novelists ways of thinking about the relationship between form and history that went beyond models of reflection or determination. By doing so, this book also argues that attention to interactions between literature and art can provide critics with new ways to think about the relationship between literature and history beyond reductive oppositions between formalism and historicism, autonomy and context.

In the early twentieth century, US writers looked at modern food—its global geographies, its nutritional theories, and its technological innovations—and saw not merely the incursion of industry and the threat of adulteration but an imaginative possibility. Fiction of the 1920s and 1930s represented food systems and used alimentary metaphors to unsettle the bases of racial classification and white supremacy. Dietetics played a key role in so-called race science, which blamed industrial food for Nordic degeneration and looked to euthenics, the study of nutrition and environment, to fix broken modern bodies that were insufficiently white. Thus, the dreams of new bodies and new categories expressed in this literature constituted a radical response to the political and nutritional theories of this cultural moment. For Jean Toomer and George Schuyler, both frustrated by the stigma of blackness in a segregated society, food technologies represented an opportunity to invent a new race or to renovate an old one. For F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Hemingway, enmeshment in the food system revealed that whiteness could not embody the purity that was supposedly its hallmark. In the Great Depression and thereafter, Zora Neale Hurston and Dorothy West indicted racist social structures and used food to interrogate the boundaries of the human. In a time of segregation, nativism, and Fascism, food brought bodies together and spoke of shared pleasure and vulnerability.

This book argues that the literature of the early twentieth-century in England and Ireland was deeply organized around a reckoning with grievous violence, imagined as intimate, direct, and often transformative. The book aims to excavate and amplify a consistent feature of this literature, which is that its central operations (formal as well as thematic) emerge specifically in reference to violence. The book offers a variety of new terms and paradigms for reading violence in literary works, most centrally the concepts it names “enchanted and disenchanted violence.” In addition to defining key aspects of literary violence in the period, including the notion of “violet hour,” the book explores three major historical episodes: dynamite violence and anarchism in the nineteenth century, which provided a vibrant, new consciousness about explosion, sensationalism, and the limits of political meaning in the act of violence; the turbulent events consuming Ireland in the first thirty years of the century, including the Rising, the War of Independence, and the Civil War, all of which play a vital role in defining the literary corpus; and the 1930s build-up to WWII, including the event that most enthralled Europe in these years, the Spanish Civil War. These historical upheavals provide the imaginative and physical material for a re-reading of four canonical writers (Eliot, Conrad, Yeats, and Woolf), understood not only as including violence in their works, but as generating their primary styles and plots out of its deformations. Included also in this panorama are a host of other works, literary and non-literary, including visual culture, journalism, popular novels, and other modernist texts.

The focus of this book is on how time is represented in reverse forms throughout modernist literature and culture, from about 1900 until the middle years of the twentieth century. It is particularly concerned with how antipodean reorientations of chronological scale reconfigure ways in which the conventional temporal categories of modernism are understood. It treats time neither as a philosophical nor as a theological concern but, rather, as a phenomenon shaped by material forces across different spatial and temporal trajectories. By foregrounding the antipodean slant of this project, it not only integrates the literature of Australia and other parts of the Southern Hemisphere into the broader trajectories of modernism, but also considers ways in which canonical narratives might productively be considered in relation to their antipodean dimensions, thereby opening up modernist narratives to various forms of systematic reversal. Backgazing thus reads canonical authors (Proust, Conrad, Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, Mann, Auden) in relation to Australasian modernist writers (Mansfield, H. H. Richardson, Dark, White, and others), and it considers how the shape of modernism appears different if viewed from an antipodean perspective. It also considers various neglected modernist writers (Cunard, Farrell, Powell, Slessor, R. D. FitzGerald) and suggests how their modernist idiom becomes more recognizable in relation to an aesthetics of backwardness and burlesque.

This book re-examines the arts in the 1920s and 1930s, arguing that rather than being dominated by modernism, the period saw a dialogue between modern baroque—eclectic, playful, and open to influence from popular culture—and modernism, which was theory-driven, didactic, and exclusive, features which suggest that it was essentially a neoclassical movement. Thus the period is characterized by the ancient competition between baroque and classical forms of expression. The author argues that both forms were equally valid responses to the challenge of modernity by setting painting and literature in the context of ‘minor arts’ such as interior design, photography, fashion, ballet, and flower arranging, and by highlighting the social context and sexual politics of creative production. The chapters of the book pursue a set of interconnected themes, focused by turns on artists, artefacts, clients, places, and publicists, in order to test and explore the central idea.

What happens when philosophy and literature meet? What is at stake when the text of a so-called single author begins to speak in two languages, now the language of theoretical reflexion, now the language of narrative fiction? And what relation does writing have to the limit that defines it, but, by exposing it to the limitlessness that lies beyond it, also threatens its possibility? These are some of the questions raised by three of the most provocative and influential French writers of the 20th century: Georges Bataille (1897-1962), Pierre Klossowski (1905-2001), and Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003). Examining all three together for the first time, this pioneering study explores their response to a double challenge: that of assuming the burden of philosophy whilst at the same time affirming the shadows, spirits, and spectres that go under the name of literature. It considers in detail the philosophical and literary heritage shared by all three writers (Sade, Hegel, and Nietzsche), and analyses in turn both the philosophical writing and literary output of all three authors, paying particular attention to Bataille's Histoire de l'œil, Le Bleu du ciel, and Madame Edwarda; Klossowski's Les Lois de l'hospitalité, and Blanchot's Le Très-Haut and Le Dernier Homme.

Beyond Desire: Sexuality in Modern Tamil Literature is the first monograph on sexuality in modern Tamil literature. The book offers an interpretation of shifting representations of masculine desire in Tamil short stories and novels across the twentieth century. Through a reading of seven male writers many of whom drew inspiration from the Tamil writer K.P. Rajagopalan (1902–1944), there emerges a whole range of sensual intimacies between men and women that are irreducible to the sexual act. The book resists the equation of desire with sexual intercourse and explores the interpenetration of desire and other sensual modes of relating to the world that include spirituality, social reform, artistic creativity, and labour. Most of these narratives are focalized through men who are seemingly conflicted by their sexual desires and their attempts to preserve their religious or aesthetic integrity. There is no resolution to this conflict as these men try to offset the threat of (female) desire by idealizing women and reorienting their desires in other forms of sensual activity. The failure to either resist or entirely satisfy or sublimate desire compels the reconfiguration of meaning and subjectivity. While the first five writers of this book focus on the possibility of spiritualizing desire, the last two explore the reformative possibilities of asexual cross-gender partnerships and the transformative potential of labour that binds and reconfigures marginalized (lower-caste, working-class female) subjects.

In Plato’s Republic Socrates spoke of an ‘ancient quarrel’ between literature and philosophy, which he offered to resolve by banning the poets from his ideal city. Few philosophers have taken Socrates at his word, and there has emerged a long tradition that has sought to value literature chiefly as a useful supplement to philosophical reasoning. The fiction of J. M. Coetzee makes a striking challenge to this tradition. While his writing has frequently engaged philosophical subjects in explicit ways, it has done so with an emphasis on the dissonance between literary expression and philosophical reasoning. And while Coetzee has often overtly engaged with academic literary theory, his fiction has done so in a way that has tended to disorient rather than affirm those same theories, wrong-footing the normal processes of literary interpretation. The present collection gathers together a range of thinkers from both philosophy and literary theory to reflect upon the challenge Coetzee has made to their respective disciplines, and to the disciplinary distinctions at stake in the ‘ancient quarrel’. Coetzee’s fiction is used to explore questions about the boundaries between literature, philosophy, and literary criticism; the relationship between literature, theology, and post-secularism; the particular ways in which literature engages reality; how literature interacts with the philosophies of language, action, subjectivity, and ethics; and the institutions that govern the distinctions between literature and philosophy. It will be of importance not only to readers of Coetzee, but to anyone interested in the ancient quarrel itself.

In his 1934 book After Strange Gods, T. S. Eliot declared blasphemy “obsolescent” as a viable literary or artistic mode. There could be no blasphemy worth the name, he reasoned, in a world that had lost its faith in God: a verdict that has gone curiously uncontested by literary scholarship. For while critics have long described modernism as “heretical” or “iconoclastic,” little attention has been paid to the profound ways in which modernism was shaped by blasphemy in the fully religious sense of that term. Far from obsolete, such blasphemy flourished in the writings of Eliot’s contemporaries and inheritors, recurring not only as theme and trope but as a signally modernist mode of writing. Profaning the very scriptures and sacraments that fueled their literary practice, writers such as Mina Loy, James Joyce, Richard Bruce Nugent, and Djuna Barnes evolved richly embodied aesthetic practices that aspired to the condition of “words made flesh.” In doing so they belied Eliot’s premise of an inherently godless modernity, their poems and fictions revealing the extent to which religion endured as a cultural force in the twentieth century. More, these writers’ profanations spotlight a politics of religion that has seldom engaged the attention of modernist studies. Blasphemy respects no division of church and state, and neither do the writers who wield it to profane all manner of coercive dogmas, including secular ideologies of race, class, nation, empire, gender, and sexuality.

This amazing inter-cultural correspondence (1919–1940) between two cultural icons of the twentieth century—Nobel laureates from the East and the West: the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) and the French novelist, playwright and biographer Romain Rolland (1866–1944)—had remained undiscovered for far too long. Published for the first time in English, these letters and telegrams are among the finest exchanges of thought between the East and the West, and script the intellectual history of that period. It is also the story of a profound friendship, where Tagore and Rolland unlock their hearts to each other. The book also records the differences of opinion and misunderstandings between the two outstanding humanists of contemporary history, who often felt isolated in their own countries, on serious issues like Gandhi and fascism. This majestic and serene correspondence, comprising 46 letters and telegrams, along with three dialogues between the two at various times, as well as letters by Rathindranath Tagore and others, is a journey towards the imaging of a different world which would create the possibility of a new space outside cultural hegemony. Edited and annotated by one of India’s foremost French scholars, it is one of the most important quests for an alternative discourse in the last century.

What happens to the concept of wartime in the 1940s? For the Duration excavates British late modernism’s relationship to war in terms of chronophobia: a joint fear of the past and future. Coloured by the trauma of past violence and dread of those to come, the Second World War and its defining military strategy, civilian aerial bombardment, upended straightforward understandings of past, present, and future. Identifying a constellation of temporalities and affects under three tropes—time capsules, time zones, and ruins—the book contends that Second World Wartime is a pivotal moment when wartime surpassed the boundaries of a specific state of emergency, becoming first routine and then open-ended. It scrutinizes a variety of cultural artefacts, from life-writings to short stories, from novels to film and painting, that formally registered the distinctiveness of this wartime through a complex feedback between anticipation and retrospection. While offering a strong foundation for new readers of the mid-century, the book and its overall theoretical focus on chronophobia will be an important intervention for those already working in the field.

‘Which writer today is not a writer of the Holocaust?’ asked the late Imre Kertész, Hungarian survivor and novelist, in his Nobel acceptance speech: ‘one does not have to choose the Holocaust as one’s subject to detect the broken voice that has dominated modern European art for decades’. This book attends to this broken voice in literature in order to explore the meaning of the Holocaust in the contemporary world, arguing, again following Kertész, that the Holocaust will ‘remain through culture, which is really the vessel of memory’. Drawing on the thought of Hannah Arendt, it identifies and develops five concepts—the public secret, evil, stasis, disorientalism and kitsch—in a range of texts by significant writers (including Kazuo Ishiguro, Jonathan Littell, Imre Kertész, W. G. Sebald, and Joseph Conrad) as well as in work by victims and perpetrators of the Holocaust and of atrocities in Africa. In this way, the book explores the interweaving of complicity, responsibility, temporality, and the often problematic powers of narrative which make up some part of the legacy of the Holocaust.

For many decades, R.S. Thomas has been portrayed according to terms that he himself helped to define. Drawing on the poet’s status as a passionate defender of the Welsh nation, scholars have followed his lead in emphasizing the Welsh credentials and dimensions of his work, tacitly affirming his chosen cultural identity. This book, however, through detailed consideration of Thomas’s writing, and extensive archival research into his reading and correspondence, goes against the grain of previous studies by revealing him as profoundly indebted to the English literary canon. Ultimately, Thomas emerges as a classic example of what Keats famously described as the ‘chameleon poet’, and through this prism the book illuminates the various dimensions of his relationship with the literary tradition, ranging from his early immersion in the work of the English Romantics, through to his discovery of Irish and Scottish writing, his response to key poetic figures, such as Herbert, Tennyson, Edward Thomas, and T.S. Eliot, his involvement with the influential journal Critical Quarterly, which inspired a creative dialogue with contemporaries like Ted Hughes and Philip Larkin, and his late engagement with the traditions of the elegy as conceived within Thomas Hardy’s Poems of 1912–13. As well as suggesting new readings and associations, this groundbreaking exposition of R.S. Thomas’s work forms part of a wider investigation into the nature of the British poetic tradition and archipelagic identity, showing how Thomas’s Welshness was in fact a hybrid construct, emerging from his vigorous interaction with the literary cultures of England, Scotland, and Ireland as much as those of his homeland.

The Practice of the Self situates the work of American poet Charles Olson (1910–70) at the centre of the early postwar American avant-garde. It shows Olson to have been one of the major advocates and theorists of American modernism in the late 1940s and early 1950s; a poet who responded fully and variously to the political, ethical, and aesthetic urgencies driving innovation across contemporary American art. Reading Olson’s work alongside that of contemporaries associated with the New York Schools of painting and music (as well as the exiled Frankfurt School), the book draws on Olson’s published and unpublished writings to establish an original account of early postwar American modernism. The development of Olson’s work is seen to illustrate two primary drivers of formal innovation in the period: the evolution of a new model of political action pivoting around the radical individual and, relatedly, a powerful new critique of instrumental reason and the Enlightenment tradition. Drawing on extensive archival research and featuring readings of a wide range of artists—including, prominently, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, David Smith, Wolfgang Paalen, and John Cage—The Practice of the Self offers a new reading of a major American poet and an original account of the emergence of postwar American modernism.

The child is a prominent figure in German literature and in German literary criticism alike. This book examines the ways in which German authors have used the child’s perspective to present the Third Reich. It examines a number of texts ranging from the 1930s to the 1980s. It also considers how children at this time were brought up and educated to accept unquestioningly National Socialist ideology, and thus questions the possibility of a traditional naive perspective on these events. Authors, as diverse as Günter Grass, Siegfried Lenz, and Christa Wolf, together with many less well-known writers had all used this perspective and this raises the question as to why it is such a popular means of confronting the enormity of the Third Reich. This study asks whether this perspective is an evasive strategy, a means of gaining new insights into the period, or a means of discovering a new language which had not been tainted by Nazism. This raises and addresses issues central to a post-war aesthetic in German writing.

Animals seem to be everywhere in contemporary literature, visual art, and performance. But though writers, artists, and performers are now engaging more and more with ideas about animals, and even with actual living animals, their aesthetic practice continues to be interpreted within a primarily human frame of reference—with art itself being understood as an exclusively human endeavor. The critical wager in this book is that the aesthetic impulse itself is profoundly trans-species. Rohman suggests that if we understand artistic and performative impulses themselves as part of our evolutionary inheritance—as that which we borrow, in some sense, from animals and the natural world—the ways we experience, theorize, and value literary, visual, and performance art fundamentally shift. Although other arguments suggest that certain modes of aesthetic expression are closely linked to animality, Rohman argues that the aesthetic is animal, showing how animality and actual animals are at the center of the aesthetic practices of crucial modernist, contemporary, and avant-garde artists. Exploring the implications of the shift from an anthropocentric to a bioaesthetic conception of art, this book turns toward animals as artistic progenitors in a range of case studies that spans print texts, visual art, dance, music, and theatrical performance. Drawing on the ideas of theorists such as Elizabeth Grosz, Jane Bennett, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, Una Chaudhuri, Timothy Morton, and Cary Wolfe, Rohman articulates a deep coincidence of the human and animal elaboration of life forces in aesthetic practices.