MODERNISM NOW! 26–28 June 2014 ABSTRACTS
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
MODERNISM NOW! 26–28 June 2014 ABSTRACTS 1. Regional Writing and the New Modernist Studies (Beveridge Hall) David James (Queen Mary), ‘Regional Modernist Fiction and the Politics of Recuperation’ Of all the varied intellectual imperatives that are now reshaping the field of modernist studies, the ethos of expansion is surely the most prevalent. Revising the spatial and temporal coordinates of modernist production has mostly been welcomed as a progressive and necessary manoeuvre. But to argue that modernism happens in radically disparate locations carries certain implications for the very future of modernism as a concept. In his introduction to the Handbook of Global Modernisms, Mark Wollaeger notes that there have been a number of anxieties over the field's ‘refusal of limits’, even as he sets out the agenda for mapping modernism's planetary reach. Taking stock of such arguments, David James’s paper will address the methodological challenges posed by the incorporation of regional writing within the current 'expansionist' climate of the new modernist studies. After a short survey of emerging scholarship on regional modernist culture, he will discuss the politics of recuperation at a time when a range of new writing from other times and other places is compelling us to question our very assumptions about where modernism happens and what modernism formally does. James considers the advantages and consequences of rethinking the narrative modes of regional writers under the rubric of modernism (ranging from late modernists like Sylvia Townsend Warner to more contemporary figures like John McGahern). In so doing, he also asks to what extent ‘modernism’ becomes a purely evaluative epithet when it is transcribed onto the arc of the regional novel’s development. He thus addresses the issue with which the panel as a whole engages: namely, despite modernism’s increasing conceptual and literary-historical capaciousness, what are the limits of its applicability as both an explanatory frame and a measure of aesthetic value in discussions of regional and rural writing? Stephanie Boland (Exeter), ‘“Err-and-Stray”: The Matter of Modernist Guide-books’ ‘“Err-and-Stray”: The Matter of Modernist Guide-books’ This paper takes as its subject a pair of publications located simultaneously on two of modernist’ studies shifting front lines. Lewis Grassic Gibbon and Hugh MacDiarmid’s Scottish Scene and Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Somerset employ the textual and bibliographic codes common in early twentieth-century guidebooks; by both incorporating and subverting the formal features of commercial guides, the volumes radically disrupt popular narratives of space, providing in their place idiosyncratic and multi-faceted portraits of the places they profile. Although each of their authors has been incorporated into the modernist canon, I will suggest these volumes remain difficult to place in relation to literary modernism: not only do their regional locations lay outside of what was, until recently, the accepted territory of modernist innovation, but their dialectic relationship with 1 the commercial travel guide places them between genres – and therefore situated in complicated ways against more conventional understandings of what constitutes formal experiment. Dominic Head (Nottingham), ‘Modernity and the Rural English Novel’ Dominic Head considers how the manner of the regional accent recently discerned in English modernism—for example in the ‘anthropological turn’ described by Jed Esty—is either matched or anticipated in the inter-war vogue for rural fiction in many respects, as can be seen in the complex nostalgia of H. E. Bates, the interrogation of belonging in Sheila Kaye-Smith, the slow embrace of mechanization in Adrian Bell, or the primitivism of Leo Walmsley. With reference to one or more representative example(s), Head shows how some of the dominant themes of modernity were registered in the rural novel of the 1920s and 1930s. The point here is not to contribute to the expansion of modernism, but rather to suggest how a shared cultural field brings together disparate forms of literary expression, or at least complicates how these disparate forms have been separated in literary history. 2. Modernism and Religion (Room G22) Erik Tonning (Bergen), ‘Modernism and Christianity as a Field of Study’ This paper examines the formative and continuing impact of Christianity upon Modernism. Central to the conception of Modernism adopted here is the idea that by the late nineteenth century, large numbers of artists, thinkers and cultural and political ideologues and activists had begun to experience the condition of Western modernity as a crisis: a seemingly unprecedented period of transition or epochal transformation pointing to an unknown, perhaps a revolutionized, future. A Modernist, on this reading, is thus both on some level a theorist or thinker of cultural crisis, as well as a practitioner of experimental responses to that perceived crisis. But the very idea of an epochal cultural transformation at this time would necessarily involve some confrontation with the still-dominant religion and cultural paradigm of the West. How was the Christian past to be assessed? Was it worth preserving, or should it be overcome once and for all? How to relate to Christianity’s present influence, both socially and individually? And did it have a future? The paper juxtaposes the idea of formative tensions between Modernism and Christianity, with more explicitly Christian modernisms, arguing that both are essential to a coherent account of Modernism as a movement. Elizabeth Anderson (Stirling), ‘Everyday Sacred in Mary Butts and H.D.’ Recent work by scholars such as Suzanne Hobson, Pericles Lewis, Erik Tonning and Lara Vetter has taken the exploration of the intersection of modernism and religion in a myriad of directions, including considerations of religion and science in modernist discourse, the relationship between both popular and institutional forms of religion and modernist texts, and the relationship between modernist formal experiments and the philosophy and psychology of religion in the early Twentieth Century. This work builds on earlier work by Leon Surette and Timothy Materer on modernism and the occult and Helen Sword on modernism and spiritualism. This growing area of interest in modernist studies has a number of points of contact with current interests in theology and religious studies. One fruitful, yet underexplored connection is how the turn towards phenomenology in theology and religious studies has brought an interest in materiality which resonates with 2 the concern with materiality in everyday life studies, a significant area of modernist studies. This paper explores the connections between current attention - within both modernist studies and theology and religious studies - to materiality, the everyday and spirituality, arguing that an everyday sacred emerges within modernist texts. The paper then goes on to consider the work of two modernist women writers in this context. It argues that Mary Butts and H.D. develop an everyday sacred through their explorations of landscape, domestic interiors and objects that are both ordinary and sacred in their autobiographical prose texts The Crystal Cabinet and The Gift. Matthew Rumbold (Warwick), ‘“Priest and Artist in the Catacomb”: Place, Religion and Late Modernist Aesthetics in the Work of David Jones’ David Jones (1895-1974) was considered in the 1920s and 1930s to be not only one of Britain’s most prominent artists, exhibiting with the Seven and Five Society, but after publishing In Parenthesis (1937) and The Anathemata (1952), his poetry was lauded by W. H. Auden and T. S. Eliot as masterpieces of the twentieth century. However, Jones’s place in the Modernist pantheon has remained obscure and peripheral. Rather than a limitation, I argue that Jones’s marginality is in fact an asset. By locating Jones at the interstices of late modernist aesthetics, I suggest ways in which notions of modernism can be reoriented. For David Jones, the most significant interconnection is between space and the sacred, and the two are fused through a sacramental aesthetic. Referring mainly to The Anathemata, I emphasise Jones’s hybridity as an Anglo-Welsh writer preoccupied with both the city of London and the plurality of myth and ancient sites associated with Wales. Jones mediates the poles of ‘the metropolitan perception’ and a decentred peripheral regionalism. Furthermore, his predominantly Catholic aesthetic influenced by Jacques Maritain’s Neo-Thomism lends credence to a critique of modernity which he referred to as the “Break”. I suggest that as a refinement of modernism rooted in a secular challenge to orthodoxies, is a current of modern artistic practitioners responding to the “Break” of modernity’s alienation and disenchantment by working within a tradition of religious devotion. Whilst still employing radical formal experimentation, David Jones’s art exemplifies a sacramental vision based on gratuitous re-enchantment of place. 3. Contemporary Modernist Practices (Adaptation, Remediation) (Room G26) Benjamin Fowler (Warwick), ‘Breaking Through (Artistic) Borders: Intermediality as Theatre’s Modernism’ “On or about December 1910, human character changed,” wrote Virginia Woolf (Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown, 1924) in an essay exploding the stratifying rhetoric of nineteenth century social hierarchies (“masters and servants, husbands and wives”); modernist artistic innovation revealed social and political shifts