Back to Stevens:
Yet the absence of the imagination had
Itself to be imagined. The great pond,
The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves,
Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silenceOf a sort, silence of a rat come out to see,
The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this
Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge,
Required, as a necessity requires.
About a decade ago—painful words to type—I started working on an empirical study of the bibliography of scholarship on modernism. I intended it to be a quick side-project, maybe a piece of an essay or a book introduction, that would bolster my theoretical argument for alternatives to “modernism” as a period concept for studies of the twentieth century. It was also my first foray into quantitative work, which possibly explains why it has seemed to need so many further iterations since then. In any case, I now have an essay version, which I call “Modernist Studies without Modernism,” which I am ready to make public. I have posted it to an Open Science Framework repository which also points to a reproducibility archive with R markdown source code for the essay and (processed and cleaned) data.
Last year I participated in a symposium at the University of Utrecht on The Ethics of Autonomy. Many of the contributions to that symposium now appear in revised form in a special issue of the Journal of Dutch Literature, edited by the symposium organizers, Frans Ruiter and Wilbert Smulders. I contributed a response to the whole, Autonomy Proliferates. The issue is in English, but all the titles have Dutch versions as well, and I particularly appreciate the rather more poetic-sounding version of mine, “Autonomie bloeit.”
Most of the essays discuss the work of the Dutch novelist W.F. Hermans, a writer for whom literary autonomy was, as Ruiter and Smulders argue in their own contribution, a central concern. But the journal issue is really very wide-ranging, both in terms of approaches and in terms of the subject matter which the pretext of autonomy makes possible. A number of essays take up the cultural theories of Pierre Bourdieu: Ruiter and Smulders draw close parallels between Bourdieu and Hermans; Thomas Vaessens makes a provocative argument against accepting what he calls Bourdieu’s “faith in autonomy”; Laurens Ham complicates Bourdieu’s framework in his study of the continuing struggles over autonomy in contemporary Dutch literature from Multatuli to the present; and as for me, well—no surprises about my theoretical touchstones, if you know me for the fanboy I am.
That’s not to say that the contributors are all in lockstep. In addition to the controversy between Ruiter and Smulders and Vaessens about autonomy and responsibility, strikingly different views of autonomy emerge in the other essays, by Derek Attridge, Aukje van Rooden, Marc de Kesel, and Arnold Heumakers.
Hermans was a new writer for me and a great pleasure to explore, even if only in translation. His output is mostly unavailable in English; Ina Rilke has translated two of his novels, The Darkroom of Damocles and Beyond Sleep. I glance at the latter in my contribution to the special issue. The JDL special issue also includes English translations of two short pieces of Hermans’s writing: a biting manifesto, “Unsympathetic Fictional Characters” (trans. I. Rilke), and an enigmatic early story, “An Emancipation” (trans. M. Hutchison).
[Edited 12/27/15: Ham’s essay, “The Specialism of Unspecificity,” is not only about contemporary writing—nor, of course, is Bourdieu his only theoretical interlocutor, any more than he is for any of the other scholars here.]
I’ll be at the Modernist Studies Association in Boston this weekend. I’m looking forward to a lively discussion of modernist disciplinarity in the seminar Jonathan Goodwin and I have organized.
On Sunday 11/22 I’m on a roundtable, “The New Institutionalism in Modernist Studies,” organized and chaired by Robert Higney (CCNY/CUNY), with Merve Emre (American Academy/McGill), Lisi Schoenbach (University of Tennessee), and Lisa Siraganian (SMU).
H1. The number of definitions of “institutionalism” is at least as large as the number of scholars asked to define it.
H2. The amount of monomaniacal insistence on the importance of genre fiction increases linearly (at least) with the amount of time you let Goldstone speak.
It’s at 10:30 a.m. in St. George A. Since we’re a five-cornered roundtable, there should be plenty of time for wider discussion, especially if the chair draws the correct conclusion from H2. Should be fun.
Over the winter break came the terribly sad news of the sudden death of Daniel Albright. His own web site has a notice and a brief biography of this remarkable scholar and teacher; the Harvard Crimson also published an obituary. (If I find other notices and memorials I’ll edit this post.) I’m thinking of him and of all the people close to him.
He was my teacher for one semester in my last year as an undergraduate, when I took his seminar on Beckett and Auden (“Early Postmodernism”). I’m sorry to say I didn’t keep in touch after I graduated, but in thinking about Daniel Albright these last few weeks I’ve realized he made a big mark on me, which I wanted to briefly trace here by way of tribute.
My essay on the sociology of G. V. Desani, “Hatterr Abroad: G. V. Desani on the Scene of World Literature,” is now out in Contemporary Literature (downloadable via JSTOR). I take the reception of Desani’s novel All About H. Hatterr as a demonstration of the divergences among readers in the system of “world literature,” a system structured by inequalities of symbolic power. The novel itself makes a theme of this disempowerment at the hands of cultural mediators—but Desani’s satire did not forestall readers in India, Britain, and the United States from appropriating his novel for their own purposes as a cornerstone of a properly “desi” Indian novel canon, a freakish feat of style, or an exemplar of global or international modernism. My account thus emphasizes a sociological interpretation of reception and mediation over the meanings one might discover through a “reading” of Hatterr.
I draw a cautionary lesson for modernist studies from my study of Desani’s reception: Desani, linked from the first with international high modernism, is always also read as inferior and belated by comparison to the axial figures of the Anglo-modernist canon to whom he is insistently compared. My prognosis for the field’s attempts to “expand” modernism is quite pessimistic; individual good intentions stand little chance in the face of the complicity, so clearly traced by Desani’s reception history, among the Eliot-Joyce canon, the uneven geographic distribution of symbolic power, and the reading protocols dictated by modernist aesthetics.
In true Hatterr-ly fashion, my material on Desani and his work insistently spilled over the bounds of the essay and its argument. The nice thing about a blog is that there’s somewhere to spill. So a couple of extra fragments.
At this year’s Modernist Studies Association meeting in Las Vegas I have convened a roundtable (where I will also be speaking) under the rubric
Beyond Modernist Periodization: Alternatives to the Canonical Half-Century.
8:30 a.m.–10 a.m., Red Rock VII, Flamingo Hotel, Friday, October 19, 2012.
Here are the (fantastic) people involved, and here’s what it’s all about.
I’m coordinating the Modernism and Globalization Seminar Series this year. We’ve just updated our webpage at the CCA, so check that out. The first MGSS event is a seminar with Heather Love on October 26. In March we’ll have a lecture by Jim English. More details to follow.
My double review of two provocative modernist studies books is now out in Studies in the Novel 43, no. 2. I discuss Elizabeth Outka’s Consuming Traditions and Enda Duffy’s The Speed Handbook. Reading the two together gave me a chance to reflect on what you might call the Standard Model of modernist studies. Lots of good work happens within the Model, but is it time for a new paradigm?
The project of developing new and better frameworks for the study of twentieth-century literature continues! I have been part of a number of events related to this project; most recently Colin Gillis and I co-organized a seminar at the American Comparative Literature Association conference on Institutions of Periodization more generally. In the past we have also convened two panels at MSA 12 on “Modernist Studies Without Modernism,” as well as a 2009 MSA seminar under the same title. If you are interested in joining an electronic mailing list for twentieth-century studies or in participating in future work on this subject, please contact me.