Category Archives: literature

Robots, automatons and modernism

Pinocchio’s Progeny: Puppets, Marionettes, Automatons, and Robots in Modernist and Avant-Garde Drama (1995) – Harold B. Segel
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

“While Carlo Collodi’s internationally revered Pinocchio may not have been the single source of the modernist fascination with puppets and marionettes, the book’s appearance on the threshold of the modernist movement heralded a new artistic interest in the making of human likenesses.”

It has been said that Carolo Lorenzini’s Pinocchio (1881 – 1883) was one of the inspiring themes of Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author. As in the allegory of the story, Pinocchio eventually went on to lead his own independent life, distinct from that of the author.

Notes on modernism

Literary Modernism and Photography: (2002) – Paul Hansom
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

See also Sara Danius book on how modernism was influenced by new media in general.

Review
“Although literary modernism is famously associated with probing interiority while photography is two dimensional , the two moved into prominence concurrently, intersecting in ways that these essays explore. The volume considers documentary uses of the image; the relation between photographers’ aesthetics and their deployment of images; photography as a literary trope; and the transition into postmodernism.”–American Literature

Book Description
The developments in narrative experimentation that marked the modernist period in Europe and the United States provide an interesting crossroads with the development of visual representation during the same time. In this collection of fourteen original essays, scholars from a variety of disciplines explore the ways in which the photograph became a vital emblem of the transformative processes of modernism, offering a new aesthetic and psychological model for the new zeitgeist. The interdisciplinary methodology of Literary Modernism and Photography melds literary, cultural, and photographic theories to offer a challenging literary framework for this period. The essays address the problems surrounding the photograph’s ostensible “factuality”-its presumed ability to represent the real world-and suggest the difficulties inherent in aestheticizing the real into fictive forms, while also examining how the photograph shaped and reflected the new, modern artistic self-consciousness of figures such as Alfred Stieglitz, Vanessa Bell, and Willa Cather. If literary modernism heralded a re-visioning of the world, then the photograph was the concrete rendering of this new vision.

A positive review of John Carey’s The Intellectuals and the Masses

WHEN IT IS published in the United States, John Carey’s polemic The Intellectuals and the Masses will probably startle reviewers. It certainly caused a flap when the British edition came out in the summer of 1992. Though an Oxford professor, Carey is a blunt literary populist: he argues that the fundamental motive behind the modernist movement in literature was a corrosive fear and loathing of the masses. Nietzsche, Ortega y Gasset, George Gissing, H. G. Wells, Bernard Shaw, T S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Sigmund Freud, Aldous Huxley, Wyndham Lewis, D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, and Graham Greene all strove to preserve a sense of class superiority by reviling the mean suburban man. They convinced themselves that the typical clerk was subhuman, bestial, machinelike, dead inside, a consumer of rubbishy newspapers and canned food. The intellectuals had to create this caricature to maintain social distinctions in an increasingly democratic and educated society. Many of these writers ultimately disposed of the masses through fantasies of wholesale extermination, usually rationalized on eugenic grounds. –Jonathan Rose quoted in The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (2001), this copy sourced http://www.autodidactproject.org

See also: modernism – low modernism – mass culture

An article on postcards in relation to modernism:

The very definition of Modernism has always been contentious. Did it begin with the advent of photography, which liberated the visual arts from the obligations of realism, or was its starting point the experiments in the application of color by such Post-Impressionist painters as Cézanne, van Gogh and Gaugin? Did Claude Debussy’s gradual abandonment of tonality, the cornerstone of Western musical composition since J.S. Bach, lead inevitably to Arnold Schoenberg’s polytonality and the sound experiments of Webern, Stockhausen and Cage? Do the honors of introducing non-representational theatre belong to Pirandello, to the German Expressionists or to the Italian Futurists? And where do Kafka, Musil, Svevo and Joyce fit in? –Anthony Guneratne via http://www.co.broward.fl.us/library/bienes/postcard/modernism.htm [Nov 2006]

See also: modernism – low modernism – mass culture

Jean Duvignaud on the nouveau roman

I had speculated before on the filmic qualities of the nouveau roman and see it confirmed here:

Thus, contemporary literature is moving towards a representation of man based on the event, where the action described is more important than any commentary, and the instantaneous revelation of reality is more important than its description. Such an attempt must end with turning the novel into a screenplay for a film which will never be made and the cinema into an unfolding of an event which never actually occurs. —The Sociology of Art, 1967

See also: sociology – art – visual arts

Genre fiction vs literary fiction

Stephen Mitchelmore in an new post at This Space (who I’ve mentioned before here) writes about the distinction between genre fiction and literary fiction.

If there’s one reason why this blog exists, it is to challenge the assumptions of British culture about what it means for work to be ‘literary’. Over two years and longer, I’ve posted blogs defining literary fiction, and observed that it tends to be only genre writers and their fans who are perplexed about their exclusion from the literary prizes (which, I must say, aren’t terribly literary anyway). I’ve even asked an apparently taboo question: why aren’t literary writers given genre awards? But it seems I’m having no impact and the dummies are winning the day. At least in that respect I’m following in the finest literary tradition.

Although he says that he’s defined literary fiction here, he starts his definition by saying that he’s only offering another evasion but then goes on to say that:

I seek an engagement at the deepest level. It’s not always the most comfortable of experiences, and if I had any intelligence maybe I’d avoid it by getting lost in some genre fiction.

In this analysis two words stand out: engagement and intelligence. Engagement points to seriousness (which we need from time to time, but not always); the way Stephen uses the term intelligence indicates that somehow genre fiction is stupid. A pity.

Let me round up this quote (introduction mine) by a certain George Walden who represents my view on this matter best:

The perceived contradiction between high and low culture is a recurring theme on Jahsonic.com. I believe that both high culture and low culture are minority tastes and as such can be described as subcultures, both influencing mainstream culture. I also believe that both high and low culture have produced masterpieces and works of mediocrity. As George Walden puts it:

Three points appear self-evident.

First, there is no conflict whatever between popular and more demanding culture, and no need to choose.

Second, that the majority of popular culture is commercially produced ephemera of mostly lamentable quality which needs absolutely no help or encouragement from government, still less nauseous ingratiation.

Third, that there is such a thing as high art, and that some things will always remain for the privileged few – privileged not in the tired old class-conscious meaning of the word, but in the sense that by hard work and/or natural ability they are able to appreciate, eg highly refined musical forms or classical literature that it is not given to everyone to understand, even if we are given every opportunity to do so.

— George Walden, source unidentified (website offline)

Jeremy Reed

Interviewed by Dee at Fringecore:

Jeremy: My interest in French literature comes from the depth of imagination and the fact that French writers use the image as the predominant constant in their work. Also the decadence that they use so uniquely, the sensuality of the work and the imagination of it, which I don’t find a corresponding equivalent in British literature. I would call myself an aesthete – love of beauty is central to all I do, therefore opulence and the decadence of the 18th/19th century period, appeals to me, and I fuse it with a modern sensibility, so that the cyber world is fused with the decadent world of De Sade’s La Coste – reaching across the centuries. —http://www.fringecore.com/magazine/m6-3.html [Nov 2006]

Excerpts from a review by Cercles of Heartbreak Hotel: A Tribute to the King in Verse by Jeremy Reed, 2002.

I first stumbled across Jeremy Reed in one of the English / American bookshops of the left bank in Paris. The novel was hidden away on the bottom shelf of a dusty bookcase and its title caught my eye; it was called Diamond Nebula (1994). I quickly found this was an author after my own heart: postmodern without being hermetic, with obvious enthusiasm for David Bowie, Marilyn Monroe, Andy Warhol, and mostly J.G. Ballard. I don’t mean the regrettably mainstreamed Ballard of recent years, the Ballard of the somewhat banal Empire of the Sun (1984) or the boring Super-Cannes (2000), no, I mean the good old Ballard of such subversive jewels as The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) or Crash (1973). […] […] After I’d read Diamond Nebula, I bought some of Reed’s previous books. He is an extraordinarily prolific author; does this man ever get any sleep?

[…] His Sadean erotic novels, such as Sister Midnight (1997) don’t impress me so much, admittedly, but they are not without merits, as such things go.

[…][Marc] Almond and Reed share many passions: David Bowie, the Marquis de Sade, Jean Genet, Oscar Wilde, Georges Bataille, J.G. Ballard, Derek Jarman, Scott Walker, Jacques Brel, Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Federico Garcia Lorca, Jean Cocteau, and especially J.K. Huysmans. “What is it like to be a torch singer?”, asks Reed, “Is it so very different from being a poet?” At any rate, this particular poet and this particular torch singer often plunge their readers / listeners into the same sleazy delectable Camp. And incidentally, Almond has also published very acceptable poetry, in addition to a gripping autobiography, Tainted Life (1999). —http://www.cercles.com/review/r5/reed.html [Nov 2006]

Excerpts from Jeremy Reed: The Prizes and the Disappointments by Geoff Stevens

There appear to be some areas of confusion, fans would say mystery, about Jeremy Reed. For instance we are told that he was born in 1952 from one source, and 1954 from another, whereas Andrew Duncan asserts that the true date was 6th March 1951. He was brought up in Jersey, in the Channel Islands, where his childhood was “solitary and dark-sided”. He was to go on to Essex University and obtain a BA hons 2 or, if other sources are to be believed, a PhD in Literature.

Icelandic singer Bjork said she found his work “the most beautiful gorgeous outrageously brilliant poetry in the universe”. —http://www.argotistonline.co.uk/Stevens%20essay.htm [Nov 2006]

Story of I (1997) – Jo Anne Kaplan

Story of the Eye is easily one of the most enduring texts of the 20th century, I just discovered this version which was new to me:

GB, 1997, 23 Min.
Jo Anne Kaplan, London

A woman sits alone in a bare, white-tiled bath, reading George Bataille’s “Story of the Eye”. The bizarre events described by the text provoke a series of fantasies in which the room and its accoutrements become the stage and the woman the main player. As her dreams unfold, she becomes the “eye” of the story and her own body the object of its gaze. With a feminine hand, “Story of I” plucks Bataille’s central metaphor from its original context and re-invents its erotic vision from the inside-out. The eye in the vagina, seen through blood, urine and tears, looks at itself in the mirror. —http://www.transmediale.de/97/english/25.htm [Nov 2006]

In a major Hayward Night for the Gallery’s Undercover Surrealism exhibition, animate! joins forces with Halloween to present The New Flesh, a visceral evening of musical and cinematic interventions exploring Georges Bataille’s trademark themes of sex and death, and the legacy of his dissident surrealism in popular culture.

The New Flesh provides a rare chance to see the highly explicit and provocative mistress-piece Story of I (1997, UK, 21 mins), Jo Ann Kaplan’s improvisation on Georges Bataille’s infamous Histoire de l’Oeil. The film is a gender-twisting meditation on the erotic extremities of human desire, a highly explicit journey through the sexual foundations of Western visual culture and the intimate terrains of male and female bodies. With a feminine hand, Story of I plucks Bataille’s central metaphor from its original context and re-invents its erotic vision from the inside out. The eye is the vagina and, seen through the blood, urine and tears, it looks at itself in a mirror. —animateonline.org [Nov 2006]

Already the breaking up has lasted longer than the relationship

David Hodges writes very short novels. 299 words each to be precise:

An excerpt:

Already the breaking up has lasted longer than the relationship and provided her more pleasure. Another week of breaking up and this will be her longest relationship yet. I’d rather drink and stay out with friends than be with you, he tells her, I never cared about you and I don’t care about you now. —Very Short Novels

What a coincidence: Wired Magazine asked a bunch of A-list writers to make six word novels. I particularly like Margaret Atwood’s six word novel:

Longed for him. Got him. Shit.

The Virgin Huntress (1951) – Elisabeth Sanxay Holding

The Virgin Huntress (1951) – Elisabeth Sanxay Holding
Image sourced here.

Raymond Chandler once called her “the top suspense writer of them all.” Born in Brooklyn in 1889, Holding married British diplomat George E. Holding in 1913 and together they traveled widely in South America and the Caribbean before settling in Bermuda for awhile. She published 25 novels in her lifetime—19 of them mysteries—and a wide variety of short stories. She died in 1955. —http://www.starkhousepress.com/holding.html [Oct 2006]

Max Ophüls directed her story The Blank Wall as The Reckless Moment. The 2001 American film The Deep End (by Scott McGehee and David Siegel, who were also behind Suture) is based upon the same text. Many of her works were published by Ace Books. Ace Books is famous for publishing William Burroughs’s Junkie in 1953:

Ace Books primarily catered to New York City subway riders, and competed in the same market as comic book, real crime and detective fiction publishers. Ace published no hardcover books, only cheap paperbacks, which sold for very little; Burroughs earned less than a cent royalty on each purchase.

Most libraries at the time did not buy Ace books, considering them trivial and without literary merit, and Ace paperbacks were never reviewed by literary critics. At the time of its publication, the novel was in a two-book (“dos-à-dos”) omnibus edition (known as an “Ace Double”) alongside a previously published 1941 novel called Narcotic Agent by Maurice Helbrant. Burroughs chose to use the pseudonym “William Lee”, Lee being his mother’s maiden name, for the writing credit. The subtitle of the work was Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict: An Ace Original. This edition is a highly desired collectible and even below-average condition copies have been known to cost hundreds of dollars. The United States Library of Congress purchased a copy in 1992 for its Rare Book/Special Collections. —http://en.wikipedia.org [Oct 2006]

See also: crime fiction – American literature – 1951

The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire (2006) – Walter Benjamin

New English-language collection of Benjamin’s writing on Baudelaire: the title an obvious pun on Painter of Modern Life (1863) – Charles Baudelaire

The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire (2006) – Walter Benjamin
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Book Description
Walter Benjamin’s essays on the great French lyric poet Charles Baudelaire revolutionized not just the way we think about Baudelaire, but our understanding of modernity and modernism as well. In these essays, Benjamin challenges the image of Baudelaire as late-Romantic dreamer, and evokes instead the modern poet caught in a life-or-death struggle with the forces of the urban commodity capitalism that had emerged in Paris around 1850. The Baudelaire who steps forth from these pages is the flâneur who affixes images as he strolls through mercantile Paris, the ragpicker who collects urban detritus only to turn it into poetry, the modern hero willing to be marked by modern life in its contradictions and paradoxes. He is in every instance the modern artist forced to commodify his literary production: “Baudelaire knew how it stood with the poet: as a flâneur he went to the market; to look it over, as he thought, but in reality to find a buyer.” Benjamin reveals Baudelaire as a social poet of the very first rank.

The introduction to this volume presents each of Benjamin’s essays on Baudelaire in chronological order. The introduction, intended for an undergraduate audience, aims to articulate and analyze the major motifs and problems in these essays, and to reveal the relationship between the essays and Benjamin’s other central statements on literature, its criticism, and its relation to the society that produces it.

See also: Walter Benjamin – Charles Baudelaire

The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (1989) – Susan Buck-Morss

The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (1989) – Susan Buck-Morss
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Review
“Wonderfully imaginative…. Like Benjamin, Buck-Morss is a surrealist explorer, her mysteries unraveled by intuition, revealed by illusion.” — Eugen Weber, The New Republic

“Buck-Morss has written a wonderful book. Although rigorously analytic, the book doesn’t sacrifice those qualities in Benjamin’s writing that are not reducible to method. his lyrical, hallucinatory evocation of the city as a place of dreams, myths, expectations.” — Herbert Muschamp, Artforum

From the publisher:
Walter Benjamin’s magnum opus was a book he did not live to write. In The Dialectics of Seeing, Susan Buck-Morss offers an inventive reconstruction of the Passagen Werk, or Arcades Project, as it might have taken form.

Working with Benjamin’s vast files of citations and commentary which contain a myriad of historical details from the dawn of consumer culture, Buck-Morss makes visible the conceptual structure that gives these fragments philosophical coherence. She uses images throughout the book to demonstrate that Benjamin took the debris of mass culture seriously as the source of philosophical truth.

The Paris Arcades that so fascinated Benjamin (as they did the Surrealists whose “materialist metaphysics” he admired) were the prototype, the 19th century “ur-form” of the modern shopping mall. Benjamin’s dialectics of seeing demonstrate how to read these consumer dream houses and so many other material objects of the time – from air balloons to women’s fashions, from Baudelaire’s poetry to Grandville’s cartoons – as anticipations of social utopia and, simultaneously, as clues for a radical political critique.

Buck-Morss plots Benjamin’s intellectual orientation on axes running east and west, north and south – Moscow Paris, Berlin-Naples – and shows how such thinking in coordinates can explain his understanding of “dialectics at a standstill.” She argues for the continuing relevance of Benjamin’s insights but then allows a set of “afterimages” to have the last word.

Susan Buck-Morss is Professor of Political Philosophy and Social Theory at Cornell University. The Dialectics of Seeing is included in the series Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought, edited by Thomas McCarthy.

Susan Buck-Morss is Professor of Political Philosophy and Social Theory, Department of Government, and Professor of Visual Culture, Department of Art History, Cornell University.

See also: seeing – dialectic – Arcades Project – Arcades Project blogathon