Category: Modernist Studies

October 5, 2015

An Interview with Steven S. Lee, author of "The Ethnic Avant-Garde"

“Up until Black Lives Matter, there was a lot of talk about ‘post-race’ and ‘post-identity,’ which now seems awfully naïve. I think my book helps us to grasp the ongoing salience of racial and ethnic divides, namely, by explaining how...

July 2, 2015

Thursday Fiction Corner — A New Perspective on Virginia Woolf

As Anne Fernald suggests in her very thoughtful review of Virginia Woolf: A Portrait, by Viviane Forrester, we don’t suffer from a lack of books on or biographies of Virginia Woolf. However, Forrester’s work, which won the Prix Goncourt award...

June 18, 2015

Thursday Fiction Corner: Portrait of the Artist as a Thrusting Spiral

Extending the concept of Bloomsday to Bloomsweek, we take a look at James Joyce for our Thursday Fiction Corner. Specifically, we feature a short excerpt from Nico Israel’s Spirals: The Whirled Image in the Twentieth-Century Literature and Art, in which...

June 15, 2015

James Joyce and His Publisher, Sylvia Beach — Keri Walsh

In a recent article in The Irish Times, Keri Walsh, editor of The Letters of Sylvia Beach, examines the difficult relationship between Beach and James Joyce. Beach, of course, was the publisher of Ulysses but became estranged from Joyce after...

February 4, 2015

Cultural Foreign Policy from Cold War Modernism to Today's Hollywood Bromance — Greg Barnhisel

Greg Barnhisel, author of “Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy,” on the possibilities and limits of cultural diplomacy.

June 16, 2014

Laura Frost on Bloomsday, James Joyce, David Foster Wallace and the Pleasures of Unpleasure

“The modernist legacy, its essential ambivalence, continues, and let us hope that it does, for it signals not only the continuing problem with plea­sure but also pleasure’s continuing potency.”—Laura Frost In honor of Bloomsday, we offer an excerpt from the...

December 11, 2013

John Nathan's Introduction to Light and Dark

This week our featured book is Light and Dark: A Novel by Natsume Sōseki, translated with an introduction by John Nathan. Throughout the week, we will be featuring content about the book, its author, and its translator on our blog...

November 1, 2013

Philip Kitcher on beauty and love in Death in Venice

This week our featured book is Deaths in Venice: The Cases of Gustav von Aschenbach by Philip Kitcher. Today, we have an excerpt from “Beauty,” the second chapter of Deaths in Venice, in which Kitcher discusses the philosophical concepts of...

October 31, 2013

Philip Kitcher on Luchino Visconti's Morte a Venizia

This week our featured book is Deaths in Venice: The Cases of Gustav von Aschenbach by Philip Kitcher. Today, we have a couple brief excerpts from Deaths in Venice, in which Kitcher discusses Luchino Visconti’s film version of Mann’s novella,...

October 30, 2013

Philip Kitcher on Benjamin Britten's Opera

This week our featured book is Deaths in Venice: The Cases of Gustav von Aschenbach by Philip Kitcher. Today, we have a brief excerpt from Deaths in Venice, in which Kitcher discusses the opera, Death in Venice, by Benjamin Britten,...

October 29, 2013

Philip Kitcher on Thomas Mann and Gustav von Aschenbach

This week our featured book is Deaths in Venice: The Cases of Gustav von Aschenbach by Philip Kitcher. Today we have an excerpt from “Discipline,” the first chapter of Deaths in Venice, in which Philip Kitcher looks at the works...

September 27, 2013

Laura Frost on David Foster Wallace and Modernism's Afterlife in the Age of Prosthetic Pleasure

The following is an excerpt from “Modernism’s Afterlife in the Age of Prosthetic Pleasure,” the final chapter in Laura Frost’s The Problem with Pleasure: Modernism and Its Discontents. In the chapter Laura Frost looks at “David Foster Wallace’s novel Infinite...