Author: Kai Evers Publisher: Northwestern University Press ISBN: 9780810129627 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
Accounts of rape, murder, mutilation, and torture run like a bloodred thread through modernist literature in the German language. Previous accounts of German literary modernism have linked its fascination with violent destruction either to the militant avant-garde on the left or to fascist modernism on the right. Critics have noted that high modernists depicted violence through its impact on their own victimized protagonists. But by minimizing and ignoring the often disturbing attraction to aggression in the works of Franz Kafka and others, these prevalent readings have filtered out much of the provocative and productive potential of German modernism. Kai Evers’s Violent Modernists: The Aesthetics of Destruction in Twentieth-Century German Literature develops a new understanding of German modernism that moves beyond the oversimplified dichotomy of an avant-garde prone to aggression on the one hand and a modernism opposed to violence on the other. Analyzing works by Robert Musil, Franz Kafka, Karl Kraus, Walter Benjamin, Elias Canetti, and others, Evers argues that these authors are among the most innovative thinkers on violence and its impact on contemporary concepts of the self, history, and society.
Author: Paul Sheehan Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1107355621 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 243
Book Description
The notion that violence can give rise to art - and that art can serve as an agent of violence - is a dominant feature of modernist literature. In this study Paul Sheehan traces the modernist fascination with violence to the middle decades of the nineteenth century, when certain French and English writers sought to celebrate dissident sexualities and stylized criminality. Sheehan presents a panoramic view of how the aesthetics of transgression gradually mutates into an infatuation with destruction and upheaval, identifying the First World War as the event through which the modernist aesthetic of violence crystallizes. By engaging with exemplary modernists such as Joyce, Conrad, Eliot and Pound, as well as lesser-known writers including Gautier, Sacher-Masoch, Wyndham Lewis and others, Sheehan shows how artworks, so often associated with creative well-being and communicative self-expression, can be reoriented toward violent and bellicose ends.
Author: Paul Sheehan Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1107036836 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 243
Book Description
This book addresses the subject of violence as it features in celebrated modernist works from the early twentieth century. It traces the modernist fascination with violence back to the middle decades of the nineteenth century, when certain writers in France and England sought to celebrate dissident sexualities and stylized criminality.
Author: Debarati Sanyal Publisher: JHU Press ISBN: 1421429292 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 289
Book Description
The Violence of Modernity turns to Charles Baudelaire, one of the most canonical figures of literary modernism, in order to reclaim an aesthetic legacy for ethical inquiry and historical critique. Works of modern literature are commonly theorized as symptomatic responses to the trauma of history. In a climate that tends to privilege crisis over critique, Debarati Sanyal argues that it is urgent to rethink literary experience in terms that recall its contestatory potential. Examining Baudelaire's poems afresh, she shifts the focus of critical attention toward an account of modernism as an active engagement with violence, specifically the violence of history in nineteenth-century France. Sanyal analyzes a literary current that uses the traditional hallmarks of modernism—irony, intertextuality, self-reflexivity, and formalism—to challenge the historical violence of modernity. Baudelaire and the committed ironists writing in his wake teach us how to read and resist the violence of history, and thereby to challenge the melancholy tenor of our contemporary "wound culture." In a series of provocative readings, Sanyal presents Baudelaire's poetry as an aesthetic form that contests historical violence through rhetorical strategies of complicity, counterviolence, and critique. The book develops a new account of Baudelaire's significance as a modernist by dislodging him both from his traditional status as a practitioner of "art for art's sake" and from his more recent incarnation as the poet of trauma. Following her extended analysis of Baudelaire's poetry, Sanyal in later chapters considers a number of authors influenced by his strategies—including Rachilde, Virginie Despentes, Albert Camus, and Jean-Paul Sartre—to examine the relevance of their interventions for our current climate of trauma and terror. The result is a study that underscores how Baudelaire's legacy continues to energize literary engagements with the violence of modernity.
Author: Marina MacKay Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 1472590082 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 185
Book Description
The modernist period was an era of world war and violent revolution. Covering a wide range of authors from Joseph Conrad and Thomas Hardy at the beginning of the period to Elizabeth Bowen and Samuel Beckett at the end, this book situates modernism's extraordinary literary achievements in their contexts of historical violence, while surveying the ways in which the relationships between modernism and conflict have been understood by readers and critics over the past fifty years. Ranging from the colonial conflicts of the late 19th century to the world wars and the civil wars in between, and concluding with the institutionalization of modernism in the Cold War, Modernism, War, and Violence provides a starting point for readers who are new to these topics and offers a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of the field for a more advanced audience.
Author: Benjamin S. West Publisher: McFarland ISBN: 0786471085 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 202
Book Description
This study explores numerous depictions of crowd violence, literal and figurative, found in American Modernist fiction, and shows the ways crowd violence is used as a literary trope to examine issues of racial, gender, national, and class identity during this period. Modernist writers consistently employ scenes and images of crowd violence to show the ways such violence is used to define and enforce individual identity in American culture. James Weldon Johnson, William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and John Steinbeck, for example, depict numerous individuals as victims of crowd violence and other crowd pressures, typically because they have transgressed against normative social standards. Especially important is the way that racially motivated lynching, and the representation of such lynchings in African American literature and culture, becomes a noteworthy focus of canonical Modernist fiction composed by white authors.
Author: Sarah Cole Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0195389611 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 392
Book Description
At the Violet Hour offers a richly historicized, trenchant look at the interlocking of literature with violence in British and Irish modernist texts.
Author: Eiko Maruko Siniawer Publisher: Cornell University Press ISBN: 0801454360 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 392
Book Description
Violence and democracy may seem fundamentally incompatible, but the two have often been intimately and inextricably linked. In Ruffians, Yakuza, Nationalists, Eiko Maruko Siniawer argues that violence has been embedded in the practice of modern Japanese politics from the very inception of the country's experiment with democracy. As soon as the parliament opened its doors in 1890, brawls, fistfights, vandalism, threats, and intimidation quickly became a fixture in Japanese politics, from campaigns and elections to legislative debates. Most of this physical force was wielded by what Siniawer calls "violence specialists": ruffians and yakuza. Their systemic and enduring political violence-in the streets, in the halls of parliament, during popular protests, and amid labor strife-ultimately compromised party politics in Japan and contributed to the rise of militarism in the 1930s. For the post-World War II years, Siniawer illustrates how the Japanese developed a preference for money over violence as a political tool of choice. This change in tactics signaled a political shift, but not necessarily an evolution, as corruption and bribery were in some ways more insidious, exclusionary, and undemocratic than violence. Siniawer demonstrates that the practice of politics in Japan has been dangerous, chaotic, and far more violent than previously thought. Additionally, crime has been more political. Throughout the book, Siniawer makes clear that certain yakuza groups were ideological in nature, contrary to the common understanding of organized crime as nonideological. Ruffians, Yakuza, Nationalists is essential reading for anyone wanting to comprehend the role of violence in the formation of modern nation-states and its place in both democratic and fascist movements.
Author: Kai Evers
Author: Matthew Levay
Author: Paul Sheehan
Author: Paul Sheehan
Author: Debarati Sanyal
Author: Marina MacKay
Author: Benjamin S. West
Author: Sarah Cole
Author: Eiko Maruko Siniawer
Author: James Macbride Sterrett