The Modernist Review Issue #50: New Work in Modernist Studies

With the promise of the coming spring, we are delighted to share with you our first issue of 2024 after a short hiatus over the winter break. This issue contains a selection of some of the brilliant papers from  New Work in Modernist Studies 2023 (NWiMS), our annual British Association for Modernist Studies (BAMS) conference for Postgraduate and Early Career Researchers. The conference, held in December, was hosted by Liverpool University and organised by Dr. Daniel Abdalla and Dr. Rebecca Bowler. We are excited to bring to you selected contributions from eight speakers at the event, who have reworked their discussions into short papers as a memento of the day! 

The Modernists We Keep Quoting

4 March 2024

Milan Terlunen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

This article is adapted from my keynote at the New Work in Modernist Studies (NWiMS) conference in December 2023. My thanks to the conference organisers, Daniel Abdalla and Rebecca Bowler.

What are the passages from Modernist writers that get quoted most frequently?

What, for example, are the most frequently quoted passages from Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way (1913, trans. 1922), James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) or Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) – three of the most widely discussed Modernist novels?

Talking Animals? The Challenge Presented by Nonhuman Voices in Marianne Moore’s Early Poetry

4 March 2024

Madeleine Rose, Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford

Marianne Moore’s presentation of nonhuman animal subjects in her poetry has proved an enduring source of interest for her readers. Often directly addressing a specific animal, her descriptions have been noted for their surprising imagery, combined with precise, even scientific, attention to detail.[i] In a subset of these animal poems, Moore presents the voices of her subjects speaking in the first person. This presentation of nonhuman animals speaking for themselves can be viewed as an extension of her drive towards accuracy, reducing as far as possible the appearance of human mediation. However, it is in these poems where Moore’s voice is apparently more distant that the challenge of accommodating the nonhuman in the fundamentally human language of poetry becomes most evident.

The Lobster As Gendered Symbol In European Modernism

4 March 2024

Cheryl McGregor, University of Dundee

Exploring the animal as a symbol in modernity, Akira Mizuta Lippit (University of Southern California) notes that animals are ‘incapable of determining or regulating the discourse they put forth: they simply transmit.’^[1] In the insect-laden premier decades of the 20th century, there is one transmitter crawling along the ocean floor of Western art and literature whose study offers key insights into gender anxieties, political ideologies, and aesthetic experimentation: the lobster. Appearing throughout the works of modernist giants such as T.S Eliot, Salvador Dalí and Samuel Beckett (amongst others), it is the aim of this article to trace the lobster’s significations across these figures, considering factors such as the role of surrealist misogyny in Dalí, the impact of the world wars, and the significance of pose – that is to say, how the creature’s body is staged in any respective work.

Re-Imagining Eliot: Francis Bacon’s Painting (1978)

4 March 2024

Lucy Wright, Leeds Trinity University

Following Valerie Eliot’s 1971 publication of a facsimile and transcript with the revised drafts and annotations by Ezra Pound on The Waste Land (1922), Francis Bacon became captivated by T.S. Eliot and Pound’s professional relationship. As a response, Bacon began to exhibit not only the poetry of the two modernists in his artwork, but the personal. Despite the twenty-five-year friendship between Bacon and Lucien Freud, the three Johns – Edwards, Minton, and Deakin – and Frank Auerbach, it was Eliot and Pound’s partnership that he had longed for and never quite obtained. Pound’s alterations on Eliot’s manuscript, which Bacon argued had improved the poem enormously in his interviews with David Sylvester (conducted from 1962-1986, reprinted in 1993) is analogous to the process by which Bacon revised his own paintings: striking out titles, revising form, and depictions of movement and verse both literal and abstract. Alongside an almost two-decade visual poetic response to Eliot’s (and in this case, Pound’s) work from 1967 in Triptych Inspired by T.S. Eliot’s “Sweeny Agonistes” to 1982 in A Piece of Waste Land, and the multitude of literary and artistic modernist works in which Bacon had similarly appreciated, it is Painting (1978) and the reflection of Eliot’s poem alongside his relationship with Pound that is the focus of this article.

‘Panicked into Avant-Gardism’: John Fowles and Modernism

4 March 2024

James Bowen, St Hilda’s College, University of Oxford

In an essay written on what would become The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), John Fowles formalised the questions that seem to have preoccupied much of his literary career, namely: ‘to what extent am I being a coward by writing inside the old tradition? To what extent am I being panicked into avant-gardism?’[i] In opening with this dichotomy between ‘avant-gardism’ and the ‘old tradition’, I do not directly seek to answer Fowles’ questions, but to examine both the motivations for asking them, and what their significance might be for contemporary readers of Fowles, or mid-century writing more generally.[ii]

The Legacy of Woolf: Reading Woolf in the Digital Age

4 March 2024

Reanna Brooks, St Hilda’s College, University of Oxford

Virginia Woolf’s distinctive writing style is characterized by her meticulous use of shapes, which not only enrich imagery but also anticipate the emergence of digitization. This anticipation is particularly evident in Woolf’s extensive engagement in typesetting, which necessitates a reevaluation of her writing techniques and cognitive processes.

Finding woman within and in between: Mina Loy’s feminist montage

4 March 2024

Anna Crofts,  Goldsmiths, University of London

Mina Loy’s visionary and provocative feminism seeks to determine woman as both sex and gender, as both biological and performatively construed. In her ‘Feminist Manifesto’ from 1914, she writes: ‘Leave off looking to men to find out what you are not – seek within yourselves to find out what you are’.^[1] A woman should not subordinate herself to man’s nature and construct herself to be the opposite. Instead, her true self – her essence – can only be found by and within herself. Moreover, in this quotation Loy seems to simultaneously vilify a negative constructivist idea: a woman, she implies, should not construct her self in the interstices not occupied by another, in this case a man.  Nevertheless, I argue, when reading Loy’s literary oeuvre, this is actually the process of finding woman that Loy herself creates, although in a positive construction: a woman is found in between all the prejudiced, polarised, and paradoxical gender roles traditionally assigned to her. She is constituted of all, but none, of these.

‘We will build with new speech’: A Theopoetic Approach to T. S. Eliot’s The Rock (1934)

4 March 2024

David Strong, University of Glasgow

In this article, I argue for the re-examination of T. S. Eliot’s dramatic work using a theopoetic approach to excavate the transcendent potential of collaboration and community present in Eliot’s Christian social project. Taking Eliot’s pageant play The Rock (1934) as an example, I will demonstrate that, while disappointing to his modernist contemporaries, the play embodies a form of new speech that articulates Christian community through its network of collaborators, cast of hundreds of amateur actors, and melding of dramatic forms.

BAMS Elections: A Representative Dialogue

Applications Open for 3 Additional BAMS Postgraduate Representatives 

As we wrap up the year with the annual New Work in Modernist Studies conference held earlier this month, we also prepare to bid goodbye to Hannah Voss and Elena Valli who have served as BAMS Postgraduate Representatives for the last two years. Three new positions for PG Reps will open up in the upcoming BAMS committee elections and successful candidates will work alongside continuing Representatives Jennifer Ashby and Serena Wong in 2024!

To give you a sense of what the role entails, the continuing Representatives sat down for a chat in TMR tradition to talk about what candidates might like to know before applying.