2 June 2022
Jonathan McAllister, University of Cambridge
A way of walking is no less a refrain
than a song or a little coloured vision.
– Gilles Deleuze.[1]
In this short essay, I will articulate several meanings that reside in the performing body of Samuel Beckett’s play Footfalls (1976).[2] The aim of such an exercise is to sketch a few distinctive significations and practices that pertain to the Beckettian body. Continue reading “Articulating Movement on the Beckettian Stage”
4 April 2022
In the UK over the last couple weeks there has been a noticeable uptick of sunshine, birdsong, and lamb sightings – we’ve crunched the numbers and can only conclude that Spring is finally here. Our issue this month is ripe with reviews, as our authors have emerged like hibernating animals from a winter spent hunkered by the fire reading their critical works of choice. Their thoughtful reflections of the newest contributions to the modernist marketplace of ideas are nicely rounded out by our lone article this month, an investigation of Mina Loy’s playful reconstruction of poetic form, culminating in her design of a build-it-yourself alphabet. If the weather holds – or maybe you permanently live somewhere sunnier than we do! – we recommend reading outside (though pack a jacket… and maybe a scarf, still).
4 April 2022
Bowen Wang, Trinity College Dublin
Ezra Pound, in a review titled ‘Marianne Moore and Mina Loy’ published in Others: A Magazine of the New Verse (1917), speaks highly of these two modernist women poets and associates them with the last type of his poetry typology: Continue reading “Mina Loy, Logopoeia, and the Alphabet that Builds Itself”
4 April 2022
Jinan Ashraf, Dublin City University
Ragini Mohite, Modern Writers, Transnational Literatures: Rabindranath Tagore and W. B. Yeats (Liverpool: Clemson University Press, 2021)
There appears to be no end of critical and interpretive studies on Rabindranath Tagore and W. B. Yeats. This is in part due to their distinct positions as predecessors of modernisms, the availability of cross-referenced studies on their literary and cross-cultural collaborations, their thematic formulations of aesthetic modernisms, and ideations of the home and the hearth across a range of literary forms borrowing from European, Asiatic and Eastern literary traditions. Readers of Modern Writers, Transnational Literatures: Rabindranath Tagore and W.B. Yeats would appreciate Ragini Mohite’s timely and nuanced study of the fraught relationship between Yeats and Tagore both for its modernist perspective and transnational discourse. Mohite is sensitive to Yeats’ and Tagore’s complex positions as contemporaneous intertextualists in attending to the ‘complementarity, tensions, and thematic echoes’ (p. 4) in such texts as Tagore’s Gora, The Home and the World, Red Oleanders, and The Post Office and Yeats’ Cathleen ni Houlihan and Purgatory besides others. Mohite’s useful tracing of paternalist tropes in colonial and gendered spaces allows readers to locate thematic and formal resonances in the works of Yeats and Tagore while making these writers quite apparent subjects for a study of the broad networks and borders of transnational currents in literary studies in the twenty-first century. Continue reading “Book Review: Modern Writers, Transnational Literatures: Rabindranath Tagore and W. B. Yeats”
4 April 2022
Katie Jones, Swansea University
Jean-Michel Rabaté and Angeliki Spiropoulou (eds.). Historical Modernisms: Time, History and Modernist Aesthetics (London, New York, New Delhi, Sydney: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022)
Marking the centenary of modernism’s year of miracles, Historical Modernisms makes a timely addition to scholarship – but not only for this reason. The eleven chapters, including an interview with Hayden White, explore and undo modernism’s associations with ahistoricity, as supposedly exemplified by the avant-gardes, by reading modernist arts in context. Jean-Michel Rabaté and Angeliki Spiropoulou expertly introduce the book; they ‘remain sceptical about the idea of transhistorical modernism, as do all the contributors to [Historical Modernisms]’ (5). While we might locate modernity across time, as a reterospectively given term, modernism– unlike “dada” or similar self-defined movements – implies the critical urge to delineate, thereby restricting its usefulness to describe works of other eras. Continue reading “Book Review: Historical Modernisms: Time, History and Modernist Aesthetics”
The Modernist Review 