Emotion-focused Cognitive Coping in Katherine Mansfield’s Miss Brill

10th June 2023

Gwenda Koo, University of Cambridge

In Katherine Mansfield’s short story ‘Miss Brill’ (1920), a lonely old lady sits at the park on a Sunday afternoon. She eavesdrops on people’s conversations, makes up stories about them, chuckles and talks to herself. She imagines that she is an actress, taking part in a play with everyone else. At the critical point of feeling self-important, however, she overhears an insulting comment. Mansfield then grinds the story to a halt; there is a short break before we see Miss Brill at her home. She hears ‘something crying’, and the story ends.

Loneliness, isolation and rejection are amongst some of the most common themes in Mansfield’s short stories. What makes ‘Miss Brill’ distinct is Mansfield’s presentation of the old lady’s illusory world as an ego-defensive process against emotional distress. Taking a cognitive approach, this paper will explore how ‘Miss Brill’ sheds light on coping strategies  for negative emotions.

Leda and the Swan in the Collective Poetic Consciousness

10th June 2024

Mariana Rogan, St. Olaf College

According to Yeats, the poet ‘is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete.’^[1] He writes this in ‘A General Introduction for my Work,’ acknowledging the role of the individual experience in a poet’s work, but emphasises a ‘phantasmagoria,’ a history of images that both influence the poet’s life and serve as a poetic reservoir to draw upon.^[2] Yeats shifts the definition of the ‘phantasmagoria’ from an individual dream-like experience to a collective imagination that fuels art-making, manifesting in his pervasive use of imagery from folklore, myth, and the occult in his poetry, particularly in serving the expression of his politics. In ‘Leda and the Swan,’ Yeats utilises a Greek myth that recalls Zeus turning into a swan and forcibly impregnating Leda, Queen of Sparta. Yeats calls on the violent myth to discuss his political beliefs about Irish nationalism and British imperialism, without giving in to the individualism he warns against. In William Johnsen’s chapter on sexual politics in Yeats’s poem, he states that Yeats knew the poem’s violence would be misunderstood by some readers as justifying sexual and political violence, but later revisions opened up the possibility for more progressive readings.^[3] Perhaps both in spite of and because of this controversy, he has established the myth of Leda and the Swan in the ‘phantasmagoria,’ as evidenced by Irish singer-songwriter Hozier’s 2022 release, titled ‘Swan Upon Leda.’^[4] Hozier engages with the ‘phantasmagoria’ by borrowing and subverting Yeats’s title and its associated Greek mythological imagery in order to make his own contemporary political assertions on imperialism and reproductive rights.

Book Review: The Intelligent Unconscious in Modernist Literature and Science

10th June 2024

Dr. Alan A. Saeed, Sulaimani University

Trigoni, Thalia. The Intelligent Unconscious in Modernist Literature and Science. London: Routledge, 2021.

Trigoni’s monograph is a major reassessment of how ideas about the unconscious mind influenced key modernist writers and modernist culture. What makes the argument novel is that it rejects the traditional Freudian contextualisation of the role of the unconscious in modernism, choosing instead to explore the early history of a field we would now call ‘cognitive science’, (including nineteenth and early twentieth century psychology, physiology, and philosophy). This presents a different understanding of the unconscious that is intelligent, able to reason, and capable of formulating thoughts and judgements (unlike its Freudian equivalent). 

Book Review: Situating Poetry: Covenant and Genre in American Modernism

10th June 2024

Dr. Erin Yanota, University of Virginia’s College at Wise

Joshua Logan Wall, Situating Poetry: Covenant and Genre in American Modernism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022)

How did voices at the margins of modernism in the United States – and the United States of America itself – create publics by appealing to the civil religious discourses central to national self-definition? This question is one that Joshua Logan Wall sets out to answer in Situating Poetry. The book focuses on four poets – James Weldon Johnson, Charles Reznikoff, Lola Ridge, Louis Zukofsky – and one ‘limit case’ (15), in Robert Hayden – and it recontextualises these writers’ poems in the original settings of their publication and circulation.^[1] Using a multiethnic approach, Situating Poetry shows how these five poets use modernist formal strategies – like those that characterise documentary poetics, for instance – to political effect. These strategies enable the poets to establish relations of solidarity. But they also use poetic form to identify, critique, and even seek to repair the broken covenants of national discourses like the American Dream, or the biblical typologies that claim the United States as a safe haven and ‘Promised Land’ for other nations’ exiles.

Book Review: Misfit Modernism

10th June 2024

Dr. Naoise Murphy, Maynooth University

Octavio R. González, Misfit Modernism: Queer Forms of Double Exile in the Twentieth-Century Novel (Penn State University Press, 2020). 

Misfit Modernism offers an answer to the question of what to do with queer theory, and modernist studies, after intersectionality. Octavio R. González grapples with a familiar problem for politically-engaged criticism: that people, as Black feminism teaches us, ‘do not live single-issue lives’.^[1] The cultural category of the ‘misfit’ is his response to the impulse to make queerness stand for all forms of marginality; an alternative term that is capacious enough to hold diverging vectors of difference, but that emerges organically from the cultural imaginary of a period before ‘intersectionality’. His ‘misfit modernists’ experience forms of ‘double exile’ that we might now term ‘intersectional’ — too queer or dark-skinned within their family unit, while also facing collective forms of social marginalization stemming from racism, misogyny, or heterosexism. Through modernist forms of narration, these misfits theorized this complex form of cultural alienation, while being left out of the story of the transcendental, universal (read: white, male) modernist subject.

Book Review: Understanding Nancy, Understanding Modernism

10th June 2024

Dr. Jamie Stephenson, University of Leeds

Cosmin Toma (ed.), Understanding Nancy, Understanding Modernism (New York, London, Dublin: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023)

Bloomsbury Academic’s Understanding Philosophy, Understanding Modernism series aims to comprehend a given thinker through literary and cultural modernism, while reciprocally reading those very modes of interpretation via the chosen philosopher’s work. Each volume adheres to a tripartite structure, ‘Conceptualizing X’, ‘X and Modernity’ (where ‘X’ pertains to the theorist under scrutiny), and a closing ‘Glossary’ which attends to several key ideas of the philosopher in question. Following previous anthologies on Henri Bergson (2013) and Gilles Deleuze (2014), the present collection discusses the work of Jean-Luc Nancy. The series’ theme of ‘reciprocity’ is apt given that the French philosopher explores conceptualisations of ‘community’, via a nuancing of Martin Heidegger’s Mitsein (‘being-with’), emphasising relationality as a crucial ontological force. Nancy purposefully pursues this democratic register so as to evade perpetuating thought as a grounding principle of being. These motifs of liminality and resonance place Nancy in close proximity with (and, one might argue, as precursor to) contemporary Anthropocene discourses which pursue a decentering of the human; consonant with bodies of theory including, but not limited to, speculative realism, new materialism, and ecocriticism. This latent theme of anti-anthropocentrism subtends many of Understanding Nancy’s essay topics, which include applications of Nancean theory to deconstruction and Christianity (Schalk Gerber), psychoanalysis (Jean-Michel Rabaté), science (Ian James), and Maurice Blanchot (Aukje van Rooden and Andreas Noyer; Jeff Fort). But what role does modernism play in all of this?

Book Review: Forms of Late Modernist Lyric

10th June 2024

Sneha Chowdhury, Brown University

Forms of Late Modernist Lyric, ed. by Edward Allen, Liverpool University Press, 2021.

Forms of Late Modernist Lyric is a multifaceted survey of poems that appear on the cusp of modernism and postmodernism and chart, in editor Edward Allen’s words, their own ‘third way’ (3). Although ‘late’ in the title is a temporal marker suggesting their subsequent place in a chronological order, the poets and poems discussed in the collection tend to ‘move sideways’ and frustrate the dictates of dating (4). ‘Late’ in this instance, is a productive metaphor for reviving the dated in the new. The diverse forms engaged in the book offset the critical tendency to focus on the post-Romantic lyric as a monolithic genre that turns poems, as Allen notes in citing Virginia Jackson, into ‘individual or communal ideals’ (9). One instance of an idealised lyric form is the short poem, a definition Allen derives from a school poetry guidebook titled Moon on the Tides: The AQA GCSE Poetry Anthology edited by David Wheeler. Such ideals limit the broad historical scope of the lyric and eclipse forms which deviate from them in different ways. The present collection recovers these deviant forms ‘resistant to textbook description’ to unlock their lyric potentialities in late modernism and challenges any stable concept of the lyric (4).

Book Review: Virginia’s Sisters

10th June 2024

Dr. Naomi Walker, University of Chester

Gabi Reigh (selected and introduced) Virginia’s Sisters: An Anthology of Women’s Writing (Richmond: Aurora Metro Books, 2023)

This book aims to highlight the work of women writers who were feminist contemporaries of Virginia Woolf. The anthology contains a wide selection of short stories, poems, novel extracts, and essays from a diverse range of women writers. It includes works from the first half of the twentieth century and covers many issues including war, female sexuality, work, and relationships. It offers pieces from thirteen different countries written in eleven different languages. Alongside passages from celebrated names such as Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Edith Wharton, Zelda Fitzgerald, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Alice Dunbar-Nelson, the anthology features the work of lesser-known authors, including Yente Serdatsky, Sorana Gurian, Fani Popova-Mutafova, and Dorka Talmon. Ultimately, it highlights the significance of women’s writing from this period and illustrates the importance of the female voice and their need for ‘a room of one’s own’ in which to write.^[1]