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More than four decades after its founding, the Journal of Modern Literature remains a leading scholarly journal in the field of modern and contemporary literature and is widely recognized as such. It emphasizes scholarly studies of literature in all languages, as well as related arts and cultural artifacts, from 1900 to the present. International in its scope, its contributors include scholars from Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, Oceana, and South America.

Showing posts with label media studies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label media studies. Show all posts

Thursday, August 14, 2025

BOOK NEWS: How portrait photos serve as literary motifs in Proust, Kafka, and Woolf

Reading Portrait Photographs in Proust, Kafka and Woolf: Modernism, Media and Emotion

By Marit Grøtta



Edinburgh UP, 2024

ISBN: 9781399526982

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-reading-portrait-photographs-in-proust-kafka-and-woolf.html


Portrait photography increased in popularity during the modernist period and offered new ways of seeing and understanding the human face. This book examines how portrait photographs appeared as literary motifs in the works of three modernist writers with personal experience of the medium: Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka and Virginia Woolf. Combining perspectives from literary, visual and media studies, Marit Grøtta discusses these writers’ ambivalent views on portrait photographs and the uncertain status of technical images in the early twentieth century more generally. In reconsidering the attention paid to analogue photographs in literature, this book throws light on both modernist reactions to portrait photography and on our relationships to photographs today.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

  • Considers the emotional and relational implications of portrait photographs for three modernist writers
  • Offers a comparative study of the motif of reading portrait photographs in Proust, Kafka, and Woolf
  • Discusses how portrait photographs prompt feelings of love and gratification as well as feelings of frustration and distress in the beholders
  • Discusses the modernists’ ambivalent views on portrait photographs and the uncertain status of such pictures early in the 20th century
  • Reconsiders the modernists’ relation to the visual media and the possibilities for contact, communication, and sympathy early in the twentieth century
  • Considers how the increased circulation of portrait photographs transformed human relations and the relation between the private and the public spheres

"Marit Grøtta makes us see how Proust, Kafka and Woolf read faces mediated by photography and revealing truth, power and sympathy in this wonderful new physiognomy of modernism." – Jean-Michel Rabaté, University of Pennsylvania

"This illuminating reading of portrait photographs in Proust, Kafka and Woolf offers both a probingly fresh understanding of modernism and a genealogy of our face-infested moment and scrambled private-public boundaries." – John Durham Peters, Yale University


Marit Grøtta is professor of comparative literature at the University of Oslo, Norway. She is the author of Baudelaire's Media Aesthetics: The Gaze of the Flâneur and Nineteenth-Century Media (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015) and a number of articles on Schlegel, Baudelaire, Proust, Kafka, Woolf, Queneau, and Agamben. Her research interests are nineteenth-century and modernist literature, visual culture, media philosophy and aesthetic theory.

Tuesday, September 20, 2022

Book News: Woolf's engagement with science

Virginia Woolf, Science, Radio, and Identity 

BY CATRIONA LIVINGSTONE



Cambridge UP, 2022

ISBN: 9781316514078

https://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/literature/english-literature-1900-1945/virginia-woolf-science-radio-and-identity?format=HB

This book offers an extensive analysis of Woolf's engagement with science. It demonstrates that science is integral to the construction of identity in Woolf's novels of the 1930s and 1940s, and identifies a little-explored source for Woolf's scientific knowledge: BBC scientific radio broadcasts. By analyzing this unstudied primary material, it traces the application of scientific concepts to questions of identity and highlights a single concept that is shared across multiple disciplines in the modernist period: the idea that modern science undermined individualized conceptions of the self. It broadens our understanding of the relationship between modernism and radio, modernism and science, and demonstrates the importance of science to Woolf's later novels.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

  • Explores Woolf's engagement with four areas of modernist science: quantum physics, neurology, radio, and evolutionary science
  • Includes detailed accounts of early BBC science broadcasts
  • Demonstrates that the popular science of the modernist period participates in the construction of multiple, expansive models of identity that is characteristic of modernist literature

Catriona Livingstone's work has appeared in Women: A Cultural Review, Woolf Studies Annual, and the Journal of Literature and Science. She co-organized the 2017 British Society for Literature and Science Winter Symposium, and was awarded an Honorable Mention in the Journal of Literature and Science/BSLS Essay Prize in 2017.

Wednesday, March 2, 2022

Book News: Music's role in E.M. Forster's ideological outlook

 E. M. Forster and Music

BY TSUNG-HAN TSAI



Cambridge UP, 2021

ISBN: 9781108844314 Hardback

https://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/literature/english-literature-1900-1945/e-m-forster-and-music?format=HB


This book examines the political resonances of E. M. Forster's representations of music, offering readings of canonical and overlooked works. It reveals music's crucial role in his writing and draws attention to a previously unacknowledged eclecticism and complexity in Forster's ideological outlook. Examining unobtrusive musical allusions in a variety of Forster's writings, this book demonstrates how music provided Forster with a means of reflecting on race and epistemology, material culture and colonialism, literary heritage and national character, hero-worship and war, and gender and professionalism. It unveils how Forster's musical representations are mediated through a matrix of ideas and debates of his time, such as those about evolution, empire, Britain's relationship with the Continent, the rise of fascism, and the emergence of musicology as an academic discipline.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

Read an excerpt at https://assets.cambridge.org/97811088/44314/excerpt/9781108844314_excerpt.pdf


Tsung-Han Tsai is an independent scholar specializing in music and twentieth-century literature. Since receiving his Ph.D. from the University of St Andrews, he has co-edited, with Emma Sutton, Twenty-First-Century Readings of E. M. Forster's Maurice, and has published articles on Forster, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, and life-writing.

Friday, October 1, 2021

The Emergences of Media Ecology and the Modern American Poetry Event

 BY DANIEL T. O'HARA

Temple University


Review of

Edward Allen. Modernist Invention: Media Technology and American Poetry. Cambridge University Press, 2020. 281 pp. $99.99 hardcover.



Any reader wanting to trace the parallels between modern American poetry in the first half of the twentieth century and the emergence of new media technology —telephone, radio, phonograph, and sound (musical) film documentary (such as Black Magic: A Pictorial History of The African-American in the Performing Arts [1967] and Black Nativity: Gospel on Broadway [1962])— will find Edward Allen’s Modernist Invention useful, informative, and fluent in communication and critical analysis as well as in theories of literary and cultural import. A good example is the reading of Wallace Stevens’s late poem “The Sick Man” (1950; pp.126-130). Allen parallels each poet he samples to an emergent media technology; Stevens’s media muse is the radio. 

After establishing the general media climate or ecology at the time, here via a rehearsal of Stevens’s correspondence with his friends the Churches—especially the widow Barbara Church, in which the poet’s reluctant but finally full-throated love affair with the radio becomes clear— Allen reads the selected example in this specific media context. At first glance, “The Sick Man” does not automatically register as a sick man’s experience of tuning and listening to his radio during the middle of the night. Instead, the poem, as Allen cites it, does make the visible a little harder literally to see, if more imaginatively suggestive for meditation: 


Bands of black men seem to be drifting in the air,
In the South, bands of thousands of black men, 
Playing mouth-organs in the night, or, now, guitars.
Here in the North, late, late, there are voices of men,
Voices in chorus, singing without words, remote and deep,
Drifting choirs, long movements and turnings of sounds.
And in a bed in one room, alone, a listener
Waits for the unison of the music of the drifting bands
And the dissolving chorals . . . (Stevens qtd. in 127)


Allen fills in the most likely context as being the old ill poet listening to and tuning his radio, and first hearing drifting along the air waves bands of black men playing their harmonicas and guitars, and then men—as if being white is the full human state—sounding their wordless chorals dissolving in the air. These massive constitutive American opposite symbols form, for the sick man, “the unison of the music” he creatively imagines and eloquently articulates:

The words of winter in which these two will come together, In the ceiling of the distant room, in which he lies, The listener, listening in the shadows, seeing them, Choosing out of himself, out of everything within him. Speech for the quiet, good hail of himself, good hail, good hail, The peaceful, blissful words, well-tuned, well-sung, well-spoken. (Stevens qtd. in 129)

Allen resourcefully illuminates these late allusions to Stevens’s own earlier poems, themes, figures, favorite tropesincluding the figure of the listener, the winter climate, the well-tuned guitar-accompanied words. Even as we see the new addition, the explicitly self-hailing practice of poetic composition that Stevens joinsand would fully exemplify as he eventually faces the ultimate quiet coming ever closer. Like his poetic father, Walt Whitman, Stevens conceives all his poems as songs of the self, ever courting and yet holding off, the final dark embrace. The only vision of unison held open yet together, at the end. 

With Frost, Allen reads the long narrative dialogue “Snow” from Mountain Interval (1917). Frost stages strategically the use of the telephone, in which a couple listening to their party line discloses what they do not see, another couple’s poignant domestic crisis that Frost reveals wryly for the observant reader via this new media device . Similarly, Allen traces Marianne Moore’s engagements with recording her poetry, especially in connection with Caedmon Records after WWII. But it is the last chapter, on Langston Hughes and how his early and continuing study of cinematic techniques, especially montage, leads him not only to develop documentaries of Black musicals but also to expand the limits of lyric poetry, including his own most celebrated lyric, as in the epic late poem Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951). 

Modernist Invention is most successful in integrating its media technology and American poetry halves in an inventive way every bit worthy of the title adjective modernist in this final chapter on Hughes. While entertaining the established critiques of this late experiment Montage of a Dream Deferred—its repetitive nature, its often-lame colloquial expressions, its epic ambitions overshooting the poet’s own lyrical moments of creativity—Allen instead demonstrates this poem’s self-conscious, even self-parodic intentionality, startling its creator by sudden imaginative surprises in the course of pursuing a jazz improvisational method. Allen devotes nine pages to its analysis, which is why I will conclude with an example from the end of the Hughes chapter. The brief obscure lyric “Advice to Cullud Movie Actors” ends the chapter, as its self-parodic depiction of tinsel-town Black actors’ required method of dramatic portrayal:


If you’ve got to play a native
Play a native good—
Play him like
Your Uncle Tom would.
. . . .
If you’ve got to be a Porgy
Be a Porgy in full
And give Mr. Goldwyn
Plenty of bull.
. . . .
Why I say all this
(You ought to know, son)
Is I’m just mad ‘cause
I didn’t get none (Hughes qtd. in 247-248)


Allen masterfully concludes: “It’s an unforgiving poem, but one that should leave us in no doubt that Goldwyn’s industry had got well and truly under the poet’s skin” (248). This conclusion is fitting all around. 

Framing the book’s analyses is a long Introduction (pp.1-36) and a half the size Coda (pp. 249-261 entitled “Synchronicity.” Allen launches his book under the flagship 1987 paper by Raymond Williams, “When Was Modernism?” The established account of modernism in Anglo-American literary history is punctuated by sacred dates, none more important than the miraculous year 1922, when Ulysses and The Waste Land were published in book form. Modernism tends in this perspective to be represented as a post-WWI development, or better, reaction. The literary innovations of modernism are seen thereby as rather simply reactions to the catastrophe of war and its aftermath. 

Williams’s point, however, is to underscore how modernism is first of all broader than any one or two national bases and also a historical happening with many different moments. In fact, as Williams suggests, modernism was a historical socio-political emergence or series of emergences not limited in time or place, except in the broadest possible terms, and not only associated with literature and the other arts, but widespread in popular forms as well as transnational, global in its impact, and associated with objects and practices we have only begun to plumb (in 1987). 

Allen’s book plows in this field. But unlike the developmental logic of established cultural histories, it would bring together in synchronous fashion the art-forms, elite and popular, American and international, attached less to these elite forms and more to the popular practices and techniques, which blossom as new inventions to shape and reshape the modernist world, moment by moment. Such emergences of this universal modernist event form the ambitious horizon still beckoning, as we leave Allen’s view of Hughes in the throes of his quick-cut montages, thereby suggesting the equally fine books to come.

----

Daniel T. O’Hara, emeritus professor of English and humanities at Temple University, is the author of nine books, including Virginia Woolf and The Modern Sublime: Invisible Tribunal (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2015), and editor or co-editor of six collections, most recently Humanistic Criticism: A William V. Spanos Reader (Northwestern UP, 2015). 


Monday, April 5, 2021

Book News: Novels navigating new media

 Out of Print: Mediating Information in the Novel and the Book

BY JULIA PANKO

Paperback: 9781625345608

Hardcover: 9781625345592

University of Massachusetts Press, December 2020

https://www.umasspress.com/9781625345608/out-of-print/


Through technological experiments, readers have seen the concept of the book change over the years, and the novel reflects these experiments, acting as a kind of archive for information. Out of Print reveals that the novel continues to shape popular understandings of information culture, even as it adapts to engage with new media and new practices of mediating information in the digital age.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

This innovative study chronicles how the print book has fared as both novelists and the burgeoning profession of information science have grappled with unprecedented quantities of data across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. As the novel’s archival project took a critical turn from realism to an investigation of the structures, possibilities, and ideologies of information media, novelists have considered ideas about how data can best be collected and stored. Julia Panko pairs case studies from information history with close readings of modernist works such as James Joyce’s Ulysses and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and contemporary novels from Jonathan Safran Foer, Stephen King, and Mark Z. Danielewski that emphasize their own informational qualities and experiment with the aesthetic potential of the print book.


"This is a complex and fascinating book that has illuminating things to say about the novel as a genre; about the future of the book, the future of the novel, and the future of literary reading; about the form of information and the category of form itself; and about the information ecology of the digital world. It is lucidly and elegantly written, and its scholarship is impressively detailed and rigorous."—John Frow, author of Character and Person

 

"Out of Print explores the continued importance and power of the book in a digital age of increased big data. It draws from many important works of scholarship across the interdisciplinary fields of new media, book history, and literary studies. This weaving together of scholarship and literary texts, from modernism and contemporary literature, is a valuable contribution."—Jessica Pressman, author of Bookishness: Loving Books in a Digital Age


JULIA PANKO is associate professor of English at Weber State University.