review
What is it like to write within a fold? Heather A. Love’s engaging new study argues that canonical modernist literature bends into a cybernetic future. Following Eve Sedgwick and Adam Frank’s transhistorical notion of the “cybernetic fold,” Love asks us to consider modernism as an art of informatics, data sets, entangled human-machines, and dynamic feedback loops, well before such notions had become self-consciously articulated. Combining both media and information theory, her book expands Bernard Scott’s claim that “cybernetics came into being before it had a nam
If literary radio studies, in its first couple of decades, anointed a hero, it was probably Hilda Matheson. The first Head of Talks at the BBC, not only an accomplished bureaucrat but a practical theorist who developed the style of “intimate address” by which the broadcaster artificially produced the impression of naturalness, Matheson was a perfect candidate for celebration: lover of Vita Sackville-West, booster of literary broadcasting, martyr (or so the story goes) to the patriarchy, as represented by Director-General Sir John Reith,
A century before Edward Said, a robust critique of orientalism proliferated within the so-called Orient. Zeynep Çelik argues this point in an edited collection of journalism, polemic, and scholarship from the late Ottoman Empire and early Turkish Republic. Europe Knows Nothing about the Orient criticizes European knowledge production about Turkey through voices well known—such as Ahmed Midhat, Nâzım Hikmet, Halide Edib, and Tevfik Fikret—as well as those less so, including Şevket Süreyya and Ebüzziya. Translated into English from the original Turkish edition by Gregory Key, Nergis Perçinel, Micah Hughes, İlker Hepkaner, and Aron Aji, these modernist writers do not celebrate the arrival of European modernity so much as critique its transformation of nearly every facet of Turkish life: architecture, tourism, gender, and literature. This light paperback is therefore anything but: it is an essential companion to Orientalism (1978). While Said’s text has generated many memorable critiques, ranging from those of Aijaz Ahmad to Wael Hallaq, Çelik’s intervention gives voice to those who were “orientalized.” If orientalist scholarship constituted epistemic violence, this volume represents a trove of epistemic resistance.
Allison Schachter’s book Women Writing Jewish Modernity gives voice to the challenges Jewish women writers faced when they turned their pen to prose in the first half of the twentieth century. Scholarship has constructed literary genealogies of Jewish prose writing primarily in relation to male writers, ranging from Sholem Aleichem to Yosef Haim Brenner’s figure of the talush (the modern rootless Jew). Women Writing Jewish Modernity, in contrast, recovers the work of five interwar women writers: Fradl Shtok, Dvora Baron, Elisheva Bikhovsky, Leah Goldberg, and Debora Vogel, and reconfigures Jewish literary history
Northrop Frye argued that behind every realist narrative was a displaced mythic structure that could explain the deeper meaning of its themes and patterns. Frye’s archetypal theory was in many ways a modernist one. Had not James Joyce and T. S. Eliot themselves sought to unify the seemingly random data of modern experience by indicating for their readers deep mythic structures undergirding their works? Myth was not held on to so much as a system of belief as for its ability to give a kind of formal unity—even if only latently—to the otherwise centrifugal force of the new and diverse material of modern life. In modernism, myth allied with literary form against the messy, debased business of daily existence in post-traditional society. But what if this is the wrong way to tell the story? This is the question posed by Paul Stasi in The Persistence of Realism in Modernist Fiction, which discovers behind modernism not myth but the displaced form of the realist novel.
The title of this swift, powerfully written monograph on the archives of the League of Nations in Geneva offers a prodigious portrait of its real object of study: the so-called “interwar” period in European culture. Rather than a mere history of the League itself, A Violent Peace reads like a humanistic treatise on the most magmatic chronotope of western late-modernity: the ironically utopian, painfully bureaucratic, Freudianly fascist years that put into question, arguably for good, earlier concepts of reality, opinion, State, and world.
Lisa Robertson’s 2001 book The Weather is a classic of the post-pastoral, in which the “architecture” of constantly shifting patterns of clouds and vapors supplants the nostalgia of landscape. A note at the end of the book tells us that it resulted partly from “an intense yet eccentric research in the rhetorical structure of English meteorological description.” BBC shipping forecasts, William Wordsworth’s The Prelude, William Cobbett’s Rural Rides, and the cloud sketches of John Constable were among Robertson’s sources, as was the delightfully titled Essay on the Modification of Clouds by the nineteenth-century amateur meteorologist Luke Howard.
In 1932, Tess Slesinger published her most famous story, “Missis Flinders,” a bracingly candid look into the mind of a woman in New York City returning home from her abortion. Slesinger’s story—inspired by her own decision to terminate her pregnancy that year—does not fit neatly into the rhetoric that surrounds our ongoing political and legal debate over women’s reproductive rights. During the Great Depression, economic scarcity meant that abortion, if still illegal, was not policed or stigmatized as bitterly as it would be in earlier or later decades. Neither simply “pro” nor “anti,” Slesinger’s tale instead explores the psychological afterlives of this experience for one woman, trying to reconcile her decision with the feelings that linger after, with her identity as an intellectual, and with her husband’s own intellectual insecurities.
The bad side of books, Lawrence says, is “the beastly marketable chunk of published volume,” the “miserable tome” as an object, “the actual paper and rag volume of any of my works,” “a bone which every dog presumes to pick with me” that “delivers me to the vulgar mercies of the world.”
