Modernist Studies Research Focus Group
Conveners:
Enda Duffy (Associate Professor, English), duffy@english.ucsb.edu
Porter Abbott (Professor, English), pabbott@english.ucsb.edu
Randall J. Pogorzelski (graduate student, Comp. Lit.)
This has been an exciting
and productive year for the IRC-sponsored Fucus group
that has come to be known as the Modernist Group. We
have held a series of meetings, in different formats,
led by a range of invited guest speakers from both inside
and outside the university. Each talk and discussion
has been on a topic which challenges the prevailing
orthodoxies in the study of the various modernisms;
each has offered inspiration for new and exciting directions
in the study of twentieth century culture. In the course
of the year, a common theme emerged: almost all of the
presentations concerned issues at the nexus of technology,
representation and politics. They were, however, sufficiently
varied in scope and appeal that each drew not only the
core 'modernism' audience but also other faculty members,
graduate students and even advanced undergraduates.
Through this variety, we were glad to draw in new audiences,
forge alliances with the members of other focus groups,
and offer the Modernism Group as the venue for the presentation
of emerging and exciting trends in the study of twentieth
century culture.
Meetings:
Upcoming activities, 2006-07
Fall:
1. Graduate Student Colloquoum. This event will feature
the work of three grad. students form different departments.
There will be three twenty-minute presentations, followed
by discussion.
2. Presentation by Prof. Jed Esty, English Dept., University
of Illinois Urbana-Champaign .
Prof. Esty’s book , A Shrinking Island: Modernism
and Post-Colonialism in
Britain (Princeton University Press, 2004) is a reinterpretation
of the relation between western high modernism and the
twilight era of
imperialism. He is also the co-editor of Postcolonial
Studies and Beyond
(Duke University Press, 2005).
3. Presentation by Prof. Yunte Huang, Dept. of English
UC Santa Barbara. Prof. Huang is the author most recently
of Transpacific Displacements: Ethnography, Translation
and Intertextual Travel in 20th Century American Literature,
and of a book of poetry, CRIBS.
4. Mini-Conference: The Modernism Group hosts the Fall
meeting of the Southern
California Consortium for the Study of Irish Literature
and Culture. This day
long event will feature participants from universities
throughout Southern
California, including UCS, UCSD, UCLA, UC Riverside,
USC, Claremont
Graduate University, Marymount Loyola University, Cal.
State Northridge, and
others.
Full details to be announced on the Modernism RFG website.
Winter/Spring:
1. Presentation by Prof. Bonnie Kime Scott, Prof. of
English and Chair of Women’s Studies, San Diego
State University. Prof. Scott is the editor of the influential
book The Gender of Modernism (Indiana 1990), author
of Refiguring Modernism, Vols. 1 and 2, (Indiana 1995)
among others, and editor of The Selected Letters of
Rebecca West (Yale 2000).
2. Graduate Student Colloquium. This will be the second
of our Graduate Series
for the year. Both will be organized around a theme,
and will be followed by
discussion.
3. Presentation by Prof. Catherine Nesci, Professor
and Chair, Dept. of French and
Italian, UCSB. Prof. Nesci has just completed a book
entitled Le Flaneur et Les
Flaneuses: Des Femmes dans Paris a l’Epoque Romantique,
and is the author of
La Femme Mode d’Emploi, and others.
Other events for next year are still in the planning
stages.
Past activities,
2005-06
This past year we hosted
three major talks:
Talk:
"Selling Out: Modernism and the Art of Scandal."
February 24, 3:30pm ,South Hall 2635
Prof. Sean Latham
By focusing on the widespread popularity of the scandalous
roman-a-clef
(or novel with a key) in the early twentieth century,
this talk will
trace the complex relationship between aesthetic modernism's
pretensions to autonomy and its deep imbrication in
the market for
celebrity. The talk will focus primarily on two distinct
literary
coteries: Ottoline Morrell's in London and Ford Maddox
Ford's in Paris.
In each cases, members of these elite yet bohemian groups
turned upon
the central figures and wrote often vicious romans a
clef, condemning
the very patrons who supported them. Rather than mere
acts of
bloody-minded revenge, this talk will argue that that
such texts
crystallize modernism's anxious attempt to negotiate
the interlocking
economics of financial reward, celebrity culture, and
cultural
distinction. Among the key works I'll discuss are Lawrence's
Women in
Love, Huxley's Crome Yellow, and Rhys's Quartet.
Sean Latham is Associate Professor of English at the
University of
Tulsa where he serves as Editor of the James Joyce Quarterly
and
Director of the Modernist Journals Project. He is a
specialist in James
Joyce, modernist literature, and critical digital theory.
His
publications include "Am I A Snob?" Modernism
and the Novel (Cornell
University Press, 2003) and Joyce's Modernism. (National
Library of
Ireland, 2005). His work has also appeared or is forthcoming
in New
Literary History, Modern Fiction Studies, PMLA, Journal
of Modern
Literature, Texas Studies in Language and Literature
and elsewhere.
Research on his current book-project, The Art of Scandal:
The Open
Secrets and Illicit Pleasures of the Modern Novel, has
been supported
by grants and fellowships from the National Endowment
for the
Humanities, and the Harry Ransom Humanities Research
Cent
Talk:
“Political Sense and Sensibility: Gramsci to
Bourdieu”
Prof. Patrick McGee
Friday, April 28 at 3:00
South Hall 2635
According to Gramsci, the difference between theory
and common sense is not qualitative but quantitative.
This insight opens the door to a dialectical understanding
of the relation between specialized language and ordinary
language. It calls into question the hierarchies of
discursive practice that currently dominate the field
of critical discourse and virtually legitimate the university
as a hierarchical institution, a virtual caste system,
as Bourdieu argued of the French grandes écoles.
It creates the possibility for a critical discourse
that mixes the styles, the voices, and the registers
of language, including the personal and the idiomatic.
Such a discourse occupies the ground between theory
and common sense and dialectically transforms one through
the other in a process that can never reach the closure
of system or doctrine. It articulates the masses—the
set of irreducible singularities that includes you and
me—as the only ground of significant social thought.
Patrick McGee is a Professor of English at Louisiana
State University, and the author most recently of From
Shane to Kill bill: Rethinking the Western (Blackwell,
2005), Joyce Beyond Marx (Florida, 2001), and Cinema,
theory and Political Responsibility in Contemporary
Culture (Cambridge 1997)
This talk was from The Importance of Being Common, his
work in progress.
Talk:
“The Blue Soap: The Scandal of Realism and the
Art of Making Things Visible”
Friday, May 5, 3pm.
IHC Small Seminar Room
Why does Gustave Flaubert point out that the soap in
Félicité’s bedroom is blue? Why
does George Eliot say that the brink of the river Floss
is tinged with a soft purple hue? Why does Theodor Fontane
dwell on the belt Effi Briest is wearing? The history
of Western literature as we know it, from Homer and
Greek tragedy onward, can be approached as a history
of making things visible. Homer wants us to see Odysseus’s
scar; Cervantes wants us to see those windmills. But
in the early nineteenth century, and especially in the
realist novel, the art of making things visible takes
a radically new turn. It is not only a quantitative
change; it is also, and above all, a qualitative one.
One might even say that the pursuit of the visible is
a specifically modern phenomenon. Yet its history remains
to be fully understood.
In her talk, Sara Danius traced the career of the visual
in the realist novel. She will focus on Flaubert in
particular, arguing that the Flaubertian image is a
wholly new object in the history of literary representation.
Sara Danius is Associate Professor in the Department
of Literature at Uppsala University, Sweden. Since receiving
her Ph.D. from the Graduate Program in Literature at
Duke University, she has been a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg
in Berlin and the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study
in the Social Sciences. She is currently Visiting Professor
in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures
at University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Her books include
Prousts Motor (Stockholm: Bonniers, 2000), The Senses
of Modernism: Perception, Technology, and Aesthetic/
(Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2002), and The Prose of the World:
Flaubert and the Art of Making Things Visible (forthcoming).
On June 2 we are planning our Graduate Student Colloquium,
with presentations of their current research on Modernism
and Gender by three graduate students, with discussion
aftrerwards.
Past activities,
2004-05
Invited Speakers:
1. Professor Paul St. Amour, English, Pomona College,
“Douhet and Mrs. Dalloway: Aerial Surveillance
and the Modernist Novel”. Fall 2004.
Professor St. Amour has just been awarded the MLA prize
for the best first book by an English professor this
year for his work on censorship and modernist fiction,
and his new work, from which he read us a part, is at
the cutting edge of studies of technology, visuality
and modernist studies. This talk, followed by a lively
discussion, was very well attended and well received;
it was a showcase for innovative ways of thinking about
the role of new kinds of vision in particular in twentieth-century
culture.
2. Professor Thomas Cousineau, Washingtown College,
Maryland, “Accepting Imitations: Thomas Bernhard
and Glenn Gould”. Winter 2005.
This paper was a model of interdisciplinary work, spanning
literature and music. It also introduced to many in
the audience the work of a major Austrian novelist.
Prof. Cousineau discussed Bernhard’s novels in
terms of Rene Girard’s account of narratives of
desire. There was a strong discussion after the talk,
particularly on connections between musical and literary
practices in modernism and postmodernism.
3. Professor Maurizia Boscagli, English, UCSB, “Buying,
Crying, and Getting With It: Walter Benjamin’s
Wax Dreams.” Spring 2005.
This paper presented a portion of Prof. Boscagli’s
most recent research, on Benjamin’s theory of
materialism. The talk provided the basis for a good
discussion of the relation of gender, modernist versions
of consumerism, and the place of materialist theory
in describing relations between the two.
Graduate Student Presentations of New Work
This year we hosted three events where senior graduate
students presented a sampling of their dissertation
work. These popular events showcased some of the exciting
research being done at UC Santa Barbara in the areas
of twentieth century literature and culture.
Fall:
1. William Carter, German, on Hegel and Modernity
2. Carolyn Butcher, English, on Narratives of Community
in Finnegans Wake
3. Suzanne Braswell, on Movement and Movement Theory
in French Modernism
Winter:
1. Susie Keller, English, on Cosmetics and the Face
in American Modernist Fiction
2. Rob Wallace, English, on Improvisation in American
Modernist Literature and Jazz
3. Aimee Kilbane, Comp. Lit., on the Bohemian Flaneur
in Nerval and Baudelaire
Spring:
1. Christy Canarriato, English, on Narratives of Chance
and Causality in late 19th C. Science Writing
2. Heidi Brevik, French, Brown University, on Women’s
Fashion and late 19th C. French Fiction
Film Screening
In April, we screened Bloom (Walsh, 2004), the adaptation
of Joyce’s Ulysses, in the McCune Conference Room.
The film was directed by Stephen Rea as Bloom, and Angelina
Ball as Molly. This screening attracted a broad audience
of undergraduates, graduate students and professors.
There was a discussion afterwards.
