Hostile Environments, Parties, and Observation in Woolf’s “The Years”
Scarlet Clark, Southampton University In the latest essay in the #ModernistMoments series, Scarlet Clark examines the role of auto-ethnography in countering hostile nationalist politics and encouraging collective self-scrutiny. Clark discusses Virginia Woolf’s employment of Mass Observationist theories in The Years (1937) as a literary example of such an invocation. Virginia Woolf’s The Years (1937) spans…
Philip Johnson: Architecture’s “International Style” and Fascist Nationalism
Bill Freind, Rowan University The designs of modernist architect Philip Johnson are prominent landmarks in many city skylines. However, Johnson was a Nazi sympathiser, and the development of his architectural style is inseparable from his fascist politics. In the latest of the #ModernistMoments series, Bill Freind examines this political-aesthetic instability in Johnson’s career. On February…
“People like that don’t expect sacrifices from us”: Katherine Mansfield’s echoes in the Covid-19 era
Emma Marns, University of Essex In the latest in the #ModernistMoments series, Emma Marns examines the significance of Katherine Mansfield’s work for the present day and the role wealth plays in how we celebrate and grieve. Katherine Mansfield came from an educated and socially prominent family in New Zealand; her father was knighted in 1923.…
PART 2: “Taking pleasure in the mere handling of the stops”: Yeats meets Joyce in poetry and prose
Adrian Paterson, NUI Galway In the second of MSI’s Modernist Moments Essay series, Adrian Paterson unpicks the artistic consequences of James Joyce’s famous first meeting with W.B. Yeats. This is the second of two parts in this essay: the first can be read here. Despite his determination to “damn Russell, damn Yeats, damn Skeffington […]…
PART 1: “Taking pleasure in the mere handling of the stops”: Yeats meets Joyce in poetry and prose
Adrian Paterson, NUI Galway In the first of MSI’s Modernist Moments Essay series, Adrian Paterson unpicks the artistic consequences of James Joyce’s famous first meeting with W.B. Yeats. The first part of this 2-part essay marks Yeats’s birthday. (Read Part Two here). James Joyce’s first meeting with William Butler Yeats on the streets of Dublin…
How to read Finnegans Wake
By Casey Lawrence Can there be a “first” line in a book which is a circle? Finnegans Wake, James Joyce’s notoriously perplexing final work, takes beginning in medias res to a whole new level. Its first line dumps the reader into the middle of Dublin’s murky River Liffey, starting the story literally mid-stream: riverrun, past…
Celebrating 100 Years Since Ulysses: New Work in Joyce Studies
Casey Lawrence, Trinity College Dublin In 1921, Joyce reportedly said of his ambitious novel, Ulysses, I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality.[1] In the 100 years since the publication of Ulysses,…
Elektropolis Coked to the Eyeballs: Berlin’s Modernist Identity Crisis
By Casey Lawrence, Trinity College Dublin In this month’s MSI New Writing about place in Modernism, TCD’s Casey Lawrence uncovers Berlin of the Modernist period, at once impoverished and decadent, as seen through the eyes of the oft-forgotten writer Robert McAlmon Berlin underwent significant changes and took many names during La Belle Époque: The Garrison…
Hong Kong: The Archaeology of a Modernist City
By Dr. Emily Ridge, NUI Galway In the latest of MSI’s 2021 series of writing about place in Modernism, NUI Galway’s Emily Ridge explores Hong Kong’s architecture and literature, and the traces of modernism within a postmodern “heterotopia”. To me, Hong Kong has always more immediately evoked a postmodern rather than a modernist aesthetic. When,…
The crossbones of Galway, modernist vortex
By Adrian Paterson, NUI Galway In the second of MSI’s 2021 series of writing about place in Modernism, NUI Galway’s Adrian Paterson explores modernism’s connections to Galway – a place not immediately obvious as one for modernist pilgrimage. Time and space in the modernist period always collided and colluded, even before Einstein’s Special Theory of…
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