{"title":"What Time Collects","authors":"P. Giles","doi":"10.1093/OSO/9780198830443.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OSO/9780198830443.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"Arguing that one of the most negative consequences of modernism’s traditional designs has been the way they have tended to marginalize or exclude major writers on the basis of ideological assumptions that are never made explicit, this chapter reads Australian novelist Eleanor Dark and American fiction writer James T. Farrell alongside each other. Both writers interrogated conventional understandings of modernism as a phenomenon predicated upon a rhetoric of liberal progress. Instead, Dark and Farrell both seek aesthetically to track back into the past, and they both adduce in their different ways a collectivist understanding of society, one in which individualism is interwoven in complex ways with communal sympathies. Hence the complex fictions of both writers mediate a heterodox version of temporality, in which the recursive passage from present to past carries as much weight as the existential charge from present to future.","PeriodicalId":270812,"journal":{"name":"Backgazing: Reverse Time in Modernist Culture","volume":"51 3","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-02-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132026721","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Antiphonal Arts","authors":"P. Giles","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198830443.003.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198830443.003.0006","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter considers how the literary representation of time after World War II was shaped by intersections with music and the visual arts. Taking its title from Djuna Barnes’s verse drama The Antiphon (1958), it argues that an antiphonal quality was implicit within works of canonical modernism, which similarly involve interplays between proposition and response, high and low. It suggests how a similar kind of recursive pattern informs Samuel Beckett’s narratives, organized as they are around a dialectic between nostalgia for the sublime and a cathexis of bathos. In relation to Patrick White’s burlesque styles, it argues that this can be seen not as marginal to constructions of modernism, but as endemic to modernism’s antiphonal arts. It also considers the mutual influences of White and Australian painter Sidney Nolan, while discussing the significance of the latter’s collaboration with Boston poet Robert Lowell.","PeriodicalId":270812,"journal":{"name":"Backgazing: Reverse Time in Modernist Culture","volume":"234 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-02-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131157161","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Organicist Time","authors":"P. Giles","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198830443.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198830443.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter traces how an organicist version of time was developed during the interwar period, how it reached its philosophical apogee in the work of Martin Heidegger and was treated sympathetically by American novelist Thomas Wolfe. However, this organicist impulse was kept at a distance by the writing of Theodor Adorno, Thomas Mann, and H. G. Wells, all of whom engage in dialectics with fascism. This chapter also considers how organicist models of temporal sequence inform the fixation on time in William Faulkner’s fiction, and how Sartre’s existentialism attempted to disavow what he saw as Faulkner’s backward-looking nostalgia. This kind of organicist imagination continued to resonate widely even after 1945, as we see from Anthony Powell’s sequence of novels A Dance to the Music of Time, and organicist time formed an integral backbone to many dimensions of modernist culture, even if its visibility became partially suppressed after World War II.","PeriodicalId":270812,"journal":{"name":"Backgazing: Reverse Time in Modernist Culture","volume":"30 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-02-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127562516","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Double Exposures","authors":"P. Giles","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198830443.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198830443.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter examines how the impetus of ‘backgazing,’ as Australian poet R. D. FitzGerald put it in his ‘Essay on Memory,’ becomes a compelling force within the general framework of modernist poetry. It traces how this retrograde vision was developed not only in FitzGerald but also, in different ways, by his fellow Australian poets Kenneth Slessor and A. D. Hope. It also considers how this counterclockwise strand of modernist poetics runs in parallel to the work of canonical modernist poets such as T. S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, and Wallace Stevens, whose interest in various versions of the antipodal has not been so clearly charted.","PeriodicalId":270812,"journal":{"name":"Backgazing: Reverse Time in Modernist Culture","volume":"5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133984248","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}