{"title":"Hauntingly Beautiful: Embodied Reading, Virginia Woolf, and Woolf Works","authors":"Patty Argyrides","doi":"10.2979/jml.2023.a908972","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jml.2023.a908972","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: As the last two decades have seen a steady increase of contemporary choreographers drawing on modernist literature, interdisciplinary modernist studies must create new and additional lines of communication not only across disciplines, but also including the public arts sector. In 2017, I attended the Royal Ballet's revival of Woolf Works , a ballet based on the life and works of Virginia Woolf and interviewed choreographer Wayne McGregor and dramaturg Uzma Hameed. I draw on my background as a former dancer to explore how we can use McGregor's choreographic and Hameed's dramaturgic approach to analyze the ballet and the embodied aspects of Woolf's writing. By focusing on the first section of Woolf Works (\"I now, I then\"), and Woolf's novel Mrs. Dalloway , I consider the ways in which the characters of Clarissa and Septimus embody predominant themes in the novel: memory, trauma versus peace, support, and time.","PeriodicalId":44453,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MODERN LITERATURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135146071","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Biography of a Face: Virginia Woolf's Orlando","authors":"Anca Parvulescu","doi":"10.2979/jmodelite.46.4.01","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jmodelite.46.4.01","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Virginia Woolf's novel Orlando: A Biography can best be described as a literary portrait. Woolf draws a portrait of the titular character—a composite of literary and visual artworks—as perpetually youthful. Through this portrait, the novel traces a change in the history of the physiognomic face in modernity—from Orlando's memorable face-to-face with Queen Elizabeth to her search for meaning in the faces around her in London in 1928. The face of Orlando, which Woolf forcefully inserts into the history of the portrait, is sketched in a formal relation to absent faces in the history of portraiture—women's faces and racialized faces. An engagement with Paul Mpagi Sepuya's recent photographic reflections on Orlando reveals the version of modernist queerness dramatized by the novel to be mediated by racial difference.","PeriodicalId":44453,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MODERN LITERATURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135146073","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Invisible Flesh: Mimesis in Jean Genet's The Maids","authors":"Farah Ali","doi":"10.2979/jml.2023.a908975","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jml.2023.a908975","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Luce Irigaray's mimesis theory is here pushed further by expanding her concept of phallocentric culture, which leads us to consider various figures of authority represented in Jean Genet's play The Maids (1947). In The Maids , characters step into the skin of their victimizers to display their invisible occluded emotions on one hand, and on the other, the hegemonic discourse of their oppressors, or what I call \"phallocentric cultures.\" The two main characters, Claire and Solange, show why their constructed images impersonating their Madame fail to fulfill their dreams of stepping out of their own milieu. I analyze their subjectivity in connection with Genet's desire to undermine the ruling social system.","PeriodicalId":44453,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MODERN LITERATURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135146065","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Black Cosmofeminism: Commodity, Sexuality, and the Transnational Mixed-Race Subject in Nella Larsen's Quicksand","authors":"Hsiao-Wen Chen","doi":"10.2979/jml.2023.a908979","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jml.2023.a908979","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Nella Larsen's Quicksand (1928) demonstrates a situated form of Black cosmofeminism to capture the difficult process through which a deviant mixed-race heroine negotiates her place in the Black community. At core, Black cosmofeminism interrogates oppressive racial and sexual politics enacted in domestic, local, and national spheres to envision a more inclusive cosmopolitan US Black community open to sexually, racially, and nationally \"impure\" subjects. However, far from advocating the erasure of local identities, such a reimagining of the domestic Black community as cosmofeminist instead foregrounds group identification and communal bonding developed in response to transnational displacement and discrimination. Working in tandem with consumer cosmopolitanism, Black cosmofeminism places the African American woman consumer center stage and traces how her desire, body, and identity are not only constructed alongside globally circulated commodities but also made localized and resistant to the global commodification and sexualization of Black and mixed-raced women.","PeriodicalId":44453,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MODERN LITERATURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135146068","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Biography of a Face: Virginia Woolf's Orlando","authors":"Anca Parvulescu","doi":"10.2979/jml.2023.a908971","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jml.2023.a908971","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Virginia Woolf's novel Orlando: A Biography can best be described as a literary portrait. Woolf draws a portrait of the titular character—a composite of literary and visual artworks—as perpetually youthful. Through this portrait, the novel traces a change in the history of the physiognomic face in modernity—from Orlando's memorable face-to-face with Queen Elizabeth to her search for meaning in the faces around her in London in 1928. The face of Orlando, which Woolf forcefully inserts into the history of the portrait, is sketched in a formal relation to absent faces in the history of portraiture—women's faces and racialized faces. An engagement with Paul Mpagi Sepuya's recent photographic reflections on Orlando reveals the version of modernist queerness dramatized by the novel to be mediated by racial difference.","PeriodicalId":44453,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MODERN LITERATURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135146061","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Imagining Justice for Sentient Lives","authors":"","doi":"10.2979/jml.2023.a908981","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jml.2023.a908981","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: In Literary Bioethics: Animality, Disability, and the Human , Maren Tova Linett posits literary fiction as uniquely valuable terrain for bioethical inquiry. By depicting phenomena like animality, disability, and aging in richly imagined worlds, she argues, literary narratives can promote more nuanced engagement with bioethical questions than do the sparse and decontextualized thought experiments commonly employed in philosophical bioethics. Linett reads several novels written across the long twentieth century as literary-philosophical laboratories for testing bioethical claims about the value of different kinds of lives, demonstrating the importance of literary ways of knowing for bioethics. In doing so, she also makes a compelling case for allying animal studies and disability studies, fields that have historically found themselves at odds but that together have much to say about how we can achieve justice for sentient lives of all kinds.","PeriodicalId":44453,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MODERN LITERATURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135146064","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"\"Everyone chooses their love after their own fashion\": The Waves as a Modernist Symposium","authors":"Patricia Morgne Cramer","doi":"10.2979/jmodelite.46.4.03","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jmodelite.46.4.03","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: In A Room of One's Own , when Virginia Woolf urges women writers to expose the \"dark spots\" in men's psychology, she signals her own intentions for The Waves . In The Waves , Woolf targets men's masculinity, elite educations, brutalized boyhoods (at public schools), and their too-easy belonging to literary traditions as causes of male writers' truncated creativity. Louis, Bernard, and Neville exhibit the writerly disabilities Woolf associates with virility in Room . They are also linked to T.S. Eliot, Desmond MacCarthy, and Lytton Strachey, and to modernist experimentalism, realism, and homosexual Hellenism, respectively. In The Waves , Woolf differentiates her aesthetics not only from the \"materialists\"—H.G. Wells, John Galsworthy, and Arnold Bennett—but her Georgian \"allies\" as well—Eliot, MacCarthy, and Strachey prominent among them.","PeriodicalId":44453,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MODERN LITERATURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135146074","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Senses of Place: The Black Community in Alice Childress's Wedding Band","authors":"Yi-chin Shih","doi":"10.2979/jmodelite.46.4.08","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jmodelite.46.4.08","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Alice Childress's Wedding Band (1966), set in an unnamed Black South Carolina community in 1918, dwells upon Julia's loneliness, caused by her interracial love, which is forbidden by the state's law against miscegenation. Julia's anxiety about being transgressive fosters her desire to belong to a community characterized by Black women's culture and their sense of place. Her quest for a place in society highlights the segregated community's need for a specifically Black space. Wedding Band complicates the interlocking system of oppression by addressing the notion of place and also demonstrates that Black women are not passive in respect to their surroundings.","PeriodicalId":44453,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MODERN LITERATURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135145981","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Modernist Dog","authors":"","doi":"10.2979/jml.2023.a908982","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jml.2023.a908982","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Karalyn Kendall-Morwick's Canis Modernis examines dog stories in Anglo-American modernism. Drawing together animal studies, modernist studies, and posthumanist theory, the book argues for an understanding of the human/dog relationship as a case of (two-way) coevolution, not merely (one-way) domestication. Ranging over an array of literary texts including Jack London's Call of the Wild , Virginia Woolf's Flush , J.R. Ackerley's My Dog Tulip , and Samuel Beckett's Three Novels, Canis Modernis finds a sustained concern with dogs' evolution, from early origins to modern breeding practices, in modernist literature. It also shows how encounters with dogs reshaped modernist understandings of the human and of humanist ethics.","PeriodicalId":44453,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MODERN LITERATURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135146066","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Animality and the Limits of Discourse in Djuna Barnes and Georges Bataille","authors":"Cory Austin Knudson","doi":"10.2979/jml.2023.a908974","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jml.2023.a908974","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: In the works of Djuna Barnes, and particularly the enigmatic final paragraphs of Nightwood , animals and animalistic qualities represent the terminal incapacity of language to encompass reality. Georges Bataille's concept of \"animality,\" considered as a comparative heuristic, allows for a more coherent articulation of the theoretical underpinnings and implications of this presentation of the animal as a limit to the logical, sequential ordering of coherent meaning through language, or what Bataille refers to in shorthand as \"discourse.\" Ultimately, Bataille theorizes and Barnes embodies an animal poetics that gives expression to that which is not strictly amenable to human sense, and both mark the literary as the site where it becomes possible to gesture beyond the human toward a mode of bestial expression that emerges from the breakdown of human signification.","PeriodicalId":44453,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MODERN LITERATURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135146069","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}