February reading

 

It's been just over a month since I started my PhD and I've spent pretty much all that time enjoying my newfound, unlimited institutional access to books and articles. However, I haven't had much to write about beyond notes and thoughts on my readings. I wanted to, as a bare minimum, write at least one blog post a month to detail the research and reading I have been doing.

Before applying, much of my reading around modernism had been confined to work that directly related to Powys, Read and/or the Apocalyptics. I wanted to compile a bibliography (and potentially a literature review) of materials pertaining to the historical contextualisation I will undertake in my first chapter, 'Landscapes of Interwar Modernism'. I started the month by looking through recent issues of Modernism / Modernity to get a sense of the scope of the discourse. This journal has a “recent books of interest” section which greatly helped identifying more recent work. I looked for handbooks and general introductions to modernism, starting off with Jean-Michel Rabaté's introduction in A Handbook of Modernism Studies (2015), followed by Peter Nicholl's chapter, 'Hard and Soft Modernism: Politics as “Theory”' and then Shayne Fiske's 'From Ritual to the Archaic in Modernism'.

I read my supervisor's (Sara Crangle) article on Anna Mendlessohn, 'The Agonies of Ambivalence...', whose work is held at Sussex. A really thought-provoking study on Mendelssohn’s work and status as “la poetesse maudite”, a female decadent poet who must navigate between political and artistic commitments - not letting politics reduce their art. Yet, it was interesting to note that the “accursed poetesse” suffers in ways the male “accursed poet” does not, with this truth reflected in Mendelssohn’s life – navigating between the spheres of education and parenthood. This article was written as a response to a special issue in Modernism / Modernity on “weak theory”, which I afterwards looked into briefly. Of perhaps more immediate interest is the current work which identifies more of a continuity between decadence and modernism than has otherwise been stated. Given Powys's and Read's mutual appreciation of Walter Pater, and Read's earlier inspiration from Ruskin, and Powys's numerously decadent tendencies, this area of study looks to be highly relevant.

I then started on Pericles Lewis' The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism (2007), which has provided a very approachable and lucid introduction to the subject. I would recommend this text to any undergraduate or non-scholar looking for a basic grasp of modernism. I have also been reading Peter Nicholl's Modernisms (2008) which provides much greater theoretical depth and scope compared to Lewis's account. I find Nicholl's analysis to provide a lot more in terms of thematic connections and academic rigour, and it has been interesting to read alongside Lewis's account. My supervisor sent me some essential texts for modernist studies for my bibliography (which included those mentioned above). Having only received my student card a few days ago, I haven't yet been able to get to the library and pick up the texts which aren't available as online electronic copies. During our first meeting, they also recommended Mao and Walkowitz's article 'The New Modernist Studies' (2008) (which I followed up with their introduction to Bad Modernisms (2006)) as well as Eve Kofosky Sedgewick's introduction to Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction (1997), 'Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You're So Paranoid You Probably Think This Introduction Is About You', which I started on and must return to. 

Alongside these contextualising readings, I have also been developing another bibliography in support of my interpretative framework. This does overlap somewhat with the contextual readings, especially the more recent ones like Bad Modernisms which stress the necessity of new modes of interpretation as well as new frameworks, groupings, parameters (historical, geographical etc.) to contest the received canon of modernism. At the beginning of Rabaté's introduction, he notes how “Theory” is bound up with the contents of modernism itself: “The emergence of high modernism in literature, architecture, film, and the other visual arts could not have happened without significant borrowing from philosophers' theories...” (Rabaté, 2013). In fact, Gifford's meta-critical reading of modernist studies identifies how a theoretical consensus was formed throughout the emergence of modernism and further consolidated by its earlier scholars, and Gifford's own assertion of a Personalist framework must be a response to this more recent “growth” (away from traditional, received frameworks) identified by Mao and Walkowitz. Put basically; it appears as if the what/where/whos of modernism are necessarily conditioned by the why/hows of modernism. In terms of my own interpretive framework, I will be returning to Sedgewick's introduction and also Rita Felski's The Limits of Critique (2015) to learn about the discourse around postcritique. At the beginning of the month, I read Jeffrey R. Di Leo’s critique of postcritique, ‘What is Critique without Pessimism? Postcritique, Neoliberalism, and the future of the Humanities’ which characterises postcritique as a form of pessimism and surrender to the Neoliberalisation of the university. Whereas Felski argues that postcritique is required to fix the crisis in the humanities, and thus produce graduates who are better able to fit into a Neoliberalised work force, Di Leo sees the route to producing such “democratic” graduates through a continuation of critique as presented in the radical pedagogies of Paulo Freire and Henry Giroux. These theorists of pedagogy saw the necessity of such a hermeneutics of suspicion, because it could help educate and empower those who are oppressed in society to uncover the actual roots of their oppression, and thus partake more effectively in democratic society. Pedagogy of the Oppressed is something I will definitely have to read, not just because of my overarching interest in critique, but because all of the authors I'm looking at were invested in education in some way. The day after I read Di Leo's article, I read Roger Rothman's 'Anarchism and the Hermeneutics of Faith' (2020), which gave me some idea about how an anarchist interpretive framework would function and differ from postcritique. Looking at Ricoeur's own assertion that his work was driven by a “hermeneutics of faith” - clarified as “a rational faith, for it interprets; but it is a faith because it seeks, through interpretation, a second naivete.... 'Believe in order to understand, understand in order to believe' – such is its maxim; and its maxim is the 'hermeneutic circle' itself of believing and understanding” (Ricoeur in Rothman, 2020: 432) – Rothman pairs this with Colin Ward's conception of anarchism as something which exists alongside dominatory systems (like seeds under the snow), to develop how an anarchist hermeneutic might look: “Founded on faith rather than suspicion, anarchism holds that a better world is already in existence (though on the margins). What is required of the revolutionary is not the ruthless criticism of dominant forces, but rather the careful cultivation of alternative systems.” (Rothman, 2020: 435)

I must return to Cohn's Anarchism and the Crisis of Representation (2006), which is perhaps the most in-depth text I can find on the subject, but I have also been accumulating other anarchist engagements with literature (Jerry Zaslove, Paul Goodman, amongst others) so that I can begin to build an interpretive framework suitable to my subject matter. Zaslove seems to be very interesting in this regard; his work inspired his students and colleagues to publish a collection of essays dedicated to him called Anarcho-modernism: Toward a New Critical Theory in Honour of Jerry Zaslove (2001). I have sought out his “open letter”, 'A Report to an Academy: Some Untimely Meditations Out of Season' (2012) which also seems very pertinent. I have, for now, put the issue of interpretive framework to one side whilst I focus on developing my understanding of modernism. Although, given the interrelationship of context and theory as stated above, I will probably return to it informally quite a lot. I will continue reading the “classics” of anarchism and have recently been reading Kropotkin's The Conquest of Bread (1892). Kropotkin and Goldman are perhaps the two most pressing anarchists to read up on, but I also would like to look at Reclus, Voltairine de Cleyre, Stirner, George Woodcock, Paul Goodman, amongst many, many others.

One thing I have noted, however, is the emphasis on faith and enchantment throughout my project. The “hermeneutics of faith” outlined above provides an interesting parallel to Read's interest in religion and faith, as well as the intensely spiritual quality of Powys's work. Neither Read nor Powys can be pigeon-holed when it comes to identifying the exact contours of their spirituality, but it plays a persistent and significant role all throughout their work. It does seem to touch upon something about anarchism, which often gets mischaracterised as a belief in “essential human goodness” or even “anti-intellectualism”. It is that anarchism often combines a positive sense of something to believe in or strive for (even something positive which exists in the here and now), whilst denying that something can be adequately represented. It is a belief in an Otherness as well as an acknowledgement that that Otherness cannot be spoken for or ever depicted in sufficient detail. This is quite a general observation and I'm unsure if it holds true for much of anarchist thought, but I think it does provide an interesting connection between its social aspects as well as its philosophical and spiritual aspects. One of the defining features of Anglo-American modernity was the influence on the arts of work coming out of the then-blossoming fields of comparative religion, anthropology, psychology and psychoanalysis, as well as the philosophy of Nietzsche. As these works contributed to the destruction of the various omphaloses of Victorian society (the church, liberal capitalism, progress etc.), they also left in their wake a renewed capacity for novel forms of spiritual and social engagement in the arts. The positive, creative aspect of this embodied by some anarchist-aligned artists and writers might perhaps be reminiscent of the romantics and their secularisation of spirituality through art and literature, but whereas their work was pervaded by a sense of failure whose corollary was so often reactionary politics, the latter could channel that failure into the anti-systematic pluralism afforded by the more recent intellectual developments within anarchism (This distinction is noted in Jesse Cohn's article, 'Under History's Changing Climate: Anarchism's Romantic Moods' (2016)). 

Moving forward, I would like to see how this romantic aspect of Powys's and Read's work sits within the context of global modernism. Furthermore, over the next month I would like to continue my reading on modernism and, in particular, look more towards theoretical discussions of modernism and the avant-garde, including the work of Peter Burger, Matei Calinescu, and Astradur Eysteinsson. I re-read T. S. Eliot's The Waste Lands and Four Quartets recently, and alongside the reading stated above I would also like to invest some time in reading Maud Ellman's work on The Poetics of Impersonality. Given the emphasis on “personality” in the work of Read and Powys, I think this will reveal much of the underlying theoretical/political differences between them and the "impersonality" of the canonical modernists.