Modernist Objects: (Clemson University Press: Seminal Modernisms)

Modernist Objects: Literature, Art, Culture is a unique mix of cultural studies, literature, and visual arts applied to the discrete materiality of modernist objects. The simultaneously physical and ideological nature of objects has made them remarkably transparent to critical inquiries into their aesthetic, political, social, historical or philosophical uses and meanings. This book identifies three processes at work in the apprehension of objects in poetry, prose, visual arts, culture and crafts. If the first instinct of the modernist novelists and playwrights was to object to the realist tradition of objects as more or less stable inherited signifiers, they felt themselves equally free, we find, to take up humanity as their object. The human body, emotions and mind were endowed with newfound plasticity, and it was now the artist’s and the writer’s task to fashion them after their own image, mobilizing and expanding them through objects seen as relational and connective catalysts for the modernist subject. Finally, the futile and decorative object is explored. From Baroness Elsa performing the commodity fetish to Jean Rhys performing the dissolution of the self in a frenzy of sartorial ornament, the agency of surface detail (misplaced, proliferating, or repurposed) is made manifest and given free play.

Table of Contents:
Part One Objecting to Realism   1) Douglas Mao, Objectionable Objects.   2) Martin Schauss, “Such density of furniture defeats imagination”: Beckett’s Post-War Room and the Inheritance of Things   3) Pavlina Radia, From Eggbeaters and Alcohol to Gryphons, Dolls, and Puppets: The Affective Mobilities of Djuna Barnes’s Objects   4) Rachel Bowlby, Tradition and the Test-Tube Baby   Part Two Fashioning the Human   5) Sanja Bahun, The Fabric of Home: Cotton Cloth between Ontology and Use-Value in Paul Klee’s, Varvara Stepanova’s and Lyubov Popova’s Artwork   6) Louise Kane, Computer Science for (Live) Modernism(s): Magazines as Metaobjects   7) Jennifer Kilgore-Caradec, “Twang the lyre and rattle the lexicon”: Harps and Lyres in Modernist Poetry   8) Lynn M. Somers, Louise Bourgeois’s Melancholy Objects to be Used.     Part Three Performing the Ornamental   9) Yasna Bozhkova, Limbswish: Baroness Elsa’s “Ready-to-Wear” Poem-Objects   10) Maurizia Boscagli, The Furniture of Alter-Modernism: Eileen Gray’s and Le Corbusier’s Two Orientalisms   11) Nonia Williams, “LOST! HANSOME GOLE BROOCH.” Broken, Lost and Forgotten Objects in Woolf, Mansfield and Stein   12) Justine Baillie, Diasporic Modernism: Memory, the Object and Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight (1939)  

About the Author :
Noëlle Cuny teaches translation and Anglo-American literature and culture, currently supervising student research on Woolf, Joyce, and on objects in modernism. After extensive work on the body in the novels D. H. Lawrence and on disciplinary hybridity in modernist writing, she became interested in the material conditions of the literary canonization process, namely, the magazines—first Lawrence’s own (very) little magazine, then the later and more ambitious J.M. Murry ventures: the Athenaeum 1919-1921 and the early years of The Adelphi. Xavier Kalck teaches American literature and translation at Sorbonne University in Paris. He specializes in twentieth-century poetry and modernism’s unacknowledged trajectories – second-generation modernists and the post-WWII efforts to revive and rewrite the modernist tradition. His current research projects revolve around the experience of reading as an all-inclusive material practice.

Review :
'The coalescent structure that comes out of Cuny and Kalck’s co-editorship maintains busy traffic across the porous disciplinary boundaries of modernist and object studies which fulfils the requisite for the integration of a conceptual compound. [...] The widening scope of objecthood that Douglas Mao [in his chapter on ‘objectionable objects’] continues to define is more than a reiteration of the modernist agenda of destabilising the given sense of the real. It is the explicit, and needed, statement of a distinct trend in the scholarship: the loosening of the human subject from its subjectivity.'Dazheng Gao, The Modernist Review