Andrew's Wiki
Geographies Modernist Literature

Essays

• Russia and modernism
• Africa and modernism
• Pound and Chinese imagery
• the teashop
• James’ bird eye view of New York turn out to be just cultural studies work about photographing NY (interesting, but not literary)
• Joyce in Dublin
• Le Corbusier and Lewis
• Rhys: Caribbean in London

Intro

• Why should we? After all what about historical turn in criticism?
  • He says look at Jameson; also Lynch, Lefebvre, Soja
• Appadurai: “modernity at large” w/in colonial, postcolonial, globalized all together
• “ground the use of geographical tropes in the material practices and places of modernity” 4
• “material spaces are often viewed only through the use of aesthetic metaphors – the city as a labyrinth…”
• Harvey’s Urban Experience as “material geography and the built environment operate as determining influences upon consciousness and conduct” 5

Teashop

• Scott Mc Cracken?’s “Voyages by teashop: An urban geography of modernism”
• ABC teashops: fifty by 1890
  • New Age editors take tea there, in Chancery Lane
• Lyons: first opened 1894 and spreads, by 1897 62 shops
  • Lyons archive still available, but ABC records destroyed in flood
• However, there are more expensive and fashionable teashops, which Pound and H D preferred: the site of Imagism (it’s born there said Aldington: “the Imagist mouvemong was born in a teashop”
• “The teashop became a standard reference point in the literature of the time”
  • Gissing, Wells, Maugham, Richardson, Pound, Rhys, Eliot, Woolf
• Mary Grover says the chain teashops were “lower-middle-class habitus….wormen workers, notably typists, and the suburbs, and associated with cheap popular fiction and the new entertainments available to women in the city” 87
  • “as much a zone of conflict and contestation as it was of refreshmen and social encounter” 87
• Works
  • Pound “The Teashop”
  • Eliot “A Cooking Egg”
• Teashops “an image of mass uran culture” 87
• Why then? why them?
  • Rapid transport of materials across continents: rail in N and S America, Africa and Asian colonies, in Europe (for agric. stuffs)
    • they were able to surface b/c of empire, bringing stuff to metropolis for English to consume
    • now commercialized rather than the old 18th cafes (see Mc Cracken?’s essay in Body Matters on Richardson)
  • “ability to dominate and control the suppliers and manufacturers of finished goods”
    • eg the shift from production to consumption that happens around 20th c
    • buy in bulk to sell cheaply
    • could play suppliers off one another (see Bird’s The First Fast Food Empire which is about Lyons)
    • Method: central depot produces the goods, then ships them off to the depots
      • “a kind of Fordism of food” 88 b/c of innovations in processing and production
  • Branding
    • part of late Victorian boom in advertising: Lyons himself was a music hall writer (penned the tunes and sketches) and popular fiction writer
    • Lyons started by catering for the big exhibitions of late Victorian period: “clean, cheap, practical, and efficient mass catering” 88
      • contra dirty pubs and “dowdy” ABCs (that’s Richardson’s term), had a spectacular flagship shop
      • marble, gilt, wrought-iron from Paris cafes, with mirrors everywhere (me: women could see themselves in public!; Mc Cracken? quote Benjamin saying that the women have looked at themselves “ten times reflected” before one male passerby can look! In Arcades Project)
      • of such cafes, Benjamin had said that the patron “gains his image more quickly than elsewhere and also seems himself more quickly merged with this, his image”
    • at once it’s an “ocular feast” and a “monument to industrial efficiency”
      • “was at once the product of the new industrial technologies of the nineteenth century and part of the city’s production of images and reflections”
• Teashops appearing in various parts of town “reorganized the visual perception of central London” 89
• Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis: mix two types
  • one, from general to specific, institutions to daily life: the city mediates daily life
  • two, from specific to general, “from the observable, ‘private’, the concealed daily life: its rhythms, its occupations, its spatio-temporal organization, its clandestine ‘culture,’ its underground life”
  • Mc Cracken?: teashops are where these two types meet (very smart!): the bodily and the everday meet the “new service economy” 91
• this is Mc Cracken?’s method, and he sees that the introduction of these chain teashops reflects the change from the realist city (1873) (divided by occupation, each sector having its jobs) to a network city (by 1900) (its shopfronts uniting the parts; its nodes and pathways bringing stuff to the shops from the main production plant)
  • he cites Benjamin saying that the new architecture of the city “create new sttaes of consciousness that adhere to its surfaces and structures” Benj 391 (Arcades)
  • he even says that the montage, even Cubism, shows the same visual patterns as the same thing (the ABC or Lyons) showing up in diff places: it’s a “Chain” that provides a modernist apprehension of the modern city
• Of Human Bondage: Philip Carley’s waitress ABC demon
  • in 19th c waiters are men, but in these new teashops, it’s women
  • She is able to resist Philip in part b/c she’s part of the chain (which is part of production of a new kind of woman, more interested in mass entertainments than luv)
    • and it’s why he sees Mildreds everywhere: mass produced; he can’t avoid her
• Miriam in Pilgrimage (Richardson) thinks of mother’s suicide when sees teashop sign
  • He sees the modern city as one that encourages dream like reverie such as in Ulysses, In Remembrance of Things Past, Nightwood, Good Morning Midnight
    • says it wouldn’t have happened in the Victorian city, where you have to pay attention
    • new state of mind “facilitated” by the new geography
• It’s where Molly begins her affair with Blazes Boylan in Ulysses, a DBC (Dublin Bakery Co)
• His essay highly Benjaminian, he’s everywhere like Proof of what he’s saying, but damn it, Benjamin is also a text, not a real history
• In West End where “urban phantasmagoria” of Benjamin meet “modernist form”
  • He notes the gender based arguments (flaneur from 18th c on, along w/restaurants, pubs, clubs for men, but not for women; OR the narr of shopping bringing women out to public sphere)
    • But of course people now have found where women had public space, ie Vauxhall Gardens; and mentions Rappaport’s “gendered identities and physical spaces were constructed through narratives of consumption”
    • and he shows how Lyons advertised it as allowing women into certain parts of city b/c it protected these women
      • and how Lyons in the 1970s still said that its opening allowed the Victorian families to come in from the surburbs b/c not respectable and too expensive
    • and thus he shows that we can’t be seduced in this Rappaport way by their narratives of serving women and helping women…it’s propaganda, and he says that if we’re dreaming like Benjamin wants us to, we should wake up (from false consciousness)
• Notes Benjamin’s comments about waking up as dialectic of the dream and reality, where you face reality in the ”’now of recognizability’ in which things put on their true surrealist face” Benj 463-4
  • a dialectical moment
• Ann in Ann Veronica escaping into a tea shop to escape a pursuer (but doesn’t work)
• He maps the teashops: they are concentrated in the City, NOT IN WEST END, so it’s more a workers’ haven
  • 1921, Lyons takes out Daily Male SECTION for articles on it
    • Lady Angela Forbes’ “The Woman’s Point of View: for women workers! while the men always had their “chop house,” “the opening of Lyons’ teashops in the City marked the beginnings of the new era. Here was, for the first time, a place where business women might make their midday meal.”
      • has a room just for ladies
      • inexpensive
      • clean
      • “Nothing, perhaps, has had a greater influence towards the sensible and natural intermingling of the sexes than the management – the revolutionary management, as it was once regarded – of the Lyons teashop.”
      • for last 25 years London’s become better for women, in large part b/c of the teashops
• Publicity and spectacle: that’s when they focused on the rarer West End teashop 96
  • 6/37 teashops were in West End by 1900
• “the geography of modernist London clearly requires a more dialectical understanding of the relationship between consumption and work” 96
  • “To see the West End as the key site for the production of modernist subjectivities is probably equally fictional” as what Richards has proven to be the “fiction of abundance” offered by the Victorian exhibitions
  • he wants us to see the INTERNATIONAL geography of the teashops not just the London one
  • he wants to synthesize the two versions of the teashop: the underbelly of lower middle class workers and the shiny marketing scheme of the West End shops
    • a dialectical “flash” will help us see the nature of the shops, “moments of fracture in the everyday” 97, a Benjaminian threshold between sleeping and waking
    • where everyday life meets city rhythms: ABC is one of those sites where everyday meets the larger economy
      • although cough cough if he were still thinking from the perspective of the worker he’d see that the workers likely would see the shop as an ESCAPE from their own immersion in the market ie their JOBS. the everyday means something else when you’re on a break than when you’ve just stopped by one at random (if yr an artist, a rich person)
• the teashop “synthesizes production and consumption, the economic and the cultural” 97
• the teashop as “spectacular space in the new commodity culture” 98: 750,000 muffins and crumpets a week
  • a site of work (see Pound’s “The Teashop”) and sexual spectacle (Ulysses’ Buck Mulligan in the DBC checking out his waitress)
• His reading of Pound’s poem shows that the teashop’s modernity is running before him, that he merely follows it, “Pound’s modernist masculinity has already been franchised”

Notes

• Huyssen 7 talks about “at the threshold of a not yet fully modernized world”
• Anna Snaith on Rhys: London of Voyage in the Dark, everything exactly alike is the refrain
• Thacker on Rhys: “never able to convert these spaces into places of belonging” (Moving through Modernity)
• Eagleton: “modernism was haunted by time, postmodernism is obsessed with space” in Times Literary Supp
• Andrzej Gasiorek on Corbusier: “fetishization of figures” of scale and economy; that Le C believing that thousands of people’s homes could be “Designed from behind a desk” was a normal phenomenon for modernist achitects (Mies van der Rohe), revolting against nature
  • “Corbusian sublime:” “monumentalism with efficiency” 142 “scale with streamlining” “architectural purity from industrial power” ”’cold’ aesthetic” and inviolable, resisting the disorder of humans and nature
  • says that some architects point out that there’s a diff between the ideal city as “regulative model” versus the “blueprint for everyday life” but then again I’d say that it diminishes primacy of living
    • Gasiorek’s rebuttal: it’s “hostile” to everyday life: “imposition of order” is the focus “abjection of the fluid and the formless” a part of rationalization
  • Compares it to Lewis: who has a change of heart
    • 1919 The Caliph’s Design: Architects! Where is your Vortex?
      • if the avant garde is to become a practice of everyday life, then we need to remodel Europe after this war: a new city will bring beauty and order
      • caliph oversees urban planning
      • what about human autonomy? Lewis worries about dystopian possibilitis (no human autonomy), so there’s a note of doubt
      • “utopian centralism” of rationally planned life, vitality, egalitarian
    • 1934 “Plain Home-Builder: Where is your Vorticist?”
      • wants to empower the public (like Pound)
      • doesn’t blame public but blames the architects, who have created works “with no sensual appeal” and so public doesn’t care
      • admits the problems of his own Vorticism and how they contributed: “we undoubtedly did sacrifice ourselves as painters to this necessity to reform…the world in which a picture must exist… We were so busy thinkg about the sort of linear and spatial world in which the picture would have its being…we sometimes took the picture a little for granted”
      • thus Vorticism played its part in public’s disillusionment
      • its architecture is too cold and austere, he realizes, creating puritans and robots
      • Vorticism had turned from artistic advance to an orthodoxy of social space
      • wants to make people resist this from continuing: revolt: “make them habitable – even disorderly” Lewis says “desecrating these spotless and puritanic planes and prudish cubes” which Gasiorek compares to Le Corbusian tactic

Annotated Bib

Geographies of Modernism is a collection of essays compiled under a set of assumptions about a recent critical turn of modernist studies and of literature in general. After the �linguistic turn� prompted by Saussure and Derrida, and after the more recent �historical turn� prompted by New Historicists, they find a �geographic turn� to literary criticism that seeks to historicize literary works by understanding their relationship to specific places at specific moments. Modernist critics in particular should follow this new development because of the position of late capitalism as the moment of (as Harvey terms it) the �time-space compression� and of (as Bhabha terms it) the �time-lagged colonial moment.� The essays, then, seek to provide �spatial histories� of certain texts in order to reveal the geographic dimensions that �inform� modernity, in order finally to answer the question �where was modernism?� (3). The essays not only re-evaluate canonical authors like Joyce and Pound, but also discuss �less� canonical authors like Rhys and Richardson, and they not only re-evaluate obvious �modernist� spaces like the metropolis, but also discuss less canonical spaces like Russia, New York, Africa, and the Caribbean. Some spaces under consideration are commercial (like tea shops), while others are imagined (like the China of the Imagists); some encompass local spaces, while others encompass regions or transnational spaces; and some investigate literary texts, while others analyze buildings, newspapers, paintings, or photographs�a variety that gives little direction for the further development of a geography of modernism simply because its aims are so diverse. Furthermore, the essays on literary texts tend to use geography more metaphorically than literally, so the collection does not investigate the quality of effects of characters� experience of geography. For example, an article on Jean Rhys theorizes her heroines as colonial consciousnesses moving through the space of the �center,� London, so the emphasis is on neither colonial nor domestic geography, but instead upon familiar themes in Rhys criticism, such as xenophobia, gender, and shopping. This collection of essays, then, is very much a beginning gesture to the many possibilities of the field of modernist geography, rather than a rough sketch of what this field might or should look like.