Andrew's Wiki
Left Bank

Who

• Barnes
• Boyle
• Cunard
• Colette
• Nin (comes back to birth-town Paris 1930)
• Loy
• H D
• Stein
• Rhys
• Wharton (on and off since 1906, permanent from 1912)

What

• “What was it like to be a literary woman in Paris?”
• How political and social patriarchy affects writing process, content, and style.
• “shock waves that these years produced are still resounding through our culture” “disturbs our image of the ‘pastness’ of this age” 5
• Expats appropriate Paris after WWI
• Women’s involvement in Modernism demands a reevaluation of it. (so for me this is a work of critical history, an intervention that’s already borne fruit)
• Problem of much feminist criticism: either argues that patriarchy entraps woman or erases her; that her writing is imitation of men’s or a mere reaction to it: merely an “Eternal battle against constraint” 7
• Literary Midwifery
  • part of the “Selling, advertising, and promotion of modernism” 20; published, printed books
  • commonly seen as “traditional female roles” – yet they did just what Pound did: marketing writers with “energy and intellectual force” 21
    • Yet b/c modernism was “a literary, social, political, and public event” that makes women’s contributions signally important
• She strenuously argues against The Pound Era and the masculine centered reading of modernism that results from such encapsulations
• “Modernist writing by women is significantly unlike that of men” b/c both experience diff and write of experience diff 32, but not “in predictable or homogeneous ways,” still individualistic
• Don’t let modernism seem too monolithic or too chaotic

Random

• Little Review: Margaret Anderson; Jane Heap
• Poetry: Harriet Monroe
• The Freewoman, the New Freewoman, the Egoist: Dora Marsden
• The Egoist: Harriet Shaw Weaver
• Susan Stanford Friedman, Psyche Reborn: “The starting point of modernism is the crisis of belief that pervades twentieth-century western culture: loss of faith, experience of fragmentation and disintegration, and shattering of cultural symbols and norms. AT the center of this new crisis were the new technologies and methodologies of science, the epistemology of logical positivism, and the relativism of functionalist thought—in short, major aspects of the philosophical perspectives that Freud embodied.”
  • How? Science destroys traditional symbols like religion and art; technology is destructive (war, atomized society)
  • “Art produced after the First World War recorded the emotional aspect of this crisis; despair, hopelessness, paralysis, angst, and a sense of meaninglessness, chaos, and fragmentation of material reality. In a variety of ways suited to their own religious, literary, mythological, occult, political, or existentialist pespectives, they emerged fro the paralysis of absolute despair to an active search for meaning. The search for order and pattern began in its own negation, in the overwhelming sense of disorder and fragmentation caused by the modern materialist world. The artist as seer would attempt to create what the culture could no longer produce: symbol and meaning.” qtd 26
  • More Susan Stanford Friedman, from “Modernism of the ‘Scattered Remnant:’” effects on women modernists of the war; H. D.: who starts to identify w/all the people “scattered” by war: “blacks, Jews, Indians, homosexuals and lebians, women, and artists” 30-1; women like Nin and H D thought that “political organizations reproduce on a dangerously large scale the unresolved violence within the individual” qtd 31, a distrust echoed by Woolf Stein Richardson Sinclair Hurston Barnes Rhys.
    • H D develops “political syncretism, a modernism of the margins rather than the reactionary center” qtd 31
  • WWI makes women “solidified commitment to liberal causes and a fear of repressive and inhumane political power structures…war was a strengthened feminism in awareness of the ways women…were vulnerable to patriarchal violence” (though some like Stein get all reactionary, it is MOSTLY that men go reactionary and women go marginal liberalism)
• More on chaos/order
  • Peter Ackroyd on The Sacred Wood: “Eliot provided literature with an order and certainty all the more potent because these were the qualities lacking in social and political life….T. E. Hulme had sketched out something of a similar thing, and in 1919 Clive Bell wrote a series of essays on ‘Order and Authority’ for the Athenaeum. But Eliot’s stance was, in the end, more influential. He reaffirmed the status of literature, as a way both of understanding the larger culture and of disciplining private feelings and experience. His own need for order reflected that which existed among his generation; his own fears of fragmentation and meaninglessness…were also theirs.” qtd 33
    • Benstock reacts: “But Eliot’s fears were not shared by all of his generation, nor was his obsessive need for order and discipline common to all of his contemporaries.”
      • Edith Sitwell, “Art is magic, not logic. This craze for the logical spirit in irrational shape is part of the present harmful mania for uniformity…in an age when the edict has gone forth for the abolition of personality, for the abolition of faces, which are practically extinct. It is because of this hatred of personality, that the crowd, in its uniformity, dislikes artists endowed with an individual vision.” “Modernist Poets,” 1930
      • check out that “Crowd” stuff with Baudelaire
      • who shares Sitwell’s “aesthetics of the individual and irrational…against Eliot’s claims for tradition and logic?” Barnes, Cunard, Natalie Barney, Stein, Woolf 34
• Woolf anti-Fascist, see Three Guineas and the Years; also see “The Political Thought of Virginia Woolf” in Feminist Studies 4(1978)
• 1930s
  • Thought to be when modernism went political whereas 20s were aesthetic
  • Sally Dennison: “writer’s artistic role was secondary to his role as social historian”
    • writers continuing in the aesthetics only vein couldn’t find publishers
    • had to have “social relevance” not “artistic integrity” 397
    • high modernism “all but dead by the end of the thirties” (Pound w/fascist sympathies in Italy, Bloomsberries seen as elitist, Harriet Shaw Weaver and Gide turn Communist) as fascism and communism become important topics
  • Bernard Bergonzi, Reading the Thirties: in the 30s the “smooth, solid, self-enclosed, free-standing object” demolished b/c of world events “that proclaimed the impossibility of an art separate from the social situation in which art is produced.” 297
  • also that “never before or since have English writers been so heavily marked by the homogeneous educational formation of the English upper and upper-middle class” (his words) and (Benstock’s words) “Public schools served as models of Fascist states whose rigid forms and enforced conventions were inverted—but never entirely escaped—in fantasy worlds; private and shared, the public school experience became ‘a source of personal fantasies and public metaphors.’”
    • this reminds me a little of what I want to say leisure spaces are able to do
  • A different view: Samuel Hynes, saying that “The literature of the thirties exposed the political nature of the presumed apolitical literary aesthetics of early Modernism, not only uncovering the Fascist leanings of an Ezra Pound or a Wyndham Lewis but unearthing as well a reactionary T. S. Eliot and an anti-Semitic Gertrude Stein.” 398
    • “masked political attitudes by claims to aesthetic purity”
    • My reaction: what you’re doing is erasing history, like people can’t change. you’re doing the Forster thing to such a degree that not only Shakespeare and Balzac and Woolf can write in the same room together, but that you have one Woolf for each of her publications.
  • Bernard Benstock: “political rhetoric to code private messages and protect personal messages” in 1930s, a reversal of what people just said above: “concealed complex personal commitments to adventurism, romanticism, religious endeavor, and the international community” some “homosexuality”
    • Why do you say “code?” “protect?” certainly some were politically dangerous and had to be hidden, but then again, there’s a diff view wherein politics and personal merge, there’s not a hierarchy, but that certain parts of your mission take a certain color by the historical moment you’re in
• James Mc Farlane?, “The Mind of Modernism:” Woolf shows the modernist tendency that “nature is not to be ranged and sorted under prescriptive heads but instead is elusive, indeterminate, multiple, often implausible, infinitely various and essentially irreducible” qtd 399
  • why can’t we see interpersonal relationships as also governed by this idea during modernism? that relationships are also always shifting
  • Benstock: 1930s couldn’t use this model of character: “the elements of human character had to be identifiable and quantifiable—that is, amenable to cataloguing” in order to “identify the enemy and expose the conspirator” 400 so they write parables and fantasy societies