Speakers and Abstracts

Keynote Speaker: Professor Tim Armstrong (Royal Holloway, University of London)
Tim Armstrong is Professor of English at Royal Holloway. His main research areas are Modernism, American literature, literature and technology, the body (including such areas as sexology, bodily reform, cinema, and sound); and the poetry of Thomas Hardy. He recently completed a book on slavery as cultural metaphor, The Logic of Slavery: Debt, Technology and Pain in American Literature, awarded the 2013 C. Hugh Holman Prize of the Society for the Study of Southern Literature. He is currently writing a study of modernist localism after 1926, Micromodernism.

His keynote speech is titled ‘Reframing Modernism after 1926: Hammersmith Modernism and its Manifestos’.

Andrew Atherton (University of Kent)
I am a third-year PhD student at the University of Kent. My thesis, titled ‘Twentieth-Century Annotation and the Crisis of Reading’, examines the role of footnotes and endnotes in twentieth-century literature. I begin with T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, move through texts such as Pale Fire and The Third Policeman, and conclude with Infinite Jest. I have an AHRC scholarship for my research.

‘The Two Eliots: Effort and Passivity in the Critical Prose of T.S. Eliot’

On 30 April 1956, thirty-three years after The Waste Land was published and eight years before his passing, Eliot delivered a lecture at the University of Minnesota titled ‘The Frontiers of Criticism’. Despite being one of the pre-eminent literary events of its time, the speech is synonymous with Eliot’s admission that his endnotes were included only to make The Waste Land longer. For the most part, critics are happy to accept Eliot’s explanation. Lawrence Rainey, for example, concludes that ‘Eliot, in his very late years, was relaxed enough that he could be more candid about the notes and their status’. Prompted by Eliot’s remarks and Rainey’s unquestioning acceptance of them, this paper will argue that an alternative reason for Eliot’s dismissal can be found in his critical prose of the 1920s and 1930s. In his earlier criticism, it will be argued, Eliot celebrates and invites his readers to exert effort. ‘The Waste Land’ and its notes are the apotheosis of this trend. One is expected to follow the notes, to read the works that they point to and to engage with those works: this extranoematic undertaking is crucial to Eliot’s poetic project. However, beginning in 1932 and fully established by 1956 Eliot has moved away from effort and towards passivity. The notes are dismissed, then, because they no longer fit into Eliot’s critical and poetic schematic.

John Dunn (Independent Scholar)
I am a graduate from the University of East Anglia, in Norwich in 2011. I then moved back home to London to study creative writing at Birkbeck for six months. The following year I completed the Comparative Literary Studies MA at Goldsmiths, University of London. In an academic career punctuated by gap years, economic need, travel and ‘campus hopping’ I am anticipating starting my PhD at Queen Mary in Autumn 2014.

‘The “Night” and “Day” of Literary Criticism in Maurice Blanchot’s Thomas the Obscure‘

Maurice Blanchot attempts to capture the unspeakable relation between reader and text. Blanchot suggests the necessity to delineate between the two writings, primary and secondary, and perform a traditional literary critical function undoes itself,and the modern creative and critical act are seen through the lens of his work as in confluence. In Blanchot an exploration of the critical act itself supersedes the function of ‘literary commentary’. Hence, there are two versions of Thomas the Obscure, one a ‘fiction’ the other a ‘critical recit’ that defines his notion of l’obscur and is a defence of modern poetics by his mediation of poetic style. The comparison between the two texts shall be the basis of discussion on the loss of ‘origin’ in reading and writing in Blanchot’s writing. The text, and analysis of it, can only touch on its textual realities and not on the ‘il y a’ beyond the text; the real is not framed by the text reference to it, but is obliterated by it. Blanchot necessitates a philosophical approach that sites his work in the wake of Heidegger’s radical ontology of the messianic ‘work’. How does Blanchot secure futural relevance of his work, and its ‘Being’, and in so doing does he anticipate an interpretation of this paradox? With the requirement that criticism be sited in the present, how to establish a lineage of futural thinking in modern literature that does not rely on the hindsight of canonisation?

Evi Heinz (Birkbeck, University of London)
Evi is a first year PhD student in English and Humanities at Birkbeck, London. Her project ‘John Rodker and the Institutions of Modernism’ aims to situate the work of writer and publisher John Rodker within the institutional landscape of Modernism and seeks a critical engagement with the concept of ‘recovery’ as a mode of canon revision.

‘As Poetry It is Rubbish’: John Rodker’s Poems and the Limits of Modernist Criticism

John Rodker’s early poetry often blurs the lines between different literary genres and even different art forms. His first book Poems, published in 1914, is strongly influenced by his interest in theatre and modern dance. In the literary community Rodker’s initial experiments with poetry as a notation of movement flopped and one critic reacted by calling Poems ‘not only rubbish, but rubbish without hope’. All the reviews in the little magazines agree: Poems is like ‘music’, like ‘painting’, like ‘drama’, like ‘rubbish’, ‘like a thin screech’, but not like poetry. Poems challenges the strictly ‘literary’ criticism of contemporary reviewers to engage with aspects of poetry that fall outside of the modernist conception of what constitutes ‘literature’, such as the performative and the trivial.

In this paper, I want to look at the reception of Rodker’s Poems in the modernist little magazines to see how Rodker’s poetry pushed literary criticism to its limits. By operating on the boundaries of what can be articulated, Poems seeps through the net of literary criticism and escapes the institutional framework of literary modernism and its associated values of erudition and expertise. Poems invites us to entertain the thought that some books are better left behind on a train than kept on a bookshelf and that the limits of modernist criticism are not the limits of modernist literature.

Maciej Jakubowiak (Jagiellonian University)
Ph.D. candidate at the Chair of Anthropology of Literature and Cultural Studies at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. He works on a thesis on relations between authors’ rights and modern literature. He has published his articles in “Teksty Drugie”, “Wielogłos” and “Polisemia”, and his reviews in “FA-art” and “artPapier”, among others. His main interests include: law and literature studies, critical theory and literary anthropology.

‘Question of the Law: Modernist Discussions on the Copyright’

In the beginning of 20th century an idea of the copyright law was still quite new. Consequences of the Berne convention (signed in 1886), which was supposed to integrate and harmonize different national approaches to a problem of protection of authors’ rights, just started to be visible in the literary practices and criticism. The mere idea of authors’ rights, based on the Romantic ideology of the creative process, was remaining controversial. Questions were raised regarding the status of an author and a literary work and their compatibility with the law. The aim of my paper is to analyse critical discussions regarding these issues. I will try to show how different approaches to the idea of copyright were functioning in an ongoing critical debate. Was the copyright law an important problem from the critics’ and writers’ perspective? What approaches and positions were taken? Was it affecting notions used to describe literary works? Did translation between languages of law and literary criticism occurred? – are among questions I will pose and try to answer. I will focus on texts of British and Polish literary critics and writers. This comparative perspective will allow me to analyse differences between two stages of a literary field: highly developed, with strong institutions and many international connections (British) and relatively small, still fluctuating and politically unstable (Polish). In this comparison differences between continental and Anglo-Saxon law traditions will also play an important role. The proposed paper is a part of a bigger research project regarding relations between modern literature and copyright law.

Michael Jolliffe (University of Leicester)
Michael Jolliffe is an AHRC-funded doctoral candidate at the University of Leicester, researching Italian American literary modernisms.

‘”Gas Bombs and Smoke Screens”: The Collateral Damage of Emanuel Carnevali’s Cultural Criticism’

During his lifetime, the Italian American poet and essayist Emanuel Carnevali was considered a dynamic genius of the modernist period. William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Kay Boyle and others write of him a visionary critic who epitomised the restless energies of his era. Carnevali first received notoriety in 1919 at a gathering of the New York modernist set. He disputed with William Carlos Williams the failure of modernist poets to genuinely ‘make it new’. Later published as an essay entitled ‘My Speech at Lola’s’, Carnevali combatively condemned what he considered to be the technically reductive poetry promoted and encouraged by the ‘little magazine’ Others. Several celebrated writers and publishers who attended the gathering subsequently recorded a reconsideration of their artistic philosophies. Williams ended Others in July 1919, believing Carnevali had exposed the magazine as a ‘rat in the garbage heap of New York’. In further critical essays entitled ‘The Book of Job Junior’ and ‘Irritation’ Carnevali’s work violently attacked as ‘war and revolution’ the underlying philosophies of modernist poetry on the basis that it favoured technique over ‘truth’. Instead he proposed, paradoxically, that the only true modern art would emerge from the destruction of modernist ‘fakery’ and a return to the infinite. This paper will be concerned with two interrelated issues regarding Carnevali’s work: the transnational intellectual currents that inform his destructive revolutionary spirit and its regenerative impact on the life and work of other modernists.

Alexandra Lyons (University College London)
I am originally from the United States, where I completed my undergraduate degree at Cornell University, majoring in English and Comparative Literature. I recently finished my postgraduate studies at University College London, earning my Masters degree in English: Issues in Modern Culture. My dissertation for this course, titled ‘The Question of Form: Katherine Mansfield and the Modernist Short Story’, looks at the short story form through the lens of Katherine Mansfield’s work and her own interest in the form.

‘”Age of Experiment”: Katherine Mansfield’s work in The Athenaeum‘

Katherine Mansfield’s critical work often goes unnoticed amid her published stories and her prolific private journals and letters. However, the literary reviews that Mansfield wrote for the magazine The Athenaeum make a valuable addition to understanding her ideal for fiction, particularly her desire for literary experimentation. According to Jenny McDonnell, ‘The body of reviews that [Mansfield] wrote throughout 1919 and 1920 constitutes her manifesto for the kind of literary fiction that she deemed necessary’. When viewed together, these reviews complement the ideas expressed in Mansfield’s journals, often articulating them more clearly.

One particularly problematic need that Mansfield stresses throughout her reviews is the desire for experimentation. Mansfield wrote in The Athenaeum, ‘We live in an age of experiment, […] when writers are seeking after new forms in which to express something more subtle, more complex, “nearer” the truth’. This drive for originality becomes complicated; ‘originality’ is not only highly subjective, but also raises concerns about the pursuit of the ‘new’ for its own sake. However, Mansfield clarifies her desire for experimentation by framing it not as a necessary factor, but as the driving force behind art. From this perspective, Mansfield does not advocate the pursuit of originality, but rather the artistic freedom from formal restrictions and preconceptions that would stifle experimentation. This view is clearly reflected in her pursuit of new forms, and her persistent distrust of the novel format. Mansfield’s belief in originality as a driving force for art leads her to question established forms and forge new paths in the mode of the short story.

David Miller (Birkbeck, University of London)
David Miller is currently a part time student at Birkbeck College, University of London, where he is working towards a PhD on queer reproduction, maternal identity and parthenogenesis in the works of modernist writers, including Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy and Olive Moore.

‘”Uncreativity” and the Gendered Production of Art in Olive Moore’s The Apple is Bitten Again (Self-Portrait) (1934)’

The Apple is Bitten Again (Self-Portrait) is the last published work by the British author Olive Moore, the pseudonym of Constance Vaughan, a reporter for the London newspaper Daily Sketch and author of three highly experimental novels, written between 1929 and 1932, which explore the entanglements of maternal identity, nationality and the possibilities of artistic creation for women whose bodies remained restrictively associated with biological reproduction. The Apple is Bitten Again is a collection of increasingly acerbic essays and aphorisms, critiquing the sites of cultural production available to women in London in the early twentieth century. My paper reads this collection of critical disturbance as a ‘self-portrait’, as the subtitle suggests. By torqueing the genre of commentary via literary aphorisms, Moore’s text stages a critical intervention in the production of self within the cultural networks of the literary scene of Bloomsbury. Rejecting both the masculinist ‘Phalliculturists’ (p. 352) and ‘that warm menstrous flow of womanly prose’ (p. 388), which she associated with Virginia Woolf’s writing, Moore produces modernist criticism as a process of alienated feminist practice that disturbingly forms itself from frequently misogynistic critiques of other female writers. My paper asks how Moore’s positioning of ‘Woman as Uncreative Artist’ (p. 386) is both implicated in and challenges not only the gendered discourse on the production of art, but also the association of the procreative white female body with the production of the English nation.

Benjamin Poore (Queen Mary, University of London)
b.w.o.poore@qmul.ac.uk
@Benjamin_Poore
Benjamin Poore is an AHRC-funded PhD candidate at Queen Mary, University of London. He previously was awarded an MA in medieval literature at the University of York. His thesis examines the shaping influence of modernist culture on the life and writing of the Anglo-Pakistani psychoanalyst Masud Khan, who lived and worked in post-war London from 1946. His work has more recently turned towards the imagination of pedagogy and public culture in the writing of E.M. Forster, Marion Milner, and T.S. Eliot. He has published in Modernism/modernity, New Formations, and has an essay forthcoming in Postcolonial Text in 2014. He is a member of the research network ‘Cultures of Trust’ and a regular contributor to the TLS.

‘Why Leonard Bast Had to be Killed’

Much recent historiography of English studies has identified the absolute centrality of F.R. Leavis and the New Critics to the creation of what Ben Knights terms the ‘regulative ideals’ of English as a discipline.The journal Scrutiny, Knights argues, describes with great urgency the ideal reader of literature in a modernity blighted by mechanical and instrumentalized forms of human life and action, and it is the values of the Scrutineers’ Cambridge pedagogy – a distinctively modernist one – that continues to shape English studies’ self-image. But what alternative pedagogies are concealed in the history of modernist culture? In Howards End of 1910 E.M. Forster presents us Leonard Bast, a poor clerk who spends his precious hours after the drudgery of his work reading John Ruskin and taking walks – or, as Forster puts it,‘tramping’ – in woods of Surrey. Bast’s thwarted autodidact project in the novel opens up a range of questions about pedagogy, authority, and aesthetic education as an emancipatory intervention in everyday life, promising what the philosopher Jacques Rancière calls “a reformulation of the established relations between seeing, doing and speaking”. This paper will argue that Bast’s practice of ‘tramping‘ through the Surrey woods, and reading poetry on his walks, is the tentative imagination of a different pedagogy Forster explores across another fifty years of his life and writing: one wary of authority, instrumentality and expertise. No critical attention thus far has turned towards the coincidence of Forster’s teaching and the visibility of education in Forster’s writing. Forster’s teaching, and documents relating to it, will be offered in this paper in the attempt to define a utopian and experimental pedagogy buried in Forster’s work, standing out in modernist culture and offering a challenge to the teaching and institutions of English studies today.

George Potts (University College London)
George Potts is a second-year PhD candidate at University College London. His doctorate explores the relationship between the writings of John Milton and Geoffrey Hill.

‘The “self-explanatory or critical poet”: Eliot, Empson and Poetic Notation’

The monumental effect that T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ had upon the burgeoning academy of English literary criticism in the 1920s – what Louis Menand has termed the ‘institutional needs his writing was able to serve’ – is well-documented. As is also well-known, Eliot would later dismiss the ‘Notes’ to his poem as ‘bogus scholarship’, lamenting the ‘wild goose chase’ on which he had sent his readership.

Yet as William Empson wrote in the 1930s, ‘to leave your poetry to be annotated by someone else, with much greater trouble than it would have cost you, is again an impertinence under the disguise of modesty’.  Musing in the same article on the possibilities modernism offered the ‘self-explanatory or critical poet’, Empson seemed to assimilate Eliot’s concept of poetic notation and push it further, towards a form of self-scholarship that was far from ‘bogus’.

If Eliot’s ‘Notes’ were appropriated by the academy for ‘institutional needs’, Empson’s ideal of notation is a product of the academy a generation later. Using the rise of the academic study of English Literature in the early twentieth century as a context for poetics in the period, this paper will consider Empson’s poetry and notes as a form of self-criticism, emblematic of the convergence of criticism and poetry that occurred in the 1920s.

Katarzyna Trzeciak (Jagiellonian University)
PhD student at Faculty of Polish Studies, Jagiellonian University in Cracow. Her thesis explores the sculpture metaphor in the literature of early 20th century. Her research interests focus on phantasmatic criticism  and psychoanalytic studies in literature.

‘Making Radical Criticism by Sculptural Concepts. T. E. Hulme and his Influence on Imagists and Vorticist’

In his essay ‘Modern Art and Its Philosophy’ Hulme favored Egyptian, Byzantine and Indian art because of their angularity and geometrical hardness. Human body in this type of art is often entirely non-vital, and distorted to fit into stiff lines and cubical shapes of various kinds. Such art sets against Renaissance and breaks off with all humanistic attitude.

Hulme seems attracted to poetic language as an anti-naturalist and abstract kind of concretization of visual things. As a Wittgenstein reader, Hulme appreciated classical (in his special sense of Classicism) verse as a dry and hard representation of the finite. Hulme’s vision of modern poetry was filtered through sculptural imagination. His favourite sculptor, Jacob Epstein, made sculptures which were turning the organic into something hard and durable, exactly the same as modern language of poetry should arrests physical things in non-vital, cubical shapes. Hulme was founding pleasure of sculptural solidity in language, and this pleasure was something Pound and other Imagists (and later Vorticists as Wyndham Lewis) constantly upheld, seeing it as the way to a more direct poetic discourse. The new poetry in Hulmian terms was sculptural in the way it has to ‘mould images into definite shapes’. This vision was taken by Richard Aldington (his poems displayed a ‘hardness as a cut stone’), Lewis and Pound with their sympathy for solid blocks of words. The radical modernism of Pound and Lewis, according to Vincet Sherry, is strongly indebted with Hulme’s sculptural concepts of solid blocks and sculptural hardness of language.

Mimi Winick (Rutgers University)
Mimi Winick is a PhD candidate in English at Rutgers University, New Jersey, USA. Her dissertation, “Studied Enchantment: Scholarly Form and the Literary Imagination in Britain, 1846-1941,” explores scholarship as an agent of enchantment in British literary culture. Her article, “Modernist Feminist Witchcraft: Margaret Murray’s Fantastic Scholarship and Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Realist Fantasy” is forthcoming in Modernism/modernity. During the 2013/2014 academic year, she is conducting archival research on early twentieth-century women scholars at repositories across the United Kingdom.

‘“On that bridge, emotionally, I halt”: Jane Harrison’s Ritual Scholarship’

Early twentieth-century Britain saw an efflorescence of scholarly writing on religion by women, from the Newnham Classicist Jane Harrison (Themis, 1912) to the medievalist Jessie Weston (From Ritual to Romance, 1920). Such work, when not overlooked, has been relegated to the status of source material for Modernists such as Eliot, Pound, and, more recently, H.D. and Mary Butts. In this paper, I take Jane Harrison’s writing on religion in Ancient Greece as a text rather than a paratext of Modernism, arguing that it offers a representative example of how women’s scholarly writing engaged with modernization by representing religious experience as a component of modernity and a driving force of progressive cultural change.

Harrison narrates an account of secularization as religious transformation among the Ancient Greeks: an originary goddess-centered religion gives way to “patriarchal” Olympians. In this shift the earlier mystical religion is secularized into something more artificial. Yet, in Harrison’s account, a certain universal religious “impulse” persists in ritual. Her scholarship traces this impulse—and, crucially, claims to preserve it. Harrison’s writing is marked by innovative use of material evidence and an emphasis on emotional responses to facts and artifacts. Scholarly evidence does more than support a theory: it fosters ecstatic revelation. Harrison thus transforms tropes of scholarly writing to represent and activate this religious impulse for her readers. Harrison’s scholarship presents itself as a modern heir to ancient ritual, preserving an authentic religious experience into modernity. Ultimately, Harrison’s alternative history of Greek religion suggests an alternative history of Modernist-era writing in which popular scholarship aligns the metaphorically feminine with the sacred and modern.

Natalie Wright (University of Sussex)
Natalie Wright is a PhD candidate at the University of Sussex. Her thesis examines women’s academic literary criticism during the formation of English as a university discipline, looking at writing by Edith Morley, Caroline Spurgeon, Muriel Bradbrook and Q. D. Leavis. She is co-organiser of the Modernist Criticisms conference.

‘”scientific, experimental, and observational work”: Edith Morley’s Professorial Criticism’

Accounts of the early twentieth century’s critical renaissance rarely mention Edith Morley. Yet as the first female literary professor in England, her career and writing both engage with many factors contingent to the establishing of academic English studies and the consequent redefining of literary criticism. Although Morley published many studies on literature, my paper focuses on her work on her own professional circumstances, including her personal experiences as a woman in academia recounted in her unpublished memoir Looking Before and After: Reminiscences of a Working Life (c.1945).

Her sociological survey for the Fabian Society, Women Workers in Seven Professions (1914), uses the scientific terminology applauded by T. S. Eliot and the kinds of empirical methods advocated by I. A. Richards, but Morley employs her critical rigour to examine social matters close to her own experience, rather than poetry. Her memoir also provides precise, concrete information of academic life, recording syllabus and tutorial arrangements, managerial policies, as well as the gender discrimination she experienced. Her writing therefore also challenges the histories of ‘impersonal’ modernist critical innovations by attesting to another revolution in criticism at this time: female professorial authority.