Bloomsbury Literary Studies

Modernism: Evolution of an Idea

Guest Post by Sean Latham and Gayle Rogers

What exactly is modernism? A movement, a style, a field, an attitude, an epoch? That question has troubled everyone from Pope Pius X to midcentury urban planners to contemporary students. Something new, something different transformed the course of Western arts—and some argue, the whole of Western life—in the late nineteenth century, but its nature and effects remain subject to fierce debate. There are thousands of courses on this topic across the arts and humanities in nearly every college and university. And yet we have no satisfactory answer to that very simple question, no basic definition for something that preoccupies teachers, artists, scholars and students. Indeed, the literary figures most often associated with the term—T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound—used the term but could not agree on its sense, leaving Pound to lament in 1932 that they had launched a movement “to which no name has ever been given.”

Our book, Modernism: Evolution of an Idea (2015), doesn’t attempt to answer that question definitively. If we learned anything from our research, it’s that such an ambition would be doomed to failure. Instead, we set out to explore the many ways in which the question of modernism has been posed and answered across the last century. We traced its early use as a term of condescension—a “modernist” was one who blindly followed contemporary fads, foolishly ignoring the wisdom of tradition—and then as a badge of honor among Bohemian Parisians and aesthetes. By the 1920s, we saw, “modernism” coherently named an emerging style of literature, art, architecture, and music, while at the same time alerting readers to its possible dangers.

The poet and critic John Crowe Ransom, for example, wrote in 1924 that no living author could “escape” the restrictive confines of “modernism,” which he equated with the dense, difficult, allusive poetry of Eliot and Pound. In the first full-length study of this trend, A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927), Robert Graves and Laura Riding championed this mode of writing—which was dismissed elsewhere for antagonizing average readers and disdaining the literary marketplace—but were ambivalent about its successes and its future prospects. And, to make things even more complicated, this early coherence of the term occurred while “modernism” also described a dissident movement within the Catholic church, innovations in technology and scientific advances, and much more.

By the 1950s, we show, “modernism” had been consolidated and as an academic field, mostly in literary studies, only to find itself attacked vociferously in the 1980s by postmodernists, who claimed that it represented an elitist, often extremist mode of understanding our complex modernity. The response to the dismissal of modernism created, in essence, what is now called the New Modernist Studies. Our book introduces and surveys this rapidly changing field and points to the other volumes in our series, New Modernisms, that will elaborate on the transformations that have taken hold in various subfields of modernist studies: globalization, gender, technology, race, environments, print culture, and much more. We offer glossaries, bibliographies, and historical resources for those who want to dig deeper. All of these books seek neither to define modernism nor to settle any debates, but rather, to understand and historicize why this capacious, slippery term has meant so much to so many people for over a century.

Sean Latham, University of Tulsa, and Gayle Rogers, University of Pittsburgh are editors of Bloomsbury's New Modernisms series, and authors of the first volume, Modernism: Evolution of an Idea.

John Kasper and Ezra Pound: Interview with Author Alec Marsh

John Kasper and Ezra Pound: Saving the Republic publishes this month. The book examines Pound’s correspondence with this militant far-right American activist who first came to prominence with his violent campaigns against desegregation in the Civil Rights era.  We asked author Alec Marsh a few questions about the book and his experiences researching the disturbing new light the book sheds on Pound and his work.

Your new book is about extensive correspondence between Ezra Pound and John Kasper. Ezra Pound is of course familiar as one of the most important literary figures of the 20th century, but Kasper might be a name fewer people are familiar with. Who was he?

Kasper was a Columbia University graduate who first contacted Pound regarding a prospective Ph.D. thesis. On meeting the poet, he became Pound’s most active agent in the world outside St. Elizabeths Hospital where Pound was confined as a political prisoner. As publisher (with David Horton) of the Square $ Press, as proprietor of two bookstores, one in Greenwich Village, NY, and later in Washington D.C. Kasper did his best to keep Pound’s books and the poet’s right-wing politics in front of the public. Kasper was a right-wing activist from a conservative evangelical Christian milieu. Until 1954-5 he might be best characterized as Neo-Nazi; like Pound, he was an avid supporter of Sen. McCarthy. After the BROWN decisions, of 1954, 1955, mandating the racial integration of public schools, Kasper took up the poet’s States’ Rights politics and agitated throughout the South against these federal mandates. Pound, Kasper and virtually all white Southerners were convinced that school integration was a Communist plot that would lead to race-mixing. They realized that these decisions implicitly surrendered the politically powerful myth of white supremacy. For Kasper and Pound the Communist conspiracy was simply the contemporary manifestation of the on-going Jewish conspiracy, a plot to degrade all races except their own “chosen” people.

In many ways this book is a political biography of Kasper. We see him evolve from an intellectual neo-Nazi to KKK style terrorist. He was responsible for fomenting riots in Clinton and Nashville, Tennessee. He was closely associated with dynamiters of schools and synagogues, although never charged.  Nonetheless, he served time in Federal prison, county and local jails for his activities.

When Pound was released in 1958 Kasper was in Federal Prison. He travelled to Italy to see Pound in 1962, but the poet would not meet with him. He was the candidate of the National States’ Rights Party for President of the US in 1964. He gave up political activism after that.  He died in 1998.

What does the relationship between Pound and Kasper tell us about Pound’s controversial political views in his later life?

An admirer of Thomas Jefferson from early on, it was natural for Pound to take a “southern;” point of view when it came to domestic American politics. That is, he believed in the rights of the states to resist unwelcome Federal mandates.  For personal reasons, given the indictment for treason hanging over his head, Pound needed to be a “strict constructionist” regarding the US Constitution, so like virtually all American conservatives Pound was bound to side with the South when the Brown decisions of 1954 (concerning principles) and 1955 (concerning implementation) came down.  

Pound’s “States’ Rights” position is perfectly consistent with his outlook all along.  So too is the radical approach Pound endorsed when he collaborated with Kasper and others to write “Virginians On Guard!~ --an attempt to influence the Constitutional Convention called in Virginia in an attempt to resist the Federal decision mandating  the integration of schools. The unhappy result is a vicious pamphlet joining some of Pound’s pet ideas with scurrilous KKK-style propaganda.

Do you think knowing more about his far right sympathies affects the way we approach Pound’s poetry? Can we enjoy his writings despite these sympathies?

This is difficult, because Pound’s later cantos by his own account were conceived as a “political weapon.” But that is not all they are, my book follows Pound’s earthly politics, but there is a cosmic agenda to Pound’s Cantos that is alive and vital. Most of all, Pound’s way of making poetry, his music, his ability to sense and assimilate the hints and glimpses he found in the ‘green world’ of Nature as well as in esoteric books, continues as a beacon light to those who wish to experience, understand, and above all, to write poetry that matters.     

What first inspired you to start looking into the relationship between Pound and Kasper?

The vast amount of correspondence at the Beinecke Library (Yale) intrigued me, although almost all of Pound’s side of it is missing. If Kasper was the fringy crank and loser most biographies portray him to be, how is it that he and the great poet exchanged hundreds and hundreds of letters—to say nothing of their close personal contact in the 1950s. It became clear that Kasper was no more a nut-case than Pound himself and that he had many good points. On the other hand, I did not guess the extent of Kasper’s involvement with right-wing segregationist violence when I started. I would have much preferred things to be otherwise.   
 
Is there anything that particularly surprised or shocked you when you were doing the research for this book?

Pound was quite aware of Kasper’s activities and supported them—that surprised me. Scholarship has painted Kasper as a marginal character, a lunatic groupie; in fact he was Pound’s best reader in the 1950s, someone he trusted to be his agent to the outside world.  I was surprised and dismayed that Pound had edited and vetted “Virginians On Guard!, the blue-print for a new, rigorously racially segregated Virginia that Kasper took south with him in 1956.  Finally, aside from Kasper, who represents the American racist right, two others in Pound’s circle had far-reaching influence on the American Right as it is constituted today. Although I can only touch on this in the current book, Dave Horton is an important ideologue behind the dispute over Federal Lands in the US Southwest today that led to the  “Sagebrush Wars” of the 1980s and more recently the Bundy Ranch incident—an event that brought 3000 armed militia to the Bundy Ranch in Nevada to oppose Federal forces just last year. And then there is Eustace Mullins, a fluent, pathological anti-Semite whose was Pound’s first biographer. His death in 2010 was widely mourned by people associated with the Tea Party Movement here in the US.  Thus, St. Elizabeths can be seen as a vortex of various rightist tendencies, all drawn to the charisma of Ezra Pound.
 
I should add that I do not regard John Kasper & Ezra Pound as an attack on the poet.  It was certainly not conceived in that spirit. Rather, it is an attempt to understand the man and to elucidate as faithfully as I can, Pound’s ideas regarding American racial politics in the 1950s, our “Civil Rights Era.”  As Pound scholars our job is not to wish away ideas we find unpleasant and wrong—we are not fans after all –but to understand those ideas and to put them in context. This is what I try to do here.  

See more information about John Kasper and Ezra Pound: Saving the Republic here

Preview the book online here

The New Human in Literature Author Interview and Review

Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, author of The New Human in Literature: Posthuman Visions of Changes in Body, Mind and Society after 1900 was recently interviewed by Jutland Station. He discusses his book that addresses literature's changing ideas of mankind. Along with the the interview is a fantastic review:

In The New Human, a fine addition to this burgeoning field of research, Thomsen often invites the reader to play with such changing conceptions of humanity and the post-human. These ideas of improving mankind or even searching for immortality have been a large aspect of the current popular imagination. 

Check out the full video and review here.

Learn more about The New Human in Literature here.

 

 

On Modern Poetry and Writing the Self named Choice Outstanding Academic Titles 2013

Continuing a mulit-year streak, two Literary Studies books have been named Choice Outstanding Academic Titles for 2013. Congratulations to On Modern Poetry by Robert Rowland Smith and Writing the Self by Peter Heehs.

More about Choice Outstanding Academic Titles:

Every year, Choice subject editors single out for recognition the most significant print and electronic works reviewed in Choice during the previous calendar year. Appearing annually in Choice’s January issue, this prestigious list of publications reflects the best in scholarly titles and attracts extraordinary attention from the academic library community. The 2013 feature includes 663 titles in 54 disciplines and subsections. In awarding Outstanding Academic Title status, the editors apply several criteria to reviewed titles:

•     Overall excellence in presentation and scholarship
•     Importance relative to other literature in the field
•     Distinction as a first treatment of a given subject in book or electronic form
•     Originality or uniqueness of treatment
•     Value to undergraduate students
•     Importance in building undergraduate library collections

Writing the Self: Diaries, Memoirs, and the History of the Self traces the history of the idea of the self, in diaries, memoirs and other first-person writings, from the Iron Age to the age of the Internet.

Start reading it here:

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On Modern Poetry: From Theory to Total Criticism explores the divide between practical criticism and theory in 20th century criticism to propose a new way of reading poetry.

Start reading it here:

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The Greatest Literary Moustaches!

It’s Movember and we love a good literary moustache. So much so, we’ve put together a collection of our all-time favourites! From the Walrus to the Mexican, and the Handlebar to the Horseshoe, it seems there is no end to the amount of creative facial topiary in the literary world… Something tells me Shakespeare set a trend.

Mark Twain

‘There has been nothing as good since’ said Ernest Hemingway about Mark Twain’s legendary book Huckleberry Finn. But, he could just as well have been talking about Twain’s famous moustache.

Mark Twain wasn’t without opinion when it came to facial hair, directing the following vitriol towards the beard: ‘it performs no useful function; it is a nuisance and a discomfort; all nations hate it; all nations persecute it with the razor’. Must have been why he plumped for this rather impressive looking moustache. And with matching eyebrows too.

Read our Bedside, Bathtub & Armchair guide to Mark Twain. It reveals all sorts of fantastic facts about this intriguing writer... did you know that he started smoking at 7 and often smoked 40 cigars a day? Nope, me neither. Pretty impressive shocking.

Rudyard Kipling

‘Being kissed by a man who didn’t wax his moustache was like eating an egg without salt’. We couldn't agree more Rudyard Kipling.

This 'tash is so impressive that we've opted for a side portrait shot so you can really see the full depth of this impressive literary bush. Look out for our new book on Rudyard Kipling and Japan - no other leading English literary figure of his day spent so long in that country or wrote so fully about it.

George Orwell

George Orwell said, in his famous 6 Rules for Writing, ‘Never use a long word where a short one will do’. It would seem he had the same approach to moustaches. I’m calling this one... modest yet confident.

George Orwell also wrote an essay in the Evening Standard in 1946 about his rules for drinking tea. Whilst not related in any way to moustaches, I still think it deserves a special mention. Orwell employed the essay as a tool to entertain, illuminate and provoke readers as well as help him fashion his distinctive 'literary' voice. George Orwell the Essayist by Peter Marks gives these compelling pieces the critical attention they merit.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

What can we say about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s moustache? It’s a wonder he had any time to write considering the hours he must have put in taming and trimming this sublime example of facial topiary.  I know what you must be thinking, ‘I WISH I could get my hands on some of his moustache trimmings’. Well, I’m afraid the opportunity has been and passed, with one moustache & ACD fan purchasing his moustache trimmings. They came neatly packaged up in the original envelope they were kept in for so many years with the following inscription: ‘My beloved moustache hairs’. I'm sure the new owner feels the same.

Walt Whitman

Is it a moustache or a beard? Are there side-burns in there? We can't quite figure it out. And that's what makes Walt Whitman's contributions to facial topiary so impressive.

In Whitman’s Queer Children, Catherine Davies looks at 'the anxious relationship between the homosexual and his American home'  in the work of four gay twentieth-century poets - Hart Crane, Allen Ginsberg, James Merrill and John Ashbery. Dwelling on the nurturing adaptable heritage of Walt Whitman, she considers Whitman’s renegotiation of the dialectic between the public and the private as a context for the project of the homosexual epic.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietzsche sports the unique looking walrus-handlebar moustache. Otherwise known as the moustache that launched a thousand philosophical arguments (and its own facebook page). 

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche posits the Übermensch as a goal that humanity can set for itself. Did he set this goal for his own facial hair? There is one thing we can be sure of – he set the philosophical world alight with this revolutionary 'tash.

Still a bit confused? Nietzsche: A Guide for the Perplexed will tell you everything you need to know.

Edgar Allen Poe

It's fair to say that EAP employed his moustache in a rather gothic manner. An article in Scribner’s Magazine in 1878 reveals that 'He wore a dark mustache, scrupulously kept, but not entirely concealing a slightly contracted expression of the mouth and an occasional twitching of the upper lip, resembling a sneer. This sneer, indeed, was easily excited — a motion of the lip, scarcely perceptible, and yet intensely expressive. There was in it nothing of ill-nature, but much of sarcasm … '

So impressive was his moustache that is spawned this imaginative looking t-shirt. If anyone could let me know where to buy it, I’d really appreciate it.

An inescapable black pit, an innocent buried alive, and the deranged hallucinations of a murderer all haunt Tales of Mystery and Imagination - a collection of Edgar Allan Poe's most celebrated chilling stories.

Ernest Hemingway

All hail Ernest Hemingway's contribution to the moustache world! We know that he loved hunting in Africa, bullfighting in Spain, deep-sea fishing in Florida and this is the perfect moustache to match. Hemingway married four times, often falling for one woman while still married to another. With this dashing moustache I think we can see why he was so irresistible to women.

Gabriel García Márquez

Gabriel García Márquez once characterised common European perceptions of Latin America as ‘a man with a moustache and a guitar and a revolver’. He might have kept the moustache, but he certainly broke other pre-existing stereotypes by putting Latin American writing on the literary map.

If a moustache could ever be described as ‘friendly’ then this is certainly it. You can find out more about this compelling man by reading our biography by Gerald Martin and literary guide to Love in the Time of Cholera by Tom Fahy.

Stefan Zweig

Born in Vienna in 1881, Stefan Zweig was one of the most respected authors of his time. And not just for his epic looking moustache. The Economist hailed him as a 'Secret Superstar' and the New Yorker called him an 'Escape Artist' earlier this year.

Foreseeing Nazi Germany's domination of Europe, Zweig and his wife left Austria in 1933. Despairing at Europe's future and feeling increasingly isolated, they committed suicide together in 1942. As Zweig's correspondence all but ceased with the outbreak of World War II, little is known about his final years. Stefan and Lotte Zweig's South American Letters, edited by Darién J. Davis and Oliver Marshall, reproduces personal letters written by the couple during this time and creates a fascinating picture of the last years of this famed author, cast adrift by the rise of Nazism and enforced exile.

Joseph Conrad

Some critics have commented that Joseph Conrad was known for his pessimistic writing style and stark presentation of the human condition. I don’t think he helped matters with this harsh looking moustache. There is one thing that the critics certainly agree upon - Heart of Darkness is a landmark text of 20th century literature that continues to resonate to this day. We certainly love it. One of our latest books, Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ and Contemporary Thought by Nidesh Lawtoo brings this book into philosophical dialogue and includes the first publication in English of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's essay, 'The Horror of the West', described by J. Hillis Miller as 'a major essay on Conrad's novel, one of the best ever written'.

That's it for our literary moustache round up! Of course we couldn't include everyone - Dostoevsky, James Joyce, Herman Melville, William Faulkner, Gustave Flaubert... the list could go on and on. It would also be impossible to choose a favourite. But we want to hear from you -  who would get your vote for the most impressive literary moustache? Who can't you believe that we have left out? Is there any obscure Russian writer with a more impressive offering than Nietzsche (probably)?  Let us know so we can add it to our literary moustache hall of fame.

In the meantime, good luck to anyone still plugging away at their Movember efforts. The crowd above would be very proud.

Jenny Tighe

Beckett and Death in the Journal of Beckett Studies

The Journal of Beckett Studies have been very kind to us lately - first, this review of Beckett and Phenomenology, and now this excellent article and review of Beckett and Death:

As Barfield and Tew note in their insightful critical foreword to Beckett and Death, it is almost unbelievable, given the central place of death in Beckett’s work, that such a volume has not appeared before. Beckett and Death addresses an underexplored area in Beckett criticism, or at least one which, despite its inescapability, has received few booklength treatments. Noting the exceptional status of Critchley’s and Ricks’s work in this context, Barfield and Tew go on to observe that death is ‘so uncannily, so uniquely productive in such different ways in Beckett’s texts, that it almost seems pointless to talk of it as a mere preoccupation’. The volume goes on to document a dizzying range of the modes of deathly production in Beckett, ranging from All That Fall and More Pricks than Kicks to the legacy of Jung, Mauthner and Augustine within Beckett’s work.

Augustine is the subject of Elizabeth Barry’s rich essay on the rhetoric of dying, and Barry aptly notes the ongoing enigma which Augustine represents within Beckett criticism, ‘often cited but not yet completely understood’. In particular, Barry’s analysis highlights the crucial but so far underdocumented correspondence between the imaginative use of narrative voice in their work. There are fascinating insights here into the parallel between Augustine’s circuire and the Unnamable’s journey back to the fold, both of which involve rhetorical, as well as spatial, round-aboutness. Most telling of all, though, is the material on the figure of distentio in Augustine, and Augustine’s perplexity with the verb moritur itself. As Barry says, there follows a pun worthy of Beckett: ‘as the thing it signifies [death] cannot be declined in fact, so the word itself [ie, the verb] cannot be declined in speech’. One has the sense here of new territory opening up, as Augustine continues to shed important light on the physical decline which so dominates the Beckett oeuvre and the rhetorical declensions through which it is articulated. Augustine is revisited in Paul Stewart’s essay on ‘Sterile Reproduction’, which focuses on the hope in All that Fall that suffering can be brought to an end by not renewing the species. Dan Rooney’s desire to kill some ‘young doom’ is recontextualised by reference to Schopenhauer and, via Jonathan Dollimore, the early Christian fathers and Augustine. For Julie Campbell, meanwhile, All That Fall exemplifies the specific connection between the omnipresence of death and the possibilities of radio drama. Campbell links the ‘dark comedy’ of the play to another form of darkness, that of the listener who, alone in the dark, constructs the fictive world of All that Fall from a soundscape with no form of visual corroboration. As she argues, ‘sound has the ability to portray a truth hidden by the “mask” of the visual, physical image’. That ability has significant implications for our reading of the play which, as Campbell notes, also contains the first unmistakable reference to the lecture by Jung attended by Beckett in 1935. Peter Fifield’s essay turns from Jung to neuropsychology, providing important evidence of Beckett’s knowledge of specific forms of clinical memory loss. Noting the status of ‘confabulation’ as a clinical term, Fifield links Beckett’s amnesiacs to ‘temporal morbidity’ and the imaginary creation of the past as a response to amnesia. The result is an original reading of the Trilogy, and new parallels are drawn with Korsakoff’s syndrome and A.R. Luria’s The Man with a Shattered World.

The contributions by Mark Nixon, Seán Lawlor and Steven Matthews address the place of death in Beckett’s body of work as a whole. Nixon’s essay links the advertisedly uncertain textual status of many works, such as From an Abandoned Work, to the troubled thematics of dying: ‘Beckett’s attempts to “fail better” as he puts it, are thus signposted by titles such as “For to End Yet Again”, so that it is now quite common to view Beckett’s entire oeuvre as a work in progress’. These are important questions in discussions of Beckett’s body of work, which continue to be dogged by Beckett’s reflexive titles and emphasis on the oeuvre as serial (one might add the bodily thematics of the titles and their imperfect correspondence between languages). For Nixon, ‘Beckett viewed the act of writing as comparable, even concomitant with, the process of living’, hence the textual instability which accompanied Beckett’s search for means of expression for declining life. The corpus as a whole is also at stake in Seán Lawlor’s essay, ‘ “O Death where is thy sting?” Finding words for the big ideas’, albeit in a different sense. Lawlor is concerned with More Pricks than Kicks, a corpus which both reflects the thematics of death and itself poses questions of life and corporeality.

Steven Matthews, meanwhile, is concerned with Beckett’s ‘late style’, applying the framework of Edward Said’s On Late Style to Beckett’s late work. Said’s is an appropriately subtle model, identifying in some authors a reconciliation between ‘bodily condition and aesthetic style’ and in others a refusal of harmony and resolution. Beckett, for Matthews, is of the latter camp, producing a late phase whose emphasis on speaking of and to the dead produces singular dilemmas of voice: ‘in these late works, to speak is to become posthumous to oneself, to become “no longer oneself”. The act of speaking, especially when speaking “close to death”, opens the self, andwords themselves, to repetition as a plurality of deaths, to the inability to speak of the dead as single and unique at the very moment when it is necessary and responsible to do so’. The analysis is an important one, and produces further parallels between Beckett and Derrida’s analysis of mourning.Matthews refers in detail to the Sottisier Notebook, and there are rich ‘late’ pickings here, although one sometimeswonders whether the problematic of voice and death in fact stretches back to earlier phases of Beckett’s career too. Shane Weller’s essay considers the ‘politics of death’ in Beckett’s work, revisiting Adorno’s reading of Beckettian suffering and its later consideration by Terry Eagleton and H. Porter Abbott. For Adorno’s Beckett, Weller argues, death takes on a radical political charge, as it comes to represent the dream of a world without suffering: ‘through his “pictures” of death, through his making of death a condition devoutly to be wished, Beckett would offer us the only tenable critique of both totalitarianism and capitalism’. Following this critique, Eagleton becomes an advocate of a ‘Beckett of the Left’, while Porter Abbott sees in Beckettian death a form of utopia, so that death’s political charge is countered by a metaphysical charge. Weller’s conclusion transcends the dichotomy, linking Beckett’s work to that of Sade via the conception of the ‘republic’, and a radical reconfiguration of the relation between suffering, pleasure and freedom. This, then, is an important volume which boldly tackles the near-omnipresence of death in Beckett, and sensitively accounts for the multiple forms it takes. One senses, inevitably, that Beckett’s dead still have much to say.

- Beckett and Death, edited by Steven Barfield, Matthew Feldman and Philip Tew, analyses a number of Beckett's poems, plays and short stories through consideration of mortality and death. It is now available to buy in paperback - you can find out more by visiting our website.

Beckett and Phenomenology reviewed in Journal of Beckett Studies

We are delighted with this excellent book review for Beckett and Phenomenology (and all-round excellent piece of writing on Beckett and Philosophy) by Russell Smith in the Journal of Beckett Studies:

It’s easy to see why Beckett looked like a phenomenologist to earlier generations of critics: many of his characteristic preoccupations – the nature of consciousness, sensory perception and embodied experience – mirror phenomenological themes, while Waiting for Godot was virtually a case study of the existentialists’ problem of meaningful action in a meaningless world. Then again, it’s easy enough to see why the generations reared on deconstruction developed an intolerance to even minute traces of phenomenology: in their passion to construct a deconstructionist Beckett, phenomenology –with its subject-centredness and its neglect of language – seemed incapable of accounting for Beckett’s decentred subjects adrift among self-reflexive linguistic aporias.

But as Maude and Feldman point out, this dismissal of phenomenology ‘has often stemmed from misreadings of deconstructive theory’ which have misconstrued the influence of Husserl on Derrida and overlooked later developments of phenomenology itself. Husserl’s ‘transcendental phenomenology’ sought, through the famous epoché, to establish the a priori conditions under which phenomena appear to the consciousness of a perceiving subject. But long before Derrida launched his critique of Husserl’s ‘phenomenology of presence’, the ‘big three’ post-Husserlian phenomenologists had begun to address these blind-spots: Heidegger on the temporality and ‘enworldedness’ of the subject, Sartre on the ethicality of the subject as both in-itself and for-itself, and Merleau- Ponty on the embodied nature of subjectivity and the many ways in which the body fails to be present at its own experiences.

This volume (Beckett and Phenomenology) is divided into two parts. The first four essays consider Beckett’s work in the light of each of the ‘big four’, while the remaining seven essays consider various phenomenological themes in relation to Beckett’s work, both in terms of its internal thematics (such as Paul Sheehan’s fascinating essay on the paradoxes of the Beckettian ‘phenomenology of sleep’), and in terms of the theoretical elaboration of a ‘phenomenology of reading’ (via Ingarden, Iser and Hirsch) capable of dealing with the unique interpretive challenges of Beckett’s prose...

Of the many excellent pieces in the second part of the book, two in particular stand out. Daniel Katz’s ‘What Remains of Beckett: Evasion and History’ returns to a topic that has received sustained attention in recent years: the relation of texts such as Endgame and The Lost Ones to the historical event of the Nazi genocide, and in particular to Adorno’s notion of an ‘image ban’ governing its representation. Following David Houston Jones’s excellent recent work, Katz draws out affinities between Giorgio Agamben’s elaboration of Primo Levi’s ‘paradox of the witness’ – the true witness cannot bear witness – and Beckett’s own sense of the impossible obligation of expression. Katz shows how Beckett responds ‘through a not-saying, although such a not-saying implies a pointing not only to the place where the image does not appear, but to the ban which prohibits it’. What is most productive in Katz’s essay is his rigorous interrogation of the more slippery moves in Agamben’s reasoning, especially its use of Levinas’s account of shame, and Katz ends by opening up questions for further work concerning Beckett’s bilingualism, the ethics of speaking by proxy, and the shameful impossibility of escaping one’s own subjectivation.

Finally, Chris Ackerley’s essay provides a fascinating introduction to the ‘phenomenology of annotation’ and the grounds by which, according to E.D. Hirsch, an annotator determines the ‘validity’ of an interpretation based on ‘a distinct context of relevant knowledge’. Ackerley is, of course, the pre-eminent annotator of Beckett’s works, and this engaging account offers a behind-the-scenes look at the annotator’s work, both the invisible hosts of factual minutiae that crowd the margins of the text, and the annotator’s triage of validity and relevance, in working towards, not a ‘correct’, but a ‘better’ interpretation. Ackerley stresses in particular its essential relation to ‘ordinary reading practice’, shuttling between a ‘divinatory moment’ or ‘imaginative guess’, and a critical activity of ‘raising interpretive guesses to the level of knowledge’.

Beckett and Phenomenology inevitably returns us to the indispensable chestnut of ‘Beckett and Philosophy’, and what that particular ‘and’ might mean. I would argue, along with some of the contributors here, that Beckett’s writing is most interesting in the ways that it refuses philosophy, keeps it at arm’s length where it provides material but never method. But when Beckett told interviewer Tom Driver in 1961 ‘I am not a philosopher’, he made it clear that the particular kind of philosopher that he was not was a Sartre or a Heidegger. Phenomenology has a special status in this refusal, and as Shane Weller points out here, Beckett knew their work well enough to insist on its categorical difference from his own project. This ‘not’ is a useful counterbalance to the implied intimacy of the ‘and’ in Beckett and Phenomenology. The nec tecum nec sine te of Beckett’s relation to philosophy, and phenomenology in particular, remains an open question to which this book makes, after all these years, an inaugural contribution.

- Edited by Ulrika Maude and Matthew Feldman, Beckett and Phenomenology compares and contrasts Beckett’s work with key figures in phenomenology and analyses phenomenological themes and their dramatization in his work. It is now available to buy in paperback. You can read the first 30 pages of the book for free here!

The persistence of detection: ‘reading the clues, reading the world, reading the detectives among us’

We are delighted to announce the publication of our new book Detecting Detection: International Perspectives on the Uses of a Plot. Edited by Peter Baker and Deborah Shaller, Detecting Detection converges writing from the UK, North and South America, Europe, Asia, and Africa to connect occasions of the detective plot in contemporary fictions.  

The detective novel has for centuries been irresistible to readers for both its mystery and its ability to morally and ethically engage readers. But what else does the ubiquity of the form say about us, especially when it arises in places other than the pages of traditional whodunits? The authors of the essays in Detecting Detection search for detection in places deviant from its usual haunts—or, “textual traces of a plot often found hidden in other plots”—and succeed in what Detecting Detection’s editors describe as seeing the “detective story as narrative topology or formula” as insight “into the worlds we like to imagine and the people we like to think we are.”

Heta Pyrhönen opens the collection with her essay “The detection plot as a means of testimony in Ann-Marie MacDonald’s The Way the Crow Flies,” suggesting that as readers we might be inadequate detectives because “our advantages in knowledge and the narrator’s confidentiality create in us a sense of superiority that has blunted our alertness and critical capacities.” As readers of detective novels, we witness crime. But what can we actually see? Pyrhönen goes on to connect detective plots with personal and national trauma, raising questions about how we witness and understand these traumas both in the world and as readers.

Peter Baker delves further into the question of reader as witness in his analysis of Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives. For Baker, “we investigate by necessity but also at our peril, for adopting the quest is nothing less—or less important—than implicating ourselves in its crimes.”

In her essay “Detectivism as a Means of Resistance in Juan Marsé’s El embrujo de Shanghai,” Ana-Maria Medina engages with the Greek detective writer Petros Markaris’s explanation for writing detective fictions: “If you want to write today a social or political novel, you have to turn to the crime novel.” Here we have an exploration of Spanish political repression as both obstructing and then enlivening the novel’s detective plot. The essay traces the history of the detective genre in Spain, and explores the influence of detection in contemporary Spanish fiction. Medina considers El embrujo de Shanghai as “a conversation among writers of contemporary post-[Spanish] war narrative,” and one that is invigorated by the “generic freedoms of postmodernism” involved “in the bloom of globalization and the entrance of foreign cultures in a country once isolated from all exterior influences.”

Michelle Robinson uses A Confederacy of Dunces as a catalyst for investigating American, African American, and detective literature. Robinson argues that in the arenas of American and African American fiction, detection does not necessarily solve its characters’ problems, but rather, it does function as a “foil for the dubious practice of activist ‘ethnojournalism’ exemplified by works of Howard Griffin’s 1961 book Black Like Me.” Ultimately, Robinson interrogates social action and political change itself.

“We think of truth along the lines of how we become aware of it, not necessarily by what it is,” Sofia Ahlberg argues in her essay “Espionage and the war on secrecy and terror in Graham Greene and beyond.” Ahlberg tackles WikiLeaks, Vietnam, Cuba, and contemporary terror alerts, while using Walter Benjamin to explore the connection between storytelling and truth. In her examination of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, Ahlberg sees readying for a “world in which detection is ubiquitous in the art of narration as a way of grappling with questions of commitment, judgment, and belief.” Here detection engages us morally—when we consider “how” truth comes about, we resort to narrative and, often inevitably, to the narrative of detection.

Rossita Terzieva-Artemis reads Julia Kirsteva’s novel Possessions as a parody of the conventional detective novel, allowing the novel’s author to traverse epistemological topics outside of the book’s immediate plot. For Tezieva-Artemis, reading a detective novel as a spoof of its own genre provides “insights into the workings of desire and language, of desires in language, of desires in the silences between language and speech.”

Sheng-mei Ma elaborates upon parody in detective novels in his essay “Zen Keytsch: Mystery Handymen with Dragon Tatoos,” in which he playfully, but seriously, looks at the function of Eastern “handymen” in an array of contemporary and historical narratives, coining the term “Zen Keytsch” for what could otherwise be called “Orientalist kitsch.” Ma describes these kitschy characters as “Orientalist images as discursive handymen, mysterious yet kitschily functional in including an aura of awe, ever so elusive while dutifully serving at the pleasure of the West.”

Kim Toft Hansen chronicles the detective novel’s history in the penultimate essay in Detecting Detection, challenging the assertion that the detective novel is by nature a modernist text, or “a narrative that asserts that role of reason and rationality while exiling the religious and supernatural.” Hansen begins his history of detection in China and the Arab world and eventually reaches the West and twenty-first-century books like The Da Vinci Code. Hansen argues that “Religion, metaphysics and supernaturalism, which savage modernity and the hard secularism it has strived to cleanse from public sphere” have actually been an “undercurrent” to the history of the detective narrative. Ultimately, Hansen argues, “post-secularism has never really come about.”

In the final essay of Detecting Detection, Amadou Koné looks at three Fulani initiation narratives and suggests that African oral tradition narratives “function in reality by using motifs that are similar or at least analogous to the motifs of detective stories.” Koné explains that in Fulani initiation narratives, the candidate to be initiated plays the role of the traditional sleuth when he searches for his master initiator and when he deciphers symbols presented to him along the journey. But in the Fulani initiation narratives, there is no initiating crime, causing the solution to this kind of mystery to be something else entirely, or as Koné writes, “It is rather a matter of achieving an understanding of the elements of the global mystery of the functioning of the world and society.”

In Detecting Detection, the detective novel becomes more than just an attractive read. As the editors write, “The detective narrative becomes, then, about writing and about reading—reading the clues, reading the world, reading the detectives among us.” The essays in this collection provoke thought about both contemporary literature and the history of literature, and offer us a wide range of takes on a literary favorite capable of persisting trends and existing on a global scale.

-Hilary Reid, Editorial Intern

Additional reviews:

“Having long ago outgrown the confines of the English country house murder mystery, the detective has travelled widely, adapting himself to other cultures and genres. Contemporary critics have become increasingly fascinated by this versatility and by the diversity of detection itself. The nine excellent essays in Detecting Detection astutely consider the reasons for the detection plot’s persistence and proliferation, exploring in detail the ways in which is has been transformed across cultures and incorporated in a variety of other narrative forms. They illuminate its ability to raise difficult questions about moral and ethical choices, guilt, political repression, personal and national trauma, witnessing, judgment and belief—and about ‘the elements of the global mystery of the functioning of the world and society.’” – Lee Horsley, Reader in Literature and Culture, Lancaster University, UK

Styles of Extinction: Cormac McCarthy's The Road

We are thrilled to announce the publication of our new book Styles of Extinction: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, edited by Julian Murphet and Mark Steven. The book brings together a superb set of critical essays to examine Cormac McCarthy’s esteemed post-apocalyptic novel, The Road.

Editors Julian Murphet and Mark Steven open Styles of Extinction with an introduction that suggests McCarthy’s The Road is “a belated addition to a modernist spirit first energized by Cervantes and reactivated through Joyce.” For Murphet and Steven, McCarthy’s singular literary style fills the same void of extinction proclaimed by his narrative. A singular literary style, the editors write, that “flickers like a last taper in the harsh winds blown down along the soggy library shelves, lighting here and there on some stray phrase, some lost chronicle of humankind, in order to poach from them a stubborn force—a subjectivity—that has not yet succumbed to the general darkness.”

The topic of style in McCarthy’s The Road unites the eight essays collected in Styles of Extinction: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Through close readings and hermeneutics, each writer explores “style as what negates, but also as what succumbs to, the entropic horizon of what, inexorably, is.” In the book’s first essay, “‘The cold illucid world:’ The poetics of gray in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road,” Chris Danta probes what he calls McCarthy’s “glaucomic” world, one in which any light decays not into complete darkness, but into gray—the color that saturates The Road’s post-apocalyptic setting. Danta finds connections and apertures between the use of the color gray in McCarthy’s work and in the work of Samual Beckett. Danta states, “An important point to grasp here is that gray is a color that marks eventuation or transformation—it is a color that things become, as when we say the sky becomes gray. By neutralizing luminosity, gray draws attention to light as a source of eventuation and transformation. But, by the same token, gray—or as in the case of Beckett, the black-grey or the ash gray—is anti dialectical; it ‘does not come with the realm of clear and distinct ideas.’”

Sean Pryor’s essay “McCarthy’s rhythm” showcases the rigorous close reading that can be found throughout the excellent essays in the collection. In “McCarthy’s rhythm,” Pryor parses through a number of sentences from The Road, analyzing each in terms of its unique rhythm, as well as its place within the larger scope of the novel. Pryor argues that The Road announces itself as a work of prose imbued with rhythm in its first paragraph, stating:

"McCarthy’s rhythms could certainly be accused of distracting the reader’s attention, and after that first paragraph, it can be difficult not to keep an ear out for unusually regular or neatly mimetic patterns. One irony is that these deliberate, ‘artificial’ rhythms frequently match natural phenomena. But the logic of that matching is one of cosmic correspondence: heartbeats, breaths, waking and sleeping, days and nights, safety and danger, food and hunger, travel and rest, action and though, question and answer, speech and silence, life and death—all conform to rhythms sounded by McCarthy’s language. Life like language in The Road is limited by number. There is an order to a cosmos."

In the essay “Spring has lost its scent: Allegory, ruination, and suicidal melancholia in The Road,” Grace Hellyer examines the functions of suicide and melancholia in McCarthy’s novel by introducing Walter Benjamin’s concept of “allegory as an artistic strategy that emerges out of and responds” to melancholia. Hellyer goes on to suggest that “The Road puts forward an allegory as a means of achieving a fragile intentionality that works to alleviate the suicidal despair of a melancholia that is ambiguously positioned between the consciousness of the man and the objective conditions of the new post-apocalyptic world.”

Mark Stevens elaborates on the idea of allegory in The Road in his essay “The late world of Cormac McCarthy,” drawing from theories of worldlessness. Stevens opens his text with the Alain Badiou quote, “I hold that we are at a very special moment, a moment at which there is not any world,” and argues that we live in a moment that “lacks its world because the splintered shards of meaningful existence have ceased to register within a globalized, superstructural expression.” What a worldless existence means for The Road, Stevens suggests, is that “The Road has something very significant to offer its readers: if not the literary construction of a new ‘world’ then the presentation of that world’s lineaments.”

Paul Sheehan argues in his essay “Road, fire, trees: Cormac McCarthy’s post-America” that McCarthy’s novel has a “serious political agenda,” more so than it has a religious or environmental agenda, as some critics have suggested. Sheehan states that “although there is a surfeit of religious allusions filling out the interstices of the novel, the questions they raise concerning faith and belief acquire a more critically directed political orientation as the narrative unfolds.” Sheehan considers The Road in terms of “Western fears of violence and fanaticism,” as well as current perceptions of refugees and displaced peoples, determining McCarthy’s man and boy to be “refugees, seeking asylum from the earth itself, vainly pitting themselves against the dead shell that is the depleted biosphere.”

In the penultimate chapter of Styles of Extinction: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, editor Julian Murphet explores McCarthy’s purposeful emphasis of silence in the post-apocalyptic world, as well as the conception of time in The Road, and adds to the other Styles of Extinction writers’ placement of McCarthy’s novel in the present political moment.

Paul Patton’s “McCarthy’s fire” closes the collection, bringing our attention back to the unnamed catastrophic even at the beginning of The Road. Patton writes, “McCarthy’s novel presents us with an event that exemplifies the conditions that make unexpected catastrophic events so terrifying, especially in the initial aftershock, namely that we do not know how to describe, identify, or name the event. As a result, we do not know what it is that has happened.” Patton also interrogates the meaning of fire in The Road, and how perhaps catastrophe itself is more imaginable than we originally thought, while that what comes after the apocalypse is truly the unimaginable.

Styles of Extinction: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is an ideal book for anyone interested in a rigorous and thorough investigation of McCarthy’s novel. Praised for being “A series of brilliant illuminations of McCarthy’s great darkness, and great literary power,” readers can be sure that “This book carries the fire.”

Early reviews:

"The evocative title of this superb collection of critical essays—Styles of Extinction: Cormac Mcarthy’s The Road—designates both the novel’s unnamed catastrophic event that reduces all human and natural life to the condition of savagery and elemental survival, and the essays themselves, which examine with insight and eloquence the consequences of that event. In the context of 'extinction' as destruction, absence, silence, nostalgia, prelude, as well as the work of fictional representation of a world growing wordless, the essays explore the implicated angles of reference: linguistic, historical, social, political, philosophical, anthropological, psychological, and moral—with even a touch of the spiritual out of the novel’s hint of some quality of life sufficient to what a brutalized world might remember or imagine." - Donald Kartiganer, Howry Professor of Faulkner Studies Emeritus, University of Mississippi

"Shuddering with the aftershocks of apocalyptic devastation to the natural world, social viability, ethical capacity, spiritual hope-with the exposed bare life of human beings, The Road shimmers in  contemporary fiction as an enigmatic reflection on end things. These essays one-by-one interrogate McCarthy's reticent text patiently yet  relentlessly, making it yield the deeply considered questions animating the novel's quiet, haunted lyricism. The essays range with frequent brilliance across matters of morality, religion, aesthetics, politics, and culture. Styles of Extinction debates how The Road negotiates the terminal conditions of late capital: economic degradation; state violence; predatory speculation; environmental abuse-the suspicion of having arrived at  worldlessness." -John T. Matthews, Professor of English, Boston University

"A timely study of McCarthy, featuring an excellent line-up of some of the very best emerging and established scholars working in literary studies, film studies, and philosophy." -- Alex Houen, University Lecturer and Fellow of Pembroke College Faculty of English University of Cambridge, UK.

"A series of brilliant illuminations of McCarthy's great darkness, and great literary power. This book carries the fire." -- Michael Zeitlin, Associate Professor, Department of English, University of British Columbia, Canada

Styles of Exctinction: Cormac McCarthy's The Road is available now in the US. It will publish elsewhere in August.

Hilary Reid, Editorial Intern 

In Conversation with Michael Lackey: Studying Nazi Christianity

Described as the 'Richard Dawkins of Literary Criticism' by Christopher Douglas (Associate Professor of English, University of Victoria), Michael Lackey is the author of our fascinating new book The Modernist God State in which he looks at the religious basis of modernist political movements. In this interview he reveals his experience of studying Nazi texts and his discoveries surrounding Nazi Christianity. His findings may well surprise you.

What was the most exhilarating aspect of your research for The Modernist God State?

As a college and graduate student, I was repeatedly taught that western culture was either totally secular or in the grip of a rapid secularization process. But this interpretation of intellectual, political, and literary history never struck me as accurate.  Indeed, a casual glance at twentieth-century literature and politics led me to draw a very different conclusion, specifically that the West had become by the twentieth century religious in new and frightening ways.  The most exhilarating part of this project was finding a way to clearly articulate the degree to which religion and the God concept continued to inform and determine the nature of the modernist body politic. 

Few people read thousands of pages of the actual texts of Hitler and the Nazis, why did you and what did you learn?

When I was an undergraduate taking theology courses in preparation for the seminary (my goal was to become a Catholic Priest), I heard vague rumours suggesting that the Catholic Church was anti-Semitic and, therefore, complicit in the Holocaust.  To understand the nature of the critique and to defend my faith, I started reading Nazi texts, primarily to demonstrate, as I had heard, that their secular and humanist views were the basis for the Holocaust. But, to my horror, I made some unsettling discoveries: The Nazis declared themselves to be a Christian Party in Point 24 of their official Party program.  In his first wireless speech to the German people after he came to power in 1933, Hitler announced that his political party regards “Christianity as the foundation of our national morality.”  Just two weeks later, he boldly declared in another speech his theological allegiance to Christianity: “it is Christians and not international atheists who now stand at the head of Germany.”  In a 1934 speech, Hitler specified the nature of the Nazi Party’s Christian orientation by claiming that the “National Socialist State professes its allegiance to positive Christianity.”  Put simply, Hitler believed that, given its commitment to positive Christianity, the Nazi Party “stands on the ground of a real Christianity,” because it is based on “Christian principles.”  These are not anomalous claims. As I demonstrate throughout my book, Hitler and many prominent Nazis consistently defined themselves and their Party as Christian. 

What I learned from all this is that there is an overwhelming amount of empirical evidence to demonstrate that Hitler and the Nazis called themselves Christian and that there is virtually no evidence that they ever called or considered themselves secular, humanist, anti-Christian, or atheist. 

Hitler & the Nazis understood themselves to be unambiguously Christian, yet they're frequently portrayed as atheists, humanists or secularists. What evidence did your reading of the source documents uncover?

As I immersed myself in the scholarship about the Holocaust, I was able to figure out why so many capable scholars drew a faulty conclusion about the religious orientation of Hitler and the Nazis.  Erich Voegelin articulated in 1938 what would become the dominant approach when he made the following claim: “the secularisation of life, which the concept of humanism brought with it, is precisely the soil in which anti-Christian religious movements such as National Socialism  could grow.”  Well-regarded scholars such as Hannah Arendt, Berel Lang, Doris Bergen, Charles Taylor, and Theodore Ziolkowski, to name only a few, have uncritically accepted this view.  But it is important to note that there is considerable confusion about the claim.  When scholars say that Hitler and the Nazis are anti-Christian secularists, it would seem that they mean that Hitler and the Nazis called themselves secular and/or anti-Christian.  But since there are literally thousands of passages in which Hitler and the Nazis declare themselves Christian, it is impossible for them to justify such an assertion.  So how can we explain their insistent claim that Hitler and the Nazis were atheists, humanists, or secularists?  When scholars make such a claim, here’s what they mean: ‘Granted, Hitler and the Nazis consistently called themselves Christian.  But they adopted a faulty version of Christianity.  Therefore, they were not really Christian.  To the contrary, they were anti-Christian.  Indeed, they were unwitting humanists and atheists.’ 

Recent scholars have posed a serious challenge to this traditional approach to Hitler and the Nazis.  Indeed, Richard Steigmann-Gall and Robert Michael have written first-rate studies that have demonstrated that Hitler and the Nazis called and considered themselves Christian, and my book contributes to this conversation by using many of their findings to illuminate literary texts.  But what has made the work of all of us possible are developments within postmodernism.  Postmodernists reject the idea that there is something such as a true Christianity.  Postmodernists realize that there are many versions of Christianity, some tolerant and humane, some not.  So instead of claiming that Hitler and the Nazis adopted a faulty version of Christianity and are, therefore, anti-Christian atheists, postmodernists seek to understand the version of Christianity that Hitler and the Nazis adopted.  From a postmodernist perspective, the real questions that need to be answered are these: Did Hitler and the Nazis consider themselves Christian?  If so, what was the version of Christianity that they adopted?  These are the questions that I answer in my book. 

What originally inspired you to study in this area?  What does it mean to you professionally?  And personally? 

It is difficult for me to make a clear distinction between the professional and the personal.  As a scholar, what I value most are intellectual honesty and scholarly precision.  But these are the very things that I want my students to learn in my classes and to use in their personal lives.  As I was writing The Modernist God State, I found myself thinking about two separate audiences.  The first consists of traditional Christian writers, who have worked vigorously and passionately to demonstrate that Hitler and the Nazis were not Christian because—to their minds—they were most certainly atheists.  The second audience consists of anti-religious atheists, who frequently demonize all versions of Christianity because they note that Hitler and many Nazis referred to themselves as Christians.  As a scholar, I consider the work of both traditional Christians and anti-religious atheists dishonest and sloppy.  The traditional Christians are dishonest because they refuse to acknowledge that Hitler and the Nazis consistently referred to themselves as Christian.  This explains why I cite so many passages from Hitler and the Nazis calling themselves and the Party Christian.  The anti-religious atheists are sloppy because they draw a faulty conclusion from the evidence about Hitler and the Nazis calling themselves Christian.  Hitler and the Nazis adopted a very specific version of Christianity, which I define in the book.  Therefore, it is illogical to claim that, because Hitler and the Nazis considered themselves Christian, Christianity entails National Socialism.  What inspired me to do this project was a desire to bring rigor, discipline, and nuance to a highly charged and controversial topic.

How would you describe your contribution to the scholarship in this area?

There are three separate contributions I make to the scholarship.  First, I offer a nuanced approach to the secularization hypothesis.  By demonstrating that intellectuals were becoming secular while the majority of the population in the West was becoming more intensely religious, I have been able to clarify why it would be more accurate to refer to the twentieth-century polity as a God state rather than a secular nation.  Second, I clarify why the novelist can illuminate intellectual and political history with an unparalleled precision and accuracy.  Finally, my work adds some clarity and depth to our understanding of the specific version of Christianity that Hitler and the Nazis adopted.

Modernism is often seen as secularist and inimical to Christianity, why do you believe otherwise?

While it is certainly true that many modernist intellectuals were indifferent or opposed to religious belief and/or the God concept, thus confirming the secularization hypothesis, it is also true that many prominent political leaders and most average citizens in the West remained deeply committed to Christianity, especially in relation to the body politic.  By doing close analyses of the writings of political leaders from King Leopold II to Hitler and the Nazis (1890s through the 1940s), I have been able to demonstrate that their political agendas are simply incomprehensible without taking into account their specific understanding of and approach to Christianity.  So in my book, instead of rejecting the secularization hypothesis altogether, I develop a nuanced approach to it.  Most modernist intellectuals embraced and even endorsed a secular approach to life, the political, and the world, but most political leaders and ordinary citizens embraced and even endorsed a religious approach to life, the political, and the world.  Therefore, when many prominent twentieth-century writers portray the modernist body politic, they frequently underscore the degree to which it is religious and the role religion plays in the shaping of the polity. 

You argue that novelists can represent intellectual and political history in a way that no other intellectual can. Why do you think this is so?

There are two separate reasons why the novelists in my study claim that they can portray intellectual and political history in a superior way to other professional intellectuals.  The first is based on the multi-disciplinary nature of the novel.  Prominent twentieth-century novelists were well-versed in philosophy and sociology, history and psychology, economics and politics.  What set them apart from other professional intellectuals was their capacity to represent one form of disciplinary knowledge in relation to or in conflict with other forms of disciplinary knowledge.  From this vantage point, novelists are superior not because they are masters of any single body of knowledge but because they are masters of polarizing, juxtaposing, negotiating, and integrating multiple bodies of knowledge.  Furthermore, they insist that the novel, more than any other intellectual medium, can insightfully and accurately portray the complex dynamics of the modern polity. 

The second reason is based on the novelist’s two-tiered conception of the human.  Nietzsche articulates this view most clearly in The Case of Wagner when he says: “all of us have, unconsciously, involuntarily in our bodies values, words, formulas, moralities of opposite descent—we are, physiologically considered, false.”  There exist in our bodies words, values, formulas, and moralities that frequently conflict with our rational conception of ourselves.  For instance, on a conscious level, we might say to ourselves and others: I am not a racist.  But at the level of the subconscious, many of us have absorbed and internalized certain racist words and values, which make many of us ‘racist’ despite our intentions to the contrary.  Given the way words, values, moralities, and formulas of opposite descent invade our bodies without our consent (“unconsciously, involuntarily”), it is impossible for us to be physiologically true.  However, if we can identify some of the subconscious words and values that inhabit our bodies, we can become less false.  This is exactly what the novelist does.  According to E.M. Forster, the novelist’s biggest contribution to intellectual and political history is the capacity to picture the subconscious short-circuiting into action.  Ideas, beliefs, and ideologies—these are the things that inhabit the subconscious and determine human action.  The problem is that most people lack the capacity to plumb the depths of their own inner lives, which means that a person’s “secret life” can be secret not only from others but also from one’s self.  But for the novelists, if we want an accurate representation of the ideologies that determine the nature of the polity, we need to examine not what people consciously say about themselves but what they subconsciously believe, think, and feel.  Therefore, it is incumbent upon the novelist to identify and define the subconscious ideology that determines human action and to devise strategies and techniques for charting the way a subconscious ideology makes its way into specific forms of socio-political action.

What will your next book explore?

In the late 1930s, Georg Lukacs argued that the biographical novel could never rise to the level of a legitimate historical novel, because the focus on “the biography of the hero” leads authors to overlook or misrepresent significant historical events and truths, and thus “reveals the historical weakness of the biographical form of the novel.”  With just a few exceptions, American novelists subscribed to Lukacs’ view, that is, until 1987, when Bruce Duffy published The World As I Found It, a novel which features characters such as Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell, D.H. Lawrence, and G.E. Moore.  After Duffy’s The World As I Found It, there was a veritable explosion of biographical novels, such as Jay Parini’s The Last Station (1990), a multi-perspective narrative account of Leo Tolstoy’s last year; Irvin D. Yalom’s When Nietzsche Wept (1992), an imaginative work featuring philosophical and psychological debates between Josef Breuer and Nietzsche; David Mamet’s The Old Religion (1997), a stream-of-consciousness narrative of Leo Frank coming to terms with his wrongful imprisonment for the rape and murder of a young white Southern factory girl; Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (1998), a work that alternately dramatizes Virginia Woolf’s life and references her novel Mrs. Dalloway in order to illuminate the stories of women in the 1950s and the 1990s; M. Allen Cunningham’s Lost Son (2008), a novelization of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetic development through his relationship with Auguste Rodin and Lou Andreas-Salomé; Parini’s The Passages of H.M. (2010), an expansive narrative of Herman Melville’s struggles as an unacknowledged writer and a closeted homosexual; and Duffy’s Disaster Was My God (2011), a comprehensive picture of Arthur Rimbaud’s tumultuous and contradictory life as first a poet and then a gun-runner.  How are we to account for this wave of biographical novels?  What intellectual forces gave birth to this aesthetic form?  What role does this novel play in illuminating history?  And how does it differ from the traditional historical novel?  These are questions that I intend to answer over the next few years as I work on a three-book project about the American biographical novel. 

The first project is a Conversations with Jay Parini book, a collection of Parini’s interviews that will be coming out next year.  The second project will be a collection of interviews with prominent novelists about the aesthetic form of and the usages of history in the biographical novel.  The final project will be a monograph about the American biographical novel. 

The Modernist God State by Michael Lackey is now available to buy. You can read an exclusive digital preview of the book by clicking on the preview button to the left.

Jenny Tighe