Modernism and Close Reading

252 Pages·2020·1.162 MB·English

by  David James

Modernism and Close Reading

Modernism and
Close Reading
Edited by
DAVID JAMES
1
1
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Acknowledgements
This collection has been a long time in the making and I owe a debt of grati-
tude to my infinitely patient contributors. It has been a pleasure to work with
such brilliant, imaginative scholars. Somehow, they were able to keep this
volume in view as the years went by, despite the many other, doubtlessly more
pressing commitments that came their way. Thanks to the diversity and con-
viction of their perspectives, they have instantiated what was always my hope
for this collection: a shared enthusiasm for taking another look at close
reading—its histories, its possibilities, its risks—without arriving at any kind
of neat, dutifully comprehensive, self-reassuring consensus.
Such a hope, of course, contains hazards of its own, particularly with
respect to coherence. And for that reason, I’m deeply grateful to the readers
for Oxford University Press, who offered both practical and conceptual advice
about how I might go about organizing this collection. Their combined
re com menda tions proved invaluable, given the many directions in which this
book could have moved—and given too the fact that relations in modernist
studies between field and method remain in perpetual motion. At the Press
itself, Jacqueline Norton has been a paragon of patience and I thank her for
entertaining this project in the first place: without her intellectual investment
in the kind of conversation I aimed to advance here, this collection would
never have materialized. The supremely efficient and supportive production
team at OUP have offered a great deal of bespoke guidance along the way.
I would finally like to acknowledge the privilege of those many invigorating
dialogues about reading for form and about reading literary modernism
(including how we feel about the process of doing both) that I’ve had over the
years with Heather Love. From the outset of conceiving this book, I had a
shortlist of one for the person to write its Afterword. With characteristic
energy, Heather eagerly embraced the labour of that commission but sadly
illness intervened. While her contribution is irreplaceable, her insights are
everywhere audible in the coming pages—pages that, I hope, complement the
spirit in which Heather has so generously facilitated conversations, provoca-
tions, and productive disagreements about the condition of critical reading.

Notes on Contributors
Derek Attridge is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of York. His inter-
ests centre on the language of literature, but radiate in many different directions. His
work in South African literary culture includes the Cambridge History of South African
Literature (co-edited with David Attwell, Cambridge University Press, 2012) and
J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading (University of Chicago Press, 2004). His
renowned work in literary theory includes The Singularity of Literature (Routledge,
2004) and The Work of Literature (Oxford University Press, 2015). He is also well
known as a Joyce scholar, having published several works on this author and served
for many years as a Trustee of the International James Joyce Foundation. Another
interest is poetry and poetic form, reflected most recently in Moving Words: Forms of
English Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2013) and The Experience of Poetry (Oxford
University Press, 2019). He has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation,
the Camargo Foundation, and the Leverhulme Trust, and is a Fellow of the British
Academy.
Joseph Brooker is Reader in Modern Literature at Birkbeck, University of London.
His books include Joyce’s Critics: Transitions in Reading and Culture (University of
Wisconsin Press, 2004), Flann O’Brien (Northcote House, 2005), Literature of the
1980s: After the Watershed (Edinburgh University Press, 2010), and most recently
Jonathan Lethem and the Galaxy of Writing (Bloomsbury, 2020).
Rachel Sagner Buurma is Associate Professor of English Literature at Swarthmore
College. She is co-author, with Laura Heffernan, of a new disciplinary history of
English titled The Teaching Archive, which will be published by the University of
Chicago Press in 2020. Excerpts and extensions of this book have appeared in New
Literary History, Representations, PMLA, Victorian Studies, and The Chronicle of
Higher Education. Rachel’s recent work on the history of knowledge organization has
appeared in Book Parts, ed. Dennis Duncan and Adam Smyth (Oxford University
Press, 2019), and in PMLA.
Melba Cuddy-Keane is Emerita Professor, Department of English, University of
Toronto. Her publications include Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual, and the Public
Sphere (Cambridge University Press, 2003), the Harcourt annotated edition of Woolf’s
Between the Acts (2008), and, co-authored with Adam Hammond and Alexandra Peat,
Modernism: Keywords (Wiley-Blackwell, 2014). In addition to numerous book chap-
ters and articles on Virginia Woolf and on modernism (globalism, ethics, periodiza-
tion), she has published extensively on narrative and cognition, including essays on
x Notes on Contributors
auditory perception, navigation and neuroscience, embodied cognition, mind-
wandering and mindfulness, distributed cognition, and somatic dance.
Hannah Freed-Thall is Assistant Professor of French Literature, Thought, and Culture
at New York University. She is the author of Spoiled Distinctions: Aesthetics and the
Ordinary in French Modernism (Oxford University Press, 2015), which was awarded
the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Studies and the
Modernist Studies Association Prize for a First Book. Her second book, The Beach
Effect, is under contract with Columbia University Press.
Laura Heffernan is Associate Professor of English at the University of North Florida
in Jacksonville. She is co-author, with Rachel Sagner Buurma, of a new disciplinary
history of English titled The Teaching Archive (University of Chicago Press, 2020).
Excerpts and extensions of this book have appeared in New Literary History,
Representations, PMLA, Victorian Studies, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. Her
next book, Unliterary Critics: The Study of Modern Literature Before Modernism, will
be published by Columbia University Press.
Peter Howarth is Senior Lecturer in Modern Literature at Queen Mary, University of
London. His books include British Poetry in the Age of Modernism (Cambridge
University Press, 2006), The Cambridge Introduction to Modernist Poetry (Cambridge
University Press, 2011), and The Cambridge Companion to the Sonnet, co-edited with
A. D. Cousins (Cambridge University Press, 2011). He is currently completing a book
about poetry and performance after World War II.
Jesse Matz is William P. Rice Professor of English at Kenyon College, Ohio. He is the
author of Literary Impressionism and Modernist Aesthetics (Cambridge University
Press, 2001), Lasting Impressions: The Legacies of Impressionism in Contemporary
Culture (Columbia University Press, 2016), and, most recently, Modernist Time
Ecology (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019). He is series editor of Frontiers of
Narrative at the University of Nebraska Press and a member of the editorial commit-
tee for Modernism/modernity.
Jean-Michel Rabaté is a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the
University of Pennsylvania. One of the founders and curators of Slought Foundation
in Philadelphia (https://slought.org), he is a managing editor of the Journal of Modern
Literature. Since 2008, he has been a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences. Rabaté has authored or edited forty books on modernism, psychoanalysis,
contemporary art, philosophy, and writers like Beckett, Pound, and Joyce. Recent
books include A Handbook of Modernism Studies (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), Think, Pig!:
Beckett at the Limit of the Human (Fordham University Press, 2016), The Pathos of
Distance: Affects of the Moderns (Bloomsbury, 2016), and After Derrida: Literature,
Theory and Criticism in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge University Press, 2018).
Vidyan Ravinthiran is Associate Professor of English at Harvard University. His first
monograph, Elizabeth Bishop’s Prosaic (Bucknell University Press, 2015), won the
Notes on Contributors xi
University English First Book Prize and the Warren-Brooks Award for Outstanding
Literary Criticism. Two books of verse have been shortlisted for several prizes, includ-
ing the Forward and the T. S. Eliot; The Million-Petalled Flower of Being Here
(Bloodaxe, 2019) won a Northern Writers Award, a PBS Recommendation, and was a
Financial Times Book of the Year. An award-winning literary journalist, he helps
organize the Ledbury Emerging Critics program, which aims at increasing racial
diversity in arts review-culture. His next critical monograph, Spontaneity and Form, is
forthcoming with Oxford University Press.
Paige Reynolds, Professor of English at the College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA,
has published widely on the subjects of modernism, drama and performance, and
modern and contemporary Irish literature. She is the author of Modernism, Drama,
and the Audience for Irish Spectacle (Cambridge University Press, 2007), and editor of
Modernist Afterlives in Irish Literature and Culture (Anthem Press, 2016). Most
recently, she has edited The New Irish Studies: Twenty-First-Century Critical Revisions
and (with Eric Falci) Irish Literature in Transition, Vol. 6: 1980–2020, both published
by Cambridge University Press.
Max Saunders is Interdisciplinary Professor of Modern Literature and Culture at the
University of Birmingham, before which he was Professor of English and Co-Director
of the Centre for Life-Writing Research at King’s College London, where he was
Director of the Arts and Humanities Research Institute (2012–18). He is the author
of Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, 2 vols. (Oxford University Press, 1996) and Self
Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature
(Oxford University Press, 2010). He has edited five volumes of Ford’s writing, includ-
ing an annotated critical edition of Some Do Not . . . (Carcanet, 2010). In 2013 he was
awarded an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council for a five-year col-
laborative project on digital life writing called ‘Ego-Media’. His latest book is Imagined
Futures (Oxford University Press, 2019), a study of the To-Day and To-Morrow book
series.