Please join us for the first Easter Term seminar in the series:
New Modernist Studies
Dr Peter Howarth
Queen Mary, University of London
***
Thursday, 26th April 2012
5:00 – 6:30 pm
Department of English Studies, Hallgarth House Seminar
Room
***
ABSTRACT
Recent surveys of the 'New Modernist
Studies' all confirm that one of its major trends is to attack the usual
oppositions between an autonomous, formally distinctive modernist work and the
cultural setting of modernity. The 'New Modernist Studies' has repeatedly shown
how so-called rebellious works depend on the market and the mass media, and that
the dynamics which used to privilege the work against its 'background' are
actually visible in the general field of modern life. In this light, modernist
form no longer looks as distinctive or interesting as it once did. Frank
Kermode's Romantic Image (1957) was one of the first books to turn against New
Critical accounts of modernist form, by arguing that the would-be autonomous
modernist 'image' was subtly complicit with the alienated cultural conditions it
was supposedly resisting. But the way in which his argument is framed suggests
that a residue of organicist thinking is also present in the anti-formalism of
the 'New Modernist Studies'. This paper will suggest that Kermode's theatrical
model offers an alternative to both; the idea that modernist form might be
making art from the cultural conditions of its mediation, circulation and
distribution.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Peter Howarth is Senior Lecturer at
Queen Mary, University of London. He is the author of British Poetry in the Age
of Modernism (CUP, 2005) and The Cambridge Introduction to Modernist Poetry
(2011).
9 May: Professor Rachel Bowlby
(UCL)
23 May: John Clegg (Durham University) and
Kaja Marczewska (Durham University)
30 May: Professor Jonathan Hart (Durham
University)
6 June: Dr Sarah Wasson (Edinburgh Napier
University)
For more information, find us on facebook, follow us on Twitter
(@inventionsSem) or check our blog:
inventionsofthetext.blogspot.com
