Conversations On Modernism

"This volume engages with pertinent questions that the literary historians, theorists, young scholars and academics have asked : How indigenous was literary modernism in India? Did alien ideas fill the vacuum created by a kind of disinheritance of tradition? Did the Partition of the subcontinent trigger off a cultural collapse and a creative resurgence simultaneously? The emergence of the ʻnew storyʼ called for an understanding of the specific socio-political context within which literary modernism flourished. The dynamics of the new consciousness, post the progressive writers, is the focus of these discussions. Sukrita Paul Kumar's conversations with some major Hindi-Urdu writers, critics and philosophers in this book have the potential to build larger debates on modernism in Indian literature, specially with reference to Hindi and Urdu, / The conversations with some eminent Indian writers, critics and philosophers in this volume are exploratory, evocative and pertinent. Inspired by the rich body of fiction that emerged as ʻʻNai Kahaniʼʼ in Hindi and ʻʻNaya Afsanaʼʼ in Urdu in the post-Independence India, many intriguing questions on literary modernism in India are raised and discussed here. These dialogues map the new dynamics of consciousness robustly found in the stories of the iconic Hindi and Urdu writers who appeared soon after the formidable generation of avowedly progressive writers such as Krishan Chander, Yashpal and Rajendra Singh Bedi. These insightful conversations aim at creating a better understanding of literary modernism in India, specially with reference to Hindi and Urdu literature. In Conversations on Modernism, Sukrita Paul Kumar, literary critic and poet, is in dialogue with : • Qurratulain Hyder • Nirmal Verma • Jeelani Bano • Joginder Paul • Namwar Singh • Muhammad Ali Siddiqui • Wazir Agha • Kathleen Raine • Margaret Chatterjee • M. M. Agrawal • Ramesh Chandra Shah • Krishna Sobti "

Uncovers the diversified role dialogue played in early twentieth-century fiction.

This study imagines modernism as a series of conversations and locates Edith Wharton s voice in those debates.

Technology, Time, and the Conversations of Modernity takes as its impetus the idea that technology is an embodiment of our uneasiness with finitude. Lorenzo Simpson argues that technology has succeeded in granting our wish to domesticate time. He shows how this attitude affects our understanding of the meaning of action and our ability to discern meaning in our lives.

Introducing readers to a new theory of 'responsible reading', this book presents a range of perspectives on the contemporary relationship between modernism and theory. Emerging from a collaborative process of comment and response, it promotes conversation among disparate views under a shared commitment to responsible reading practices. An international range of contributors question the interplay between modernism and theory today and provide new ways of understanding the relationship between the two, and the links to emerging concerns such as the Anthropocene, decolonization, the post-human, and eco-theory. Promoting responsible reading as a practice that reads generously and engages constructively, even where disagreement is inevitable, this book articulates a mode of ethical reading that is fundamental to ongoing debates about strength and weakness, paranoia and reparation, and critique and affect.

Modernism à la Mode argues that fashion describes why and how literary modernism matters in its own historical moment and ours. Bringing together texts, textiles, and theories of dress, Elizabeth Sheehan shows that writers, including Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, W.E.B. Du Bois, Nella Larsen, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, turned to fashion to understand what their own stylized works could do in the context of global capital, systemic violence, and social transformation. Modernists engage with fashion as a mood, a set of material objects, and a target of critique, and, in doing so, anticipate and address contemporary debates centered on the uses of literature and literary criticism amidst the supposed crisis in the humanities. A modernist affect with a purpose, no less. By engaging modernism à la mode—that is, contingently, contextually, and in light of contemporary concerns—this book offers an alternative to the often-untenable distinctions between strong or weak, suspicious or reparative, and politically activist or quietist approaches to literature, which frame current debates about literary methodology. As fashion helps us to describe what modernist texts do, it enables us to do more with modernism as a form of inquiry, perception, and critique. Fashion and modernism are interwoven forms of inquiry, perception, and critique, writes Sheehan. It is fashion that puts the work of early twentieth-century writers in conversation with twenty-first century theories of emotion, materiality, animality, beauty, and history.

Winner of the Modernist Studies Association (MSA) Edited Volume Prize Bringing together works by writers from sub-Saharan Africa, Turkey, central Europe, the Muslim world, Asia, South America and Australia – many translated into English for the first time – this is the first collection of statements on modernism by writers, artists and practitioners from across the world. Annotated throughout, the texts are supported by critical essays from leading modernist scholars exploring major issues in the contemporary study of global modernism. Global Modernists on Modernism is an essential resource for students and scholars of modernism and world literature and one that opens up a dazzling new array of perspectives on the field.

Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia accompanies an exhibition of the same title examining the art, architecture and design of the counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s. The catalogue surveys the radical experiments that challenged societal and professional norms while proposing new kinds of technological, ecological and political utopia. It includes the counter design proposals of Victor Papanek and the anti-design polemics of Global Tools; the radical architectural visions of Archigram, Superstudio, Haus Rucker Co and ONYX; the media-based installations of Ken Isaacs, Joan Hills and Mark Boyle and Helio Oiticica and Neville D'Almeida; the experimental films of Jordan Belson, Bruce Conner and John Whitney; posters and prints by Emory Douglas, Corita Kent and Victor Moscoso; documentation of performances staged by the Diggers and the Cockettes; publications such as Oz Magazine and The Whole Earth Catalog and books by Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller; and much, much more. While the turbulent social history of the 1960s is well known, its cultural production remains comparatively under-examined. In this substantial volume, scholars explore a range of practices such as radical architectural and anti-design movements emerging in Europe and North America; the print revolution in the experimental graphic design of books, posters and magazines; and new forms of cultural practice that merged street theater and radical politics. Through a profusion of illustrations, interviews with figures including Gerd Stern and Michael Callahan of USCO, Gunther Zamp Kelp of Haus Rucker Co, Ken Isaacs, Ron Williams and Woody Rainey of ONYX, Franco Raggi of Global Tools, Tony Martin, Clark Richert and Richard Kallweit of Drop City, and new scholarly writings, this book explores the hybrid conjunction of the countercultural ethos and the modernist desire to fuse art and life.