Modernism And Exile

Studying exile and utopia as correlated cultural phenomena, and offering a wealth of historical examples with emphasis on the modern period, Spariosu argues that modernism itself can be seen as a product of an acute exilic consciousness that often seeks to generate utopian social schemes to compensate for its exacerbated sense of existential loss.

The Exile of George Grosz examines the life and work of George Grosz after he fled Nazi Germany in 1933 and sought to re-establish his artistic career under changed circumstances in New York. It situates GroszÕs American production specifically within the cultural politics of German exile in the United States during World War II and the Cold War. Basing her study on extensive archival research and using theories of exile, migrancy, and cosmopolitanism, McCloskey explores how GroszÕs art illuminates the changing cultural politics of exile. She also foregrounds the terms on which German exile helped to define both the limits and possibilities of American visions of a one world order under U.S. leadership that emerged during this period. This book presents GroszÕs work in relation to that of other prominent figures of the German emigration, including Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht, as the exile community agonized over its measure of responsibility for the Nazi atrocity German culture had become and debated what GermanyÕs postwar future should be. Important too at this time were GroszÕs interactions with the American art world. His historical allegories, self-portraits, and other works are analyzed as confrontational responses to the New York art worldÕs consolidating consensus around Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism during and after World War II. This nuanced study recounts the controversial repatriation of GroszÕs work, and the exile culture of which it was a part, to a German nation perilously divided between East and West in the Cold War.

In this book, Octavio R. González revisits the theme of alienation in the twentieth-century novel, identifying an alternative aesthetic centered on the experience of double exile, or marginalization from both majority and home culture. This misfit modernist aesthetic decenters the mainstream narrative of modernism—which explores alienation from a universal and existential perspective—by showing how a group of authors leveraged modernist narrative to explore minoritarian experiences of cultural nonbelonging. Tying the biography of a particular author to a close reading of one of that author’s major works, González considers in turn Nella Larsen’s Quicksand, Wallace Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry, Jean Rhys’s Quartet, and Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man. Each of these novels explores conditions of maladjustment within one of three burgeoning cultural movements that sought representation in the greater public sphere: the New Negro movement during the Harlem Renaissance, the 1920s Paris expatriate scene, and the queer expatriate scene in Los Angeles before Stonewall. Using a methodological approach that resists institutional taxonomies of knowledge, González shows that this double exile speaks profoundly through largely autobiographical narratives and that the novels’ protagonists challenge the compromises made by these minoritarian groups out of an urge to assimilate into dominant social norms and values. Original and innovative, Misfit Modernism is a vital contribution to conversations about modernism in the contexts of sexual identity, nationality, and race. Moving beyond the debates over the intellectual legacies of intersectionality and queer theory, González shows us new ways to think about exclusion.

In the 1930s and '40s, LA became a cultural sanctuary for a distinguished group of German artists and intellectuals - including Thomas Mann, Theodor W. Adorno, Bertolt Brecht, Fritz Lang, and Arnold Schoenberg - who were fleeing Nazi Germany. This book is the first to examine their work and lives.

Examining hardboiled fiction through Flaubert, New Yorker cartoons through modernist painting, and Bette Davis through Hegel and Marx, Transatlantic Aliens challenges and changes the way we understand modernism's place in midcentury American culture.

Reading on the Edge explores the notion of multiple cultural identity and exile in the work of Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and James Baldwin. Focusing on the cultural politics of modernism through the prism of cultural theory, the book reconceives each author's work while at the same time redrawing modernism's traditionally Eurocentric disciplinary boundaries. The book therefore has wide implications for our understanding of modernism and the modernist canon.

"A remarkable study. . . . The first book of its kind and essential for any future discussion of modernism and its embattled boundaries."—Françoise Meltzer, author of Hot Property "One of the very best books of literary criticism, literary scholarship, or literary theory I have ever read. . . . It illuminates interrelationships between historical studies and theory in any humanist discipline."—Menachim Brinker, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem "A milestone in the study of modern Jewish literature. It seriously engages and recontextualizes all the scholarship that came before, and by so doing sets it on a new course: applying a rigorous definition of modernism yet insistent upon methodological diversity; deeply grounded in Hebrew culture yet unabashedly diaspora-centered. This is not a book that readers will take lightly."—David G. Roskies, author of Against the Apocalypse