Modernism in European drama

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Kevin J.H. Dettmar

The literary world has in the past two decades celebrated the centenaries of Joyce, Eliot, and Pound, the three pillars of Anglo-American modernism. Only now, Kevin J.H. Dettmar contends, are we starting to appreciate "what was apparent to the Modernists all along - that the monuments of High Modernism already contained within them the seeds of their own de(con)struction." The contributors to Rereading the New: A Backward Glance at Modernism argue that we are in the midst of a critical paradigm shift. First literary critics greeted the birth of modernism with outrage, decrying its anarchy; then the New Critics sought to control it with interpretation. Today, critics are beginning to rediscover modernism's inherent anarchy, this time from the postmodernist perspective. The result is the emergence of a new way of reading - and writing about - modernism. The book collects essays by established scholars as well as fresh new voices that provide a variety of perspectives on modernism. The first section, "Inventing Modernism," shows how modernist writers worked together to craft a coherent identity; the second, "Modernist Aesthetics," critiques Lyotard and other theorists on the assumptions underlying modernist texts. In "Modernism and Mass Culture," we see how Stein, Lawrence, and Eliot reacted to a burgeoning mass culture, while "Rereading the New" provides postmodernist readings of Conrad, Woolf, and Djuna Barnes, as well as Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.

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Elena Russo

This book examines three first-person novels that narrate spectacular failures of self-representation. In an innovative move, the author grounds these failures in the narrators' inability to move beyond Empiricist notions of correspondence between private, nonverbal experience and public expression, an inability that confines them to various forms of solipsism. Russo contends that such Empiricist notions still inform contemporary French novels and criticism. She deftly shows that current forms of linguistic skepticism favored by Blanchot, Sartre, Barthes, and Derrida are in fact the very product of the Empiricist notion of truth these authors claim to have rejected. Instead, she argues for the social and contextual dimension of language and against the illusion of authenticity on which these critics still rely. Her readings recast the debates surrounding postmodernism by placing them in a much-needed historical context. Through a series of lively close readings of Prevost's Histoire d'une Grecque moderne, Constant's Adolphe, and Des Forets's Le Bavard, Russo establishes the continuous legacy of Empiricism across three centuries. Prevost pins his narrator's interpretive difficulties on an inability to know and categorize Oriental reality, Constant grounds his critique of language on the same ethical and political principles that underlie his liberalism, while Des Forets's extreme solipsism pitches him against the Sartrean notion of engagement.

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Christopher Palmer

"Philip K. Dick: Exhilaration and Terror of the Postmodern examines a wide range of Dick's work, including his short stories and posthumously published realist novels. Christopher Palmer analyses the puzzling and dazzling effects of Dick's fiction, and argues that at its heart is a clash between exhilarating possibilities of transformation, and a frightening lack of ethical certainties. Dick's work is seen as the inscription of his own historical predicament, the clash between humanism and postmodernism being played out in the complex forms of the fiction. The problem is never resolved, but Dick's ways of imagining it become steadily more ingenious and challenging."--BOOK JACKET.

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Phyllis T. Dircks

"This book covers the canon of playwright Edward Albee. Comprehensive entries detail each of the plays and major characters, and all works are cross referenced with important themes. Other features include biographical information focusing on Albee's artistic beliefs, his understanding of the playwright's responsibility, the importance of music in drama, and the technical craft of writing plays"--Provided by publisher.