Vom Annex zum Atelier

Author(s):  
Meike G. Werner

Abstract In 1960, two competing anthologies of modern poetry were published in an attempt to renew and internationalize German poetry: Günther Steinbrinker’s Panorama moderner Lyrik and Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s Museum der modernen Poesie. This essay argues that the success of Museum over Panorama was based on Enzensberger’s comparative approach to modernist poetry in the first half of the twentieth century as a “chrestomathy” (a textbook) for a “world language of poetry”. This chrestomathy also provided the blueprint for his own German-language poems, which he published the same year in a collection titled Landessprache.

2016 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-47
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Squires

Modernism is usually defined historically as the composite movement at the beginning of the twentieth century which led to a radical break with what had gone before in literature and the other arts. Given the problems of the continuing use of the concept to cover subsequent writing, this essay proposes an alternative, philosophical perspective which explores the impact of rationalism (what we bring to the world) on the prevailing empiricism (what we take from the world) of modern poetry, which leads to a concern with consciousness rather than experience. This in turn involves a re-conceptualisation of the lyric or narrative I, of language itself as a phenomenon, and of other poetic themes such as nature, culture, history, and art. Against the background of the dominant empiricism of modern Irish poetry as presented in Crotty's anthology, the essay explores these ideas in terms of a small number of poets who may be considered modernist in various ways. This does not rule out modernist elements in some other poets and the initial distinction between a poetics of experience and one of consciousness is better seen as a multi-dimensional spectrum that requires further, more detailed analysis than is possible here.


2010 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 267-290 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Currell

Showing how ‘modernist cosmopolitanism’ coexisted with an anti-cosmopolitan municipal control this essay looks at the way utopian ideals about breeding better humans entered into new town and city planning in the early twentieth century. An experiment in eugenic garden city planning which took place in Strasbourg, France, in the 1920s provided a model for modern planning that was keenly observed by the international eugenics movement as well as city planners. The comparative approach taken in this essay shows that while core beliefs about degeneration and the importance of eugenics to improve the national ‘body’ were often transnational and cosmopolitan, attempts to implement eugenic beliefs on a practical level were shaped by national and regional circumstances that were on many levels anti-cosmopolitan. As a way of assuaging the tensions between the local and the global, as well as the traditional with the modern, this unique and now forgotten experiment in eugenic city planning aimed to show that both preservation and progress could succeed at the same time.


2019 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-259
Author(s):  
Joseph Acquisto

This essay examines a polemic between two Baudelaire critics of the 1930s, Jean Cassou and Benjamin Fondane, which centered on the relationship of poetry to progressive politics and metaphysics. I argue that a return to Baudelaire's poetry can yield insight into what seems like an impasse in Cassou and Fondane. Baudelaire provides the possibility of realigning metaphysics and politics so that poetry has the potential to become the space in which we can begin to think the two of them together, as opposed to seeing them in unresolvable tension. Or rather, the tension that Baudelaire animates between the two allows us a new way of thinking about the role of esthetics in moments of political crisis. We can in some ways see Baudelaire as responding, avant la lettre, to two of his early twentieth-century readers who correctly perceived his work as the space that breathes a new urgency into the questions of how modern poetry relates to the world from which it springs and in which it intervenes.


2021 ◽  
Vol 71 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-82
Author(s):  
Angel Adams Parham

This essay places Louisiana Creole culture and identity into comparative perspective with the evolution of Creole identity and créolité in Haiti and the French Antilles. While Haitian and Antillean intellectuals wrestled at the crossroads of French and African culture over the course of the twentieth century, the leading intellectuals of Louisiana’s Creole society were more likely to embrace French language and culture than to work self-consciously to integrate African influences into their understanding of themselves. A similar kind of cultural reckoning did not occur among Louisiana Creole writers and intellectuals until late in the twentieth century. The essay uses a comparative approach to examine the factors that have led to Louisiana taking such a different approach to Creole identity and cultural expression and considers how the community may evolve in the years to come. Cet essai situe la culture et l’identité créoles louisianaises dans une perspective comparée avec l’évolution de l’identité créole et de la créolité en Haïti et aux Antilles françaises. Lorsque des intellectuels haïtiens et antillais travaillaient au carrefour des cultures française et africaine au parcours du vingtième siècle, les intellectuels du chef de file de la société créole de la Louisiane tendaient plus à engager la langue et la culture françaises que de chercher à intégrer consciemment les influences africaines dans leur conception identitaire. Ce n’est que plus tard dans le vingtième siècle que nous témoignons d’une reconnaissance culturelle similaire chez les écrivains et les intellectuels de la Louisiane créole. Cet essai aborde de manière comparée les éléments qui contribuaient à une approche si différente à l’identité et l’expression culturelle créoles en Louisiane et considère comment la communauté pourraient évoluer à l’avenir.


Author(s):  
Claudia Sadowski-Smith

This chapter explores Sana Krasikov’s short story collection One More Year (2008) and Anya Ulinich’s novel Petropolis (2007) in order to develop a comparative approach to representations of irregular and unauthorized migration, a form of movement that has been largely identified with migrants from Mexico and Central America. The fiction by Krasikov and Ulinich represents ethnically and racially diverse protagonists from Russia, Georgia, and Uzbekistan, who arrive in the United States on nonimmigrant visas and become irregular or undocumented. These two works move beyond the themes of assimilation and family migration that dominated twentieth-century cultural productions by eastern European immigrants of Jewish descent, such as Mary Antin, Abraham Cahan, and Anzia Yezierska. Their work laid the foundation for a literature of assimilation to a middle-class white US racial identity that became fully available to European immigrants by the mid-twentieth century. The fiction by Krasikov and Ulinich emphasizes post-Soviet characters’ experiences of diminished access to the US labor market, residency, and citizenship rights, and thus positions itself in the larger context of contemporary US immigrant writing.


Labyrinth ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 156
Author(s):  
Hamad Al-Rayes

In this paper, I attempt to read the poetic principle behind the Tammuzi movement of modern Arabic poetry through the lens of speculative poetics. While speculative-poetic accounts of modern poetry, such as those provided by Allen Grossman, blazed new paths connecting poetry to personhood in modernity, their application to the development of modern poetry outside of Europe remains limited by their self-avowed focus on European history. This paper will outline a critical corrective to speculative poetics which, I argue, can be of value in extending its domain of application to Arabic projects of poetic modernity, particularly the two tendencies of "free verse" and "commitment" poetry that emerged out of the Tammuzi movement. 


Author(s):  
Patrick Collier

This chapter meditates upon the role of the poetry anthology and its claims on literary value at the turn of the twentieth century. By sorting the output of poets, the anthology might seem to stabilize literary value; but like all print artefacts in the period, the anthology was overproduced, and therefore could also be seen as positing multiple, competing canons. The anthology form was in flux in these years as well, with such familiar conventions as tables of contents and the grouping of poems by poet not having emerged as norms. In this context, the textual materiality of anthologies became a complex system for intervening in debates about value. The chapter revisits the most popular anthologies of the era—Palgrave’s Golden Treasury and the Oxford Book of English Verse—to sketch out the emerging codes of the anthology form. Poet and publisher Harold Monro, the chapter argues, pursued a more egalitarian textual politics than these popular anthologies, particularly his underappreciated 1929 anthology, Twentieth Century Poetry. The chapter reads the content and the metatexts of Twentieth Century Poetry as asserting a catholic vision of modern poetry as vital to everyday life.


2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-133 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Olszynko-Gryn ◽  
Caroline Rusterholz

This special issue adopts a comparative approach to the politics of reproduction in twentieth-century France and Britain. The articles investigate the flow of information, practices and tools across national boundaries and between groups of experts, activists and laypeople. Empirically grounded in medical, news media and feminist sources, as well as ethnographic fieldwork, they reveal the practical similarities that existed between countries with officially different political regimes as well as local differences within the two countries. Taken as a whole, the special issue shows that the border between France and Britain was more porous than is typically apparent from nationally-focused studies: ideas, people and devices travelled in both directions; communication strategies were always able to evade the rule of law; contraceptive practices were surprisingly similar in both countries; and religion loomed large in debates on both sides of the channel.


2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 568-589
Author(s):  
Hannah Roche

By the end of the twentieth century, Amy Lowell's poetry had been all but erased from modernism, with her name resurfacing only in relation to her dealings with Ezra Pound, her distant kinship with Robert Lowell, or her correspondence with D. H. Lawrence. The tale of how Pound rejected Lowell's Imagism, rebranding his movement as Vorticism and spurning the ‘Amygism’ of Lowell's Some Imagist Poets anthologies (1915–1917), has become something of a modernist myth. Recent critics have begun the project of re-evaluating and ultimately reinstating Lowell, but the extent of her contribution to modernist poetry and poetics – and her influence on other, more popular, twentieth-century writers – has not yet been acknowledged. This essay encourages readers to see the apparitional Lowell, both in the male-dominated world of modernism and in celebrated works by writers that followed. By drawing attention to the weighty impact of Lowell's poetry on Lawrence – and, later, on Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath – I provide compelling reasons not only to revisit Lowell but also to reassess those texts that are haunted by her presence.


Author(s):  
Hans Hummer

During the twentieth century historians and structural anthropologists developed kinship into a method for laying bare the mechanisms of history and human sociality. French Annaliste historians such as Marc Bloch and George Duby promoted kinship as a natural and primordial social structure, its vitality fluctuating in inverse proportion to the strength of institutions and the state. At the same time, German-language scholars refined kinship into a method for investigating the medieval aristocracy. This chapter examines the prosopographical research program advocated by Karl Schmid and Gerd Tellenbach, its intersection with the French sociological tradition, and the belief by the 1970s that the study of kinship could reveal the elemental processes of history. It concludes with the rebellion against structuralism and critiques the biogenetic and genealogical presuppositions that underpin the study of medieval kinship.


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