«EVERYDAY LIFE» IN THE WORKS BY W. C. WILLIAMS AND J. JARMUSCH: FROM POETRY TO POETICS. INTERMEDIALITY

The article examines William Carlos Williams’ works that focus on the everyday, mundanity, and poetize daily life which was common in modernist literature. In our time, Williams’ poetry inspired director Jim Jarmusch to make a poetic film «Paterson» about everyday life and the poetic potential of ordinary routine life. The director reinterprets Williams’ ideas and makes a complex, postmodern film about everyday life in the small town Paterson, where he depicts the routine life of his main character, a bus driver. This life, despite its external simplicity and triviality, encourages the hero named Paterson to read modernist literature and write his own poems whose themes and images are intertwined with the work of the well-known Paterson resident, William Carlos Williams himself. In particular, we examine the intermedial interaction of Williams’ works («Paterson» and «This Is Just To Say») with the film and the indirect transition of one sign system into another. In addition to the more or less direct and explicit influence of literature on film through allusions or quotations from the work of the American modernist poet, Williams’ poetry becomes a precedent for the stylized poems of the film’s main character, written by a contemporary American poet Ron Padgett («Another One», «The Run», «Love Poem») and Jarmusch himself («Water Falls»). In this article, we also compare Padgett’s and Jarmusch’s poetry with some of Williams’ poems («Blizzard», «To A Poor Old Woman»), to demonstrate the similarity of motifs and imagery. Thedirector’s work can be interpreted as a manifestation of the idea of looking for poetry in the everyday, or that everyday life is already poetry. Jarmusch’s film about everyday life provides a possible answer to the question of literary anthropology «why is literature as a medium important in people’s lives» – creativity is the very meaning of life. This penetration of one art form (poetry) into another (cinema) gives grounds for speaking about the relevance of the themes of modernist poetry in the context of modernity and about the meaning and value of simplicity for creativity in general.

The Multiple Simultaneous Temporalities of Global Modernity: Pamuk, Tanpınar, Proust

This essay proposes the theory of multiple simultaneous temporalities as a constitutive feature of global modernism. It spotlights varieties of heterogeneous time—outside but alongside the homogeneous empty time of clocks and calendars—in modernist literature. These overlapping temporalities replace the linear succession of past, present, and future with a principle of nonteleology. The multiple simultaneous temporalities of these works analogize the multiple simultaneous temporalities of global modernity. Thus the temporalization of difference that separates developed nations from developing ones is refuted by the pluralization of temporality. The simultaneity of these temporalities denies, a priori, the ideology of progress. The essay makes this point through a series of interlaced epiphanies about time, across time, staging an East-West comparison that reflects the creole nature of global modernity. It does so via readings of interconnected novels by Orhan Pamuk, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, and Marcel Proust.

The Pressure of Eurochronology and the Romanian Rural Prose

The paper looks at the Romanian relationship between modernism and rural imagination in the Romanian 20th century debates. As in other cases of semi-peripheral or emergent literatures (the general framework builds on contributions from Frederic Jameson, Pascale Casanova and Wai Chee Dimock), the hegemonical pressure of the Eurochronology has put an embargo on rural prose, excluding it from the projects of modernist literature. The study asserts that far from being a collateral symptom of modernity, rural imaginary is essential for understanding its contradictory mechanisms.

READING POVERTY IN MODERNIST LITERATURE: RIFFATERRIAN SEMIOTIC ANALYSIS ON T.S ELIOT'S MORNING AT THE WINDOW

The idea of poverty as the theme has been recurrently used in literature. However, it is rarely come across in Modernist Literature. Accordingly, this study examines poverty as the theme, which is also the main issue in a poem written by T.S. Eliot entitled Morning at the Window. To dive deep into the main issue of the poem, it uses a close-reading method. It focuses on how the text of the poem represents the main issue in which the poem tries to convey. To come into the results of the study, three aspects from Semiotics of Poetry by Michael Riffaterre are used, which are unsustainable expressions, heuristic and hermeneutic reading, and matrix. Analyzing these three aspects, the results show that the representation of poverty as the main issue is evidently stated. The diction in the poem successfully creates the images and set the tone that correlates with poverty.

GORICA MAJSTOROVIC. Global South Modernities: Modernist Literature and the Avant-Garde in Latin America. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2021. 154 pp.

Reseña de Global South Modernities: Modernist Literature and the Avant-Garde in Latin America de Gorica Majstorovic.

A Phone of One’s Own: Woolf, TikTok and the Aesthetic Evolution of Bisexuality

Whereas bisexuality, as it existed in modernity, has been described as a ‘floating signifier', one that was problematically conflated with gender and intersex bodies, the articulation of bisexuality is now experiencing a discursive resurgence in spaces and platforms online. Through a deliberately disparate comparison between Virginia Woolf’s modernist writing and the discussions of bisexuality on the video-sharing social networking service TikTok, this essay presents a reflective reassessment of how far bisexual representation in the popular imagination has progressed and by extension, evaluate extant limitations. To realize these ambitions, I compare the reception of sexology (the new science of sexuality) in ‘high’ modernist literature with a post-modern demographic whose bisexuality is articulated in the 2020s online via TikTok’s towards what I would demarcate as a post-queer theory user base. This essay is not intended as an overview of the advancements made in psychoanalytic institutions about bisexuality nor does it set out to comment on the refinement of bisexuality’s aestheticization through time. Instead, it uses these two temporally specific moments in the cultural zeitgeist to compare and contrast how differently two different demographics articulate bisexuality, both as a written mode in modernism and as a visual apparatus online. This is less a critique of bi-erasure, but an interrogation of why and how bisexual representation, as an aestheticized subjectivity that compromises romantic, spiritual, and erotic desires for bodies of all genders, continues to be problematically restrictive.

Mind, Body, and Race in Jessie Redmon Fauset’s Plum Bun

Working at the intersection of cognitive and critical race narratology, the essay examines the relationship between the embodied mind and the social construction of race in Jessie Redmon Fauset’s Plum Bun: A Novel Without a Moral (1928/2011). The essay argues that Fauset’s African American passing novel rejects the notion of a solely ‘inward turn’, which is commonly associated with modernist literature, in favor of a more dynamic understanding of embodied cognition that acknowledges the shaping force of race and racialization. Using a seemingly traditional omniscient narrator, Fauset not only draws attention to the failure of U. S. American racial hierarchies, but she also lays bare how race impacts both individual consciousness and social cognition.1

Where the Dialogue Ends: Problems of Reception of Russian Literature in China

The article is devoted to the phenomenon of the conflict of interpretations in the perception of the text by a foreign recipient. The study explores reasons for the difficulty of understanding unrealistic works in the Chinese readership and proposes a variant of improving the commentary as an intermediary text. The research is based on the methodological approaches and provisions of the theory of intercultural communication, discourse theory, receptive aesthetics and hermeneutics. As a result of the analysis of the judgments and assessments of Chinese students and specialists in Russian, we identified their main receptive difficulties: difficult understanding of the tropes, omission of allusions, lack of mastery of the language of a particular literary phenomenon. The reason for the latter is the absence of interpretive reading models, which have not been formed due to the long-term ignorance in China of Russian modernist literature. As a result, even today there are conflicts of interpretations, attempts to interpret an unrealistic text in a realistic paradigm. The outdated, ideologically «correct» intermediary texts should be replaced by a new type of commentary. Its model, proposed by the authors of this article, includes the following structural elements: information about the cultural and literary context; clarification of the semantics of words that are important for understanding the text; designation of national stereotypes that can lead to false interpretation and assessment of the text; step-by-step algorithm for working with text; list of references. Such a commentary will allow not only to remove lexical difficulties, but also to form interpretation skills

THE CHARACTER CONFRONTING THE AUTOR: TOWARD THE ISSUE OF AN UNDESCRIBDED METALITERARY PLOT

The article examines a specific metaliterary motif of the confrontation between ‘the author’ and the character. In this motif, both ‘the author’ and the character are portrayed as characters of the plot of the fictional world. The article analyses the emergence of the motif in modernist literature which subverts the realist poetics of the author’s omniscience. The author of the article employs the term ruman to refer to the novel genre where the author and the character enjoy equal rights. The term was first introduced by Miguel de Unamuno whose Mist (1914) was the first example of this version of metareflexive narrative. The article traces the development of the motif in modernist, postmodernist, and recently published contemporary novels. The differences in depicting of the relationship between the author and the character are explicated by reconstruction of the aesthetic and philosophical context of the time and the polemics with the dominating concepts of the Subject. Additionally, the article examines variations of the motif both in highbrow and mass literature focusing on such rumanistic pieces as novels by K. Vaginov, J. Fowles, V. Pelevin, L. Binet.

FLANEUR’S ANXIOUS MASCULINITY: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF THE NOVELS “MIST” BY M. DE UNAMUNO AND “NOTES OF SNUB-NOSED MEPHISTOPHELES” BY V. VYNNYCHENKO

At the beginning of the 20th century, modernist literature starts to face the new existential issues unfolded in the urban environment. One of these issues is the phenomenon of anxious masculinity caused by the destruction of the patriarchal paradigm. In the literatures that were moving from the traditional type of culture to urban and modern, the writers described men who went out on the streets, converting themselves into the urban cultural type known as flânerie. The practice of ﾠflânerie, first presented in French literature, became popular in other European literatures as well, Spanish and Ukrainian not being exceptions. However, the type of flâneur in these two literatures still requires a scrupulous study. The paper provides a comparative analysis of M. de Unamuno’s “Niebla” (“Mist”) and V. Vynnychenko’s “Zapysky kyrpatoho Mefistofelia” (“Notes of Snub-Nosed Mephistopheles”) aiming to analyze the represented types of flâneurs. The novels demonstrate the specifics of flâneur’s discourse in Spanish and Ukrainian literatures, which were undergoing modernization processes. The comparison of such elements as writers’ urban experiences, protagonists’ interaction with the urban space, meeting with the modern women on the streets as the main plot element, and gender issues allowed defining different reflections on anxious masculinity and broadening European ﾠflânerie discourse. In addition, the analysis defined the protagonists of the novels as proto-ﾠ вneurs, which creates the perspective for further studies of the ﾠflânerie in Spanish and Ukrainian literatures. The results of the research provide arguments for the hypothesis that the ﾠflânerie is one of the modernist perception strategies, symptomatic for European culture.