Melih Levi

I edited this special section for Dibur, which features editors of recent edited volumes and anthologies in the field of modernism. The submissions are in the form of essays, conversations, and interviews. The pdf also includes my interview ("Modernism and its Concepts") with Eric Hayot and Rebecca Walkowitz

Global Modernists on Modernism: A Conversation for Dibur. Alys Moody and Stephen J. Ross are the editors of one of the most recent collection of modernist writings: Global Modernists on Modernism: An Anthology (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020). This collection features translations of works associated with modernism in Latin America, the Caribbean, sub-Saharan Africa, the Arab world, Turkey, Iran, the Caucasus, South Asia, China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, the South Pacific, the Malay Peninsula, and the Ashkenazi Jewish diaspora. As anticipated by its remarkable coverage, this volume is already having a transformative effect on discussions concerning modernism and its aesthetic, geographical, and cultural range. In their conversation for Dibur, Moody and Ross offer conceptual interrogations of various modes of rethinking modernism on a global scale, the Eurocentric power structures which, overtly or implicitly, come to undergird such approaches, and their broader methodology as editors.

At the Edges of Yiddishland: Editorial Praxes on the Jewish Translingual Threshold. As the editor of the “Modernism of the Ashkenazi Jewish Diaspora” module in Global Modernists on Modernism: An Anthology (2020), Resnikoff constellates the writings of six transnational Ashkenazi Jewish modernists who engage with Yiddish not only as a mother tongue but as an expanded conceptual poetic mode. The module includes work by Mikhl Likht, the New York–based Introspectivism group, Avot Yeshurun, and Dvoyre Fogel. Resnikoff contextualizes his praxes as a translingual (language-crossing) editor, translator, scholar, and writer working at the thresholds of late-Yiddish modernisms and their variegated afterlives in other tongues. He concludes the present essay with a short work of poetics as a test or case study for the speculative expanded-Yiddish language-scape that his editorial practice, writing, and translation together attempt to cast into relief.

Reports from an Outpost of Modernist Studies. Andrew Reynolds and Bonnie Roos are the coeditors of the collection of essays Behind the Masks of Modernism: Global and Transnational Perspectives (University Press of Florida, 2016). The essays in this diverse collection reconsider the meaning of “modernism” by taking an interdisciplinary approach and stretching beyond the Western modernist canon and the literary scope of the field. In this essay Reynolds and Roos describe some of the thought processes that contributed to their decision to publish their collection, the complexities that emerged from the blending of modernist studies with postcolonial approaches, and the rationale behind their use of masks as a unifying thematic thread.

Modernism and Its Concepts. In 2016, Eric Hayot and Rebecca L. Walkowitz published A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism, which was the first anthology about global modernism to invite essays organized by intellectual keyword, or concept, rather than by geography or national literary history. Sixteen leading critics working at the conjunction of modernism, comparative literature, and world literature agreed to participate in the venture. The result: drawing on archives beyond the European center, contributors showed how new global approaches are transforming the intellectual paradigms we have long associated with modernism and also bringing an idiosyncratic array of new paradigms into view. In an interview conducted in spring 2021, Hayot and Walkowitz reflect on whether they were imagining new durable concepts for global modernism or instead were imagining a new approach to the history of concepts and the way they have shaped the field and could shape it going forward. They choose the latter.

Central Issues in Studies of Modernist Peripheries. The essay reflects on key issues of definition in modernist studies and comparative modernisms by returning to the author’s edited volume, The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms (2012). In particular, it assesses the continued relevance of center-periphery models of global study and the formal dimension of modernism while speculating on the future of modernist and literary studies in the university.

Global Modernisms Reconsidered. The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms is a collection of essays devoted to investigating the geographic and temporal scope of modernism. The assembled essays include historical surveys of specific modernist movements, comparisons between different national traditions, and theoretical reflections on the nature of global modernism. In my reflections on this collection, I consider how the volume sought to define the terms of relationality that would guide the field of global modernism in its subsequent years. I then proceed to make a case for the utility of world-systems theory for modernist studies, using as my primary example the Sestiger movement of 1960s South Africa.

This chapter offers both a comprehensive critical study of George Turberville’s poetry, and an evaluation of plain-style poetics as conceived in this particular historical moment. The mid-Tudor period is when plain style becomes institutionalized; this chapter attempts to identify the various historical institutions (i.e. the Inns of Court) and discursive structures (i.e. readership, Protestantism) that helped facilitate its spread. The idea of “constancy” as a thematic locus is used to explore intersections between these various discourses. A survey of the precursors to plain style in the tradition underlines that plain-style goes through a decisive structural configuration in this period. Special attention is paid to the use of exemplification, epigrammatical statement, homosocial desire, and metrical regularity. Since mid-Tudor poets often imitated poems from Tottel, this chapter considers this trajectory, especially in terms of style and the question of constancy.

The article seeks a rapprochement between pragmatic and semantic theories of language by returning to a breaking point in the history of philosophy, the middle of the twentieth century, when these theoretical models began to evolve into distinct schools of thought. Philosophical accounts of this period explore various and intertwined dependencies between semantics and context; however, they only implicitly examine the potential of sounds and bodily ges- tures in bringing descriptive clarity to the modes and limits of such de- pendencies. The article first investigates the way W. V. Quine conceptualized linguistic reference by combining behavioral models of language acquisition with more systematic explorations of syntax. It then turns to P. F. Strawson’s revisionary accounts of Kantian philosophy which reassess the silent strains of empiricism in Kant’s framework in order to identify possible grounds of recon- ciliation between pragmatic and semantic theories of language. Sound and gesture, two aspects that supplement language and give it an embodied feeling, are suggested as possible devices for formalizing intersections between context and semantic-oriented approaches. Poems by Wallace Stevens are used to think about the endurance of reference and how this endurance can find more compelling demonstration through an investigation of language as an embodied phenomenon.

Literary critics have variously distinguished between the two dominant poetic styles in sixteenth-century England. C. S. Lewis characterized them as “drab” and “golden,” Yvor Winters as “plain” and “ornate” or “eloquent,” and J. V. Cunningham as “moral” and “pleasant.” These accounts either compare the rhetorical features of the two styles or link their coexistence to the tumultuous political landscape of the Tudor period. This article proposes a different set of parameters: It was the gradual reification of a mon- olingual paradigm in sixteenth-century London that precipitated the divisions of poetic lan- guage along such axes. The poetic representation of London—prominent in the plain and almost entirely absent from the eloquent poetic traditions of the period—offers a conven- ient lens to juxtapose the social dynamics that undergird both styles. London finds repre- sentation through the plain style because, unlike the eloquent style’s emphasis on private idiom and self-fashioning, plainness foregrounds shared contexts and referential functions of language. This article first explains the ideological force of the sixteenth-century mon- olingual paradigm and its relation to these two dominant poetic styles. It then turns to two particular poets to show why the plain style endured in the city’s social and geographical margins: While George Turberville addresses the city from its periphery, capturing the centrifugal growth of an emergent market logic, Isabella Whitney uses her marginalized position to deconstruct this logic from within.

The article offers a detailed study of the twentieth-century Turkish poet Attilâ İlhan’s early work by focusing on the use of imagery and atmosphere. The critical term in Turkish literary studies for imagery is imge and the term has acquired an unsettlingly wide semantic range since its popularization with the rise of the İkinci Yeni poetry movement in the 1950s and 60 s. İkinci Yeni's descriptive procedures continue to be the dominant influence on Turkish poetry today and this article turns the spotlight on Attilâ İlhan in order to trace alternative conceptions of imagery which were developed concurrently and in reaction to the İkinci Yeni movement. The article engages with relevant psychoanalytic and affect theories that help elucidate İlhan's use of anxiety as a socially and poetically constitutive force.

Ahmet Midhat Efendi’s famous 1875 novel Felâtun Bey and Râkim Efendi takes place in late nineteenth-century Istanbul and follows the lives of two young men who come from radically different backgrounds. Râkim Efendi is an erudite, self-made man, one who is ambitious and cultivated enough to mingle with a European crowd. In contrast, Felâtun Bey is a spendthrift who lacks intellectual curiosity and a strong work ethic. Squandering his wealth and education, he leads a life of decadence.

The novel traces Râkim and Felâtun’s relationships with multiple characters, charting their romances and passions, as well as their foibles and amusing mishaps as they struggle to find and follow their own path through the many temptations and traps of European culture. The author creates a rich portrait of stratified Ottoman life through a diverse and colorful cast of characters—from a French piano teacher and an Arab nanny, to a Circassian slave girl—each deftly navigating the shifting mores of their social class. Written during the Ottoman Empire’s uneasy transition to modernity, the novel’s protagonists embody both the best and worst elements of two worlds, European and Ottoman. The novel provides readers with an elegant yet powerful appeal for progressive reforms and individual freedoms. Levi and Ringer’s fluid translation of this Ottoman classic stands as a landmark in the history of Turkish literature in translation.