British Modernism

Owen Hatherley’s 'A New Kind of Bleak – Journeys Through Urban Britain', is an animated narration of Hatherley’s travels through the UK, away from world heritage sites and conservation areas into what is arguably the day-to-day reality of how cities present themselves to their inhabitants.
The message of Hatherley’s materialist critique of the UK's urban and exurban landscapes is that it is deeply regrettable that both the socialist
and modernist projects have been abandoned in favour of the neo-liberal
myth of unfettered wealth creation through free trade, deregulation and
speculation.

The British artist Ralph Rumney never adhered to a fixed sense of self. Of the little documentation that exists of his life and work, most is comprised of his own disparately collected thoughts, letters, notes, interviews, images and recollections. Born in Newcastle-on-Tyne in 1934, he experienced an unsettled and repressive childhood in Wakefield, prompting him to leave home ‘by stages’. His adolescent years were spent lodging with the ‘notorious communist’ Edward Thompson, hitching to London in 1951 for the Festival of Britain, and then travelling around Cornwall meeting ‘all those Cornish artists like Pat Heron and Terry Frost and Brian Winter — and Barbara Hepworth’, until, in order to avoid arrest as a conscientious objector, he moved where the currents bore him, between London, Paris, Milan and eventually settling for a time in Venice. The writer, painter and only member of the British branch of the Situationniste International, was often the one behind the Rolleiflex camera.

In this monograph two Virginia Woolf’s novels Jacob’s Room and The Waves are analyzed in terms of modernist techniques employed in characterization and narrative shaping. Firstly, the author provides a clear overview of modernist thought at the beginning of the twentieth century with the idea that understanding experimentation with form can serve as a basis for further elaboration of the way in which Woolf employed techniques in the two novels. Further analysis of the mentioned works contributes to a better understanding of her innovation, especially in finding new ways to structure narration. The author shows the use of fragmentation for the characterization of the protagonist in Jacob’s Room, who due to this technique remains elusive to readers. It is pointed out that the fragments creating Jacob’s character are provided by people surrounding him, i.e. by using a complex point of view, Woolf continues her experiment that results in a protagonist escaping any comprehensive description. Jacob’s Room begins Woolf’s innovation in terms of characterization that she further develops in The Waves, which is clarified by analyzing her use of writing techniques, such as soliloquies, lyric present, fragmentation and unification. The monograph demonstrates that experimentation with the mentioned forms has enabled Woolf to show six different consciousnesses in this novel, which constitute a unique whole. The author also explains that experimenting with a narrative, which constitutes a parallel representation of several characters, is a complex process incited by the idea that characterization is significantly more precise when the two opposing processes of fragmentation and unification are employed simultaneously for there is a feel that the six singular consciousnesses form a single mind, and vice versa. The author thus claims that The Waves is rightly regarded as Virginia Woolf’s most experimental novel and points out that the development of techniques shown in this monograph is important for a deeper understanding of Woolf’s sensibility as a modernist writer and her highly innovative character.

The first few decades of the 20th century was a tumultuous period of incredible innovation and constant change. It was also an era where the open questioning of much of what had been assumed and accepted was not simply a viable option, it was essentially a mandatory reality of the time. This critical relationship with tradition was manifest in religious ideology, scientific dogma, economic realities, and personal expression in the arts. The impact of Modernist thought and perspective was acutely experienced in the realm of literature. Many great voices emerged during this time, but James Joyce and Virginia Woolf stand out for numerous reasons. Both authors exhibit the tell-tale signs of a Modernist author. Whether that be Woolf’s groundbreaking innovations in narrative structure (Lodwick), specifically as it relates to an Einsteinian understanding of time and space (Tolliver Brown), or Joyce’s radical new approach dialogue and inner monologue in works like Ulysses (Lawrence), these authors were never afraid to question traditional authority and engage in ceaseless and sweeping innovation. Literary Modernism was not a monolithic movement and Modern thinkers were constantly evolving in thought (Mead), so definitions are elusive. However, Literary Modernism was an early 20th century reaction to the ideology and form of the Victorian realism dominant in Europe and the United States. Modernism broke with the rigidity of inherited literary norms, especially in regards to traditional narrative, character focus and development, dialogue, and how the reader (and characters) experience time. Joyce and Woolf are each superb examples of just what this artistic movement truly was.

This study aims primarily at re-thinking the relationship between Dubliners and the words “paralysis,” “gnomon,” and “simony” which appear in the very first paragraph of “The Sisters.” Given that critics have approached them following patterns leading to the centering, de-centering and re-centering of Joyce’s collection, the concept of rhizome, as developed by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, can be a relevant tool to present the variation of territoriality relationships between the work and the three words. At the end of this study, the latter are granted successive statuses, which challenge the idea of a structural center or core (the arborescent). The framework of this study is as follows: three rhizomatic movements illustrating the capacity of these words to allow for endless building, collapsing, and re-building of the textual territory, namely territorialization, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization. This ritournelle style approach leads to the identification of Joyce’s irreducible writing technique in his early period.

As a high circulation publication with a well-preserved archive The BBC’s Listener magazine offers a rare opportunity to examine the details of publishing and taste in visual art in the interwar period. This article examines the surprising variety of writers and broadcasters involved with the BBC’s visual arts coverage, the views they held, and the attempts made to analyse and mould ‘popular’ taste that eventually led into the formation of the Arts Council of Great Britain.

On the basis of selected examples from the history of the sculpture of the first half and middle of the 20th century, a range of issues related to the concepts of “symbolic form”, “ideal” and “archetype” is analyzed. In the center of consideration is the image of the reclining figure in the works of Aristide Maillol and Henry Moore. Accepting the general statement that such sculptures embody the harmony of statics and dynamics, the author is keener to explore the historical patterns of the selection of a symbolic form in the category of a monument. The significance of the reclining figure is proved by separate historical examples related, in particular, to the work of Michelangelo, with classicism and its derivatives, the concept of the ideal form and the theory of architectonics. The theme of the ambiguity of the classical ideal, its fate in the 20th century, and its dependence on political / ideological ideas is also emphasized. In the sculptural concept of Maillol, the qualities of picturesque, corporeality, and monumentality stand out. In the description of Moore’s creativity, the reclining figure — “archetypal form” (term of Herbert Read) — is considered from the standpoint of identifying qualities in it that allowed the sculptor to realize it in a wide range of interpretations of form and content. Moore’s creativity issues include the relationship between sculpture and space, the interpretation of the statue’s silhouette, the revealing of the “landscape” and “pictorial” qualities in it, as well as the extensive theme of addressing classical heritage. The monumental characteristics of Moore’s reclining figures are analyzed; examples of their interpretation (including the artist himself) and critics are considered. The idea of a symbolic figure in the balance of a figurative and abstract form is adopted as an alternative to the monumental traditional, with emphasis on individual qualities.

The origin of this paper comes, by chance, from a curious dedication by Kate Lechmere found in a purchased copy of BLAST* (1914), the Vorticist literary magazine and manifesto. Lechmere was an avant-garde British artist closely associated with Vorticism – an art movement that has been called the ‘only bona fide, manifesto-waving modern art movement to have originated in these islands’ (Mark Hudson). This paper investigates paradoxes and problems arising when writing a life of Lechmere.

It was Kate Lechmere who suggested, co-foundered and self-financed the two major showcases of collective Vorticist art: the Rebel Art Centre and BLAST. Lechmere is also associated with the artist Wyndham Lewis and the philosopher T.E. Hulme, both of whom were her lovers. More immediately, through her reminiscences, she has acted as a ‘living witness’ (Robert Ferguson) to the lives of Lewis and Hulme and helped shape scholarship of the Vorticist movement. However, despite her involvement with some of the leading artists of her day, Lechmere’s name as an artist is today unrecognised and her association with Vorticism all but forgotten.

In researching Lechmere’s life, a number of problems and paradoxes emerge that complicate what we should remember her for. Foremost, as no known works by Lechmere remain, should she be remembered as an important artist if we cannot assess her artistic merit? Owing to her sex, generation and willingness to have her personal reminiscences published for scholarly interest, Lechmere has frequently been cast in a myriad role of victim: as limited artist surrounded by greatness; duped sponsor of Lewis’s ambition; timid muse, and widow pining for Hulme. In doing so, whilst attention has eagerly been given to what this victim has to tell us about others – notably famous men – has this directly been at the expense of interest in Lechmere’s own life and achievements?







*The copy of BLAST is available to view at the conference.

This article examines the Map of Down Below as a central element for understanding Leonora Carrington's Down Below (1944). Carrington's Surrealist memoir about madness, first dictated in French and then translated into and published in English, recounts her experience of being interned in a mental asylum during the early Francoist dictatorship in Spain while trying to flee from the Nazis in France. The text has often been read as a Surrealist autobiography contesting André Breton's Nadja (1928). However, and without disavowing this reading, I argue that the way in which Carrington narrates her experience of madness is a means to gather knowledge about the world and the Self beyond the literary and institutional conventions of the time, namely, autobiography and eugenic psychiatry as part of the authoritarian state. Thus, I explore how Down Below, as life writing, illuminates a form of truth that deviates from the autobiographical tradition of the unitarian Self. Carrington's found truth sheds light on other possibilities of experiencing-or creatingthe Self, while she also challenges both the normative Francoist psychiatry and traditional life writing.

A study of early 20th century British art, the key players, controversies and arguments, with chapters focused on one work (or a closely associated group of works) by Walter Sickert, Augustus John, Wyndham Lewis, Vanessa Bell and David Bomberg. Afterword on Modernism and Modernity. Extensive notes.

This paper offers a moral reading of the second and third books of Wyndham Lewis's The Human Age, situating the work as an apocalypse with a specifically Catholic orientation. The crisis of communication between the human and the divine draws attention to the missing medium in Lewis's afterworld: the "Great Fish" Jesus Christ.

My book features two major sections: "Theorizing Late Modernism," in which I develop a revisionary model for examining the literary culture of the 1930s, and "Reading Late Modernism," which offers detailed interpretations of works by Wyndham Lewis, Djuna Barnes, and Samuel Beckett.  I trace the emergence during the 1920s and 30s of a critical "late modernist" strain of fiction and reveal how later modernist writers rejected crucial precepts of modernist aesthetics and articulated an alternative mode of writing presaging post-modern forms of textuality.  In the opening section (two chapters), I discuss historiographic problems raised by the 1930s culture of transition and define the nature of late modernist forms.  I then offer a contextual view of the changed situation for modernist writers beginning their careers in the late 1920s.  These writers shared a sense of a progressive "derealization" of reality through spectacle and responded by employing literary forms based on "reduced laughter" (Bakhtin) as an antidote to the vertiginous loss of a stable social ground.  In the interpretive section I discuss in individual chapters the works of Wyndham Lewis, Djuna Barnes, Samuel Beckett, and Mina Loy, developing the theoretical and historical perspectives of the previous section.

Call for papers. Deadline: 31 May, 2017.
Seeking the Marvellous is a two-day interdisciplinary symposium that will examine the work of Ithell Colquhoun (1906-1988) and other women connected both with Surrealism and with Britain. It is organised by Plymouth College of Art in partnership with the Black Mirror research network and will be held in Plymouth on 22 nd and 23 rd March 2018.

It remains a remarkable fact that during  World War Two a civic entertainments manager in the Cotswolds planned a festival of modern music. The Tory Council supported his idea. The 1945 Cheltenham Festival of Modern British Music was staged five weeks after Victory in Europe Day, and its successor remains a fixture in the British festival diary. This article explores the ideological origins and development of the annual festival, arguing that it was a key part of an economic strategy to promote the town as an elitist enclave. Also examined is cause of the so-called 'Cheltenham Symphony', of which it may be claimed that there are 24, alongside 29 'Cheltenham Concertos'.

In this article I analyse the deconstruction of the public/private dichotomy in the city of Paris in Jean Rhys's Good Morning Midnight (1939). Through the exploration of Sasha's aimless wandering through Paris in her failed quest for romantic love, this paper aims to explore Rhys's Paris as a city which is hostile to women who fail to perform conventional standards of femininity. These standards are in turn encouraged and set by the promise of happiness; thus, the mimicry of femininity-whether intentional or not-exposes ongoing power dynamics in gender roles, the construction of the bodies of others through political ideals of happiness and love, and the subversive potential in Rhys's novel, even if the protagonist is crushed at the end by the private side of the emerging totalitarian regimes on the eve of the Second World War.

The paper discusses Wyndham Lewis's short-lived post-WWI journal The Tyro, which occupies a critically under-discussed position in Lewis's artistic and literary corpus. I argue that the notion of the "tyro," a beginner or novice, and its inflection by Lewis as a satirical figure of arrested development, is performatively reflected in the structure and themes of the journal itself.

This article explores work now perceived to be at the margins of the tradition of direct carving in Britain in the first half of the twentieth century. As a result of object-based contextual research relating to the Barbara Hepworth retrospective at Tate Britain, a number of rediscovered or little-known works were located, made by women artists who were, broadly speaking, peers of Hepworth’s, but whose work has since fallen from public view. Drawing upon a range of catalogued and uncatalogued archives held in both public and private collections, in addition to contemporary records of exhibition and key publications by scholars such as Kineton Parkes and Eric Underwood, the biographies and careers of these artists are summarized with particular reference to the existing works, and an attempt is made to situate the works aesthetically and thematically within the context of a developing modernist tradition in Britain in the crucial period between the wars.

Originally published in 1998, Easels of Utopia presents a discussion of art's duration and contingency within the avant garde's aesthetic parameters, which throughout this century have constructed, influenced, and informed our definitions of modernity. In this context the book reads Umberto Boccioni's Futurism as reminiscent of Thomist realism; proposes Caravaggism's historical relevance to the election of individuality in post-war realism; and draws the readers attention to the aesthetic implications in Carlo Carrà's metaphysical art and its reappraisal of the early Renaissance. Following a contextual analysis of the historic avant-garde in Part One, Part Two presents parallel discussions of Italian and British questions, articulated by the works of Marino Marini, Francis Bacon, Renato Guttuso and Stanley Spencer in their return to individuality within art's aesthetic construct. The author argues that this initiates a return to 'lost' beginnings where form seeks knowledge, content regains an ability to anarchize, and art recognizes its contingent condition.

In this paper I intend to examine the map of Down Below as a central element for understanding Leonora Carrington’s Surrealist memoir about madness. Down Below (1944), first dictated and published in French and then translated into English, recounts Carrington’s experience of being interned in a mental asylum during the early Francoist dictatorship in Spain while trying to flee from the Nazis in France. The text has often been read as a Surrealist autobiography contesting André Breton’s Nadja (1928). However, and without disavowing this reading, my aim is to explore how Carrington deploys the language of madness as a tool for gathering knowledge about the world and the self outside of literary and institutional conventions of the time, namely, autobiography and eugenic psychiatry as tools of the authoritarian state.
As Leigh Gilmore points out, “the autobiographical subject is a representation and its representation is its construction” (25). Therefore, the genre itself constructs the idea of the self. Similarly, in Giving an Account of Oneself (2005), Judith Butler claims that autobiography, as a “work on the self . . . takes place within the context of a set of norms that precede and exceed the subject” (17). Thus, according to Butler, this “truth of a person . . . might well become more clear in moments of interruption, stoppage, [and] open-endedness”(64). Thus, my aim in this chapter is to look at Carrington’s “stoppages” or breaks in giving her account of her asylum experience through the introduction of visual elements such as the map of “Down Below”. As Kathleen M. Kirby indicates, “[c]artography institutes a particular kind of boundary between the subject and space, but is also itself a site of interface, mediating the relationship between space and the subject and constructing each in its own particularly ossified way” (47). The map can then be read as a surrealist strategy to break with life writing conventions as well as with authoritarianist narratives of knowledge and the self.
Thus, I intend to explore how Down Below, as life writing, illuminates some kind of truth or knowledge that deviates from the autobiographical tradition of the unitarian self. Carrington’s found truth sheds light on other possibilities of existing—or creating—the self, while she challenges both the normative knowledges of Francoist psychiatry and traditional life writing. I will analyse how she reappropriates the surrealist tradition to represent, subvert and challenge her experience of madness by finding a new way to convey this experience as a break in the normative idea of self which allows for a breakthrough in new forms of representation.