Thinking of aesthetics with reference to the Greek term aisthesis as both sense perception and the theory of the nature and perception of art and beauty, I read and teach Hope Mirrlees’s Paris as a particularly aesthetically-minded and meta-reflexive modernist poem that addresses questions about the dynamics of life, art, and representation. While Paris textualizes and aestheticizes Parisian reality, some of the poem’s formal modernist techniques make it particularly open and responsive to other...

This article addresses a phenomenon which literary critics frequently suggest might not exist: the Turkish modernist novel. In an article on modernism and the Turkish novel, Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk programmatically claims: in Turkey, “we did not have modernism in the true sense of the word.” Emphasizing stream of consciousness techniques, fragmented narratives, and a limited period of emergence, he points to a laundry list of modernism’s standard definitional features, all of which he claims are not appropriate for understanding the development of the Turkish novel. However, a deeper look into the Turkish novel of the early twentieth century reveals that these features are, in fact, present in the fiction Pamuk is addressing. Not only is novelist Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s writing full of stream of consciousness techniques and fragmentary narratives, but novelists writing in earlier decades such as Peyami Safa (1899–1961) experiment with representations of temporality and visual culture in their fiction. This discrepancy between the presence of aesthetic features understood as modernist elsewhere in conjunction with critical readings of the Turkish modernist novel as an absence or lack offers up a new way to engage questions of modernism’s relation to modernity following the field’s global turn. This article first takes up the disputed existence of the Turkish modernist novel as a means of exploring why it is described as lacking in the Turkish context despite a persistent recognition of Turkish modernity within historical and sociological scholarship. I am interested in how this discourse surrounding the lack of a Turkish modernist novel illustrates the ways in which the history of modernization as a state-sponsored project in Turkey shapes how literary scholars and authors have defined the modern, and consequently literary modernism, in the Turkish context. In particular, I explore how practices of defining modernism in relation to modernity, namely as the cultural or “aesthetic domain of modernity” make apparent the ideological stakes of reading certain authors as modernist—or not—within Turkish literary criticism. Turkish literary criticism, written by poets, novelists, and scholars, offers a compelling insight into the ways in which literary modernism has been conceived globally beyond the Anglo-European academy. As such, critical writing is particularly useful to the project of global modernisms as it reveals the ways in which the state-sponsored processes of modernization have shaped discourses around literature and literary modernism in locations where modernity was defined and cultivated self-consciously through state initiatives.

When attention is paid to Japanese poetry in Anglo-American culture, it is overwhelmingly to what Hosea Hirata observes are considered “authentically ‘Japanese’ texts, such as haiku and waka.” [1] Modern Japanese poetry—and certainly modernist Japanese poetry—have long been relatively overlooked because of their perceived “inauthenticity” and the sense that Japanese responses to movements such as Imagism and surrealism were merely “a translation of Western texts” (Hirata, Poetics, 184)...

Although the Beats associated with the avant-garde and although “[scholars] understand the Beat Generation in terms of a literary avant-garde,” historically and from the perspective of forms and gestures, they had in fact repeated, distorted and sometimes mocked the avant-garde. [1] They may thus be defined as a neo-avant-garde. Peter Bürger describes the neo-avant-garde as a possible double failure: not only does it repeat the gestures of the avant-garde, which, according to him, failed, but by...

American Language poetry can be considered a neo-avant-garde movement, at least if we refer to Hal Foster’s definition of the term as the result of a “deferred action,” a later event that recodes the original (historical) avant-garde—e.g. Dada or Gertrude Stein—in a way that stresses “a continual process of protension and retension, a complex relay of anticipated futures and reconstructed pasts.” [1] This sometimes controversially labeled “post-avant”-poetry (a term promoted, among others, by...

Reading Loy in the twenty-first century, after the material turn in the humanities, sheds new light on her writing as particularly attuned to how the material and the incorporeal are embedded in each other. Perhaps today the question is no longer whether Loy’s poetics epitomizes the dance of the intellect or the dance of the body, but how it renegotiates intricate entanglements of mind and matter, spirit and flesh, or nature and culture. A “binarian’s nightmare,” as Roger Conover described her...

The poet Guillaume Apollinaire was for the record. Between 1913 and 1914, he wrote repeatedly about the impact of recording technology on lyric poetry. Like a number of fellow poets, Apollinaire believed that within one to two centuries the record would replace the book as the preferred method for the dissemination of poetic texts. However, for Apollinaire, the gramophone was not merely exterior or tangential to the poetic enterprise, a stance adopted by many Symbolist poets who nevertheless continued to view technology and lyric poetry as diametrically opposed. As Apollinaire’s theoretical writings illustrate, he also viewed the gramophone as a generative metaphor which encouraged him to take a fresh look at the concept of the voice at the heart of lyric poetry since its inception. The status of lyric voice in the era of sound recording is explored in Apollinaire’s very first calligram, the gramophone-inspired “Lettre-Océan.” The poem was published in the June 1914 issue of Les Soirées de Paris (fig. 1) on the heels of a series of articles, letters, and first-hand experiences Apollinaire had with the phonograph. However, “Lettre-Océan” has never been studied in this phonographic context. To document Apollinaire’s position vis-à-vis modern technology, scholars have been rightly turning to his lecture “L’Esprit nouveau et les poètes” (1917) but have overlooked the tantalizing representation of the lyric voice as recording in “Lettre-Océan,” published three years prior. With the shape of a gramophone record embedded into its verbal-visual fabric, the calligram is an important precedent to the lecture and a key text for understanding how sound recording informed Apollinaire’s vision of the lyric voice as a site of tension between orality and the written word.

Amy Lowell is tired. “This is a work, this poetry,” she writes Harriet Monroe in March of 1922, finalizing the poems she’ll have included in the 1922 version of Monroe and Alice Corbin Henderson’s The New Poetry anthology. Lowell had published her eighth and ninth books the previous year, and would publish her tenth in ten years later that fall. She has pulled back on the rigorous lecturing schedule which has kept her away from her home in Brookline, Massachusetts and has had her crisscrossing the country the past several years.

Other papers in this cluster illuminate how modernism and extinction are closely historically related, but my contribution here is specifically concerned with the utility of reading a poet—Ruth Lechlitner—who allows us to think about modernism and extinction along parallel tracks. Lechlitner’s work is attentive to extinction in diverse ways; her poetry confronts the extinction of human solidarity, the extinction of organic life by the machines of extractive capitalism, the extinction of our embeddedness, as human animals, in a multispecies ecology, and the global extinction threat of nuclear war.