“I don't really want to write about theory, but it just keeps coming up again and again. It's inescapable.”
Tag: Modernism
My Certainty Shall Be Their Confusion
Ann Quin is, above all, a self-aware writer, with an ironic understanding of the limits of symbolic expression, who was nevertheless prepared to test those limits.
Art and Culture in Schorske’s Century
With decades of creativity—that ended with World War I—Vienna jolted Western art and culture forward into high modernity. But how?
B-Sides: Elinor Wylie’s “Atavism”
Caesuras do things to stories—and to readers, even readers too young to know the term.
B-Sides: Virginia Woolf’s “Flush”
Woolf’s spin on the genre of children’s fiction about animals is valuable because of its comedy, not despite it.
B-Sides: Mary Butts’s “Armed with Madness”
The author’s pagan obsessions, like her chatty metacritiques of other modernist writers, set her apart from her contemporaries.
Fascism’s Cultural Behemoth
Milan 1919: Fascism was founded as a movement almost exactly a century ago, by journalist and agitator Benito Mussolini along with a gaggle of World War I ...
Knausgaard’s Ruthless Freedom
So here it is at last: the end of Knausgaard’s struggle. It is 1,160 pages long, divided into three parts. Part 2 consists of a long essay on Hitler. Both ...
The Polyphonic Gospel
At one point in Umberto Eco’s novel Foucault’s Pendulum the narrator speculates about how the Gospels came to be written: “Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are a bunch of practical jokers who meet ...
Modernism, Heal Thyself
Austria’s most famous asylum rises on regular terraces up the shallow slope of Vienna’s Gallitzinberg hill. Seen from the south, the asylum’s 60-odd buildings appear to merge, presenting a continuous ...
Claire Messud’s Noble Lie
In the bouquet of novel typologies—the picaresque, the Künstlerroman, the Zeitroman, the novel of ideas, magical realism, hysterical realism, “experimental” anything—the bildungsroman is the least ...
Kafka: The Impossible Biography
The prospect of a new Kafka biography is like an invitation to a party that is bound to be entertaining but may end badly. Situating Kafka’s writing ...
Ordinary People
One fantasy of modernism is telling all there is to tell about the most ordinary of lives. On a train journey from Richmond to Waterloo Station, Virginia Woolf watched “an old lady in the corner ...
Virtual Roundtable on
“Description in the Novel”
This roundtable on description in the novel took place on May 3, 2016, at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University. Concluding the inaugural year of the Novel Theory Seminar, the ...
Tales of the Interwar
Today, the once-provocative suggestion that we live in an age of interminable warfare has become a truism. The claim often takes the form of an observation about the post-9/11 syndrome that drives an ...
Quiz: Gertrude Stein or a Children’s Book?
In her essay “In The Great Green Room,” Anne E. Fernald discusses the surprising influence of literary modernism on Margaret Wise Brown, author of the legendary children’s book Goodnight Moon (1946) ...
Jhumpa Lahiri’s Modernist Turn
Jhumpa Lahiri’s In altre parole announces the birth of a modernist. Written in hard-won Italian and reverberating with the energy of early 20th-century literary experiment, In altre parole describes ...
2015’s Most-Read on the Public Books Blog
Now that you’ve had a chance to look over our most popular features from last year, here were the top five most-read essays from our blog: “Thinking Critically about Critical Thinking,” ...
In the Great Green Room: Margaret Wise Brown and Modernism
When Goodnight Moon was published in 1946, no one predicted it would become a classic. Its sales began to take off in 1953, and now the book has sold over 14 million copies. I grew up with Goodnight ...
A Playhouse Ready to Vanish: An Interview with Saikat Majumdar
She reminded Ori of the dark theatres that were breaking off in flakes of plaster and cement, crumbling into dust. That was the world that had made and nourished her. She was a playhouse with silver ...