Author：Ottmar Ette

Abstract: Abstract: This article presents and discusses João Guimarães Rosa as an outstanding Brazilian author whose literary work, especially Sagarana, expresses aesthetically different ways of life-forms between human beings, animals, plants, and landscapes. Movement and transformations are the basic principles in which the melody of prose expresses itself as a language in and as motion. Although based...

Vol. 4 No. 1 Jun 2020      Time：2020-07-06 View Citation

Author：Robert Brazeau

Abstract: Abstract: This essay examines the disjunctive temporality of Irish globalization, arguing that past formations of Irish society inhere within, and complicate, the racialization of Irish subjects in the present. It uses Anne Enright’s 2015 novel The Green Road to demonstrate the many ways in which racial difference is made to signify in an Ireland whose emergence as a global economic center dur...

Vol. 4 No. 1 Jun 2020      Time：2020-07-06 View Citation

Author：Barrett Watten (Guest Editor)

Abstract: The fatalism by which incomprehensible death was sanctioned in primeval times has now passed over into utterly comprehensible life. The noonday panic fear in which nature suddenly appeared to humans as an all-encompassing power has found its counterpart in the panic which is ready to break out at any moment today: human beings expect the world, which is without issue, to be set ablaze by a univ...

Vol. 4 No. 1 Jun 2020      Time：2020-07-06 View Citation

Author：Barrett Watten

Abstract: Abstract: This essay is a part of a longer work on literary and visual modernism at the “moment” of destruction in 1945: Stunde Null or Zero Hour. Here, I focus on the “constructedness” of universals via the material, psychological, and political destruction in Germany at war’s end. At this moment, destruction and universals interconnect in three temporal modes: anticipatory, punctual, and...

Vol. 4 No. 1 Jun 2020      Time：2020-07-06 View Citation

Author：Maggie Rosenau

Abstract: Abstract: Concern regarding linguistic nationalism and the need for a modern universal language preoccupied many European writers, artists and philosophers throughout the inter- and postwar years. This article looks at a peculiar overlap in the activities of two notable persons involved in this matter: Eugen Gomringer and Eugene Jolas. Their respective projects for poetry aimed to offer solutio...

Vol. 4 No. 1 Jun 2020      Time：2020-07-06 View Citation

Author：Herman Rapaport

Abstract: Abstract: In addition to positing a historical, traumatic, and representational break relative to the end of World War II in Europe, this essay posits the idea of an ethical break concerning the abrogation of the right to life as figured in three texts: La Douleur, a memoir by Marguerite Duras; Overlord, lyrical poetry by Jorie Graham; and Zong!, a conceptual poem by M. NourbeSe Philip. Concept...

Vol. 4 No. 1 Jun 2020      Time：2020-07-06 View Citation

Author：Lauri Scheyer

Abstract: Abstract: What is the meaning of Zero Hour for African Americans? The Zero Hour of May 8, 1945 was a celebratory moment to mark “the victory of the cause of freedom,” in the immortal words of Winston Churchill. But what could Zero Hour signify for African Americans who continued to encounter racist and discriminatory practices at the end of the war and into the present? The history of African...

Vol. 4 No. 1 Jun 2020      Time：2020-07-06 View Citation

Author：David Kellogg

Abstract: Abstract: A 1942 meeting of T.S. Eliot in a BBC recording studio with George Orwell, alongside several Caribbean and British Indian writers of color, suggests a multicultural vision of high modernism that never quite happened. The exemplary modernism of Eliot’s The Waste Land prompted a number of imitations, extensions, and experiments, only some of which made it into subsequent literary histo...

Vol. 4 No. 1 Jun 2020      Time：2020-07-06 View Citation

Author：Parvinder Mehta

Abstract: Abstract: This essay takes up the modernist tradition of representing fractured feminine selves in the work of contemporary Asian-American author Meena Alexander (1951–2018), examining her representation of the postcolonial artist through a critical exploration of autospecular affect. Drawing on modernist impulses—the breakdown of human communication, the inefficacy of language, as well as ex...

Vol. 4 No. 1 Jun 2020      Time：2020-07-06 View Citation

Author：Gary Huafan He

Abstract: Abstract: This paper critically reexamines the canonical utopic scene from the end of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust II (1832) through the writings of the British-born Yale physicist Dr. William Francis Gray Swann (1884–1962), who composed one hundred years later a book on the philosophy of contemporary physical science titled The Architecture of the Universe (1934). In his text, Swann in...

Vol. 4 No. 1 Jun 2020      Time：2020-07-06 View Citation