While the two modernist novels considered in this book, Samuel Beckett's Murphy and Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, were initially understood within the categories of stoic and tragic despair, more recent criticism has focused upon their carnivalesque dimension. The identification of these hermeneutic polarities presented the author with the challenging problem which underlies the present analysis, namely the question concerning the structural relationship between the contesting thematics. Drawing upon the paradigm of oscillation as established within the natural sciences, and adding a figurative dimension to the concept, the author has adapted this model as a key to unravelling the narrative buoyancy and structural coherence which sustain these novels of Modernism. The book elucidates how the carnivalesque challenge to despair contributes towards innovative narrative configurations, galvanizing the thematic antipodes into vertiginous microcosms of defiant selfhood.

Analyzes the complex role receptions of antiquity had in forging nationalist ideology and literary modernism in Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

By analyzing appropriations of literary modernism in video, experimental film, and installation art, this study investigates works of media art as agents of cultural memory. While research recognizes film and literature as media of memory, it often overlooks media art. Adaptation studies, art history, and hermeneutics help understand ‘appropriation’ in art in terms of a dialog between an artwork, a text, and their contexts. The Russian Formalist notion of estrangement, together with new concepts from literary, film, and media studies, offers a new perspective on ‘appropriation’ that illuminates the sensuous dimension of cultural memory . Media artworks make memory palpable: they address the collective body memory of their viewers, prompting them to reflect on the past and embody new ways of remembering. Five contextual close-readings analyze artworks by Janis Crystal Lipzin, William Kentridge, Mark Aerial Waller, Paweł Wojtasik, and Tom Kalin. They appropriate modernist texts by Gertrude Stein, Italo Svevo, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Guillaume Apollinaire, Virginia Woolf, and Robert Musil. This book will be of value to readers interested in cultural memory, sensory studies, literary modernism, adaptation studies, and art history.

This book examines the relationship between the literary and bioscientific cultures of the period as a means of exploring the ways in which the comprehension and representation of the human body fundamentally shapes a variety of the period's communal and national visions.

Oscillations of Literary Theory offers a new psychoanalytic approach to reading literature queerly, one that implicates queer theory without depending on explicit representations of sex or queer identities. By focusing on desire and identifications, A. C. Facundo argues that readers can enjoy the text through a variety of rhythms between two (eroticized) positions: the paranoid imperative and queer reparative. Facundo examines the metaphor of rupture as central to the logic of critique, particularly the project to undo conventional formations of identity and power. To show how readers can rebuild their relational worlds after the rupture, Facundo looks to the themes of the desire for omniscience, the queer pleasure of the text, loss and letting go, and the vanishing points that structure thinking. Analyses of Nabokov's Lolita, Danielewski's House of Leaves, Findley's The Wars, and Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go are included, which model this new approach to reading.

Accessible essays place Kafka in historical, political and cultural context, providing new and often unexpected perspectives on his works.

"Even after the end of modernism and postmodernism, the grandiose fantasies of artifice and self-reference that have informed so much modernist literature still resonate in the "social constructivism" of current literary and cultural theory: in the idea that we can perform or construct "identities" or social roles without external constraint, as if we had consumer choice of self. Larson Powell's book posits nature as a limit to such fantasies, redefining aesthetic modernity's conception of and relation to nature and therefore its relation to reality. He shows how nature, no longer the idealized, maternally coded Utopia of the Romantics, becomes the trace of specific political, sexual, and technological traumas. The book's four chapters center on the representation of nature in German prose and-especially-poetry by Rainer Maria Rilke, Gottfried Benn, Bertolt Brecht, and Alfred Doblin from the years 1900 to 1945, while making reference to other literatures as well." "Powell's term "the Technological Unconscious" refers to a point of intersection between psychoanalysis and social and scientific theories of modernism and also to the philosophical mediation between history and nature, a motif important from Kant to Adorno. Powell critiques the tendency toward jargon of an often merely rhetorical "theory," while continuing to develop the philosophical and conceptual inheritance of Continental traditions. He analyzes in connection with the works treated the conceptions of subject and system in the theories of Adorno, Luhmann, and Lacan and their relation to their complement, nature. The Technological Unconscious is thus an important polemical intervention both in the debates over interdisciplinarity and in those between eclectic "culturalist" theories such as New Historicism and postcolonialism on the one hand and systems theory and psychoanalysis on the other." --Book Jacket.