Modernism is hot again. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, poets and architects, designers and critics, teachers and artists are rediscovering the virtues of the previous century’s most vibrant cultural constellation. Yet this widespread embrace raises questions about modernism’s relation to its own success. Modernism’s “badness”—its emphasis on outrageous behavior, its elevation of negativity, its refusal to be condoned—seems essential to its power. But once modernism is accepted as “good” or valuable (as a great deal of modernist art now is), its status as a subversive aesthetic intervention seems undermined. The contributors to Bad Modernisms tease out the contradictions in modernism’s commitment to badness. Bad Modernisms thus builds on and extends the “new modernist studies,” recent work marked by the application of diverse methods and attention to texts and artists not usually labeled as modernist. In this collection, these developments are exemplified by essays ranging from a reading of dandyism in 1920s Harlem as a performance of a “bad” black modernist imaginary to a consideration of Filipino American modernism in the context of anticolonialism. The contributors reconsider familiar figures—such as Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Josef von Sternberg, Ludwig Wittgenstein, W. H. Auden, and Wyndham Lewis—and bring to light the work of lesser-known artists, including the writer Carlos Bulosan and the experimental filmmaker Len Lye. Examining cultural artifacts ranging from novels to manifestos, from philosophical treatises to movie musicals, and from anthropological essays to advertising campaigns, these essays signal the capaciousness and energy galvanizing the new modernist studies. Contributors. Lisa Fluet, Laura Frost, Michael LeMahieu, Heather K. Love, Douglas Mao, Jesse Matz, Joshua L. Miller, Monica L. Miller, Sianne Ngai, Martin Puchner, Rebecca L. Walkowitz

New essays on diverse topics from the Age of Goethe, with a special section on Goethe scholarship's role in the establishment of Germanistik. The Goethe Yearbook is a publication of the Goethe Society of North America, encouraging North American Goethe scholarship by publishing original English-language contributions to the understanding of Goethe and other authors of the Goethezeit while also welcoming contributions from scholars around the world. Volume 19 of the Goethe Yearbook continues to investigate the connection between Goethe's scientific theories and his aesthetics, with essays on his optics and his plant morphology. A special section examines the central role that Goethe philology has had in establishing practices that shaped the history of Germanistik as a whole. The yearbookalso includes essays on legal history and the novella, Goethe Lieder, esoteric mysticism in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, and Werther's sexual pathology. The volume also includes three essays re-examining Goethe's aesthetics in the context of the history of deconstruction, as well as the customary book review section. Contributors: Beate Allert, Frauke Berndt, Sean Franzel, Stefan Hajduk, Bernd Hamacher, Jeffrey L. High, Francien Markx, Lavinia Meier-Ewert, Ansgar Mohnkern, Rüdiger Nutt-Kofoth, Edward T. Potter, Chenxi Tang, Robert Walter. Daniel Purdy is Associate Professor of German at Pennsylvania State University. Book review editor Catriona MacLeod is Associate Professor of German at the University of Pennsylvania.

The first part of Goethe's dramatic poem Faust (1808), one of the great works of German literature, grabbed the attention of Byron and Percy Shelley in the 1810s, engaging them in a shared fascination that was to exert an important influence over their writings. In this comparative study, Ben Hewitt explores the links between Faust and Byron's and Shelley's works, connecting Goethe and the two English Romantic poets in terms of their differing, intricately related experiments with epic. In so doing, Hewitt enters the three writers into a literary and philosophical dialogue concerning 'epic' and 'tragic' perspectives on human knowledge and potential - perspectives crucial to the very structure and significance of Goethe's masterpiece - and illuminates hitherto unacknowledged affinities between these key figures in Romantic literature, and between British and German Romanticisms.

Both Modernism and Globalization are concepts that oscillate between homogenization and differentiation, each supplying totalizing platforms and sites of resistance. Cultural manifestations of difference and accommodation arise, producing their own specific temporalities in diverse practices of disparate Modernisms. Where Modernism and Globalization meet, the antithetical impulses within each serve as an intensifying dynamic for cultural contestation and discursive formations. The essays collected in this volume aim at the discrepant formations and multiple temporalities that issue from this dynamic yielding emphatic alterities in modes of cultural and literary production and material culture. Discussed are, among others, the following aspects: - Redefining Modernism - Modernity - Modernization - Local Concepts and Temporalities of Modernism - Global Transfers of Texts and Concepts - Reading the Other in/of Modernism - Places of Modernity in Literature and Film.

This Companion offers a comprehensive analysis of U.S. modernism as part of a global literature. Recent writing on U.S. immigration, imperialism, and territorial expansion has generated fresh reasons to read modernist novelists, both prominent and forgotten. Written by a host of leading scholars, this Companion provides unique approaches to modernist texts.

"This book addresses three key areas of intellectual enquiry: literary criticism, cultural critique, and philosophical theology. Once closely related, especially in the Catholic tradition, they often appear to be separate and unconnected domains in the modern university. The work of Nicholas Boyle is one of the most significant recent attempts to reconnect them. Responding to that initiative, The Present Word challenges this fragmentation of knowledge. Several of the essays reflect a major change of emphasis in literary studies over the last two decades: the reconnection of an idea of literary criticism closely related to the experience of reading, and the wider societal and political concerns addressed by Cultural Studies. Contributors also debate, from both perspectives, whether theological concepts can illuminate the secular culture in which literature is written and read. John Walker is Senior Lecturer in German at Birkbeck College, London, where he served as Head of the School of Languages, Linguistics and Culture from 2006-2009."

Maurice Blanchot occupies a central though still-overlooked position in the Anglo-American reception of 20th-century continental philosophy and literary criticism. On the one hand, his rigorous yet always-playful exchanges with the most challenging figures of the philosophical and literary canons of modernity have led thinkers such as Georges Bataille, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault to acknowledge Blanchot as a major influence on the development of literary and philosophical culture after World War II. On the other hand, Blanchot's reputation for frustrating readers with his difficult style of thought and writing has resulted in a missed opportunity for leveraging Blanchot in advancing the most essential discussions and debates going on today in the comparative study of literature, philosophy, politics, history, ethics, and art. Blanchot's voice is simply too profound, too erudite, and too illuminating of what is at stake at the intersections of these disciplines not to be exercising more of an influence than it has in only a minority of intellectual circles. Understanding Blanchot, Understanding Modernism brings together an international cast of leading and emergent scholars in making the case for precisely what contemporary modernist studies stands to gain from close inspection of Blanchot's provocative post-war writings.

Early 20th-century literary critics Joseph Collins, Hermann Hesse, and Percy Lubbock concluded that the pages of a book present a succession of moments that the reader visualizes and reinterprets. They feared that few would actually commit themselves to memory, and that most were likely to soon disappear. As you turn these pages, you will (re)discover the value of the literary canon through the Self. My objective is to examine how the Self is formed, lost, and regained through creative strategies that confront and define its shapes and distortions on nearly every page of a canonical work. You can consider Confronting / Defining the Self: Formation and Dissolution of the ‘I’ from La Fayette to Grass as offering an apology for the study of literature and the humanities in an era when technology and commerce dominate our consciousness, drive our daily expectations, and shape our career goals.