Revenant modernisms and the recurrence of literary history
Abstract
This essay suggests that literary production post-postmodernism has not progressed to something new, but rather has returned to quintessentially modernist anxieties and modes of expression––especially renewed faith in grand narratives. The argument draws upon and coalesces two theoretical texts to help identify what I term ‘revenant modernism’ as a “symbolic space” (Flatley, 2008: 32) where a sort of “secular re-enchantment” (Landy & Saler, 2009: 2) remains possible: Jonathan Flatley’s Affective mapping: Melancholia and the politics of modernism (2008) and The re-enchantment of the world: Secular magic in a rational age (2009) by Joshua Landy and Michael Saler. I then examine two recent novels––Will Self’s Umbrella (2012) and Eimear McBride’s A girl is a half-formed thing (2014)––as evidence of this return. Along the way, I tie both of these novels back to their stated modernist influence (James Joyce’s Ulysses [1993]) in order to show how Self and McBride’s fiction borrows from Joyce’s particular brand of postcolonial modernism.
Downloads
References
Baudelaire, C. (2006). The Painter of Modern Life. In J. Mayne (Ed. and Trans.), The painter of modern life and other essays (pp. 1–41). New York, NY: Phaidon Press.
Becker, K., Becker, M. & Schwarz, J. H. (2007). String theory and M-theory: A modern introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bishop, J. (2008, December 10). Modernism and Postmodernism [Audio blog post. English 45C, Fall 2008, UC Berkeley. iTunes U]. Retrieved 2 May, 2016 from https://itunes.apple.com/us/itunes-u/english-45c-fall-2008-uc-berkeley/id354819401?mt=10.
Collard, D. (2014, May). Interview with Eimear McBride. The White Review. Retrieved 2 May, 2016 from www.thewhitereview.org/interviews/interview-with-eimear-mcbride/.
Conrad, J. (2002). The secret sharer. In C. Watts (Ed.), Typhoon and other tales (pp. 177–217). Oxford: Oxford University Press (Original work published 1910).
Daniels, L. (2012, August 15). Umbrella by Will Self: review for Man Booker shortlist 2012. The Telegraph. Retrieved 2 May, 2016 from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/ bookreviews/9464808/Umbrella-by-Will-Self-review-for-Man-Booker-shortlist-2012.html.
Derrida, J. (2006). Specters of Marx: The state of the debt, the work of mourning, and the new international. (P. Kamuf, Trans.). New York, NY: Routledge Classics (Original work published 1993).
Deuteronomy 34.4. (1984). The Holy Bible, New International Version. Grand Rapids: Zondervan House.
Eliot, T. S. (1975). Ulysses, order, and myth. In F. Kermode (Ed.), Selected prose of T. S. Eliot (pp. 175–178). New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Flatley, J. (2008). Affective mapping: Melancholia and the politics of modernism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Freud, S. (1919). The uncanny. New York, NY: Penguin Classics.
Gordon, A. F. (2008). Ghostly matters: Haunting and the sociological imagination. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Green, B. (2004). The fabric of the cosmos: Space, time, and the texture of reality. New York, NY: Vintage Books.
Inglis, T. (1998). Moral monopoly: The rise and fall of the Catholic Church in modern Ireland. (2nd ed.). Dublin: University College Dublin Press.
Jameson, F. (1991). Postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Joyce, J. (1993). Ulysses. (H. W. Gabler, Ed.). New York, NY: Vintage Books.
Joyce, J. (2007). A portrait of the artist as a young man. (J. P. Riquelme, Ed.). New York, NY: W.W. Norton.
Joyce, J. (2012). Finnegans wake. (R. J. Henkes, E. Bindervoet & F. Fordham, Eds.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kafka, F. (1993). “The Metamorphosis”. In G. Josipovici (Ed.), Collected Stories (pp. 73–128). (T. & E. Muir, Trans.). New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf (Original work published 1915).
Kaiwar, V. (2009, October 20). Colonialism, difference and exoticism in the formation of a postcolonial metanarrative. Revue LISA/LISA e-journal, 5(3). Retrieved 2 May, 2016 from http://lisa.revues.org/1537.
Kenny, M. (2000). Goodbye to Catholic Ireland. (rev. ed.). Dublin: New Island Books.
Landy, J. & Saler, M. (2009). Introduction. In J. Landy & M. Saler (Eds.), The re-enchantment of the world: Secular magic in a rational age (pp. 1–14). Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.
Lyotard, J. F. (1984). The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge. (G. Bennington & B. Massumi, Trans.). Theory and History of Literature (Vol. 10). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
McBride, E. (2014). A girl is a half-formed thing. Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press.
McHale, B. (1987). Postmodernist fiction. New York, NY: Routledge.
Moloney, E. (2002). A secret history of the IRA. London: W. W. Norton.
Nicol, B. (2009). The Cambridge introduction to postmodern fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
O’Brien, E. (2008). The return and redefinition of the repressed: The construction of female identity in the writings of James Joyce. In L. Orr (Ed.), Joyce, imperialism & postcolonialism (pp. 41–57). Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.
Pound, E. (1996). CXVI. In The Cantos of Ezra Pound (p. 815). New York, NY: New Directions Publishing.
Said, E. (1979). Orientalism. New York, NY: Vintage.
Self, W. (2012). Umbrella. New York, NY: Grove Press.
Sherry, V. (2015). Modernism and the reinvention of decadence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Smythe, L. (2015). Modernism post-postmodernism: Art in the era of light modernity. Modernism/modernity, 22(2), 365–379.
Spivak, G. C. (1998). Can the subaltern speak? In C. Nelson & L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and the interpretation of culture (pp. 271–313). Basingstoke: Macmillan Education.
Still, K. (2007). Introduction. In C. Nouvet, Z. Stahuljak & K. Still (Eds.), Minima memoria: In the wake of Jean-François Lyotard (pp. xi–xxiv). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Young, R. J. C. (2003). Postcolonialism: A very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
The works published in this journal are subject to the following terms:
1. The Publications Services at the University of Murcia (the publisher) retains the property rights (copyright) of published works, and encourages and enables the reuse of the same under the license specified in item 2.
2. The works are published in the electronic edition of the magazine under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike 4.0.
3.Conditions of self-archiving. Authors are encouraged to disseminate pre-print (draft papers prior to being assessed) and/or post-print versions (those reviewed and accepted for publication) of their papers before publication, because it encourages distribution earlier and thus leads to a possible increase in citations and circulation among the academic community.
RoMEO color: green
