Fredric Jameson: The Modernist Papers (2007)

“A new perspective on Proust, Joyce, Kafka and others from master of literary theory.

Cultural critic Fredric Jameson, renowned for his incisive studies of the passage of modernism to postmodernism, for the first time since his acclaimed A Singular Modernity returns to the movement that dramatically broke with all tradition in search of progress.

The Modernist Papers is a tour de froce of anlysis and criticism, in which Jameson brings his dynamic and acute thought to bear on the modernist literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Jameson discusses modernist poetics, including intensive discussions of the work of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Wallace Stevens, Joyce, Proust, and Thomas Mann. He explores the peculiarties of the American literary field, taking in William Carlos Williams and the American epic, and examines the language theories of Gertrude Stein. Refusing to see modernism as simply a Western phenomenon he also pays close attention to its Japanese expression; while the complexities of a late modernist representation of twentieth-century politics are articulated in a concluding section on Peter Weiss’s novel The Aesthetics of Resistance.”

Publisher Verso, 2007
ISBN 1844670961, 9781844670963
426 pages

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Mark Wollaeger: Modernism, Media, and Propaganda: British Narrative from 1900 to 1945 (2008)

Though often defined as having opposite aims, means, and effects, modernism and modern propaganda developed at the same time and influenced each other in surprising ways. The professional propagandist emerged as one kind of information specialist, the modernist writer as another. Britain was particularly important to this double history. By secretly hiring well-known writers and intellectuals to write for the government and by exploiting their control of new global information systems, the British in World War I invented a new template for the manipulation of information that remains with us to this day. Making a persuasive case for the importance of understanding modernism in the context of the history of modern propaganda, Modernism, Media, and Propaganda also helps explain the origins of today’s highly propagandized world.

Modernism, Media, and Propaganda integrates new archival research with fresh interpretations of British fiction and film to provide a comprehensive cultural history of the relationship between modernism and propaganda in Britain during the first half of the twentieth century. From works by Joseph Conrad to propaganda films by Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles, Mark Wollaeger traces the transition from literary to cinematic propaganda while offering compelling close readings of major fiction by Virginia Woolf, Ford Madox Ford, and James Joyce.

Publisher Princeton University Press, 2008
ISBN 0691138451, 9780691138459
Length 335 pages

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Marie-Laure Ryan: Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media (2001)

Is there a significant difference in attitude between immersion in a game and immersion in a movie or novel? What are the new possibilities for representation offered by the emerging technology of virtual reality? As Marie—Laure Ryan demonstrates in Narrative as Virtual Reality, the questions raised by new, interactive technologies have their precursors and echoes in pre—electronic literary and artistic traditions. Formerly a culture of immersive ideals — getting lost in a good book, for example — we are becoming, Ryan claims, a culture more concerned with interactivity. Approaching the idea of virtual reality as a metaphor for total art, Narrative as Virtual Reality applies the concepts of immersion and interactivity to develop a phenomenology of reading.

Ryan’s analysis encompasses both traditional literary narratives and the new textual genres made possible by the electronic revolution of the past few years, such as hypertext, interactive movies and drama, digital installation art, and computer role—playing games. Interspersed among the book’s chapters are several “interludes” that focus exclusively on either key literary texts that foreshadow what we now call “virtual reality,” including those of Baudelaire, Huysmans, Ignatius de Loyola, Calvino, and science—fiction author Neal Stephenson, or recent efforts to produce interactive art forms, like the hypertext “novel” Twelve Blue, by Michael Joyce, and I’m Your Man, an interactive movie. As Ryan considers the fate of traditional narrative patterns in digital culture, she revisits one of the central issues in modern literary theory — the opposition between a presumably passive reading that is taken over by the world a text represents and an active, deconstructive reading that imaginatively participates in the text’s creation.

Publisher Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001
ISBN 0801864879, 9780801864872
399 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2013-6-28, some images missing)