Conquering the Virtual Public': Jean-Paul Sartre's La tribune des temps modernes and the Radio in France

On the evening of Monday, 21 October 1947, La Tribune de Paris – a daily radio programme that provided a forum for discussion and analysis of current events – gave over its nightly news review, from 8:30 to 8:50, to ‘Jean-Paul Sartre et ses collaborateurs’. This new programme, scheduled to run weekly on Monday evenings, was La tribune des temps modernes. Sartre’s ‘collaborateurs’ were a rotating group of fellow editors of his journal, Les temps modernes, for which the radio programme was named. They included Simone de Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau-Ponty as regulars, alongside important contributions from Jean Pouillon, Jean-Bertrand Pontalis and Alain Bonafé. Structured as a semiscripted discussion, La tribune des temps modernes ran in the regular weekly slot for six weeks, before being abruptly cancelled in December, following a controversial run and – probably crucially – a change of government

CONTEMPORARY MISOGYNY: LAURA RIDING, WILLIAM EMPSON AND THE CRITICS – A SURVEY OF MIS-HISTORY

This essay examines three books: A Survey of Modernist Poetry, by Laura Riding and Robert Graves, Seven Types of Ambiguity by William Empson, and William Empson: Among the Mandarins by John Haffenden. It shows how and why Laura Riding was the original author of the interpretation of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129 in A Survey of Modernist Poetry, which provided the idea of Empson’s understanding of ‘ambiguity’ which in turn was highly significant to the subsequent development of ‘New Criticism’. It examines the history of A Survey of Modernist Poetry since its first publication in 1927, its treatment by critics and reviewers, and its mistakenly being described as a book by Robert Graves up to the present day as epitomized in John Haffenden’s biography. It also indicates that modernist or post-modernist literary criticism from 1927 onwards would have been significantly different had numerous critics, Empson among them, but other poets and authors, too, given more attention to the work of Laura Riding than to Robert Graves

Craig: the forgotten modernist

This was the keyword speech at the event, 'Edward Gordon Craig: His Legacy' A biographical and historical perspective, this talk suggests some early influences on Craig’s visionary ideas from his extraordinary theatrical pedigree. Sir Michael will also chart Craig’s development as a European Modernist during a long, wayward life in exile that led to his achievements being largely forgotten by the end of his career

Modernist Architecture and Ruins

Modernist Architecture and Ruins: On Ruins as a Minus, Neoclassicism and the Uncann

Is the semiosphere post-modernist?

This paper provides arguments for and against M.Lotman’s (2002) contention that Y.Lotman’s seminal concept of semiosphere is of post-modernist (post-structuralist; Posner 2011) orientation. A comparative reading of the definitional components of the semiosphere, their hierarchical relationship and their interactions is undertaken against the two principal axes of space and subjectivity in the light of Kantian transcendental idealism, as inaugural and authoritative figure of modernity, the Foucauldian discursive turn and the Deleuzian (post) radical empiricism (sic), as representative authors of the highly versatile post-modernvernacular. This comparative reading aims at highlighting not only similarities and differences between the Lotmanian conceptualization of the semiosphere and the concerned modernist and postmodernist authors, but the construct’s operational relevance in a post-metanarratives cultural predicament that has been coupled with the so-called spatial turn in cultural studies (Hess- Luttich 2012)

The Full Wealth of Conviction and Cognition: Psychology\'s Modernist Critique of Fundamentalism in Postmodern Perspective

The author draws parallels between psychology and religious modernism as exemplified in the writings of such figures as Harry Emerson Fosdick. Miller suggests that psychological research arguing that fundamentalists are \"cognitivcly challenged\" is more reflective of psychology\'s unacknowledged modernist assumptions than descriptive of fundamentalists. A post-modernist recognition of psychology\'s bias should help redirect efforts toward understanding fundamentalists\' pressing desire to preserve a particular orderly culture

The Modernist Corpse: Posthumanism and the Posthumous by Erin E. Edwards

Review of Erin E. Edwards\u27 The Modernist Corpse: Posthumanism and the Posthumous

Veiling and unveiling: Mansfield's modernist aesthetics

The wearing of a veil like other fashionable items of attire in Mansfield’s fiction ‒ parasols, hats, gloves, muffs, and hair ribbons ‒ usually serves more than mere decoration, protection or fashion. Such accessories often represent symbolically an intangible emotion or feeling, and can be read as a form of disguise. Diaphonous veils that create a filmic layer between viewer and external world, hint at a disturbance in the field of vision and the need for a different mode of seeing. Often this layering signals the necessary artifice of fiction-making and when associated with illusion, deceit and storytelling, points to Mansfield’s shaping of her art. In stories and sketches like “Die Einsame”, “The Dark Hollow”, “The Escape” and “Taking the Veil”, she reworks the veil motif as an emblem of self-impersonation, artifice and impersonality. Metaphorically lifting or lowering the veil can be associated with the aesthetic principle of “the glimpse” and the author’s ability to veil and unveil, as in Middleton Murry’s view of her art as offering “those glimpses of reality that in themselves possess a peculiar vividness”, and as stated in her own wish “to lift that mist from my people and let them be seen and then hide them again”. This paper examines veil imagery in several of Mansfield’s stories as a significant motif in her modernist aesthetics with which she registers problems of sight and vision in relation to representation

An Uninformed Pilgrim

Joseph C. Pattison’s article, “The Celestial City, or Dream Tale,” examines Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Celestial Railroad” and portrays the narrator as a Christian hero standing against the modernist persuasions of his time – a protagonist who enters the story with firm orthodox convictions and exits his dream journey with unaltered principles or character. However, Hawthorne’s narrator frequently adopts new modernist arguments and wavers in his pre-formed convictions. He toys with Christian faith but promptly discards any accusations of guilt that such beliefs suggest. While he repeatedly compromises his principles and doubts the ramifications of Christian faith, his dynamic nature is nowhere stronger than in the final scene of the story when he realizes the consequences of modernist thought. Here, he finally expresses true regret and displays his tendency to change – a tendency which Pattison’s article takes so little account of. Though Pattison sees this story as Hawthorne’s attempt to illustrate unwavering Christian principles, the narrative rather serves as a cautionary note to uneducated individuals, and a warning against shaky convictions and unfounded faith