Taking Note: Text and Context in Virginia Woolf\u27s Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown

In this article I argue that the note attached to “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” which states that it was “A paper read to the Heretics, Cambridge, on May 18, 1924, is central to our interpretation of Woolf’s essay, especially in relation to contexts that politicize, historicize, or aestheticize the text. I trace the different manifestations of Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown in order to reveal the contextual and textual ways in which Woolf and the organs in which she published directed interpretation and dealt with the essay as an aesthetic object enmeshed in history. The note will prove an integral, though not isolated example of this project, as I analyze the bibliographic and linguistic changes in the essay\u27s publication trajectory throughout Woolf’s lifetime, from it inception as a brief piece in the Nation & Athenaeum (1923), to its inclusion in a collection of The Hogarth Essays (1928)

Mapping modernism: Connections between cartography and *literature.

My dissertation investigates an unexamined issue in literary studies---the role of maps in modernist literature. As modernist writers searched for ways to express changing and sometimes contradictory perspectives on physical and mental experiences, they repeatedly turned to maps as both authoritative and problematic forms of representation and navigation. I argue that these maps---whether they appear as images described in the text, the subject of a poem's meditations, or actual sketches included in a book---act as interpretive nodes that allow insight into an issue central to much early twentieth-century literature: the orientation of the modern subject. Literature's turn to cartography can be seen as part of a formal project to explore and chart a comprehensive modern ontology at a time of technological advances, national and colonial upheaval, and a transformed understanding of human psychology. Breaking original critical ground, I argue that the acts of map reading and map-making in literature are integrally connected to the modernist search for new orders and modes of representation. I engage in historicized readings of literature and maps as well as with questions of poetic, narrative, and cartographic structure. I look at World War I trench maps and texts by Ford Madox Ford and David Jones in order to argue that the destruction of land produces a radically unfamiliar experience of space and necessitates a new literary form to represent that space. Shifting my focus, I examine the regional survey movement in Britain in conjunction with texts by Hardy, Forster, and Auden. I then explore the development of this regionalism in the United States through an examination of Sherwood Anderson's writing, contrasting it to Gertrude Stein's map-like vision of the nation and of literature. Returning to the British scene, I probe the geographic theory of the 'closed world' and the destabilization of the imperial world map in works by Kipling, Conrad, and Graham Greene. In my conclusion, I read poems of the Spanish Civil War, which reveal, I argue, a crisis of spatial representation that is the harbinger of another upheaval in literary representation, soon to be intensified by the next world war.Ph.D.American literatureEnglish literatureLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsModern literatureUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/125601/2/3208316.pd

The Self-Elegy: Narcissistic Nostalgia or Proleptic Postmortem?

This chapter presents a survey of World War I poetry, examining in particular the aesthetic and ethical dilemmas that arise when representing war and mass death, as well as the divide between trench poetry and the modernist canon. I look at poets including Rupert Brooke, Edward Thomas, Charles Hamilton Sorley, Edmund Blunden, Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, W. B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, Mina Loy, T. S. Eliot, and David Jones. Reading these poets together shows, I argue, how both trench poetry and modernist verse experimented with shifts in perspective-taking that reveal dynamic renegotiations of the functions and limits of poetry

Dissolving Landscapes: Auden’s Protean Nostalgia

Eve Sorum begins by examining the well-known “anti-nostalgic” W. H. Auden of the thirties, but she then argues that we must rethink this categorization in order to recognize Auden’s later revision of the object of nostalgia. Focusing on “In Praise of Limestone,” Sorum contends that Auden presents a new object of nostalgia that speaks to his desire—and to a modernist desire in general—to embrace change even while adhering to a past ideal. Such an urge, the poem makes clear, has aesthetic and ethical implications: limestone triggers the homesickness with which nostalgia is etymologically wedded, and it also provides the foundation of a particular version of art and the setting for relationships based on acceptance and inclusion, rather than judgment

Hardy’s Geography of Narrative Empathy

This article explores how Thomas Hardy used geographic descriptions to promote empathetic engagement with his characters. I argue he worked to literalize the experience of narrative empathy by orienting his readers in both real and imaginary spaces, creating what I will call a “geo-empathy.” Exploring this conjunction between geography and empathy in both his novels and in surrounding texts suggests that Hardy offers an alternative narrative practice in which subject-making—the imagining of interior life and emotions—is no longer the primary method of engaging empathy. Yet by rooting perspective-taking in geographic positioning and exploring the potential impossibility of successfully standing in someone-else’s shoes, I argue that Hardy locates a sense of limit and loss in the very terrain of the text, even as he strives to enable empathy in his readers

Mourning and Moving On: Life after War in Ford Madox Ford’s The Last Post

Ford Madox Ford’s tetralogy Parade’s End—a story of World War I and its aftermath—is often passed over in the line-up of war literature. In part this may have to do with Ford’s method of narrating the war, which is an exercise in obliterated terrain, truncated views, and narrative gaps. Readers also criticize the final novel in the tetralogy, The Last Post (1928), as a dispiriting conclusion to an otherwise astounding sequence, and Ford himself expressed doubts about its publication. The uncertainties surrounding The Last Post reflect, I believe, the novel’s unsuccessful continuance of the narrative techniques used in the preceding three books. The “failure” of The Last Post emerges from its reliance on war-time mourning practices in a post-war world. The novel thus exposes the underlying dangers of a mourning that neither confronts nor leaves behind the traumas of war. Ultimately, The Last Post raises the dilemma of how to write a post-war novel that enables the characters and the narrative to move past the war in the face of the unending horror of such an event and the possibility of a future conflict. Ford presents not only a crisis of modern British life, but also a crisis of genre. This essay begins with an examination of the narrative techniques used by Ford in the preceding three novels. Like many modernists, Ford negotiates the boundary between crippling memory and callous dismissal by narrating the war as a series of erasures, defacements, and ellipses. This mimetic representation of loss—a way of mourning the war through the effacement of the text, memory, and actual events—occurs both in the narrative form (full of ellipses and events only told in retrospect) and in the similarly fragmented thoughts of the characters. Problems arise, however, with this type of narration when the story moves into the post-war era in The Last Post. After the rowdy, nationwide celebration of the Armistice that occupies the final pages of A Man Could Stand Up, the tetralogy collapses into a mute and isolated perspective. The silencing of the war in this last volume, we soon learn, does not release grief; instead it prolongs the trauma and exposes the unhealed wounds of the people and the country. By continuing the trope of silence, Ford effectively anesthetizes the characters. He attempts to write the post-war world into a nineteenth-century setting, but neither the continuity of the domestic drama nor the productive disjunction of the modernist war novel can effectively emerge. The story stagnates in the obsessive mental revisiting of war wounds in the novel’s fruitless search for a post-war form. Ultimately, this problem of narration in The Last Post reveals the anxiety that inflects so many pieces from the 30s about whether a post-war peace is sustainable. The novel’s claim, made in its final lines, that a return to nineteenth-century values is the only option, implicitly suggests that there is no way truly to move past the experience of the war. Lurking behind this turn to the past is the fear that another war is inevitable, and that the lessons of World War I have not been learned. The failure of narrative technique, therefore, not only reflects British society’s uneasy silence about a war that, in retrospect, seems a futile bloodbath, but also eerily foreshadows the eventual failure of the peace