Modern Literature: The Trace of History
Session Coordinator: Steven Matuszak
Univ. of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
matuszak@uwm.edu

Session A

Reading Modernity’s Nostalgia in Miller’s Obscenity

At the end of his introduction to Grundrisse, Marx writes briefly about ancient Greek art. Attempting to explain why the ancient Greeks “still afford us artistic pleasure and [that] in a certain respect [they] count as a norm and as an unattainable model” Marx writes: “A man cannot become a child again, or he becomes childish. But does he not find joy in the child’s naïveté, and must he himself not strive to reproduce the truth at a higher stage?” (111). Marx is not the only modern thinker who thinks of ancient Greek culture as the “historic childhood of humanity” (Marx, 111). Hegel, Nietzsche, and Elie Faure, for example, also think of the ancient Greeks as children and, like Marx, are troubled by their feelings toward the ancient Greeks. For they find themselves both fascinated by the “innocence” and “vigor” of the ancient Greeks and somewhat contemptuous of their childlike characteristics. These writers see themselves and their culture occupying a position of adulthood from which they look back over the ancient Greek with indulgence and nostalgia. In my paper, I begin with an analysis of Hegel’s Philosophy of History, Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, and Elie Faure’s History of Art that demonstrates how this nostalgia for the ancient Greeks indicates pervasive feelings of disappointment and insecurity in the culture of modernity. Then, with an analysis of Henry Miller’s writing, which was greatly influenced by both Faure and Nietzsche, I illustrate a literary response to these feelings. Miller’s writing is often accused of being rebellious, adolescent, and obscene. However, looking at Miller’s writing through the lens of modernity’s nostalgia for ancient Greek culture indicates that Miller is an adult striving “to reproduce the truth [of childhood] at a higher stage” rather than a rebellious and obscene adolescent.

Brooke Groskopf
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
brookeg2@uwm.edu

Ex-Post-Infancy in Walter Benjamin

In this paper I theorize the notion of infancy as both a desire for the irretrievable and an incarnation of historical interpretation inherent in selected writings of Walter Benjamin. I consider Berlin ChildhoodAround Nineteenhundred as a return to the myth of Benjamin’s childhood, which accomplishes itself as history by taking recourse to the specific framework of infancy. In turn, I utilize this framework to approach in a new way Benjaminian themes such as melancholy, the ruin, and collecting in “Unpacking My Library” and Origin of the German Tragic Drama. Infancy, I argue, neither belongs to an age nor has an age. The very specific temporality of history is captured in collected objects which are best described by Giorgio Agamben as “the relics of a past on which is written the Edenic cipher of infancy, [which] have captured forever a gleam of that which can be possessed only with the provision that it be lost forever.” Always already over and not yet begun, infancy can neither be said nor read – and yet it is a crucial concept in Benjamin’s writing. Like playing with a toy, it ensures the renewal of the world on a smaller scale. Referring to the ‘once upon a time’ and a ‘no more,’ it is an eminently historical thing. In its miniaturization, it is a site in which we can grasp the temporality of history. I claim, however, that the temporal dimension is really a spatialized one, for time extends itself, in the form of allegory, into a petrified Ur-landscape – the space of infancy. Though the strategy of Benjamin’s angel of history can only be a funereal one – for it is impossible to capture the phantasm of infancy – this impossibility never forestalls the desire for it. The hidden intention of allegory, to rescue objects into Eternity, thus becomes apparent precisely in the Benjaminian remembrance of the agelessness of the child as a figuration of infancy.

Julia Isabel Faisst
Harvard University
faisst@fas.harvard.edu

The Mediation of Historical Loss Through Nostalgia in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited

Recent critical reconsiderations of nostalgia have reconstituted it as an interactive form that operates at the fundamental level of social discord, providing a mental and cultural space for exposing individual and social responses to historical crisis. This paper posits that the novel can be understood as one such space that makes most manifest the articulation of historical loss through nostalgia, and which is particularly resonant when contextualised against the fragmenting of personal and national narratives of historical continuity during the Second World War. A novel such as Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945), often dismissed as overly sentimental, thus becomes emblematic of these creative and critical textual explorations of nostalgia. Waugh’s novel constitutes a dynamic, twofold analysis that serves as a counter-response to the destabilisation of national historical identity in post-war Britain, as well as to the crisis of literary history after the fallout from the Modernist experiment. Reaffirming the coherent historical function of the country house against the moral vacuum of the modern age, Brideshead Revisited pivots on the affinity between an authentic national heritage and a legitimate personal inheritance. Mediating these multiple histories, Waugh’s textual nostalgia is reassessed as offering a more radical critique of the poverty of modernity.

Laura Coffey
Birkbeck College, University of London
fcoff01@students.bbk.ac.uk

Session B

Re-defining Authenticity: D. M. Thomas’s The White Hotel and Holocaust Fiction

Although literature has consistently been both praised and condemned for the imaginative power with which it confronts and interprets the world, in the case of literature that concerns itself with the Holocaust, there is an immediacy of moral exigency to remain responsible to historical fact. Yet, how can the need for historical veracity or “authenticity” be negotiated by writers and readers of fiction? This paper recasts the terms of the relationship between history and literature, arguing that literature can productively disrupt the confounding silence which traumatic history imposes upon us. As that which defies representation or articulation, the trauma of history calls for a way to be recognized and is answered by literature, which, precisely because of its artifice and imaginative possibilities, can begin to speak the unspeakable. It is not that literature successfully bridges the gap between what cannot be written and writing; rather, in its very nature, it is capable of dramatizing the gap on the local level of text. Reading D. M. Thomas’s The White Hotel as a case study, this paper proposes that the issue at stake for scholars of “Holocaust fiction” is the definition of an “authentic” Holocaust fiction—or, whether a notion of authenticity can be extended to a fiction that bears (at best) a tangential relation to its historical object, and whether that notion of authenticity might be best thought of as “figural” rather than historical or biographical.

Taryn L. Okuma
University of Wisconsin-Madison
tlokuma@wisc.edu

Lenin’s Head and Other Traces of History In Recent Post-Communist European Cinema

The collapse of communism in Europe has seen the revival of Hegelian teleological arguments about the end of history, updated into the claim that history culminates into modern, liberal capitalist democracies, most notably argued by Francis Fukuyama in The End of History and the Last Man. But what does it mean to say that history has an end? Moreover, why must liberal capitalism emerge after the end of history? This paper looks at such Hegelian discourses and attempts to answer the latter questions through an examination of the recurring image of the dismembered statue of Lenin that has appeared in several recent post-communist European films such as Dusan Makavejev’s Gorilla Bathes at Noon, Theo Angelopoulos’s Ulysses’ Gaze, and Wolfgang Becker’s Goodbye, Lenin!

I will argue that these films represent, often through repeated images of decaying or dismembered statues of Lenin, the historical break between a communist and post-communist Europe in a complex and ambivalent fashion, mixing nostalgia for the communist past, with melancholic longings for an emergent future. Yet, such ambivalence about representing the historical divide, in turn, evacuates the historical present from having any stable meaning outside of the historical decay of the past. I will focus in particular on the film Ulysses’ Gaze, and its self-reflexive representations of cinema and the film image, to show how this evacuation of the historical present ultimately casts doubt on the ability for cinema and the film image to represent any emergent historical teleos.

Zoran Samardzija
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
zs2@uwm.edu

Absent Images and History’s Traces: Theorizing the Lost Fictional Photographs of Twentieth Century American Novels

The ‘missing’ photographs of twentieth century American novels register the traces of history rather than its full presence. W riters have used absent images (fictional photographs described in words but not printed as images) to offer theories of time, systems of memory, and philosophies of history, to explore individual and collective memory, and to build themes of optics and vision. These f ictional photographs destabilize assumptions of reality and maneuver within the various tensions of nostalgia and presence, faithful representation and manipulative interpretation, objectivity and subjectivity. They become metaphors for the problems inherent in observation and representation as well as physical manifestations of the novel’s ambivalent placement in the world and out of it. Ultimately the absent images are legacies of loss, representing irretrievable moments, disposable pasts, violently intrusive memories, destructive evidence, and unhealthy nostalgia. They force an awareness of the gulf between past and present; substitute image and memory for reality; offer an epitaph and an obituary; create a vacuum, a loss of movement or growth; aggrandize the past and make life a list of missing photographs; stand for a loss of momentum or a lost vision. I analyze the place of missing photographs within literary realism, using numerous twentieth century American novels and their absent images.

Zoe Trodd
Harvard University
trodd@fas.harvard.edu