Geo-Graphing Modernism
Session Coordinator: Desmond Harding
Department of English Language and Literature
Central Michigan University
Anspach Hall
Mount Pleasant, MI 48859
“True Places: Mapping
Lived Experience in Modernism”
A fundamental rupture between the individual’s lived experience and its “structural” reality typifies the modernist era. The most personal or local practices reveal themselves to be bound up within a multinational network of power that the individual can barely make sense of. Take teatime, that most British of British national customs: tea in London involves tealeaves from India, sugar from Jamaica, and possibly china from China (or Dresden). The “truth,” the underlying reality of this personal or family or regional or national experience, lies elsewhere. This disorientation, the disconnection between one’s lived space and the global totality, affects individuals both in great urban metropolises and in the hinterlands. (Even Faulkner’s Yokanapatawpha County, seemingly insulated against the surge of modernity, finds itself subject to an international system its inhabitants can barely comprehend.) Indeed, the modernist project might be viewed as an attempt to map the spaces of the new global reality, where the individual’s own experience, as well as his or her regional and even national identity, becomes unfamiliar. The literary text becomes a map (or a collection of maps). This literary cartography makes visible the relations between individual subjects, local concerns, national issues, and the world economy. The success or failure of such a mapping project—the reconquest of the truth of lived experience—lies in the ability to represent an increasingly unrepresentable experience in the world.
Robert T. Tally Jr.
Texas State University
“Cognitive Mapping Musil’s Vienna”
In Postmodernism: Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism Fredric Jameson adopts Kevin Lynch’s notion of “cognitive mapping” in order to name the situation in which “people are unable to map (in their minds) either their own positions or the urban totality in which they find themselves” (50). The difficulty of calling up such a map is suggestive of the experience of the sublime, which as Lyotard describes, takes place when “the imagination fails to present an object which might, if only in principle, come to match a concept” (The Postmodern Condition 78). Urban complexity and the difficulty/impossibility of conceptualizing it figure importantly in Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities and raises there the question of the narrative means of presenting the unpresentable. This paper engages the question of mapping modernism/modernity by examining the narrative resources Musil develops for presenting the sublime, unimaginable totality of urban experience in the specific case of Vienna at the Jahrhundertwende.
Mark M. Freed
Central Michigan University
“‘China is an Old
Bitch that Eats Her Own Puppies’: Modernism and Contemporary Chinese Fiction”
This paper explores the use made of Anglo-Irish modernism by contemporary Chinese writers. I argue that in a number of recent novels modernism functions as a mediating discourse that facilitates the discussion of globalization and historical upheaval. An awareness of this transcultural dialogue is vital to an understanding of contemporary Chinese fiction and, furthermore, activates new meanings in texts central to the high modernist canon. After a brief survey of relevant texts, including Hong Jing’s K: The Art of Love (2002), which explores the presence of Julian Bell, Virginia Woolf’s nephew, in Shanghai, I will focus on Ha Jin’s campus novel The Crazed (2002) and its extended engagement with James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The novel’s protagonist, a young dissident and scholar of literature in 1980’s Beijing, is clearly modeled on Stephen Dedalus (the novel ends with his emigration to Hong Kong, which resembles Stephen’s flight to Paris). At one point he reflects, “China is an old bitch that eats her own puppies”; in this echo of Portrait (“Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow”), Ha Jin translates the national and religious chauvinism under which Stephen lives into the State repression of Tiananmen Square-era China. It is my contention that Ha Jin’s adaptation of Joyce is symptomatic of a larger repurposing of modernist tropes by Chinese writers as they negotiate issues of identity and history in a transnational context.
Lucas Tromly
University of Manitoba