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  • Raising Questions: Modernism, Genre, Text
  • Paula Marantz Cohen

The first group of essays in this volume raises questions about what constitutes modernism and how works previously unconnected to the movement may relate to or extend our understanding of it. Matthew Levay explores the importance of Gertrude Stein’s detective novel, Blood on the Dining Room Floor, arguing that the work shows Stein combining an experimental aesthetic with a popular one, thereby bringing modernist ideas to a larger, middlebrow audience. The second piece, by Cecily Swanson, challenges the parameters of modernism through a discussion of Muriel Draper’s NBC radio program, It’s a Woman’s World, and her 1929 memoir of her music salon. Swanson maintains that Draper’s conversation about music with her mostly female audience adds a new dimension to our understanding of the musical medium and of the modernist enterprise: it both challenges the notion that music is impersonal and incorporates the responses of an audience of female listeners and readers into a blended oral and written aesthetic. The two essays that follow expand the way an individual work has been conceived within the modernist canon. Timothy C. Baker looks at James Leslie Mitchell’s A Scots Quair, traditionally viewed narrowly within Scottish literary canon, and shows its relevance to modernist ideas of fiction and romance. Likewise, W.E.B. Du Buois’s novel Dark Princess, often taken as a propagandist work, is recontextualized by Syndey Bufkin as an effort to relate the romantic tradition that it invokes to a utopian idea of the novel.

The remaining pieces deal with more contemporary questions and forms of critical definition and reconsideration. Isidore Diala sees Isidore Okpewho’s 2004 novel Call Me by My Rightful Name as a departure from his earlier, more realistic work in its incorporation of magical realism, folk imagination, and orality. Diala argues that this work oppposes Western novelistic techniques while also, precariously, supporting myths about Africa. F. Meltem Gürle takes a revisionary approach to the Turkish Bildungsroman, arguing that the genre’s protagonist does not, like his Western counterpart, become a reformed idealist but ends, instead, in a state of pure contemplation. This, says Gürle, reflects the unresolved conflict between tradition and modernity in Turkish culture. Corinna K. Lee looks at Tillie Olsen’s Yonnondio: From the Thirties, a work begun in 1932 but published in 1974, as an example of literary recovery — not an unfinished work but one that has been reclaimed according to a newer documentary aesthetic. Finally, Ondrea E. [End Page v] Ackerman discusses Robert Grenier’s provocative drawing poems as innovative explorations of what a text can be understood to be.

The books reviewed at the end of this issue continue the discussion of questions raised in these essays. [End Page vi]

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