Modernism, Inc. : Body, Memory, Capital

by Scandura, Jani

• ISBN13: 9780814781371
• ISBN10: 0814781373
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-08-01
• Publisher: New York University Press

Summary

Drawing on a variety of interdisciplinary debates in cultural studies and contemporary theory,Modernism, Inc. provides a new look at the relationship between modernism and postmodernism within the critical frame of twentieth-century American culture.Organized around the idea of "incorporation"--embodiment, repressed memory, and advanced capitalism--Modernism, Inc. covers a wide range of topics: Josephine Baker's "hot house style"; the president's penis in American political life; myth-making and the Hoover Dam; trauma, poetics, and the Armenian genocide; feminist kitsch and the recuperation of North America's "Great Lady painters"; Gertrude Stein and Jewish Social Science; the Reno Divorce Factory and the production of gender; Andy Razaf and Black Bolshevism. Collectively, the essays suggest that the relationship between the modern and the postmodern is not one of rupture, belatedness, dilution, or extremity, but of haunting.Modernism, Inc. looks at our ghosts, and at the unspeakable secrets of modernity from which they're derived.Contributors: Maria Damon, Walter Kalidjian, Walter Lew, Janet Lyon, William J. Maxwell, Cary Nelson, John Timberman Newcombe, David G. Nicholls, Thomas Pepper, Paula Rabinowitz, Daniel Rosenberg, Marlon Ross, Jani Scandura, Kathleen Stewart, Julia Walker.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	vii
Introduction: America and the Phantom Modern	1	(18)
Jani Scandura
Michael Thurston
I BODY	19	(62)
Machine Dreams	21	(8)
Kathleen Stewart
Josephine Baker's Hothouse	29	(19)
Janet Lyon
Trespassing the Colorline: Aggressive Mobility and Sexual Trangression in the Construction of New Negro Modernity	48	(20)
Marlon B. Ross
Bodies, Voices, Words: Modern Drama and the Problem of the Literary	68	(13)
Julia A. Walker
II MEMORY	81	(110)
No One Is Buried in Hoover Dam	84	(23)
Daniel Rosenberg
The Edge of Modernism: Genocide and the Poetics of Traumatic Memory	107	(26)
Walter Kalaidjian
Writing, Social Science, and Ethnicity in Gertrude Stein and Certain Others	133	(18)
Maria Damon
Jean Toomer's Cane, Modernization, and the Spectral Folk	151	(20)
David G. Nicholls
Grafts, Transplants, Translation: The Americanizing of Younghill Kang	171	(20)
Walter K. Lew
III CAPITAL	191	(98)
Great Lady Painters, Inc.: Icons of Feminism, Modernism, and the Nation	193	(26)
Paula Rabinowitz
Kitchen Mechanics and Parlor Nationalists: Andy Razaf, Black Bolshevism, and Harlem's Renaissance	219	(19)
William J. Maxwell
Reno-Vating Gender: Place, Production, and the Reno Divorce Factory	238	(30)
Jani Scandura
Politics and Labor in Poetry of the Fin De Siecle and Beyond: Fragments of an Unwritable History	268	(21)
Cary Nelson
Contributors	289	(4)
Index	293