Susan Stanford Friedman

Definitional Excursions: The Meanings of Modern/Modernity/Modernism

What is modernity? What is or was modernism? Why is the energetic, expanding, multidisciplinary field of modernist studies so filled with contestation over the very ground of study? Definitional activities are fictionalizing processes, however much they sound like rational categorization. As such, I will begin with three stories, allegorized but rooted in my own experience in an evolving field.1

Periodizing Modernism: Postcolonial Modernities and the Space/Time Borders of Modernist Studies

Susan Stanford Friedman is Virginia Woolf Professor of english and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-madison. She writes extensively on modernism, including such writers as H.d., Woolf, and Joyce. Her recent books include Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter and Analyzing Freud: Letters of H.D., Bryher, and Their Circle. Currently, she is writing on globalization, migration, and diaspora as well as her book in progress, Planetary Modernism and the Modernities of Empire, Nation, and Diaspora. modernism / modernity volume thirteen, number three, pp 425–443.

Joyce : the return of the repressed

Did James Joyce, that icon of modernity, spearhead the dismantling of the Cartesian subject? Or was he a supreme example of a modern man forever divided and never fully known to himself? This volume reads the dialogue of contradictory cultural voices in Joyces works-revolutionary and reactionary, critical and subject to critique, marginal and central. It includes ten essays that identify repressed elements in Joyces writings and examine how psychic and cultural repressions persistently surface in his texts. Contributors include Joseph A. Boone, Marilyn L. Brownstein, Jay Clayton, Laura Doyle, Susan Stanford Friedman, Christine Froula, Ellen Carol Jones, Alberto Moreirias, Richard Pearce, and Robert Spoo.

Conjunctures of the “New” World Literature and Migration Studies: Cosmopolitanism, Religion, and Diasporic Sisters of Scheherazade

The essay explores the overlapping discourses in the fields of the “new” world literature and the “new” migration studies, with a focus on their related discourses of circulation and cosmopolitanism . It examines the transnational circulation of writers in addition to texts in twenty-first century world literature with specific discussions of the cosmopolitan treatment of religion in the work of selected diasporic Muslim women writers, featuring Elif Shafak’s The Bastard of Istanbul and Mohja Kahf’s E-Mails from Scheherazad and The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf . The essay considers the importance for diasporic Muslim women writers of Scheherazade as a learned woman and clever storyteller who saves the realm through words, not violence. Confronting Islamophobia and Orientalist fantasies of Muslim women, these authors locate traditions of cosmopolitanism and religious tolerance within their own heritage, not as an exclusive property of the West.

Response to Robbins and Walkowitz

ditions beyond Europe; analysing how those traditions operate within systems of production and circulation; and remaking the knowledge categories that have made regional literary histories seem distinct, autonomous and disconnected. We can see this argument in Friedman’s articulation of ‘four different ways of developing a doable planetary strategy’. These involve asking how familiar archives participate in global projects; locating new archives beyond Europe; tracing networks among archives; and comparing archives. Make no mistake: Friedman intends to ‘weaken’ the field, in the positive sense recently championed by Paul Saint-Amour (in Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form, also published in 2015). That is, she wants to loosen the concept of modernist studies, allow its certainties about time and place to give way to more diverse, and less coherent, trajectories of cause and effect. In the construction of her book, Friedman favours ‘many angles’ over ‘a single thesis’, but it is fair to say that she favours this approach to the field, too. And perhaps this is not surprising, since above all she seeks to displace the logic of first and best that she sees as a lethal impediment to modernism’s worldliness. Friedman argues that the only substantial fix for the European hold on modernism is the retraction of periodization. If you look further back and further forward, she claims, modernist expression can be found in eighth-century China and mid-twentieth-century India. Whether you agree that these earlier and later examples are ‘modernist’ – whether you agree it is important to use that adjective for aesthetic expression in any period of modernity – these examples serve to prise open the question of beginnings and endings, originality and adaptation. Friedman seeks to show ‘how Western modernity/modernism has been formed in relation to non-Western modernities/modernisms.’ As a first step to locating more relationships of cause and effect, insisting that there are many vectors of influence and inheritance, Friedman calls for new ontologies ofmodernism and new comparisons among those ontologies. In one of her typical acts of intellectual generosity, Friedman cites a question I asked her seven years ago when she presented this work in a keynote address to the Modernist Studies Association conference in Montreal. At that time, I wondered how the geographic and historical plurality of modernism as she is imagining it could be translated into pedagogy, hiring and curriculum. We owe it to Friedman’s courageous book that we now have some answers. This is what she says. Scholars who hope to write about and teach ‘modernism’ will need to invent courses that introduce students to a much larger aesthetic geography. They will need to engage with literatures drawn from more languages and a more diverse range of languages. They will need to collaborate. And they will need to think about the interrelationship among what have appeared to be distinct aesthetic traditions. There is no doubt that Planetary Modernisms is asking us to learn more and learn differently. Only then will we produce a more worldly, because more planetary, history of modernism.

Women Poets and the American Sublime

Preface Acknowledgments 1. From Emerson to Whitman: Engendering the Sublime 2. Another Way to See: Dickinson and the Counter-Sublime 3. Dickinson, Moore, and the Poetics of Deflection 4. Marianne Moore: Toward an Engendered Sublime 5. The Piercing, Melting Word: MooreOs Octopus 6. BishopOs Sexual Poetics 7. PlathOs Bodily Ego: Restaging the Sublime 8. Of Woman Born: Adrienne Rich and the Feminist Sublime Notes Index