Modernist Writings and Religio-Scientific Discourse: H.D., Loy, and Toomer

ISBN-13: 9780230621220 / Angielski / Twarda / 2010 / 219 str.

Lara Vetter

Opis

This book mediates a dialectics between power and subjectivity versus history and politics. The invention of Africa is not merely a residue of Africa's encounter with Europe but a project in continuity in contemporary history of Africa, where history has become a location of struggle and meaning, a location of power and domination. Eze contends that postcolonial African studies that thrive by way of unanimity, analogy, or homogenenity are merely advancing a "defeatist" historicism. It attempts to gain essence by inverting the terms of colonial discourse and is decisively implicated in the very logic of coloniality. This method of historiography not only stifles the overall socio-political imagination of contemporary Africa but offers a dogmatic blueprint for politics of domination. Eze argues that a chance for an African Renaissance is dependent on review mechanisms of African historiography

Recenzje

"Vetter s Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse offers a fascinating overview of convergences between late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century metaphysical, scientific, and literary speculations about the sexual body, the body in motion, and the racialized body. Moving easily between meditations by sexologists, physical trainers, dance theorists, and eugenicists, on the one hand, and preachers, Mesmerists, Theosophists, and Christian Scientists on the other, Vetter demonstrates the wash of extra-literary ideas through literary documents, published and unpublished, by H.D., Mina Loy, and Jean Toomer. The result is a rich and dynamic picture of the flux and struggle of ideas that constitute a cultural moment." - Adalaide Morris, John C. Gerber Professor of English, The University of Iowa

"Having read widely in both relevant published and archival work as well as extra-literary texts - including popular periodicals and heterodox religious tracts - Vetter has succeeded in developing a nuanced, sophisticated, and interdisciplinary approach to her material. This monograph will appeal to a number of different constituencies within modernist literary studies, including scholars who are interested in material and cultural history, theories of gender and sexuality, and the unpublished works of three important modernist writers: H.D., Loy, and Toomer. Vetter´s book is, indeed, admirably conceived and potentially groundbreaking." - Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos, University Research Professor, University of New Brunswick and editor of H.D. s Majic Ring

"Vetter explores two largely neglected aspects of modernist writing - its spiritual and scientific dimensions - and offers a nuanced portrayal of the literary progeny spawned by these strange bedfellows. Through perceptive close readings of works by H.D., Loy, Toomer, and other key figures, she shows how religio-scientific discourse empowered modernist writers to articulate profoundly materialist concerns about race, sexuality, and the paradoxes of embodiment." - Helen Sword, The University of Auckland

Spis treści

Introduction '[T]he electric incitement of Eros': Electromagnetism, Sexuality, and Modernism Seeking 'a sort of clairvoyant material plane': Spirituality and the Moving Body Negotiating the Racialized Body: Theories of Spiritual Evolution and the 'American Race' Coda

O autorze

LARA VETTER is Assistant Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA.