This book addresses an anomaly in the novel as genre: the generic promise to readers--that "reading a novel" is a familiar and repeatable experience--is challenged by the extravagant exceptions to this rule. Furthermore, these exceptions (such as Moby-Dick, Ulysses, or To the Lighthouse) are sui generis, hybrid concoctions that cannot be said to be typical novels. The novel, then, as literary form, succeeds by extravagantly disregarding or even disavowing the protocols of its own genre. Examining a number of famous examples from Don Quixote to Nostromo, this book offers an anatomy of exceptions that illustrate the structural role of their exceptionality for the prestige of the novel as literary form.

Genre and Extravagance in the Novel: Lower Frequencies

Literature & Fiction

Rasula, Jed

History & Criticism

Oxford University Press

This is a book about artistic modernism contending with the historical transfigurations of modernity. As a conscientious engagement with modernity's restructuring of the lifeworld, the modernist avant-garde raised the stakes of this engagement to programmatic explicitness. But even beyond the vanguard, the global phenomenon of jazz combined somatic assault with sensory tutelage. Jazz, like the new technologies of modernity, re-calibrated sensory ratios. The criterion of the new as self-making also extended to names: pseudonyms and heteronyms. The protocols of modernism solicited a pragmatic arousal of bodily sensation as artistic resource, validating an acrobatic sensibility ranging from slapstick and laughter to the pathos of bereavement. Expressivity trumped representation. The artwork was a diagram of perception, not a mimetic rendering. For artists, the historical pressures of altered perception provoked new models, and Ezra Pound's slogan 'Make It New' became the generic rallying cry of renovation. The paradigmatic stance of the avant-garde was established by Futurism, but the discovery of prehistoric art added another provocation to artists. Paleolithic caves validated the spirit of all-over composition, unframed and dynamic. Geometric abstraction, Constructivism and Purism, and Surrealism were all in quest of a new mythology. Making it new yielded a new pathos in the sensation of radical discrepancy between futurist striving and remotest antiquity. The Paleolithic cave and the USSR emitted comparable siren calls on behalf of the remote past and the desired future. As such, the present was suffused with the pathos of being neither, but subject to both.

Acrobatic Modernism from the Avant-Garde to Prehistory

Arts & Photography

Music

An abrupt break in the prevailing modes of artistic expression, for many, marks the advent of modernism in the early twentieth century, but revisionary attempts to pin down a precise moment of its emergence remain disputed. History of a Shiver proffers a different approach, tracing the first inkling of modernism instead to the nineteenth century's fascination with music. As Jed Rasula deftly shows, melomania--the passion for music--gave rise to concepts like Richard Wagner's "endless melody" and the Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art, which in turn infused the arts of the fin de si�cle with an aura of expectancy, challenging them to induce musical effects by their own means. With each art aspiring to produce the effects of another artistic medium, a synesthetic yearning ran like a shiver through the body of art that would emerge over the next half century. Rasula traces this pan-arts polyphony from German Romantic theory to early experiments in "visual music," encompassing such diverse phenomena as American fixation on Arcadia, early film theory, and the lure of the fourth dimension. All the while, he keeps focus on the paramount historical consequence in elevating music to a new universal aesthetic standard, arguing that Wagnerism was first among modern "isms." In surveying this momentous interplay among arts, History of a Shiver ranges from literature, music and painting to theatre, cinema, dance, photography, and civic pageantry. It retells the story of modernism by recovering not an idea, but a feeling--the hair-raising potential for each painting, literary text, or musical composition to herald an unprecedented domain of human enterprise.

History of a Shiver: The Sublime Impudence of Modernism

A major provocation to modern poetics is the inspirational bounty of destruction (effacement, negation, undoing) bequeathed by Mallarmé. Modernist poets and artists explored this initiative through strategic explorations in the materiality of the medium, as well as dislocations of sensibility. Informing these maneuvers is the most ancient legacy of the muses, the supposition of a guiding voice, a shadow mouth. This legacy nourishes a fantasy of inspiration as privileged access to the murmur of pre-signifying meaning, a speech without words, a picture without images, or images that are so deep as to defy scrutiny. The sites of inspiration documented in Modernism and Poetic Inspiration range from nineteenth century linguistic theory to postmodern strategies of conceptual writing, encompassing well known instances of modernist poetics (Mallarmé, Pound, Olson) alongside obscure but revealing figures like Otto Nebel and Henri-Martin Barzun.

Modernism and Poetic Inspiration: The Shadow Mouth (Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics)

PALGRAVE~MACMILLAN

In 1916, as World War I raged around them, a group of bohemians gathered at a small cabaret in Zurich, Switzerland. After decorating the walls with art by Picasso and other avant-garde artists, they embarked on a series of extravagant performances. Three readers simultaneously recited a poem in three languages; a monocle-wearing teenager performed a spell from New Zealand; another young man sneered at the audience, snapping a whip as he intoned his Fantastic Prayers.” One of the artists called these sessions both buffoonery and a requiem mass.” Soon they would have a more evocative name: Dada. In Destruction Was My Beatrice, modernist scholar Jed Rasula presents the first narrative history of Dada, showing how this little-understood artistic phenomenon laid the foundation for culture as we know it today. Although the venue where Dada was born closed after only four months and its acolytes scattered, the idea of Dada quickly spread to New York, where it influenced artists like Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray; to Berlin, where it inspired painters George Grosz and Hannah Höch; and to Paris, where it dethroned previous avant-garde movements like Fauvism and Cubism while inspiring early Surrealists like André Breton, Louis Aragon, and Paul Éluard. The long tail of Dadaism, Rasula shows, can be traced even further, to artists as diverse as William S. Burroughs, Robert Rauschenberg, Marshall McLuhan, the Beatles, Monty Python, David Byrne, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, all of whomalong with untold othersowe a debt to the bizarre wartime escapades of the Dada vanguard. A globe-spanning narrative that resurrects some of the 20th century’s most influential artistic figures,Destruction Was My Beatrice describes how Dada burst upon the world in the midst of total warand how the effects of this explosion are still reverberating today.

Destruction Was My Beatrice: Dada and the Unmaking of the Twentieth Century

Basic Books

What the Thunder Said: How The Waste Land Made Poetry Modern

Review\n"Stimulating. . . . [What the Thunder Said] wonderfully traces the evolution of literary thought, and [Rasula’s] syntheses feel fresh and exciting. The result is a refreshing reappraisal of a classic." ― Publishers Weekly starred review\nOn the 100th anniversary of T. S. Eliot’s modernist masterpiece, a rich cultural history of The Waste Land’s creation, explosive impact, and enduring influence\nWhen T. S. Eliot published The Waste Land in 1922, it put the thirty-four-year-old author on a path to worldwide fame and the Nobel Prize. “But,” as Jed Rasula writes, “The Waste Land is not only a poem: it names an event, like a tornado or an earthquake. Its publication was a watershed, marking a before and after. It was a poem that unequivocally declared that the ancient art of poetry had become modern.” In What the Thunder Said, Rasula tells the story of how The Waste Land changed poetry forever and how this cultural bombshell served as a harbinger of modernist revolution in all the arts, from abstraction in visual art to atonality in music.\nFrom its famous opening, “April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land,” to its closing Sanskrit mantra, “Shantih shantih shantih,” The Waste Land combined singular imagery, experimental technique, and dense allusions, boldly fulfilling Ezra Pound’s injunction to “make it new.” What the Thunder Said traces the origins, reception, and enduring influence of the poem, from its roots in Wagnerism and French Symbolism to the way its strangely beguiling music continues to inspire readers. Along the way, we learn about Eliot’s storied circle, including Wyndham Lewis, Virginia Woolf, and Bertrand Russell, and about poets like Mina Loy and Marianne Moore, whose innovations have proven as consequential as those of the “men of 1914.”\nFilled with fresh insights and unfamiliar anecdotes, What the Thunder Said recovers the explosive force of the twentieth century’s most influential poem.

Princeton University Press

The American Poetry Wax Museum: Reality Effects, 1940-1990 (Refiguring English Studies)

Oscillating between documentary and polemic, The Americans Poetry Wax Museum is a study of the canonizing assumptions and obsessions that animate postwar American poetry. Highly public literary controversies, such as the Pound affair of 1949, or the anthology wars of the early 1960s, are chronicled in a precise, detailed, and theoretically inflected account that redefines the project of literary history. Rasula's analysis moves from the rise of New Criticism, through the ascendancy of Robert Lowell and confessional poetics, into the current period of multiculturalism and the avant-garde provocations of the language poets. Drawing upon an impressive array of sources - ranging from the history of museum display to the institutional and cultural processes by which American poets have been canonized - Rasula combines literary criticism, cultural studies, and social history in an analysis that works to disrupt prevailing myths about poets and poetry in the public sphere and in the academy. This innovative and irreverent book, second in NCTE's Prefiguring English Studies series, will be an important resource not only for scholars of the period but for writers and teachers of poetry as well. It stands as an invitation for all of us to consider what it means to assemble and police a national canon of poetry.

Natl. Council of Teachers of English

The American Poetry Wax Museum: Reality Effects, 1940 - 1990 (Refiguring English Studies)Jed Rasula

Makes a case for innovation as the generative and thematic force in American poetry of the late 20th century. Syncopations is an analysis of the sustaining vitality behind contemporary American poetry from 1975 to the present day by one of the most astute observers and critics in the field. The 12 essays reflect Jed Rasula's nearly 30 years of advocacy on behalf of opening the field of American poetry. From the Beats and the Black Mountain poets in the 1950s and 1960s to the impact of language poetry, the specter of an avant-garde has haunted the administrative centers of poetic conservatism. But the very concept of avant-garde is misleading, implying organized assault. Incentives for change can be traced to other factors, including the increased participation of women, critical theory's self-reflection, and a growing interest in the book as a unit of composition. Syncopations addresses these and other issues evident in the work of such poets and critics as Clayton Eshleman, Marjorie Perloff, Ronald Johnson, Clark Coolidge, Nathaniel Mackey, and Robin Blaser. Its chapters range in modes and include close readings, sociological analysis, philosophical-aesthetic meditations, and career appraisals. By examining both exemplary innovators and the social context in which innovation is either resisted, acclaimed, or taken for granted, Rasula delivers an important conceptual chronicle of the promise of American poetry. Jed Rasula is Helen S. Lanier Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Georgia and author of The American Poetry Wax Museum: Reality Effects, 1940-1990.

Syncopations: The Stress of Innovation in Contemporary American Poetry (Modern and Contemporary Poetics)

University Alabama Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Rasula, Jed. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Rasula, Jed

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Rasula, Jed. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Genre and Extravagance in the Novel: Lower Frequencies

Acrobatic Modernism from the Avant-Garde to Prehistory

History of a Shiver: The Sublime Impudence of Modernism

Modernism and Poetic Inspiration: The Shadow Mouth (Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics)

Destruction Was My Beatrice: Dada and the Unmaking of the Twentieth Century

What the Thunder Said: How The Waste Land Made Poetry Modern

What the Thunder Said: How The Waste Land Made Poetry Modern

The American Poetry Wax Museum: Reality Effects, 1940-1990 (Refiguring English Studies)

The American Poetry Wax Museum: Reality Effects, 1940-1990 (Refiguring English Studies)

Syncopations: The Stress of Innovation in Contemporary American Poetry (Modern and Contemporary Poetics)