As models of academic literary study, it would appear that elocution and New Criticism could not be further apart. While elocution (the theory and art of reading aloud) supposedly belonged to a pre‐modernist, genteel type of criticism derived from traditional rhetoric, New Criticism is considered the quintessentially modern, serious, and professional type of criticism. Yet, a close look at the elocutionary tradition by means of two concise case studies – those of turn‐of‐the‐century elocutionists Samuel Silas Curry and Solomon Henry Clark – shows more similarities than differences. It is therefore argued that the demise of elocution as a mode of literary study was not caused by the revolutionary action of the New Critics, but by impersonal, institutional factors that played into the hands of New Criticism. The focus on elocution helps to raise the right questions about the complex relation between modernism and rhetoric, and about the delineation of a modernist canon by the New Critics, who supposedly adopted the anti‐rhetorical aesthetic dicta of high modernism. Yet, this article argues that the exclusion of the American “New Poets” from the modernist canon can only be explained by the same pressure of academic professionalization that had advantaged New Criticism in academia.
This article traces the emergence and evolution of 'rhetoric' as a historical key term of metaliterary discourse. In the modernist period, the term 'rhetoric' was given a conspicuously central role in the heated debate over literary style and its relation to ordinary language, not incidentally after rhetoric's fall from grace as an academic discipline over the course of the 19 th century. Scores of writers (e. g. Symons, Yeats, Hofmannsthal, Gourmont, Pound, Eliot) attacked 'rhetoric,' variously (and often vaguely) defined as convoluted poetic diction, moralistic or political preaching, and meaningless abstraction. Yet, the broader cultural context in which this anti-rhetorical discourse was situated reveals a climate of widespread suspicion of language as a sign system, with the term 'rhetoric' functioning as a receptacle for feelings of dissatisfaction with language. In contrast, Jean Paulhan's sophisticated reappropriation of 'rhetoric' in Les fleurs de Tarbes (The Flowers of Tarbes) and other writings reasserted confidence in language and its commonplace expressions, and in the "arts of writing." Paulhan's proposed solution helps us to shed light on a demonstrable tendency in modernist poetics to incorporate rather than simply expel rhetorica search for a properly modernist rhetoric.
De “ New Negro”, de preek, en het naoorlogse modernisme van Baldwin en Ellison. De literatuurgeschiedenis heeft traditioneel de verschillen en breuken benadrukt tussen Ralph Ellison en James Baldwin enerzijds en de schrijvers van de Harlem Renaissance anderzijds. Ellison en Baldwin zorgden zelf voor dit beeld, door in hun essays en commentaren hun eigen poëtica af te zetten tegen die van hun voorgangers, en door hun eigen romans expliciet te definiëren als modernistische romans in de traditie van James, Faulkner en Hemingway. Desondanks is het duidelijk dat debatten over de Afro-Amerikaanse literatuur, en over haar functie als kunst of als propaganda, zowel voor als na de Tweede Wereldoorlog in gelijkaardige termen gevoerd werden. Door de aandacht te richten op het element van de “ Negro sermon” (de preek) in de poëtica van Alain Locke en James Weldon Johnson, wegbereiders van de Harlem Renaissance, toont dit artikel aan dat Ellison en Baldwin, die ook veel ruimte gaven aan de kerk en aan het genre van de preek in Invisible Man (1952) and Go Tell it on the Mountain (1953), toch bepaalde poëticale principes van de Harlem Renaissance voortzetten. Bestaande ideeën en strategieën rond het wezen van een specifiek Afro-Amerikaans modernisme werkten dus duidelijk door na 1945.
The British modernist little magazine Ray: Art Miscellany (1926–1927) pioneered the combination of text and image in the vein of the Continental avant-gardes. Amid the surge of interest in periodicals within modernist studies, Ray has managed to escape broader attention. Its editor, Sidney Hunt, was an enigmatic figure and the magazine itself also eludes categorization, as it did not conform to the standards of English modernism, which were in the process of crystallising at the time of its publication and then dominated the scholarly consensus on artistic innovation during the interwar period. Focusing on the specificities of the magazine form and on Ray's explicitly interartistic and transnational ethos, this article locates Ray within the spectrum of British ‘modernisms’, while interpreting its manifest effort to introduce various European avant-garde movements to a British audience as part of a strategy to establish an alternative modernist project grounded in the ideals of the moribund Arts and Crafts tradition.
Modernism's Rhetoric (with a note on terror) By Way of Introduction 1According to Jean-François Lyotard, "it is in the aesthetic of the sublime that modern art (including literature) finds its impetus and the logic of avant-gardes finds its axioms." 2 This statement succinctly introduces the problem of modernism and rhetoric, because the sublime was first theorized by Longinus, of whom Lyotard ominously observes: "The author was a rhetorician. Basically, he taught those oratorical devices with which a speaker can persuade or move (depending on the genre) his audience." 3 Longinus's contribution to classical rhetoric, Peri Hypsous (On the Sublime), was intended as a stylistics textbook on how to express and convey the feeling of the sublime, but, as Lyotard remarks, "the sublime, the indeterminate, were destabilizing the text's didactic intention." 4 The sublime, as Longinus sensed, Boileau affirmed, and Lyotard underscores, undermines prescriptive efforts and ultimately escapes the capacities of rhetoric.The sublime was the cornerstone of modern (Romantic) aesthetics, and is recovered by Lyotard as the defining element of "the modern" in art, associated particularly strongly with the avant-garde in the broadest sense of 1 This special issue is the result of two workshops held respectively at New York University (November 15, 2013) and the University of Leuven (February 17, 2015). These events were graciously sponsored by the Dept. of English at NYU, the Leuven MDRN research lab, and the Interuniversity Attraction Pole Programme initiated by the Belgian Science Policy Office, more specifically the project "Literature and Media Innovation" (BELSPO-IAP-PAI 7/01).
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