This panel presents work by younger scholars who seek to enrich the emergent global turn in modernist studies, not by expanding the field horizontally (spatially) or vertically (temporally), but rather by extending its aesthetic axis. Generic modernism then starts by acknowledging that literary modernism and genre fiction arose concurrently as experimental methods of narrative organization in the aftermath of the Victorian novel. In the three years spanning 1894 to 1897 the number of published triple-decker novels fell from 184 to just four. Filling this void were cheaper, shorter, more popular genres such as adventure stories, science fiction, detective stories, thrillers, historical romances, as well as the more literary fiction we now call modernist. Rather than aesthetically irreconcilable forms performing disparate cultural functions, modernist and genre fiction are dialectically and historically interrelated, each holding the other as a precondition for its emergence. For critics traditionally define the literary according to two criteria: language used as imitation (fiction) and language used aesthetically to draw attention to itself (foregrounding). While the latter understanding of foregrounding relies on a background of ordinary or utilitarian language, modernist foregrounding tends to surface against a background of generic conventions, tropes, and forms. Thus, modernism’s literariness materializes just as much from its use of genre (e.g. genre play or genre slippage) as it does from its use of language (e.g. symbolism). Examining American, British, Irish, and Yiddish modernist writers, this panel appraises various modernist treatments of genre, while reconsidering established methods and approaches, and exploring connections between works on either side of the literary divide.
To ensure ample time for discussion and questions this special session will consist of three panelists each presenting a fifteen minute papers. Sam Grayck will begin with her paper, “On the Margins: Spatio-Temporal Disorder and Genre Slippage in Elizabeth Bowen’s ‘Look at All Those Roses’ and Yisroel Rabon’s Di Gas.’ Grayck examines how Bowen and Rabon use genre-slippage to address the anxiety of wartime by mobilizing science-fiction elements and spatio-temporal liminality in order to examine the instability of non-conventional subjectivity. This slippage between genre and world highlights the experience of disempowerment in a rapidly shifting, deeply violent landscape, which imposes an ongoing state of displacement. These texts provide significantly different perspectives on the project of situating oneself in the physical and conceptual space of warfare but both shed light on its bewildering atmosphere. Grayck extends Mary Dudziak’s notion that war suspends time itself to include the idea of disordered space as a parallel feature of wartime. She demonstrates how each of these authors uses unreliable and disrupted narrative forms to mirror the deep instability that characterizes both the worlds of the texts and the wartimes under which they were produced.
Garrett Bruen’s paper, “Looking Back: Retrospection and Narrative Overlay in Ford Madox Ford’s Historical Romances,” explores Ford’s early modernist experiments in genre with narrative retrospection and nonlinear plotting. With one exception all of Ford’s historical romances were published over an eleven year period (1903-13). In Romance (1903), Ford describes the function of retrospection: “And, looking back, we see Romance— that subtle thing that is mirage— that is life” (428). For Ford romance is not only retrospective but also creative, giving past suffering and pain a sense of glamour and significance. Ford’s historical romances are written in an increasingly modern style, juxtaposing the past with contemporary literary techniques, and creating what Laurence Davies calls a “literature of cognitive estrangement” through temporal juxtaposition. In Ladies Whose Bright Eyes (1911), Ford renders medieval England through the eyes of an Edwardian: “Yes, they co-existed. It was perhaps only the human perception that could not appreciate co-existing scenes. Though you can of course. You can look at thin mist and see the mist or you can equally look through the mist and see the sun” (258). Thus, Ford’s experiments in historical romance become studies in the rendering of the movement of memory and comments upon the nature of perception.
In her paper, “Surface tension: ‘Un-delving’ into realism in Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives,” Kerri Slatus examines Stein’s early novella, Three Lives (1909), which transposes and reimagines Gustave Flaubert’s Trois Contes (1877). Three Lives invokes nineteenth-century form and content, yet its irregularities of style reveal Stein’s experiment in breaking from the literary past, departing from stylistic tradition to tread into modernist play with the use of repetition and opacity. Stein dips and weaves into realism, a kind of ‘un-delving,’ wavering between modernist play and earnest nineteenth-century realism, honoring the notion of character and the ethics of storytelling with linear narrative and studied description, while at times shifting to a more serious bent by erasing the notion of character and its inherent depth of meaning. Slatus notes that the assignment of genre is often based on historical values, of what literary tradition is and means. Slatus’s paper, like the others from this panel, informs our understanding of genre, the complications of classification, and helps to elucidate modernism’s project of paying tribute to generic traditions while also undoing their primary tenets and foundations.