{"id":11228,"date":"2021-03-22T00:51:00","date_gmt":"2021-03-22T07:51:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/BigJimIndustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=11228"},"modified":"2021-03-21T14:39:37","modified_gmt":"2021-03-21T21:39:37","slug":"1925-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2021\/03\/22\/1925-2\/","title":{"rendered":"1925"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

from The New York Times<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Was 1925 Literary Modernism\u2019s Most Important Year?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

By\u00a0Ben Libman<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"\/<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAn illiterate, underbred book it seems to me: the book of a self-taught working man, & we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking & ultimately nauseating.\u201d So goes Virginia Woolf\u2019s well-known complaint about \u201cUlysses<\/a>,\u201d scribbled into her diary before she had finished reading it. Her disparagement is catnip to those many critics who like to view \u201cMrs. Dalloway\u201d \u2014 that other uber-famous, if more lapidary, modernist novel that spans the course of a single day \u2014 as Woolf\u2019s rejoinder to Joyce. More than that, though, it tells us something important about our literary history. Nineteen twenty-two, the year of \u201cUlysses,\u201d may well be ground zero for the explosion of modernism in literature. But the resultant shock wave is better captured by another year: 1925, that of \u201cMrs. Dalloway\u201d and several other works, all now in the spotlight in 2021, as\u00a0they emerge from under copyright.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

If many an English-majored ear perks up at the sound of \u201c1922,\u201d it\u2019s mostly because of the two somewhat ornery men who published their masterpieces that year: Joyce and T. S. Eliot. \u201cUlysses\u201d and \u201cThe Waste Land\u201d are taught everywhere and almost without exception as \u201csignifying a definitive break in literary history,\u201d to quote the critic Michael North from his book \u201cReading 1922.\u201d Both the novel and the poem are notoriously challenging, obscurely allusive and highly uneasy about their modern time and the rubble of tradition astride which it stood. Both are also often distressing, egotistic, insistent, raw, striking and (depending on one\u2019s mood) ultimately nauseating. And it is precisely these qualities that account for their hold on our literary imagination. They represent everything that literary modernism is meant to: rupture, difficulty and, of course, making it new<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet 1925 is arguably the more important date in modernism\u2019s development, the year that it went mainstream, as embodied by four books whose influence continues to shape fiction today: Woolf\u2019s \u201cMrs. Dalloway<\/a>,\u201d Ernest Hemingway\u2019s debut story collection, \u201cIn Our Time<\/a>,\u201d John Dos Passos\u2019 \u201cManhattan Transfer<\/a>\u201d and F. Scott Fitzgerald\u2019s \u201cThe Great Gatsby<\/a>.\u201d Compared with the masterpieces of 1922, these books \u2014 all slated for reissue in new editions this year \u2014 entered our culture in relatively unspectacular fashion. But it\u2019s precisely their unassuming guise that allowed them, by osmosis rather than disruption, to diffuse their modernist conceits throughout the literary field, ensuring their widespread adoption.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[ click to continue reading at NYT<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from The New York Times Was 1925 Literary Modernism\u2019s Most Important Year? By\u00a0Ben Libman \u201cAn illiterate, underbred book it seems to me: the book of a self-taught working man, & we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking & ultimately nauseating.\u201d So goes Virginia Woolf\u2019s well-known complaint about \u201cUlysses,\u201d scribbled into […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11228","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literary-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11228","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11228"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11228\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11228"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}