...Megan Poole Optical Impersonality: Science, Images, and Literary Modernism , by Walter Christina . Johns Hopkins University Press , 2014 . 352 pages. Copyright © Hofstra University 2016 Fashioning a foundational book within contemporary modernist studies is a rare occurrence...

...Heather Arvidson This essay traces a critique of anti-sentimentalist leftist impersonality in the critically underestimated and best-selling novel The Unpossessed (1934). Tess Slesinger’s satire parodies the deadened affect that results from programmatic refusals of subjectivity and personal life...

...Aleksandr Prigozhin This essay demonstrates the centrality of impersonal intimacy to Virginia Woolf’s modernist poetics. In contrast to the major forms of intimacy—marriage, friendship, and family—the “minor” intimacies to which Woolf attends generate a sense of significant relation...

... vitalist philosophy, Barnes produces a “morbid vitalism,” exemplified by Dr. Matthew O’Connor, by which life and death are conceived as variant expressions of a single force, and the subject is modeled as an assemblage of affects, impersonal but inherently social, that can be understood primarily through...

...Jordan S. Carroll This essay examines the US literary publisher Grove Press from 1951 to 1970. During this period, Grove promoted an aesthetic that Susan Sontag termed the “new sensibility,” one that valued impersonal sensations over personal expression. Grove thus became a key mediator between...

..., as the psychoanalytic tradition posits, but instead precedes and undermines the priority of fixed subjects (which are in fact produced by the repression or disciplining of desire). This Deleuzian perspective, which slices up the social world into impersonal life forces, flows, and motions rather than...

... novelists to analysis of the influence of one press’s editorial principles and publications on the cultural/intellectual turn from modernism to postmodernism. All provided trenchant political and historical contextualization for their topics and most considered aspects of affect and impersonality. Each...

... cultural and intellectual situations, I will argue not only that Eliot’s developing use of scholarly notation is institutionally and philosophically symptomatic but also that it is, ultimately, critical of the impersonal assumptions that often characterize academic study. At one time it might have seemed...

...). As a “textbook illustration,” Eliot’s subjectivity or “personality,” rather than his poetry, is described by the theory. The most suggestive work o f the essay connects Buder’s “heterosexual melancholia” to the genre o f elegy. Using Eliot’s theory o f impersonality,Tim D ean’s “T. S. Eliot...

... relationships rather than on a fixed identity defined by its resistance to external flux. These modernist writers, despite their reputation for offering an impersonal and “antipsychological” portrait of character in their fiction and poetry, are for Moses those most interested in exploring an understanding...

...) for interpreting faces, is always influenced by impersonal forces intent on remaking, sometimes violently, the person in question. Rives is well situated to examine such a process. Her first book, Modernist Impersonalities: Affect, Authority, and the Subject (2012) , takes up the way that losing one’s sense...

... and impersonation are essential acts for the American Jew” (129). In The Counterlife, Zuckerman again asks if Jewish identity is only performative or is somehow irretrievably Jewish. Shostak’s answer to this inevitably Rothian question is “yes and no” (129). O n one level, The Counterlife...

.... For a philosopher of science these are serious problems, but my subject is poetry, and my scientists are not real, but rather the imaginary figures that poets think of when they think of science. My experimental­ ists, therefore, will be perfectly impersonal, and my natural historians will remain free from...

... of East/West influence and explore the cultural consequences of that interaction. Christian Kloeck- ner’s essay “Re-Orienting Impersonality: T. S. Eliot and the Self of the Far East,” for instance, makes a major contribution to both Eliot studies and the study of American orientalism by identifying...

...- tures the chapter, as the poets “occupy positions on a visionary continuum running from the unashamedly personal art of Ginsberg to the avowedly impersonal art of Spicer” (76). In the Ginsberg section we learn, as we often do from Fredman, about the personal connection between these artists...

... famous doctrines. Here we find a lucid explanation of what he means by the “impersonal poet,” an idea he had begun to consider in the first part of “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” which appeared in the Egoist in September of the same year. Here is his first clear use of the metaphor...

... aesthetics then be understood to perform? Impersonal feelings Affect theory in the humanities and social sciences is largely focused on complicating the perceived connection between feelings and the indi- vidual that we see animating the affective hypothesis. Though work on affect...

... is the relationship between a book of Shelley’s poetry, a gun, and a toe? In juxtaposition, these items express not individual personality (or even, perhaps, the collective impersonality of the title—these three girls, after all, could be any three girls) but their own thingly qualities beyond use-value...

... than the poems, her letters scarcely more so. The scrupulously impersonal character of Moore’s writing, so admired by her fellow modernists, also rendered her unable, in the eyes of many first-wave feminists, to “function publicly as an artist who can yoke ‘woman’ and ‘poet in the preferred...

... is not egoic, but rather “an extended exercise in the impersonal method” (“Impersonality” 88). Longworth contends that Miriam’s Emerson-inspired “intuitive-empirical vision of reality” demonstrates a lived resolution of the “Idealist/New Realist deadlock” that gripped Britain as Bertrand Russell’s New...