Peripheral Modernisms
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Peripheral Modernisms
ISSUE 9–10
fall 2020 - spring 2021
Issue Editors:
Vered K. Shemtov, Melih Levi
Modernist Networks and the Concept of the Periphery: Introduction
Author:
Melih Levi
Vered K. Shemtov
Subverting Hebrew’s Gender Binary: Grammar, Poetry, and Performance in the Work of Esther Raab
Author:
Shoshana Olidort
This article examines antigrammaticality in the work of the so-called first “native” modern Hebrew poet, Esther Raab, focusing in particular on how Raab deploys the constraints of Hebrew’s highly gendered grammar in her poems. I begin by considering the broad implications of grammatical gender for how we think and act in the world, while also taking into account specific, concrete examples of gender policing that Raab recalled from her own early childhood. I then offer a close reading of a single, untitled poem to demonstrate how, from her position at the intersection of multiple margins, as a
The Jewish December 1910; or, The Parting of Ways of Eretz Yisraeli Prose and Hebrew Modernism
Author:
Dina Berdichevsky
The date in the article’s title hints at Virginia Woolf’s famous assertion that in this month “the human character had changed,” a change that, according to Woolf, altered the forms of literary representation of subjective experience and marked the rise of twentieth-century modernist literature. Interestingly, in this month or in the month preceding it, the prominent Hebrew writer Y. H. Brenner published his Hebrew novella Nerves. I argue that in the Jewish Hebrew context December 1910 marked precisely the decline of the early Hebrew modernist turn, parallel to the establishment of a new
The Shape-Shifting Margin: Patterns of Change in Arabic Modernism Past Beirut
Author:
Daniel Behar
This essay presents an initial foray into the rich field of modern Arabic poetry after the canonization phase of modernism in midcentury Beirut. Though by no means offering an exhaustive account, the chosen case studies are claimed to cover major orientations in forms of second-wave modernism that swept across poetic writing in the last quarter of the twentieth century. As Beirut became the prestigious metropolitan center for modernist poetics, shifts of sensibility are viewed in relation to its dominant modes and in terms of an altered imagining of the center-periphery duality. I follow two
The Revolutionary Force of the Periphery: "The Levant," "Nostalgia," and World Literature
Author:
Delia Ungureanu
The December 1989 Revolution that overthrew the Communist regime brought Romanian literature back on the international literary market and dramatically changed the conditions for production and circulation. However, there was a lively circulation of foreign literature through translation into Romanian well before 1989. Here I will argue that Mircea Cărtărescu’s two major texts written in the late 1980s — the verse epic Levantul (The Levant) and the poetic novel Nostalgia — can be seen as works of world literature through their intertextual dialogue, even though they were created with no
Periphery or Center? Ukrainian Modernism in Kyiv
Author:
Irena R. Makaryk
Contesting the use of the geospatial concepts of “periphery” and “center,” this essay argues that a mathematical metaphor, the Möbius strip, better expresses the continuously morphing, interrelated, dynamic mesh that we call modernism. One of the major but still understudied nodes on this strip was Kyiv (Russian: Kiev). Flourishing between 1905 and the early 1930s, modernism in Kyiv was distinctive by virtue of its historical-political circumstances and by its rapid acceptance, vitality, and astonishing efflorescence. After an overview of some of its most salient features, the latter part of
Hidden Contiguities: Zalman Shneour and Leonid Andreyev, David Vogel and Peter Altenberg
Author:
Lilah Nethanel
The map of modern Jewish literature is made up of contiguous cultural environments. Rather than a map of territories, it is a map of stylistic and conceptual intersections. But these intersections often leave no trace in a translation, a quotation, a documented encounter, or an archived correspondence. We need to reconsider the mapping of modern Jewish literature: no longer as a defined surface divided into territories of literary activity and publishing but as a dynamic and often implicit set of contiguities. Unlike comparative research that looks for the essence of literary influence in the
Self-Fashioning in Front of a Distorting Mirror: Interwar Jewish Literature Gazing at Classical Chinese Poetry, or Second-Order Modernism
Author:
Giddon Ticotsky
The modernist fascination with the Far East is a well-known phenomenon, driven among other things by the “decline of the West” zeitgeist. When adopted by peripheral communities involved in nation building, it often served other needs and, in the process, became distorted or disproportioned. This article focuses on the representation of the Far East in the Hebrew and Yiddish literatures of the interwar years. Its main argument is that the longing for the Far East in these literatures has contributed to their self-fashioning precisely as occidental and modern. Accordingly, this is an intriguing
Reading the Talmud in Mexico: A Confession
Author:
Ilan Stavans
Modernist Networks and the Concept of the Periphery: Introduction to Part II
Author:
Melih Levi
Vered K. Shemtov
Newspaper Journalism, Realism, and Modernism in Japan: From Kanagaki Robun to Kawabata Yasunari
Author:
Indra Levy and Tim Kawanishi-Young
If modernism can be broadly understood as a revolt against Western traditions, this article asks how modernism in Japan relates to the revolt against Japanese and Chinese traditions that ushered modern Japanese literary realism into being. By juxtaposing Kawabata Yasunari’s The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa (1929–30) with Kanagaki Robun’s Chronicle of the Telegrams from Saga (1874) and A Blade in the Night: The Tale of She-Demon Takahashi Oden (1879), we highlight the rarely examined role of newspaper journalism in the nascent development of modern Japanese realism and the modernist rebellion
“The Times We Live In”: Uri Nissan Gnessin’s Discovery of Contemporaneity and Hebrew Modernism
Author:
Natasha Gordinsky
This article addresses Uri Nissan Gnessin’s modernist poetics through the notion of the contemporary. Examination of a selection of his early texts — a letter, a literary review, and the short story “Jenya” — written between 1900 and 1902 reveals his perception of Eastern European Jewish modernity as heterochronous and polytopic.
Tango, Gendered Embodiment, and Acousmatic Listening in Argentina
Author:
Jessica Berman
This essay considers the modernist cultural production of tango within the contexts of broadcast radio and popular print in the 1920s and 1930s, when both tango and radio were reaching their heyday. Because of its deep engagement with the changing social, economic, and media dynamics of Argentine modernity, its emphasis on cultural “newness” and experimental forms, as well as its play with matters of identity, embodiment, and belonging, tango deserves to be considered among the forms of Argentine modernism. I explore the connections between tango-canción (tango song) as broadcast on the radio
Combined and Uneven Modernism: Turkey’s İkinci Yeni Poets
Author:
Kenan Sharpe
This article explores the poetry of a group of mid-twentieth-century Turkish modernist poets known as İkinci Yeni, or the “Second New.” Engaging with global approaches to modernism that relate it to capitalist modernity, and building on the specific historical dynamics of 1950s Turkey, I use the Second New as a case study to show how modernist literature from the periphery can be compared with more canonized Western models without relying on claims of European originality or literary influence. Through readings of Second New poets Edip Cansever and Turgut Uyar, I show how their poetry combines
Localizing the Pogrom: Jewish Leftist Poets on Palestine, 1929
Author:
Amelia Glaser
In 1929, Jewish left-wing modernists used language and images that evoked recent pogrom violence to describe Jewish and Arab sides of a violent conflict in Palestine. Jews around the world chose to identify with either the aggrieved Arabs who had lost their homes and land or the many innocent Jewish victims of grassroots violence in British Mandate Palestine. This article centers on the 1929 divide as a case study in how collective memories of anti-Jewish violence can be mobilized by competing sides in violent struggles. Drawing from Maurice Halbwachs’s definitions of collective memory and
Democratizing the Modern in Contemporary Turkish Poetry: Elif Sofya’s and Asuman Susam’s Ecopoetics
Author:
Deniz Gundogan Ibrisim
Modern Turkish poetry has been occupied with an aesthetic need to fashion a style for the “modern,” understanding it as a universal condition of being determined by notions of the “secular,” the “national,” and the “local.” Since the Garip and İkinci Yeni movements beginning in the early 1940s, Turkish poetry has also favored a straight and linear understanding of modernist aesthetics as having a stable past and future and a place. I argue that contemporary women poets, including Elif Sofya and Asuman Susam, by exposing entanglement rather than straight and clear development, expand as well as
Centering the Marginal? Yiddish Avant-Garde as a Paradigm for Modernism
Author:
Chana Kronfeld, Vered K. Shemtov and Melih Levi
A conversation with Chana Kronfeld in 2021 on the concept of the periphery, the margin, and the marginal foregrounds the unique literary and linguistic networks of Yiddish modernism. Explaining the linguistic, historical, and sociopolitical realities that inform modern/modernist Yiddish literature, Kronfeld demonstrates that “Yiddish poets didn’t see themselves as peripheral to anything. They saw their literature as central and they developed an option that was progressive and new in its resistance to the nation-state.”
Peripheral Modernisms — Editors' Roundtable
Author:
Alys Moody and Stephen J. Ross
Andrew Reynolds and Bonnie Roos
Ariel Resnikoff
Eric Hayot and Rebecca L. Walkowitz
Mark Wollaeger
Matthew Eatough
Global Modernists on Modernism: A Conversation for Dibur . Alys Moody and Stephen J. Ross are the editors of one of the most recent collection of modernist writings: Global Modernists on Modernism: An Anthology (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020). This collection features translations of works associated with modernism in Latin America, the Caribbean, sub-Saharan Africa, the Arab world, Turkey, Iran, the Caucasus, South Asia, China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, the South Pacific, the Malay Peninsula, and the Ashkenazi Jewish diaspora. As anticipated by its remarkable coverage, this volume is already having
The Unmade Self: An Essay
Author:
Saikat Majumdar
The Materiality of the Book in Yiddish Modernism: An Essay
Author:
Barbara Mann
Yiddish book art exemplifies how sacred Jewish forms shaped secular cultural expression for twentieth-century artists and writers in a variety of geographic and linguistic settings. Reading El Lissitzky’s Khad gádye (One kid; 1919) within the context of European modernism demonstrates how Jewish artists straddled multiple aesthetic affiliations, bringing sensitivity for iconic forms in conversation with abstraction and ethnography.
Peripheral Modernisms: Suggested Bibliography
Author:
Issue Contributors
Melih Levi
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Dibur is a peer-reviewed academic journal dedicated to comparative literature.
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Vered Karti Shemtov, Dibur Editor-in-Chief
Chen Bar-Itzhak, Dibur Editor
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