Noreen Masud talks about the unnamed feelings and ambiguous modes of relationship occasioned by flat landscapes, and the act of looking at them, in twentieth century fiction, especially the novels of D.H. Lawrence, Willa Cather, and Gertrude Stein.
Noreen Masud is a Lecturer at the University of Bristol, UK, currently working on flat landscapes in twentieth century literature. Her first academic book, Hard Language: Stevie Smith and the Aphorism, is out with OUP in 2022, and her first trade book, A Flat Place, will be released by Hamish Hamilton in the UK and Melville House Press in the US in 2023.
Image: © 2022 Saronik Bosu
Music used in promotional material: ‘In Your Hollow’ by Allysen Callery
Tag: modernism
Resonance
Kim speaks with Julie Beth Napolin about Resonance.
Julie Beth’s book The Fact of Resonance: Modernist Acoustics and Narrative Form (Fordham UP, 2020) explores resonance and sound in modern literature. In the episode she references Jean-Luc Nancy’s book Listening (Fordham UP, 2007), Inayat Khan’s The Mysticism of Sound and Music (Shambala Publications, 1996), the music of Toru Takemitsu, and Damo Suzuki´s “sound carriers.” In our longer conversation she talked about Naomi Waltham-Smith’s new book, Shattering Biopolitics: Militant Listening and the Sound of Life (Fordham UP, 2021)
Julie Beth is an Associate Professor of Digital Humanities at The New School. She also makes music under the name Meridians. You can listen on Sound Cloud!
This week’s image is a simulation of interference between two sound waves in two-dimensions made by Ibrahim S. Souki, used under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License, from Wikimedia Commons.
Modernist Mushrooms
Shalini Sengupta thinks together ‘the mycological turn’ in the humanities and the narrative and aesthetic work that mushrooms do in some modernist literature. She draws from Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World and the research of Sam Solomon and Natalia Cecire. Modernist mushrooms, if they are a thing, exist in the writings of Alfred Kreymborg, Djuna Barnes, and Sylvia Plath, and the photography of Alfred Stieglitz.
Shalini is a final year PhD student at the University of Sussex, UK. Her thesis explores the concept of modernist difficulty in British and diasporic poetry through the lens of intersectionality. Her academic writing have appeared/are forthcoming in Modernism/modernity Print Plus, Contemporary Women’s Writing, and the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry. In 2021, she was selected as a Ledbury Emerging Critic.
Image Art by Saronik Bosu
Music used in promotional material: ‘How Many’ by Windmill
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