79 research outputs found
Interview with Michaela Bronstein
No full textMichaela Bronstein is an Assistant Professor in the English Department of Stanford University. Professor Bronstein researches the historical context of the novel, focusing on connections to Anglo-American modernism. In inspecting literature from 19th-century Russian and British authors to later 20th-century African and African-American authors, Professor Bronstein seeks to understand the transhistorical afterlives of literary works and examine how narratives that had a particular effect during their own times have become a part of more recent histories. In her most recent work, Professor Bronstein has delved into the modern television realm in order to connect the intimate temporalities of reading with the broad temporalities of reception.
Her publications include her book, Out of Context, as well as her manuscript-in-progress, Crimes for All Humanity: Revolution and the Modern Novel. She teaches a variety of English classes at Stanford such as Narrative and Narrative Theory, Serial Storytelling, and Literature and the Future.
Professor Bronstein attended the University of Oxford for her undergraduate education followed by graduate work in Yale University’s English Department. Prior to joining Stanford in 2016, she also worked as a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and a Visiting Lecturer at MIT
Jere Nash Interview with Alvin Bronstein
No full textInterview conducted by author Jere Nash with lawyer Alvin Bronstein in the process of writing Mississippi Politics: The Struggle for Power, 1976-2006. Bronstein served as Chief Staff Counsel for the Lawyers\u27 Constitutional Defense Committee from 1964 to 1968, litigating civil rights cases in Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana. Topics covered include the Lawyers\u27 Constitutional Defense Committee; other civil rights lawyers in the South during the 1960s; judges, public officials, and civil rights activists in Mississippi; and the reapportionment of the Mississippi Legislature
Modernism Today, or The Author Becomes a Character
No full textThe final chapter examines the recent appearance of biographical fiction about the recuperative modernists from four continents—Cynthia Ozick’s Dictation, Michiel Heyns’s The Typewriter’s Tale, Colm Tóibín’s The Master, and Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s Secret History of Costaguana. These works go beyond influence or allusion: they simultaneously trade on the continuing appeal of their subject writers (and on the style of their subjects), and examine them from the perspective of a future to which they are already a little bit out of date. It is this dichotomy—between a persisting readership and a specific, time-bound context—that animates modern fiction, its political significance, and the persisting critical debates about it today.</p
A Study of the Dynamic Effects on the Design Loads of Civil Aircraft
No full textThis paper addresses the effects of a fully dynamic approach to determine the design loads of a mid-size business jet. The study is conducted by considering the fuselage midsection of the DAEDALOS aircraft model with landing impact conditions. This study aims to compare the loads levels obtained with the cuasi-static approach usually used in the aircraft design process with a novel full dynamic method of analysis. The comparison is presented in terms of stress levels between the novel dynamic approach and the standard design practice based on the use of equivalent static loads. The results illustrate that a slight reduction of the load levels can be achieved, but a careful modelling of the damping level is needed. Guidelines for an improved load definition are discussed, and suggestions for future research activities are provided
Out of Context
No full textHow do novels travel through time? How might they endure in a changing world in order to reach the unknowable readers of the future? Modernist writers were obsessed with questions like these, and eager for their books to reach out to people, times, and cultures beyond their own. In recent years, scholars of modernism have focused on pinning them down: putting these books in their context and these authors in their place. We do so because we fear that any ambition to reach the future will make literature disengaged, irresponsible, and apolitical. We worry that literature cannot escape its own moment without also evading the hard truths of history itself. This book argues instead that literature can travel through time: not by transcending history, but by adapting to historical change. Each chapter pairs a modernist author with a reader who heard these old novels calling his or her name. In each case, these future readers are also novelists—who read with an eye to form and craft, and who put what they see to new use in their own novels. Their rewritings of the past treat the literary canon not as an object of antagonistic critique, but as a set of resources and tools to move new generations of readers.</p
Needing to Narrate
No full textFaulkner unites the problems of character and chronology that James and Conrad faced. Faulkner’s novels show the potentially disastrous consequences of failing to impose narrative order on experience. Critics often see Faulkner’s techniques, like Conrad’s, as representations of the disorder of reality—of the failings of human knowledge and the impossibility of communication. Yet through Quentin Compson’s desperate attempts to understand the story of Thomas Sutpen in Absalom, Absalom!, and through the failure of the community in The Hamlet to recognize that they are merely characters in Flem Snopes’s story, Faulkner sketches the hazard and the value of attempting to know one’s place in the story of one’s life. In Sometimes a Great Notion, Kesey extends the experiments of Absalom, Absalom! He includes more voices than Faulkner and juxtaposes more layers of history, testing against each other the competing claims of politicized local action and multiple forms of universal sentiment.</p
Introduction
No full textWe often think of literary canons as representing the hegemony of the past over the present. The introduction asks us to think instead of the way the present reshapes the past to serve its needs. The literary past, in other words, becomes a set of tools for producing new work and thought in the present. Rather than see the literature of the past as a means for us today to critique its historical context, we can see older works as providing a whole host of later readers with modes of engaging with political questions in their own times. Modernist authors, in this view, cultivate forms of commitment and belief rather than critique and skepticism. Modernist literary innovation teaches us, in other words, not the hermeneutics of suspicion but its alternatives.</p
What Chronology Demands of Us
No full textWhy tell a story out of order? Conrad’s narrative experiments are usually read as reflecting a skeptical attitude toward human achievement and knowledge: he tells events out of order, critics suggest, in order to question whether any version of events is more valid than any other; experience dissolves into fragmentary chaos. This chapter shows that by upending chronology, Conrad instead provokes the reader to see the connections between different moments, and to become invested in the process of using disparate perspectives as material for the reader’s own single understanding. In Conrad’s chronological and perspectival experiments, Ngũgĩ sees tools for acknowledging the complexity of events—like British actions during the state of emergency in Kenya—while at the same time compelling his readers to take a political and moral stand on them. He uses achronology and multiple voices to demand an international audience’s engagement with the crises and dilemmas of decolonization.</p
Character and Identity
No full textWhat is the appeal and use of a charismatic character? Henry James’s attempt to preserve an ideal of vivid character associated with older genres like romance becomes part of James Baldwin’s set of rhetorical tools for demanding recognition of gay and black humanity. James shows the contagion of personality among characters not to reject a Victorian style of defined characterization, but as material for his protagonists’ decisive acts of self-definition. When Baldwin rejects the protest novel for failing to recognize the agency of individuals in resisting the roles society casts them in, it is through a Jamesian ideal of identity constructed out of, but not trapped within, one’s social context. The charismatically individual character provides a template for resisting the influence of social convention.</p
Rescue Work
No full textThis chapter describes the “rescue work” (Conrad) practiced by the three exemplars of recuperative modernism: James, Conrad, and Faulkner. Each asserts the continuing power of past ideals as a strategy for claiming continuity with a future readership. The thematic parallels and historical connections that unite these authors show that they consistently evoke the possibility of a disordered, meaningless existence in order to license the artistic task of attempting to make sense of the world. Rather than reflecting the slow victory of modernist skepticism over Victorian ideals, these authors become more experimental precisely in order to seek out what seems enduring through the onslaught of historical change. The narrative forms of these writers provide not training in suspicious reading, but an invitation to commitment and belief.</p
- …
