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Revolutions

其他書名	Art, Science, and Subjectivity in Modernism and Irish Post-colonialism
出版	University of California, Davis, 2011
ISBN	12672387559781267238757
URL	http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=XUWYoAEACAAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api

註釋Modernism, spoken of generally as a cross-cultural phenomenon, arises from a series of inter-related and tumultuous events in the twenty-first century. These include the anxieties affecting Western Europe around the fin-de-siecle and the first decades of the new millennium: the decline of the British Empire, The Great War, and anti-colonial nationalist movements across the Empire, but particularly in Ireland and India. Alongside, and often in conjunction with these momentous historical events, are witnessed nascent social movements by subaltern groups including women, labor, and colonized populations. Less often recognized are the intersections of historical, social and cultural shifts with revolutions in science, particularly in theoretical physics. At the height of literary Modernism, a textual revolution, one finds contemporary social, political and scientific revolutions. This study locates these connections in the pages of James Joyce's Ulysses and Virginia Woolf's The Waves, ultimately arguing that the modernist avant-garde borrows from the convulsive shifts occurring in cosmology and epistemology owing to the New Physics. Revolutionary physics are complementary to modernist textual revolutions, and provide a dynamic and shifting structure through which to describe the subaltern desire for social, political and economic revolution, as well as to begin to address what these new conditions may look like. This interdisciplinary approach is actually suggested in the earliest works of Western Literature. This is particularly so in Homer's Odyssey (from which Ulysses is adapted), in which the Euclidian models of space and time are poetically mapped onto the spaces of the known world, ultimately imposing a dichotomy of order versus chaos and civilization versus barbarism, through gendered tropes reliant on sexual difference. As such normative social organizations and normative science have historically worked in the service of a relatively uniform ideological paradigm. This sheds much light on the appeal of the scientifically revolutionary to the politics of modernist revolutionary aesthetics. At a glance, the history of the twentieth century has witnessed episodic improvements for many disenfranchised and subaltern groups. So, too, has it witnessed the rapid mechanization of life that defines modernity, the mechanization of mass death, increasing disparities in access to resources, the consolidation of power at the nexus of global capital and the State, and perhaps most immediately, neo-imperialism and neo-liberalism. Joyce, Woolf, in highlighting the constellation of forces that produce global and local inequalities, identify a space from which to begin to dismantle those ideological and institutional monoliths. This speaks meaningfully to the contemporary cooptation of the State by neo-liberal and neo-colonial ventures. In my final chapter, a comparative look at two films centered on Irish post-colonialism: Michael Collins and The Wind that Shakes the Barley, I argue that popular art may represent history in ways that are either complicit with the compounding moves of the State and global capital (the former), or, that they may show, as did Joyce and Woolf in their modernist politics, the sites of the dispossessed and disenfranchised as the very locations of resistance (the latter).