8-01 – Aesthetic Modernism
Sunday, November 11, 2018 – 10:00am to 11:30am (Miller Hall 156)
Chair: Judith Paltin, University of British Columbia
- “Dollarton? That’s what we thought but it’s Grasmere”: Malcolm Lowry and Literary Ecology. Margaret Linley, Simon Fraser University (Canada)., Miguel Mota, The University of British Columbia (Canada).
The environmentally conscious spatial imaginary that developed over hundreds of years in England’s Lake District influenced modern perceptions of place, especially the post-colonial landscapes of British Columbia. This paper considers how the complex relationship between a well-known tourist destination with a history of poetic associations and environmental awareness and a former settler colony characterized by past imperial sympathies and present “green” consciousness are represented in Malcolm Lowry’s writing and in the legacy that he left behind.
- (Trans)Nationalism and the Question of New Nihilism in Paul, La Rochelle, and Lewis. Anders Johnson, University of California at Irvine.
This paper focuses on different figurations the modernist motif of European nihilism as they are manifest in three competing works by Elliot Paul, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, and Wyndham Lewis to show that the meaning and extent of nihilism as a problem was by no means settled in modernist thought and, further, that these contests over the meaning of the problem of nihilism should be understood as deeply imbricated in notions of the nation and its relation to history.
- An Aesthetic Response to Trauma: On Édouard Levé’s Suicide. Kimberly Olivar, California State University Fullerton.
Many use suicide to escape trauma. Édouard Levé’s epistolary novel, Suicide, approaches the narrator’s trauma from his peer’s suicide through the aesthetic response of a new text. Suicide, as the author presents it, becomes an aesthetic organism rather than a moral dilemma.