In 1951, L. S. Alexander Gumby donated his vast collection of handmade scrapbooks to Columbia University. Preserved institutionally in Rare Book & Manuscript section at Butler Library, Alexander Gumby Collection of Negroiana, [ca. 1800]–1981 compiles local materials about the impact of the Harlem Renaissance at home and abroad and records of its worldwide audience and appeal. By combining artistic and historiographic aims and blending cultural historiography and sentimental history, Gumby develops a crossover form of vernacular historiography that defies generic categorization and straddles the fields of artistic production and social historiography. The project’s scope and the multi-dimensionality of its records transform the traditional and highly idiosyncratic scrapbook format into a curatorial project with clear political, conservationist, and aesthetic implications. By focusing on Gumby’s choice of material, method of archiving, and book-making techniques, this chapter develops a form-sensitive reading to show how the documenting practices he develops transform scrapbooking into an archival practice. Drawing on the ongoing theorization of literary worlds within world-literature studies, this chapter argues that Gumby’s material practices of assemblage, categorization, and exhibition allow his collection to reappraise the dynamics between world-historical and local perspectives and stage a dialogue among the competing national, local, and global outlooks shaped the period’s aesthetics and politics.

By shifting the focus of reading on the varied rhythms of the city space in James Joyce’s Dubliners, on the time-space-mind curvatures and the dissonances they effect, this chapter foregrounds Joyce’s central preoccupation with modes of writing that respond to the unrelenting pressures of urban living on the alignment between sensory experiences, perceptions, and articulated thought, without condescension or moralism. It argues that the energy and vitality of the stories’ poetic rhythm lie in their capacity to make artistically visible and spatially perceptible the dissonances of these alignments, rendering the power of the city both transformative and alienating, critical and fortifying.

By shifting the focus of reading on the varied rhythms of the city space in James Joyce’s Dubliners, on the time-space-mind curvatures and the dissonances they effect, this chapter foregrounds Joyce’s central preoccupation with modes of writing that respond to the unrelenting pressures of urban living on the alignment between sensory experiences, perceptions and articulated thought, without condescension or moralism. It argues that the energy and vitality of the stories’ poetic rhythm lie in their capacity to make artistically visible and spatially perceptible the dissonances of these alignments, rendering the power of the city both transformative and alienating, critical and fortifying.

In the “Oxen of the Sun” episode of Ulysses, James Joyce dramatizes the evolution of English prose styles by creating a stylistic matrix for gestation. This article links the episode’s stylistic evolution to the historical development of liberal thought about autonomy and self-determination, reading Joyce’s styles as rhetorical gateways to liberal discourses on statehood, politics, socioeconomics, national health, and sexuality. In the immediate historical context of national agitation in Ireland, the episode’s bodily tropes of reproduction, birth, emergence, and break dislocate the rhetoric of national conception, providing a critical insight into the development of liberal thought, particularly into the contradictory blend of progressive and regressive thinking from which liberal notions of autonomy and self-determination have emerged. By demonstrating how the stylistic evolution in “Oxen” moves through a series of breaks, the article relates Joyce’s disruptive tactics to the aesthetic practices of the historical avant-gardes, showing how the affinities with the avant-garde in “Oxen” work on the level of form, content, and imagined life praxis. The main argument at stake is understanding how Joyce creates a literary position of being in advance by way of engaging critically with biopolitics and the liberal discourses on national and social advancement.

Acmeism [АКМЕИЗМ] was a major literary movement of the Russian Silver Age. Although difficult to date precisely, scholars generally agree that Acmeism unofficially began with the closing of the major Symbolist publication Vesy [The Scales], coinciding with the appearance of the journal Apollon in 1909, and ended with the execution of its nominal founder, the poet Nikolay Gumilyev (1886–1921), shortly after the Russian Civil War. Conceptualized as a new school of poetry by two disaffected poets from the Tsekh Poetov [Poets’ Guild], Gumilyev and Sergey Gorodetsky, Acmeism became one of the major currents in the post-Symbolist Russian literary avant-garde, competing with the more vociferous Futurism for advancing contemporary Russian poetry into the future. Despite the movement’s brief history and its seemingly conformist alignment with Symbolism, major Acmeist poets such as Anna Akhmatova (1889–1938) and Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938) placed Acmeism firmly on the map of both Russian and European modernism, on a par with Aleksandr Blok’s Symbolism and Vladimir Mayakovsky’s Futurism.

This chapter approaches the nexus of cosmopolitanism and nationalism as it is actualised in a range of aesthetic documentary projects from the 1920s and 30s. It argues that a range of varied documentary modernist projects implement cosmopolitan practices of collection, assemblage and reportage in order to remap the world in formations conductive to universal social justice. It shows, firstly, how the modernist production of cosmopolitan value in aestheticized documentary cultural forms energises the sociopolitical imaginary of the period and, secondly, how aesthetic modernisms’ response to the cosmopolitics of the interwar period anticipates contemporary debates in the early 21st century about globalisation and world literature.

THE 'OXEN OF THE SUN' episode of Ulysses is set at the National Maternity hospitalin Dublin and by Joycean standards its plot is relatively unambiguous. It presentsa group of young Dubliners, some of whom are students or professionals inthe field of medicine, discussing national politics, demographics and sexuality. Theirdebate dips in and out of the social theories concerning history, economics, philosophy, naturalhistory, anthropology, eugenics and social Darwinism, with state-of-the-art refractions ofthe narrative voice through canonical styles of English prose. In contrast to the predictable,evolutionary trajectory of the plot, the debaters' say-sos, the barrage of mild indecencies andthe explicit subject matter generate a dense textuality and ambiguous ideologies.

Bringing together international scholars interested in the ethics of fiction, this book extends the rich field of ethical literary criticism that has emerged in the last twenty years. New ground is broached in that the authors explore literariness itself as constitutive of ethical intimations about the pluralistic community and about egalitarian modes of communication. The epistemological point of departure is the ethical thought of modernity as filtered through Hegelian recognition as infinite social responsibility. The structure of the anthology reflects this anchoring as the authors investigate modalities of recognition and social regeneration via literary language, which effects the transvaluation of values, of the collective imaginary, and of intermediality. This collection is generally concerned with the immanence of intersubjectivity in literature and with how from this immanence new modes of ethical communication are generated. The authors of Ethics and Poetics clarify how modern narratives, in ways akin to, yet different from, political interrogations such as deconstruction, psychoanalysis, Marxism and gender studies, refine the understanding of the recursive process of recognition, thereby disclosing ethico-political dimensions of the reading experience. The chapters in this anthology share an interest in ethico-literary responses to shifts within modernity from communal to transnational imagination. All the articles explore how modalities of recognition in modern and contemporary literature deeply affect and potentially regenerate real social spaces.