{"id":731,"date":"2016-11-14T13:07:18","date_gmt":"2016-11-14T20:07:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/comma-wordpress.english.ucsb.edu\/?p=731"},"modified":"2016-11-29T07:04:03","modified_gmt":"2016-11-29T14:04:03","slug":"proletarian-modernism-in-the-long-1930s-a-talk-by-professor-benjamin-kholmann-university-of-freiburg","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/comma.english.ucsb.edu\/?p=731","title":{"rendered":"“Proletarian Modernism in the Long 1930’s,” a talk by Professor Benjamin Kholmann (University of Freiburg)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Quarto_Stato\"<\/p>\n

Please join us for another talk for COMMA’s\u00a02016-17 series, “Modernist Energies<\/a>.” We continue the year\u00a0with a talk by Professor Benjamin Kholmann on Tuesday, November 22nd at 3:00 in the Sankey Room (SH 2623).<\/p>\n

Professor Kholmann is Assistant Professor at the University of Freiburg. \u00a0He is author of\u00a0Committed Styles: Modernism, Politics, and Left-Wing Literature in the 1930s<\/a><\/em> (Oxford UP, 2014) which cuts against the long-standing tradition of an apolitical modernism to offer a novel reading of modernism of the 1930s as highly political. Professor Kholmann has also edited several volumes, including the forthcoming\u00a0A History of 1930s British Literature\u00a0<\/em>(Cambridge UP); a special issue of\u00a0Literature and History<\/em> on\u00a0Literatures of Anti-Communism\u00a0<\/em>(Spring 2015);\u00a0Edward Upward and the Left-Wing Literary Culture in Britain<\/em> (Ashgate 2013); and,\u00a0Utopian Spaces of Modernism: British Literature and Culture 1885-1945<\/em> (Palgrave 2012).<\/p>\n

Professor Kholmann will deliver a talk entitled “Proletarian Modernism in the Long 1930’s.”<\/span>\u00a0This paper identifies a modality of modernist writing that he\u00a0calls \u201cproletarian modernism\u201d. The writing subsumed under this label is significant for several reasons. First, it usefully defamiliarizes the popular notion of \u201clate modernism\u201d by highlighting an alternative route taken by interwar writing: proletarian modernists, he suggests, aimed at a retooling of modernism, opening up new futures for modernism rather than anticipating its end. Second, proletarian modernism effected a wide-ranging politicization of modernist formal experiment: in works of proletarian modernism, the question of what a properly classless aesthetic looks like is inseparably bound up with the vision of a genuinely classless society. Proletarian modernism thus reopens the question of modernism\u2019s political valences by asking us to think about modernism in proletarian terms; at the same time, it requires us to think about the proletarian aesthetic not in relation to some content (writing which is by and about the working class) but in more specifically formal (or aesthetic) terms.<\/p>\n

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Please join us for another talk for COMMA’s\u00a02016-17 series, “Modernist Energies.” We continue the year\u00a0with a talk by Professor Benjamin Kholmann on Tuesday, November 22nd at 3:00 in the Sankey Room (SH 2623). Professor Kholmann is Assistant Professor at the University of Freiburg. \u00a0He is author of\u00a0Committed Styles: Modernism, Politics, and Left-Wing Literature in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[55,53],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/comma.english.ucsb.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/731"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/comma.english.ucsb.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/comma.english.ucsb.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comma.english.ucsb.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comma.english.ucsb.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=731"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/comma.english.ucsb.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/731\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":747,"href":"https:\/\/comma.english.ucsb.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/731\/revisions\/747"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/comma.english.ucsb.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=731"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comma.english.ucsb.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=731"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comma.english.ucsb.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=731"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}