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Among the brilliant writers and thinkers who emerged from the multicultural and multilingual world of the Austro-Hungarian Empire were Joseph Roth, Robert Musil, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. For them, the trauma of World War I included the sudden loss of the geographical entity into which they had been born: in 1918, the empire was dissolved overnight, leaving Austria a small, fragile republic that would last only twenty years before being annexed by Hitler's Third Reich. In this major reconsideration of European modernism, Marjorie Perloff identifies and explores the aesthetic world that emerged from the rubble of Vienna and other former Habsburg territories—an "Austro-Modernism" that produced a major body of drama, fiction, poetry, and autobiography. Perloff explores works ranging from Karl Kraus's drama The Last Days of Mankind and Elias Canetti's memoir The Tongue Set Free to Ludwig Wittgenstein's notebooks and Paul Celan's lyric poetry. Throughout, she shows that Austro-Modernist literature is characterized less by the formal and technical inventions of a modernism familiar to us in the work of Joyce and Pound, Dada and Futurism, than by a radical irony beneath a seemingly conventional surface, an acute sense of exile, and a sensibility more erotic and quixotic than that of its German contemporaries. Skeptical and disillusioned, Austro-Modernism prefers to ask questions rather than formulate answers.

In Seven American Deaths and Disasters (2013), Kenneth Goldsmith recounted a set of tragic and unanticipated events in recent American history by using transcriptions of radio and TV broadcasts, usually from minor networks. Designed to be an "eighthAmerican disaster," Goldsmith presented The Body of Michael Brown, a performance based on the St. Louis autopsy report at the "Interrupt 3" conference at Brown University(13 March 2015), eliciting widespread criticism and controversy. Seemingly very different from Goldsmith—Sophie Calle's projects, for the past few decades, set up particularprocedural processes that raise pressing epistemological questions, especially about the nature of relationships, personal and political. One of her recent projects, Prenez soin de vous (Take Care of Yourself) that was based on her installation for the Venice Biennale in 2007, comprises comments by 107 women on an email that Calle received from her then lover. In this project, Calle uses the "real" words of others to create a montage of possible interpretations of the discourse that confronts us in our daily lives. For Calle, as for Goldsmith, the most troubling gap is that between information and knowledge, while the issue, that a conceptual poetics can take as a premise, is that the body most difficult to getinside of turns out to be one's own.

In Seven American Deaths and Disasters (2013), Kenneth Goldsmith recounted a set of tragic and unanticipated events in recent American history by using transcriptions of radio and TV broadcasts, usually from minor networks. Designed to be an "eighthAmerican disaster," Goldsmith presented The Body of Michael Brown, a performance based on the St. Louis autopsy report at the "Interrupt 3" conference at Brown University(13 March 2015), eliciting widespread criticism and controversy. Seemingly very different from Goldsmith—Sophie Calle's projects, for the past few decades, set up particularprocedural processes that raise pressing epistemological questions, especially about the nature of relationships, personal and political. One of her recent projects, Prenez soin de vous (Take Care of Yourself) that was based on her installation for the Venice Biennale in 2007, comprises comments by 107 women on an email that Calle received from her then lover. In this project, Calle uses the "real" words of others to create a montage of possible interpretations of the discourse that confronts us in our daily lives. For Calle, as for Goldsmith, the most troubling gap is that between information and knowledge, while the issue, that a conceptual poetics can take as a premise, is that the body most difficult to getinside of turns out to be one's own.

AbstractWittgenstein's oddly negative assessment of Shakespeare has caused consternation among literary critics. From F. R. Leavis to the present, English critics have often assumed that Wittgenstein was simply a bad judge of poetry and that he knew little about the literature of his adopted country. Or again,Wittgenstein stands accused, by critics like George Steiner, of demanding clear ethical values from literature - values Shakespeare, who never quite took sides with particular characters, did not proclaim. This essay argues that such criticisms fail to understand Wittgenstein's own context as an Austrian writer, brought up on the German classics of the 18th and 19th centuries. It s true that this "classical" literature, coming two centuries later than Shakespeare, was much more subjective, more personal than Elizabethan literature, and that Wittgenstein was accustomed to a psychology not characteristic of Shakespeare. It is the demand for realism, for characters with whom the reader can identify that makes Shakespeare unsatisfactory to Wittgenstein. Nevertheless, Wittgenstein's fugitive remarks about Shakespeare show great acumen and insight; he understood the Tragedies - for example, King Lear, much better than one might conclude from some of his strictures. Despite the gulf between the two writers, Shakespeare's "dreamwork," as Wittgenstein calls it, became a model for the philosopher's own writing

This essay offers a critical re-assessment of Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era. It argues that Kenner's magisterial survey remains important to our understanding of Modernism, despite its frankly partisan viewpoint. Kenner's is an insider's account of the Anglo-American Modernist writing that he takes to have been significant because it sought to invent a new language consonant with the ethos of the twentieth century. The essay suggests that Kenner's impeccable attention to the Modernist renovation of language goes beyond formalism, since, for him, its 'patterned energies' (a term derived from Buckminster Fuller's theory of knots) relate Modernism to the larger complex of artefacts within which it functions and, beyond these, to what he takes to be the great works of the past and to the scientific-technological inventions of the present. But the essay also points out that Kenner's is an eccentric canon, which makes no room for Forster, Frost, Lawrence, or Stevens. Furthermore, Kenner's emphasis on the First World War as a great cultural rupture, while plausible, works less well for Joyce and Williams than it does for Pound and Eliot.

Marjorie Perloff's wide-ranging essay reflects on the fate of Modernism in the twentieth century. She focuses in particular on claims that it was either elitist and authoritarian, and thus politically reactionary, or was caught up in processes of capitalist commodification, and therefore unable to resist the very alienation it diagnosed. In the period that ran from the 1960s to the early 1990s Modernism was typically seen as a failed project, which was compromised by its complicity with the bourgeois institution of art and by the reification of its art-works, seen now as the dead exhibits of a once resonant cultural moment. But it has become apparent that those who trumpeted the death of Modernism were premature with their obituary notices. Perloff traces some of the major shifts in recent critical work, and her essay questions earlier claims about Modernism's reactionary politics, anti-populism, and rejection of the everyday. She also draws attention to the non-academic interest in Modernism that is rife on the internet, where, in fulfilment of Benjamin's prophecy, the distinction between artist and public has broken down and the "pleasure of the text" takes precedence over concerns with ideology. Perloff suggests that although genres such as poems, paintings, and novels have to some extent been displaced by "differential text", Modernism's established artefacts continue to "stay news" and to exert their strange auratic power.