Uncovering the ‘gold-bearing rubble’: Ernst Bloch’s Literary Criticism

Abstract

Over the past 25 years, the modernist canon has been significantly revised as theoretical and empirical interventions have emphasized its transnational and globalized patterns of connection through a range of disciplinary approaches. As scholarship has moved beyond Europe and the United States, the complex nature of modernism’s socio-cultural matrices has become prominent, and a re-evaluation of the private and public spaces through which modernist works were disseminated - from the publishing house to the continuation of private patronage - has developed alongside a reconsideration of the way in which we theorize such activities (Brooker et al., 2010, pp. 1–4). In particular, the Marxist notion of ‘uneven development’ has resurfaced in recent years as a model capable of conceptualizing the overlapping simultaneities in different parts of the world of aesthetic practices, transnational dialogues, publication and dissemination of texts, institutional engagements, and the oppositional, counter-public spheres where various modernisms emerged and were contested.