Tim Armstrong | Royal Holloway, University of London (original) (raw)

Books by Tim Armstrong

An Introduction to Hardy's Poetry, 2009

Papers by Tim Armstrong

Moving Modernism: Motion, Technology, and Modernity, ed. David Bradshaw, Laura Marcus, and Rebecca Roach (Oxford University Press, 2016) ISBN 9780198714170, 2016

Cambridge Companion to Literature and Science, ed. Steven Meyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp.223-41. , 2018

The Cambridge Companion to Slavery in American Literature, 2016

This article examines literature by both African American and white authors dealing with slavery ... more This article examines literature by both African American and white authors dealing with slavery in the period 1900-1945.

Affirmations: of the modern, 2019

This paper explores Hardy's modernity, both in a general sense (in terms of language and stance) ... more This paper explores Hardy's modernity, both in a general sense (in terms of language and stance) and also in terms of a late engagement with the modernism of The London Mercury in his volume Human Shows.

Critical Quarterly 55:2 (2013): 50-65., Jul 2013

Taking as its starting point the philosopher Stanley Cavell's brief reflections on Poe's "The Imp... more Taking as its starting point the philosopher Stanley Cavell's brief reflections on Poe's "The Imp of the Perverse" and writing as self-understanding, self-concealment and madness -and as its founding image Cary Grant speaking of love alone in a sidecar in I Was a Male War Bride -this paper considers the relation between totality and incompleteness in the short story, focusing in particular on the incompletion of desire as a way of discussing the formal issues involved. If the modernist short story is so often thought of as an emblem of formal closure (the single gesture or unitary narrative shape), it often deals with notions of interruption and nonpresence, and with a certain madness created by the inability to account for the other. The paper considers two classic modernist stories of incomplete desire -Joyce's "The Dead" and Katherine Mansfield's "The Stranger" -and compares them to two sets of postmodern short stories, the "chain stories" of the English writer David Mitchell and the stories of the American David Foster Wallace (in particular the title story of Oblivion), exploring the proposition that in the contemporary stories incompleteness is displaced from identity to the narrative in which the self is ostensibly located, radically changing the form itself. That suggestion can, finally, be related to the changed cultural position of the form within the publishing industry.

Science in Modern Poetry: New Directions, Jan 1, 2012

I want to talk today about modernist abstraction, or at least one aspect of the topic. It is an i... more I want to talk today about modernist abstraction, or at least one aspect of the topic. It is an issue we often feel we are familiar with; definitional to modernism; confronting us whenever we enter an art gallery, or try to read Gertrude Stein. Yet it is also a topic which is slippery, particularly in its relation to literature -as opposed to painting, sculpture or music. The question of what the abstract is or does in literature does not seem to have received a very clear answer; and indeed a great deal of what has been written on the subject either refers us to painting or ekphrasis, as Charles Altieri's book does, or considers literature which deals with the idea of abstraction -Wallace Steven's eminently lucid work above all. The reason for this is of course that writing is a referential rather than a directly perceptual medium. Words -even if isolated or piled on top of each other randomly -carry traces of meaning. What could be the equivalent, in literature, of the abstraction of Malevitch's 'Black Square' or Pollock's doodle? For this reason we more readily speak of difficulty or obscurity in relation to the written; a term which immediately places us more on the side of the reader -the question of having a key -than of the producer; reception rather than creation, so that we do not readily think of obscurity as a practice. In the same semantic field is vagueness (which had a philosophical elaboration in Russell and Wittgenstein); the use of chance or automaticity; -and, a little closer to my topic here, the aesthetic of emptiness, of a resistance to the world in the refusal of closed meaning -a resistance articulated in formal terms by Wallace Stevens and in more political terms by Theodore Adorno.

The Salt Companion to Mina Loy

An Introduction to Hardy's Poetry, 2009

Moving Modernism: Motion, Technology, and Modernity, ed. David Bradshaw, Laura Marcus, and Rebecca Roach (Oxford University Press, 2016) ISBN 9780198714170, 2016

Cambridge Companion to Literature and Science, ed. Steven Meyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp.223-41. , 2018

The Cambridge Companion to Slavery in American Literature, 2016

This article examines literature by both African American and white authors dealing with slavery ... more This article examines literature by both African American and white authors dealing with slavery in the period 1900-1945.

Affirmations: of the modern, 2019

This paper explores Hardy's modernity, both in a general sense (in terms of language and stance) ... more This paper explores Hardy's modernity, both in a general sense (in terms of language and stance) and also in terms of a late engagement with the modernism of The London Mercury in his volume Human Shows.

Critical Quarterly 55:2 (2013): 50-65., Jul 2013

Taking as its starting point the philosopher Stanley Cavell's brief reflections on Poe's "The Imp... more Taking as its starting point the philosopher Stanley Cavell's brief reflections on Poe's "The Imp of the Perverse" and writing as self-understanding, self-concealment and madness -and as its founding image Cary Grant speaking of love alone in a sidecar in I Was a Male War Bride -this paper considers the relation between totality and incompleteness in the short story, focusing in particular on the incompletion of desire as a way of discussing the formal issues involved. If the modernist short story is so often thought of as an emblem of formal closure (the single gesture or unitary narrative shape), it often deals with notions of interruption and nonpresence, and with a certain madness created by the inability to account for the other. The paper considers two classic modernist stories of incomplete desire -Joyce's "The Dead" and Katherine Mansfield's "The Stranger" -and compares them to two sets of postmodern short stories, the "chain stories" of the English writer David Mitchell and the stories of the American David Foster Wallace (in particular the title story of Oblivion), exploring the proposition that in the contemporary stories incompleteness is displaced from identity to the narrative in which the self is ostensibly located, radically changing the form itself. That suggestion can, finally, be related to the changed cultural position of the form within the publishing industry.

Science in Modern Poetry: New Directions, Jan 1, 2012

I want to talk today about modernist abstraction, or at least one aspect of the topic. It is an i... more I want to talk today about modernist abstraction, or at least one aspect of the topic. It is an issue we often feel we are familiar with; definitional to modernism; confronting us whenever we enter an art gallery, or try to read Gertrude Stein. Yet it is also a topic which is slippery, particularly in its relation to literature -as opposed to painting, sculpture or music. The question of what the abstract is or does in literature does not seem to have received a very clear answer; and indeed a great deal of what has been written on the subject either refers us to painting or ekphrasis, as Charles Altieri's book does, or considers literature which deals with the idea of abstraction -Wallace Steven's eminently lucid work above all. The reason for this is of course that writing is a referential rather than a directly perceptual medium. Words -even if isolated or piled on top of each other randomly -carry traces of meaning. What could be the equivalent, in literature, of the abstraction of Malevitch's 'Black Square' or Pollock's doodle? For this reason we more readily speak of difficulty or obscurity in relation to the written; a term which immediately places us more on the side of the reader -the question of having a key -than of the producer; reception rather than creation, so that we do not readily think of obscurity as a practice. In the same semantic field is vagueness (which had a philosophical elaboration in Russell and Wittgenstein); the use of chance or automaticity; -and, a little closer to my topic here, the aesthetic of emptiness, of a resistance to the world in the refusal of closed meaning -a resistance articulated in formal terms by Wallace Stevens and in more political terms by Theodore Adorno.

The Salt Companion to Mina Loy

A Companion to Thomas Hardy, Jan 1, 2009

This is an uncorrected version of the article that appeared as 'Sequence and Series in Hardy's Po... more This is an uncorrected version of the article that appeared as 'Sequence and Series in Hardy's Poetry', A Companion to Thomas Hardy, ed. Keith Wilson (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), 378-94.

Cultural Politics: An International Journal, 2008

David Humphrey's notes for this issue point out that Ike's amateur paintings–done to co... more David Humphrey's notes for this issue point out that Ike's amateur paintings–done to cool down after running the country–include “oddly rendered rocks” which return as disturbing blobs in Humphrey's artwork. We might think of the legacy of the Cold War in terms of such ...

The Journal of Legal History, Jan 1, 2007

Writing Technologies 1.1 , 2007

Tim Armstrong is Professor of Modern English and American Literature at Royal Holloway, Universit... more Tim Armstrong is Professor of Modern English and American Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. His recent publications include Modernism, Technology and the Body (998), Haunted Hardy: Poetry, History, Memory (2000), and Modernism: A Cultural History (2005). He is currently working on a study of the metaphorical correlatives of slavery.

The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature, ed. Peter Nicholls and Laura Marcus, 2005

In the post-war world, it is the late sixties and seventies which gives birth to much of what we ... more In the post-war world, it is the late sixties and seventies which gives birth to much of what we recognise as contemporary culture: a commodified counter-culture; identity politics; the celebration of popular culture and its recycling of materials; suspicion of authority and political process. The turbulent decade of the seventies is marked by a release and dissemination of energies which have their origins in the political rebellions of the sixties, and by a move towards culture itself as the ground of debate and resistance. This was a move reinforced theoretically by the 'New Left' with its emphasis on culture, increasingly broadly defined, as a site of contestation, and a shift towards notions of hegemony and false consciousness derived from Gramsci and Althusser, rather than the 'Old Left' emphasis on class, labour and dialectics. The period also sees the rise of the discourse of postmodernism itself as an analytic framework for contemporary historical fault-lines.

Sea Changes: Historicizing the Ocean. Ed. …, Jan 1, 2004