Ernst Bloch
Having worked extensively on the thinking of Ernst Bloch in my PhD research, Fictions of the Not Yet: Time and the Twenty-First Century British Novel, I was keen to research Bloch's own literary criticism in more detail. In April 2010 I was able to start mapping out some of the key trajectories of Bloch's own massive aesthetic oeuvre in a conference paper at "Modernism and Utopia: Convergences in the Arts," which was held at the University of Birmingham.
The conference organisers Dr Nathan Waddell and Dr Alice Reeve-Tucker are now publishing an edited collection on Utopianism, Modernism and Twentieth-Century Literature (Palgrave, 2013) and I've written up a chapter titled "Unearthing the 'gold-bearing rubble': Ernst Bloch’s Literary Criticism," which argues that despite the obvious impact and theoretical usefulness of Bloch’s concept of non-contemporaneous time for a transnational approach to comparative modernisms – or what has been called ‘the new modernist studies’ – there has been little written either about Bloch’s notion of Ungleichzeitigkeit or his wide-ranging writings on modernism. Bloch wrote significant articles and essays on a wide range of literary forms – from poetry, Goethe, James Joyce and avant-garde Expressionism, to the pulp "colportage" adventure narratives, crime fiction, the Novel of the Artist (Kunstlerroman) and the utopias of H. G. Wells, William Morris and Edward Bellamy.
My claim is that an attention to modernist aesthetic practices can help us understand Bloch’s philosophy more fully, since his dynamic engagement with modernist forms is a crucial aspect in the development of Bloch’s thinking that is often overlooked in secondary scholarship; and, secondly, that a more in-depth reading of Bloch’s concept of utopian temporality, as developed in his analysis of fascism, needs to be central to any comparative and/or post-colonial reading of (geo-)modernisms concerned with the uneven, contradictory, and even reactionary formal and political articulations that ‘effloresced’ during the first decades of the twentieth century.
You can preview a green open access pre-print version of the chapter below, or click here to download the pdf.
See below for PowerPoint slides of an invited lecture I gave on Ernst Bloch and "Fictions of the Not Yet" at the University of Westminster in 2011:
Dr Caroline Edwards is Senior Lecturer in Modern & Contemporary Literature at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research and teaching specialisms are in 21st century literature and critical theory, science fiction and post-apocalyptic narratives, Marxist aesthetics, and utopianism.
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