Joyce wrote as a kind of archaeologist: Ulysses, Henri Lefebvre wrote, marked ‘the momentous eruption of everyday life into literature’, in which Joyce’s sprawling prose ‘rescues, one after the other, each facet of the quotidian from anonymity’. Famously, Joyce even risked censorship in order to drag into view details about the career of the human body that other novelists had ignored. This chapter analyzes Joyce’s engagement with the everyday by focusing on scenes of mourning, when the everyday suddenly becomes at once visible and painfully fragile. These moments – funerals, wakes, and death rites – constitute a steady yet largely unexamined through-line running from Joyce’s first story to his last novel. Death itself is at once the most common and the most shocking of experiences, an event that rends the fabric of our everyday life as we try to readjust our habits around an often abrupt and painful absence. Seen this way, Joyce’s works become not only archaeological digs into the ever-vanishing everyday but also documents of human and cultural resilience amid the fury of modernity.

This chapter articulates the book’s main intervention and contribution, ending with a brief discussion of the phrases “is a book” and “like a book.” Premodern writers who said something “is” or is “like a book” forged the very conceptual connection that How the World Became a Book traces through English culture. Contains six major sections covering the contribution and intervention of the book.

The worldwide scope and depth of the present international system and its sense of legitimacy have not been applied in the same way everywhere. There is still much diversity among countries and the courses of action and the policies that they embrace. This explains, in part, the tensions and disagreements concerning the nature and dynamic of this international system as well as the claims of legitimacy in it. The redistribution of power currently underway at the international level, epitomized by the rise of China, could create more stress in the future. Nevertheless, overlooking the scope and depth of the present international order and its culture of legitimacy would be a mistake. The scope and depth of the present international order and its culture of legitimacy are the manifestations and the products of the following elements working together: position of power dominance, means of penetration and integration, values and norms, and secularization and democratization.

Through the mediation of Messiaen and Leibowitz, Boulez became acquainted with the repertoire of modern music during his student years, leading him to conceive of its synthesis at an early stage. First with Cage, then with Stockhausen, he maintained a fruitful dialogue, linked to the construction of a coherent language. Nevertheless, he was suspicious of Darmstadt and critical of the music he heard there, such as that of Nono. From the 1960s onwards, he pursued his compositional approach in a more solitary fashion, while interpreting the music of his contemporaries as a conductor. Open to the influences of writers and painters but an adept of absolute music that produced its own meanings, Boulez drew close to contemporaries such as Berio, Carter and Ligeti, who admired his work and his commitment to creation. In his writings, however, he relies essentially on his predecessors, making almost no reference to his contemporaries.

Boulez’s status as a modern is rarely doubted. Yet he provided relatively little by way of explicit reflection on the concept of modernity. This chapter traces a path via Charles Baudelaire’s formulation in his essay, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, and Michel Foucault’s commentary on it, to Foucault’s essay on Boulez himself, ‘Pierre Boulez, ou l’écran traversé’. There, Boulez is seen as motivated by ‘the necessity of a conjuncture’, an imperative for action demanded by whatever nexus of circumstances and contradictions confronts the individual in the present. The conjuncture, as further amplified by Louis Althusser, offers useful perspectives on Boulez’s modernity, which is often characterised as prescriptive and deterministic but which emerges here as relativist and perspectival, stressing contingency rather than inevitability. Above all, modernity comes to signify not a binding aesthetic but an enduring ethic, whose manifestations remain particular to the historical and problem contexts in which they arise.

The chapter introduces Vico’s praxis epistemology and situates it within the maker’s knowledge tradition. It shows how Vico transformed the tradition into an ambitious philosophical anthropology, a philosophy of history, culture, and existence, which informs human epistemic possibilities, strengths, and limits. It is argued that this philosophy supposes and outlines an alternative, non-Cartesian version of modernity – a version based on the practical certainty that we are makers of our history and symbolic world.

This chapter addresses an alternative history of The Rite of Spring: principally, as a meme of modernity within popular culture and cinema. Stravinsky’s score, we learn, has inspired countless jazz practitioners and film directors: who, how, when and why are important questions raised, giving the reader a clear sense of the contemporary currency of Stravinsky’s music with an audience of listeners and musicians for whom the original ballet has taken on new life and meaning.

This chapter examines the way in which the Holocaust has been brought into conversation with understandings of the modern world, with a strong focus on historical and sociological accounts (though recognizing the place of the Holocaust in postmodern literary and critical theory.) It shows the multiple ways in which concepts of modernization, modernity, and the modern have been deployed, be it to establish the Holocaust’s paradigmatic or normative character, or the reverse. It illustrates the paradoxical character of efforts to highlight the Holocaust’s distinctiveness while harnessing it to a pervasive and generic “modernity.”

Chapter 2 demonstrates that Russian modernist conservatism was first formed in the late Soviet Union as an attempt to confront the convergence horizon predicted by Western liberal modernization theories. From 1970 to 1985, theorizers of modernist conservatism aimed to reenchant Soviet modernity through the deconfliction of the relationship between technological modernity and spirituality. As they viewed it, this new ideological language should serve to reinvigorate the Soviet state ideology and maintain it as an alternative to the Western model of modernity. The chapter shows that, in contrast to the description of the Soviet state ideology as a rigid monolith, modernist conservatism’s ideas were selectively dispersed in official sites of ideology production such as the Komsomol.

Chapter 1 introduces the reader to the book’s definition of the Russian hawks. It provides a brief review of the current literature on Russian conservatism and the gaps in it. It presents the two distinctive features of the book: the historical scope that spans across the 1991 regime change and the sociohistorical analysis of the career of the Russian hawks from ideological fringes to policy prominence. It builds the main argument of the book around the concept of idea network. Finally, it discusses the outline of the book.

This conclusion highlights that the Russian regime, from the mid-1990s onwards, has revived Soviet practices of sponsorship of ideology production. Instead of the Soviet institutionalization of an ideological apparatus, however, the current regime has outsourced it to clubs and think tanks outside the administration or party institutions. This challenges the common narrative that identifies a distinct conservative turning point in the Russian regime from 2012 onward. Instead, the book argues that this shift should be viewed within a broader and more gradual evolution of the relationship between decision-makers and “ideas networks.” The second implication is that regime support for ideology production aimed not at consolidating a unique state ideology but at cultivating and authoritatively controlling a certain degree of ideological pluralism. While an ideological core consolidated over the years in official discourse around key concepts such as strong state power and the multipolarity of the world order, additional ideological content remained fluid. This practice of “managed ideological pluralism” through the promotion or demotion of different idea networks maintained a range of lines and narratives available to justify various policy courses.

Islands have long been privileged objects of spatially oriented literary analyses. Along similar lines, oceanic space has been studied through various spatial concepts, from Margaret Cohen’s ‘chronotopes of the sea’ to recent work in the so-called blue humanities and critical ocean studies. Responding to and complementing these critical trends, this chapter argues that islands and oceanic space have not only provided highly interesting case studies for the ‘application’ of spatial literary and cultural studies, but have themselves been at the heart of spatial theorising – from the fragmentation of mediaeval spatialities in the early modern isolario to Benoît Mandelbrot’s conceptualisation of fractal geometry through the figure of the island. Islands and oceans have also been central to Indigenous and Creole spatial poetics and philosophies; Édouard Glissant’s use of the Caribbean archipelago as a key figure for his poetics of relation is a case in point. Ultimately, then, this chapter is not primarily interested in what spatial theory can teach us about islands and oceans, but in what islands and oceans can teach us about space – and in how the poetic and narrative presence of islands, oceans, and archipelagoes in cultural texts has actively shaped and challenged wider assumptions about space.

Chapter VI offers a final overview of the main themes addressed in the book and integrates them into a cohesive, overarching framework. In the first part, I discuss the meta-literary implications of Gandalf’s fall as described in Chapter V and illustrate Tolkien’s concern for what can be properly described as a ‘death of the author’ – to use the concept of Roland Barthes. This is clarified through an extensive discussion of Tolkien’s meta-literary short story Leaf by Niggle, in which one can trace all main features of the ‘sub-creative death’. The second part explores other important elements of Tolkien’s ‘theory’, focusing on the meta-literary significance of Gandalf’s return, and introducing a related concept that I call ‘the resurrection of the author’. This concept is explored through a discussion of five ‘gifts’ bestowed to Niggle’s tree in the eponymous story by the Divine Voices (completion, realisation, ramification, harmony, and prophecy), which conjure up a vision of divine enhancement of human literature, with fascinating eschatological implications.

The mock arts written by Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope and their circle touched on issues of mechanical instruction, but their satire depended on its application to incongruously non-mechanical subjects. It was in Gulliver’s Travels that Swift turned more directly to descriptions of material production and mechanical ingenuity. The framing of those descriptions in a travel narrative recalls Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Both texts reduced scenes of human ingenuity and manufacture to a proto-anthropological ground zero in distant and solitary locations. But reading Gulliver and Crusoe from a mock-technical perspective reveals a surprising reversal in their authors’ attitudes to mechanical ingenuity. Defoe, the propagandist for commerce, is sceptical about the value and cognitive significance of handicraft skill. Swift, by contrast, uses his commentary on mechanical technique to depict different richly-imagined ecologies of mind in the four parts of Gulliver’s Travels.