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Irina RasmussenAssociate Professor (Docent)

About me

Irina Rasmussen is an Associate Professor at the Department of English, Stockholm University. She is a specialist in British modernism, with sub-specialties in American, Irish, and Russian modernisms, the history of aesthetics, dialectical materialism, and modern world literatures in English from the 19th century to the first half of the 20th century. She will be happy to supervise students in the main areas of her expertise, but also in literary theory, and more specifically, in cultural, postcolonial, and world-literature criticisms.

Her book manuscript, James Joyce’s Ulysses and the Historical Record, elucidates the interaction of Joyce’s aesthetic modernism with forms of nationalism and internationalism. It explores how the novel’s alignment with the historical avant-garde serves as the condition of its complex negotiations between Ireland’s colonial legacy and its nationalist imagination.

Her nearly completed book manuscript, “Documentary Modernism: World Sympathies, Ideal Collectivities, and Dissenting Individualism,” explores collaborative interventionist modernist projects: the modes of reading they invite, the values they generate, and the worlds they project. It maps the complex ways the modernist imagination of the 1920s and 1930s migrates to a culturally diverse imaginary, sometimes enabling radically new world-conceptions. The project builds on the established methodological merger between new historicist and intermedial critical practice, supplemented with current world-making theory.

She is currently working on a book project, “Vernacular Modernisms: Poetics of the World,” which examines experimental modernist poetics of Acmeists and Imagists, of Mina Loy, Virginia Woolf, and Ernest Hemingway in the context of their conceptualizations of literary production. Bearing in mind modernism’s double identity as concept- and praxis-oriented, the questions this study asks are: what happens in the encounter between modernism's studied form and vernacular material; what possibilities such a dualism opens; and what elisions it might perform. The larger focus is on how the wrapping of immediate and distant vernacular materials into artistic practices helped the modernists to spawn new expressive forms.

Her articles and reviews appeared in James Joyce Broadsheet, James Joyce Quarterly, and in Modernism/modernity.

Please contact irina.rasmussen@english.su.se if you are interested in Degree Thesis supervision.

Publications

A selection from Stockholm University publication database

  • A Homemade History

    2022. Irina Rasmussen. Literature and the Making of the World, 173-214

    Chapter

    In 1951, L. S. Alexander Gumby donated his vast collection of handmade scrapbooks to Columbia University. Preserved institutionally in Rare Book & Manuscript section at Butler Library, Alexander Gumby Collection of Negroiana, [ca. 1800]–1981 compiles local materials about the impact of the Harlem Renaissance at home and abroad and records of its worldwide audience and appeal. By combining artistic and historiographic aims and blending cultural historiography and sentimental history, Gumby develops a crossover form of vernacular historiography that defies generic categorization and straddles the fields of artistic production and social historiography. The project’s scope and the multi-dimensionality of its records transform the traditional and highly idiosyncratic scrapbook format into a curatorial project with clear political, conservationist, and aesthetic implications. By focusing on Gumby’s choice of material, method of archiving, and book-making techniques, this chapter develops a form-sensitive reading to show how the documenting practices he develops transform scrapbooking into an archival practice. Drawing on the ongoing theorization of literary worlds within world-literature studies, this chapter argues that Gumby’s material practices of assemblage, categorization, and exhibition allow his collection to reappraise the dynamics between world-historical and local perspectives and stage a dialogue among the competing national, local, and global outlooks shaped the period’s aesthetics and politics.

    Read more about A Homemade History

  • James Joyce's Dubliners: Geography 'Taking Substance under our Eyes'

    2021. Irina D. Rasmussen. Palgrave encyclopedia of urban literary studies

    Chapter

    By shifting the focus of reading on the varied rhythms of the city space in James Joyce’s Dubliners, on the time-space-mind curvatures and the dissonances they effect, this chapter foregrounds Joyce’s central preoccupation with modes of writing that respond to the unrelenting pressures of urban living on the alignment between sensory experiences, perceptions and articulated thought, without condescension or moralism. It argues that the energy and vitality of the stories’ poetic rhythm lie in their capacity to make artistically visible and spatially perceptible the dissonances of these alignments, rendering the power of the city both transformative and alienating, critical and fortifying.

    Read more about James Joyce's Dubliners

  • "En avant, mes enfants!" Nations, Populations, and the Avant-Garde Body in James Joyce's "Oxen of the Sun"

    2019. Irina Rasmussen. Comparative Literature 71 (4), 408-435

    Article

    In the “Oxen of the Sun” episode of Ulysses, James Joyce dramatizes the evolution of English prose styles by creating a stylistic matrix for gestation. This article links the episode’s stylistic evolution to the historical development of liberal thought about autonomy and self-determination, reading Joyce’s styles as rhetorical gateways to liberal discourses on statehood, politics, socioeconomics, national health, and sexuality. In the immediate historical context of national agitation in Ireland, the episode’s bodily tropes of reproduction, birth, emergence, and break dislocate the rhetoric of national conception, providing a critical insight into the development of liberal thought, particularly into the contradictory blend of progressive and regressive thinking from which liberal notions of autonomy and self-determination have emerged. By demonstrating how the stylistic evolution in “Oxen” moves through a series of breaks, the article relates Joyce’s disruptive tactics to the aesthetic practices of the historical avant-gardes, showing how the affinities with the avant-garde in “Oxen” work on the level of form, content, and imagined life praxis. The main argument at stake is understanding how Joyce creates a literary position of being in advance by way of engaging critically with biopolitics and the liberal discourses on national and social advancement.

    Read more about "En avant, mes enfants!" Nations, Populations, and the Avant-Garde Body in James Joyce's "Oxen of the Sun"

  • Acmeism

    2018. Irina Rasmussen Goloubeva, Matthew McGarry. Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism

    Chapter

    Acmeism [АКМЕИЗМ] was a major literary movement of the Russian Silver Age. Although difficult to date precisely, scholars generally agree that Acmeism unofficially began with the closing of the major Symbolist publication Vesy [The Scales], coinciding with the appearance of the journal Apollon in 1909, and ended with the execution of its nominal founder, the poet Nikolay Gumilyev (1886–1921), shortly after the Russian Civil War. Conceptualized as a new school of poetry by two disaffected poets from the Tsekh Poetov [Poets’ Guild], Gumilyev and Sergey Gorodetsky, Acmeism became one of the major currents in the post-Symbolist Russian literary avant-garde, competing with the more vociferous Futurism for advancing contemporary Russian poetry into the future. Despite the movement’s brief history and its seemingly conformist alignment with Symbolism, major Acmeist poets such as Anna Akhmatova (1889–1938) and Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938) placed Acmeism firmly on the map of both Russian and European modernism, on a par with Aleksandr Blok’s Symbolism and Vladimir Mayakovsky’s Futurism.

    Read more about Acmeism

  • Documentary Modernism

    2018. Irina Rasmussen. World Literatures, 185-198

    Chapter

    This chapter approaches the nexus of cosmopolitanism and nationalism as it is actualised in a range of aesthetic documentary projects from the 1920s and 30s. It argues that a range of varied documentary modernist projects implement cosmopolitan practices of collection, assemblage and reportage in order to remap the world in formations conductive to universal social justice. It shows, firstly, how the modernist production of cosmopolitan value in aestheticized documentary cultural forms energises the sociopolitical imaginary of the period and, secondly, how aesthetic modernisms’ response to the cosmopolitics of the interwar period anticipates contemporary debates in the early 21st century about globalisation and world literature.

    Read more about Documentary Modernism

  • Avant-garde "Oxen"

    2014. Irina Rasmussen Goloubeva. James Joyce Broadsheet (98)

    Article

    THE 'OXEN OF THE SUN' episode of Ulysses is set at the National Maternity hospitalin Dublin and by Joycean standards its plot is relatively unambiguous. It presentsa group of young Dubliners, some of whom are students or professionals inthe field of medicine, discussing national politics, demographics and sexuality. Theirdebate dips in and out of the social theories concerning history, economics, philosophy, naturalhistory, anthropology, eugenics and social Darwinism, with state-of-the-art refractions ofthe narrative voice through canonical styles of English prose. In contrast to the predictable,evolutionary trajectory of the plot, the debaters' say-sos, the barrage of mild indecencies andthe explicit subject matter generate a dense textuality and ambiguous ideologies.

    Read more about Avant-garde "Oxen"

  • Ethics and Poetics

    2014. .

    Book (ed)

    Bringing together international scholars interested in the ethics of fiction, this book extends the rich field of ethical literary criticism that has emerged in the last twenty years. New ground is broached in that the authors explore literariness itself as constitutive of ethical intimations about the pluralistic community and about egalitarian modes of communication. The epistemological point of departure is the ethical thought of modernity as filtered through Hegelian recognition as infinite social responsibility. The structure of the anthology reflects this anchoring as the authors investigate modalities of recognition and social regeneration via literary language, which effects the transvaluation of values, of the collective imaginary, and of intermediality. This collection is generally concerned with the immanence of intersubjectivity in literature and with how from this immanence new modes of ethical communication are generated. The authors of Ethics and Poetics clarify how modern narratives, in ways akin to, yet different from, political interrogations such as deconstruction, psychoanalysis, Marxism and gender studies, refine the understanding of the recursive process of recognition, thereby disclosing ethico-political dimensions of the reading experience. The chapters in this anthology share an interest in ethico-literary responses to shifts within modernity from communal to transnational imagination. All the articles explore how modalities of recognition in modern and contemporary literature deeply affect and potentially regenerate real social spaces.

    Read more about Ethics and Poetics

  • "That's the Music of the Future"

    2013. Irina Rasmussen Goloubeva. Modernism/Modernity 20 (4), 685-708

    Article

    The modernists' obsession with history is well known. Responding to the ineluctable pace of modernization that threatened to sweep away the past, some modernists celebrated the loss and welcomed the new world; others engaged the historical imagination by capturing the disappearing world and the intransigent present. The actual difference between these two forms of modernist historical imagination is, however, not so tidy and complete, reflecting both the general disjunction between modernity's historical and anti-historical instincts and history's inexorable traces in the collective unconscious. James Joyce's adaptation of an epic perspective in Ulysses, however absurd and half serious, is instinctively historical and characteristically works both ways. He revels in the intoxicating dynamic of the new fast-changing world while at the same time obstinately working to capture the historicity of a disappearing present.

    Read more about "That's the Music of the Future"

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