Synopses & Reviews
Copyright looms large in the digital world. As users and creators of expressive works, we all know more about copyright than we did a decade ago. But scholars of modernism have felt a special urgency in grappling with this branch of law, whose rapid expansion in recent years has prolonged or revived the rights in many modernist works. Indeed, thanks to public clashes between estates and users, 'modernism' has lately begun to seem like a byword for contested intellectual property. At the same time, today's volatile legal climate has prompted us to ask how modernism was, from its beginning, shaped by intellectual property law-and how modernists sought variously to exploit, reform, anoint, and evade copyright. We are beginning to discover, too, how copyright's transatlantic and imperial asymmetries during the modernist decades helped set the stage for its geopolitical role in the new millennium.
Modernism and Copyright is the first book to take up these questions and discoveries in all their urgency. A truly multi-disciplinary study, it brings together essays by well-known scholars of literature, theater, cinema, music, and law as well as by practicing lawyers and caretakers of modernist literary estates. Its contributors' methods are as diverse as the works they discuss: Ezra Pound's copyright statute and Charlie Parker's bebop compositions feature here, as do early Chaplin, EverQuest, and the Madison Avenue memo. As our portrait of modernism expands and fragments, Modernism and Copyright locates works like these on one of the few landscapes they all clearly share: the uneven terrain of intellectual property law.
Review
"The genius of this collection lies in its drawing from diverse and often unexpected sources...This collection is necessary and timely, not just because it reveals the ways modernist practice evolved but because it queries the ways we study this evolution." --James Joyce Quarterly
"Modernism and Copyright places copyright at the center of modernist art, modernist theories of art, and modern ideas of ownership. For that alone, it is an important book. But these essays take us much further: they show convincingly that the laws and customs of intellectual property are crucial to our most significant political and aesthetic concepts such as generation, tradition, authenticity, community, and privacy." --Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Rutgers University
"An engaging collection investigating how copyright has interacted with modernism as well as with its study. Working across genres--text, music, advertisements--and legal fields--privacy and publicity rights as well as copyright--Modernism and Copyright demonstrates that the allusive, mix-and-match qualities of modernism find echoes as well as contrasts in law." --Rebecca Tushnet, Georgetown Law
"Finally, a book on modernism that addresses the elephant in the room: copyright law, and the way it has shaped both artistic practices and scholarship on the subject. Modernism and Copyright is a conversation starter that will provoke a much-needed discussion." --Kembrew McLeod, University of Iowa
Synopsis
How was modernism shaped, from its beginning, by intellectual property law? What role did the law's imperial and transatlantic asymmetries play in modernism's dissemination? How did various modernists exploit, reform, anoint, and evade copyright? And how is the study of modernism today being affected by expanding copyright regimes?
Modernism and Copyright is the first book to take up these questions. A truly multi-disciplinary study, it brings together essays by scholars of literature, theater, cinema, music, and law as well as by practicing lawyers and caretakers of modernist literary estates. Its contributors' methods are as diverse as the works they discuss: Ezra Pound's copyright statute and Charlie Parker's bebop compositions feature here, as do early Chaplin films, EverQuest, and the Madison Avenue memo. As our portrait of modernism expands and fragments, Modernism and Copyright locates works such as these on one of the few landscapes they all clearly share: the uneven terrain of intellectual property law.
About the Author
Paul K. Saint-Amour is Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of
The Copywrights: Intellectual Property and the Literary Imagination.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Series Editors' Foreword
Paul K. Saint-Amour
"Introduction: Modernism and the Lives of Copyright"
I: Portraits of the Modernist As Copywright
Robert Spoo
"Ezra Pound, Legislator: Perpetual Rights and Unfair Competition with the Dead"
Celia Marshik
"Thinking Back through Copyright: Freedom and Fair Use in Virginia Woolf's Nonfiction"
II: Melodic Properties of the Culture System
Mark Osteen
"Rhythm Changes: Contrafacts, Copyright, and Jazz Modernism"
Joanna Demers
"Melody, Theft, and High Culture"
III: The Fall and Rise of Remix Culture
Peter Decherney
"Gag Orders: Comedy, Chaplin, and Copyright"
W. Ron Gard and Elizabeth Townsend Gard
"Marked by Modernism: Reconfiguring the 'Traditional Contours of Copyright Law' for the Twenty-First Century"
IV: Regimes of Attribution and Publicity
Catherine L. Fisk
"The Modern Author at Work on Madison Avenue"
Oliver Gerland
"Modernism and the Emergence of the Right of Publicity: From Hedda Gabler to Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon"
V: Biography, Privacy, and Copyright
Mark A. Fowler
"'The Quick in Pursuit of the Dead': Ian Hamilton and the Clash Between Literary Biographers and Copyright Owners"
Carol Loeb Shloss
"Privacy and the Misuse of Copyright: The Case of Shloss v. The Estate of James Joyce"
VI: Calving the Wind
Stanford G. Gann, Jr.
"Beyond the Grave: Continuing Life Through Great Works"
Mary de Rachewiltz
"Mens Sine Affectu"
VII: Modernism After Modernism
Joseph R. Slaughter
"'It's good to be primitive': (Re)Placing Africa at the Ends of Modernism"
Eric Hayot and Edward Wesp
"Solomon's Bluff: Virtual Property and the Aesthetics of Modern Worldmaking"
Appendix: Copyright Protection and Users' Rights-Frequently Asked Questions
Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index