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Corroding Geometries: Elsa Gramcko, Automobility, and the Paradoxes of Venezuelan Modernity, 1955–1965
By Devon Zimmerman,
© 2023 Johns Hopkins University Press
Desdoblamiento after Colonization: Julia de Burgos’s Latinx Modernism
By Laura Lomas,
Julia de Burgos (1914–53), one of Puerto Rico’s greatest poets, haunts the American literary imagination from the borders of the modern. Her ghostly presence, desperate and furious, searches for interlocutors on the bridge to Welfare Island, historically a warehouse for the poor, the criminalized and sick just east of the United Nations. Julia’s barefoot figure wandering across that bridge in her bata, just as she describes in letters to her sister Consuelo in 1953, positions her to catch the eye of today’s visitors to the newly restored and renamed Roosevelt Island, which offers no physical reminders of this important Puerto Rican and American poet’s residence there. Nothing in the island’s glistening white granite park mentions the two poems Burgos wrote in English when Roosevelt Island was Welfare Island, months before her death in Spanish Harlem.
“Nowhere an obstacle”: Transparency, Embodied Perception, and Becoming in Paul Scheerbart’s Lesabéndio
By Carl Gelderloos,
How might we situate Paul Scheerbart within German modernism? The work of excavating his oeuvre, its conceptual and generic contours, and its entanglements with other figures and constellations of German modernism has begun in earnest, yet he is still known primarily as a theorist of glass architecture, on the one hand, and as a decades-long, subterranean influence on Walter Benjamin, on the other—Benjamin received a copy of Scheerbart’s 1913 novel Lesabéndio from Gershom Scholem as a wedding present, and continually returned to the utopian aspects of Scheerbart’s writing.
“And words were images to him”: Narrative Remediation in Rockwell Kent
By Jonathan Najarian,
In early 1912, when Walt Kuhn, Walter Pach, and Arthur Davies convened to begin planning the International Exhibit of Modern Art, they decided that the show would need to include the most important artists working in the contemporary avant-garde. The 1913 Armory Show, as the exhibit came to be called, effectively brought experimental European art to the United States; for the first time in a major exhibit, artists like Matisse, Picasso, and Duchamp were brought together for American audiences.