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John Middleton Murry and Ethical (Anti-) Modernism

John Middleton Murry, photograph by Lady Ottoline Morrell, 1917.

By Bridget Chalk, Manhattan College

A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasure of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause.

“Objects Worthy of Attention”: Modernism and the Travel Guide

A typical page of the Bradshaw’s Monthly Railroad and Steam Navigation Guide, January 1863.

By Jesse Schotter, Ohio State University

In her 1926 essay “Impassioned Prose,” Virginia Woolf seeks to distinguish herself from her Edwardian predecessors, writing that “they ignore [the mind’s] thoughts, its rhapsodies, its dreams . . . while prose itself . . . will be fit . . . to write nothing but the immortal works of Bradshaw and Baedeker.”[1] Like her fellow modern novelists E. M. Forster and Henry James, like Mina Loy with her Lost Lunar Baedeker or T. S. Eliot with his “Burbank with a Baedeker; Bleistein with a Cigar,” Woolf mentions the famously popular Baedeker travel guides of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Woolf here seems unconcerned with what the Baedekers and similar guidebooks have to say about changing patterns of tourism and travel, or about how they mediate the relationship between cultures. The content of travel guides—what Roland Barthes sees as the “disease of essence,” the tendency to reduce cultures to “types”—is not the issue for Woolf.[2] Instead, Woolf uses the Baedekers to characterize the language of Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy: a language perfect for the simplest forms of communication, but unsuited to creative expression. The “Bradshaw” to which Woolf refers is probably the Bradshaw railway guide—a textual form reduced to a list of times and city names. Bradshaws and Baedekers impart information, but they don’t express; they don’t, as she says, dream. Woolf defines the modern novel against the travel guide, yet the persistent invocation of guidebooks in fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries points to a deeper connection between them. While the modernist novel and the travel guide both claim to be totalizing genres that can more fully represent the reality of cities or countries, they each confront the limits of that endeavor. Both genres are characterized, I argue, by their selectiveness rather than by their expansiveness. While they attempt synecdochally to construct an encyclopedic portrait of a nation or metropolis, they are faced with the need to choose which people or places or events should be focused on, or, in the words of the Bradshaw, what “objects” are “worthy of attention.”[3

Another Nature Speaks to the Camera: Natural History and Film Theory

The water flea frontal view (bottom). Water Folk, British Instructional Films, 1931.

By Caroline Hovanec, University of Tampa

The London Film Society was founded in 1925 with a mission of bringing avant-garde and foreign films to British audiences. Its programming included a number of films that have gone down in history as landmarks of experimental cinema: Ballet mécanique and Entr’acte from France, the German expressionist classics The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler, and Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin and October from the Soviet Union. These selections gave the Film Society a certain modernist cachet, and its screenings attracted the likes of Roger Fry and Virginia and Leonard Woolf. Alongside these ambitious international films, however, the Film Society also had a curious liking for a humbler, more homegrown kind of programming: the natural history short

Keller’s Zak, Duchamp’s Mutt, and the Art of the Ruse

Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917, photograph by Alfred Steiglitz following the 1917 Society of Independent Artists exhibit. Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

By Brett Nathan Boutwell, Louisiana State University

Surveying American Late Modernism: Partisan Review and the Cultural Politics of the Questionnaire

Participant list for “Our Country and Our Culture” Symposium, 1952. Courtesy of the Howard Gottlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University.

By Ian Afflerbach, University of North Georgia

From 1920 to 1932, the Literary Digest—a weekly American magazine—accurately predicted the winner of each presidential election in the United States by conducting massive straw polls. In 1936, however, the magazine fell into irreparable ignominy when, after distributing over ten million questionnaires, the editors predicted a landslide victory for Republican candidate Alf Landon, only to have Franklin Roosevelt win handily, securing sixty-one percent of the popular vote. George Gallup’s American Institute of Public Opinion, founded just the year before, gained widespread notoriety for not only correctly predicting the election’s outcome using only 50,000 respondents, but also estimating the Digest poll’s error in advance of their publication, with a sample of just 3,000.[1] Gallup took the technique of the questionnaire, made politically potent by mass print culture, yet still employed as a blunt instrument, and infused it with a newfound statistical rigor.[2] Gallup’s confrontation with the Digest at once exemplified and accelerated the growing influence that questionnaires had in American culture in the 1930s, and particularly highlighted how modern periodicals might thrive—or wither—by using this technique to actively engage national political debates.[3] The Literary Digest, founded in 1890, endured its shame only briefly, being sold in 1938 and shortly thereafter dissolved into Henry Luce’s Time.[4] Gallup’s Institute, meanwhile, became a leading authority in evaluating public opinion, his name soon treated as metonymic for the use of modern, quantitative polling.

The Weak Powers of Digital Modernist Studies

Fig. 1. A visualization of Willa Cather’s correspondents (derived from “A Calendar of the Letters of Willa Cather,” ed. Andrew Jewell and Janis P. Stout, Willa Cather Archive, Center for Digital Research, University of Nebraska-Lincoln).

By Gabriel Hankins, Clemson University

Are digital methods weak or strong? How should we understand the conjunction of digital tools and methods with modernist studies? In some accounts of the rise of weak theories in literary studies, weak theory and digital methods like distant reading are taken as correlative terms, with associative logic and epistemological modesty common to both.[1] Yet a nearly opposite set of arguments is as familiar: digital literary methods are too “strong,” so goes the claim, because they conceal naïvely positivist notions of evidence and proof, reductively quantify cultural production, or advance a neoliberal agenda within the academy.[2] Digital methods appear both too weak and too strong for use on literary objects, particularly objects so delicately rebarbative as those of modernism.

Unrarified Air: Alfred Stieglitz and the Modernism of Equivalence

Alfred Stieglitz, Equivalent, 1930, gelatin silver print, 9.3 x 11.9 cm, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL.

By Kate Stanley, Western University, Ontario

In 1923 Alfred Stieglitz published “How I Came to Photograph Clouds,” a short essay in which he writes:

Archival Airwaves: Recording Ireland for the BBC

By Daniel Gomes, Bakersfield College

In 1947, Brian George, the head of the British Broadcasting Corporation’s Central Programme Operations, hired Séamus Ennis to help record traditional music throughout Ireland. Ennis was ideally suited for the task. Born in Finglas, North County Dublin, Ennis had become renowned as a uilleann pipe player, a talent inherited from his father, James.[1] Ennis’s musical aptitude was matched by his scrupulousness as a collector. Over the previous five years he became one of the principal fieldworkers for the Irish Folklore Commission. Ennis’s rapport with source musicians was a vital asset to George, himself a singer who hailed from Donegal. Having long envisioned the broadcasting service as a leading collector of folk song and music, George hoped a strong yield of Irish field recordings would persuade the BBC London headquarters to invest in systematically recording all of Britain and Ireland.

Modernity as Trauma and Frederick Ashton’s Dante Sonata

By Victoria Thoms, Coventry University

In January 1940, amid the confusion of wartime London, the Sadler’s Wells Ballet opened its somewhat cautious season with a premiere of Frederick Ashton’s new work Dante Sonata.[1] Conceived after the September 1939 declaration of war, the ballet is Ashton’s response to the developing events of the Second World War. It is a dark, relentless, and violent work with overtones of romantic melancholy that emphasizes nineteenth-century artists’ engagement with Dante’s Divine Comedy. It would become one of the company’s preeminent wartime ballets, regularly performed by the company and strongly admired by audiences both in London and on national tours. What is surprising about this work is its pronounced expressionist quality—a characteristic often associated with what was becoming known as modern dance. This article examines how Dante Sonata’s departure from traditional ballet aesthetics can be read as a reaction to a larger onto-historic disposition relating to the growing anxiety about the failed project of modernity. To do this I argue for the importance of a panoramic view of Dante Sonata in its relationship with both modernity and trauma.

“Acting the Man”: Wyndham Lewis and the Future of Masculinity

By Erin G. Carlston, University of Auckland

The work of Wyndham Lewis seems like a strange place to go looking for innovative configurations of gender. Notoriously associated with what Jeffrey Herf termed “reactionary modernism,” Lewis is well known for the flamboyant misogyny and homophobia expressed in both his fiction and his theoretical writing. Unlike male modernists whose work has been subjected to richly revelatory feminist and queer rereadings (James Joyce, Marcel Proust, D. H. Lawrence, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway), Wyndham Lewis was for a long time generally assumed to be unsalvageable for any kind of progressive or even very interesting politics of gender and sexuality.

“Copied Out Big”: Instruction in Joyce’s Ulysses

By Ramsey McGlazer, University of California, Berkeley

The narrator of Joyce’s “Ithaca” renders Molly Bloom’s experience of “direct instruction” (Ulysses, 562). From the perspective of her teacher, who is interested in outcomes, this experience is not a success. Molly’s insouciance and inconsistency, as recorded in the sentence above, lead the self-appointed pedagogue Leopold Bloom to adopt a “more effective” and modern approach: “[i]ndirect suggestion implicating selfinterest” (563). Joyce’s language suggests here, however, that the “direct” method proves surprisingly enabling—more so, in fact, than the updated, “implicating” alternative. The latter leads, in “Ithaca,” to an ultimately straightforward if initially perplexing consumer equation: “She disliked umbrella with rain, he liked woman with umbrella, she disliked new hat with rain, he liked woman with new hat, he bought new hat with rain, she carried umbrella with new hat” (563). Note the relative predictability of the sentence, its directness, even, “indirect suggestion” notwithstanding. It’s as if “indirect suggestion implicating self-interest” could yield only this parade of pros, cons, and commodities, this regular succession of dislikes and likes.

Kinski Speaks Villon: Literary Media and the Poète Maudit, 1952–1962

By Andrew McCann, Dartmouth College

In the late 1950s, well before his association with Werner Herzog had made him the most internationally recognizable German screen actor of his generation, Klaus Kinski was a phenomenon. Between 1957 and 1962, his concert-style recitations and studio recordings of work by François Villon, Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire, Gerhart Hauptmann, Bertolt Brecht, and a range of other canonical figures, held out the possibility that literature—a literature associated with sexual and political transgression, moreover—might find its place in a commercially driven culture industry.

Out of the Archive: S. N. Ghose’s “The Man Who Came Back” and Other Stories

By Anne Donlon, Modern Language Association

The post-World War II novels of the Bengali writer S. N. (Sudhin or Sudhindra Nath) Ghose (1899–1965) received critical recognition in India, Europe, and the United States; however, the short stories and plays he published in London in the early 1920s have been largely neglected. He published stories in Sylvia Pankhurst’s East London newspaper, the Workers’ Dreadnought, and literary magazine, Germinal, which comprise some of the earliest examples of fiction written in English by a South Asian author and published in Britain.[1] They appeared several years before his more famous contemporary Mulk Raj Anand published his first short story, “The Lost Child,” produced on Eric Gill’s handpress in County Buckinghamshire.^{^[2]} While Anand’s interactions with writers in Britain have recently been recognized within modernist studies, Ghose’s literary activities in London in the 1920s have been almost entirely forgotten.

In the Soviet School of Photography: Lessons in Photographic Literacy

By Katherine M. H. Reischl, Princeton University

By the mid-1930s, the literary works of the aging Russian naturalist author Mikhail Prishvin abounded in the Soviet press, from children’s books to literary journals.[1] But despite a long list of publications, the author has been relegated to a secondary position in the Soviet literary canon. It has only been with the recent publication of his vast and detailed diaries that Prishvin’s authorial persona has sparked growing scholarship and interest.[2] And it was not until December 2015 that viewers were able to see the first exhibition of his equally meticulous and remarkable photographs.

Weak Theory, Weak Modernism

By Paul Saint-Amour, University of Pennsylvania

Weakness: not a word that would seem, at first blush, to have anything to say to modernism. Modernism doesn’t blush; it blasts. Its reputation is for strength in extremis—for steep critiques of modernity, energetic convention busting, the breaking of vessels. In the words of its early theorists, modernism is “rebellion against authority,” a “revolution of the word,” “kicking over old walls” and “breaking of ‘Do Nots.’”[1] Nothing small-bore about revolt, nothing weak about making it new. Surely weakness is modernism’s obverse—injured, low-energy, and acquiescent—all the cloying orthodoxy that modernism would shock its way out of. Modernism is the production of aesthetic strength through iconoclasm and strenuous innovation. It is strong people exhibiting strength.

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