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For the Record: Voice and Orality in Guillaume Apollinaire’s “Lettre-Océan”

Texts in shape, Guillaume Apollinaire, “Lettre-Océan,” Les Soirées de Paris 25

By Irina Markina,

The poet Guillaume Apollinaire was for the record. Between 1913 and 1914, he wrote repeatedly about the impact of recording technology on lyric poetry.

Corrosive Littoral: On the Beach with Kenneth Slessor

Stylized painting of people playing on a beach

By Peter Kirkpatrick,

The modernity of colonial nations has often seemed belated, but in Australia it has been especially troubled by ongoing doubts about the authenticity of the nation itself. According to Bob Hodge and Vijay Mishra in Dark Side of the Dream: “Legitimacy is a raw and buried issue in the contemporary Australian consciousness for good reasons.

Global Autofictional Flânerie

French and Persian text mixed in Ja'far Khan Has Returned from Europe

By Shaj Mathew,

He is a walking paradox: a loner who desires the crowd, “a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito,” a spectator who casts off his air of detachment, a skeptic who can experience states of childlike wonder, “an ‘I’ with an insatiable appetite for the ‘non-I.’” More gaze than body, he is a phantom of the arcade, “a mirror as vast as the crowd itself . . . a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness” (Baudelaire, “Painter,” 9). Who is this person? “Observer, philosopher . . . —call him what you will,” the flâneur is the modern man par excellence, an urban stroller who will always be encountered, en passant, in the act of capturing “the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent”—that is, the contradictory, enigmatic, and elusive condition otherwise known as modernity (13).

The Loose Mass, The Open Society, and the Co-operative Commonwealth: Altermodernities Between the Wars

Bergson's signature as president of League of Nations

By Randi Koppen,

In their book Commonwealth from 2009, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri look forward to a commonwealth of the future, a true democracy of the multitude; reconceptualized forms of sociality and conviviality; a new culture and new modes of life, whose realization will require nothing less than “anthropological transformation.” While this new democracy is yet to come, for Hardt and Negri it has antecedents in a partially submerged history of altermodernity: a critical tradition in political modernism that proposes different alternatives to capitalist modernity while attempting to circumvent the negative dialectic of modernity/antimodernity.

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For the Record: Voice and Orality in Guillaume Apollinaire’s “Lettre-Océan”

By Irina Markina

The poet Guillaume Apollinaire was for the record. Between 1913 and 1914, he wrote repeatedly about the impact of recording technology on lyric poetry.

Corrosive Littoral: On the Beach with Kenneth Slessor

By Peter Kirkpatrick

The modernity of colonial nations has often seemed belated, but in Australia it has been especially troubled by ongoing doubts about the authenticity of the nation itself.

Global Autofictional Flânerie

By Shaj Mathew

The Loose Mass, The Open Society, and the Co-operative Commonwealth: Altermodernities Between the Wars

By Randi Koppen

Hart Crane: The “Architectural Art”

By Jo Gill

In the near-century since the publication of The Bridge (1930), Hart Crane has been widely recognized as the poet of urban modernity, or, in his own words, as a “suitable Pindar for the dawn of the machine age." He has been acclaimed as celebrant and critic, by turn, of America’s myth of itself and as a pioneer cartographer of the queer spaces of the modern metropolis. Paradoxically, perhaps, it is his rendering of the late nineteenth-century Brooklyn Bridge (designed by John Roebling, started in 1869 and opened in 1883), which has been taken as central to his vision of early twentieth-century America’s tensile complexity.

Tapestried Landscape: The Queer Influence of Roberto Burle Marx on Elizabeth Bishop’s Brazil

By Christopher Schmidt

“Marvelous and somehow sad, flamboyant, and threatening.”

The words are Elizabeth Bishop’s, writing in a letter to describe the extraordinary tropical plant life encountered at the Sítio Burle Marx, the hundred-acre home and nursery of Roberto Burle Marx, Brazil’s best-known landscape architect and a key figure in the country’s modernist movement. Although Bishop had already lived in Brazil for ten years when she wrote this, the Sítio Burle Marx, located on the western outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, was and continues to be an incomparably rich showcase for botanical exotica collected on the designer’s many scouting expeditions to remote Brazilian biomes.

Pillars of Process: Muriel Rukeyser, Franz Boas, and the Poetics of Birth

By Rowena Kennedy-Epstein, University of Bristol

In a 1947 letter to Ernst Boas, the son of anthropologist Franz Boas, the American writer Muriel Rukeyser confesses, “May I tell you how, as it begins to open before me, how much this inquiry into your father’s life is meaning to me? The stories are very beautiful, the clues to further meaning are illuminating. I begin to see the power of the connections. I am very happy to be doing this.” In the same letter she writes that she is pregnant, a “happy” complication to the work.

Postcolonial Modernism and the Camera Eye: Eliot Elisofon’s Photographs of African Art

By Emily Hyde, Rowan University

1959: The Atlantic magazine devotes its April issue to “Africa South of the Sahara.” Articles on the politics of decolonization frame a large number of contributions on art and culture. A short story by Chinua Achebe appears alongside the work of Nadine Gordimer, Tom Mboya, Léon Damas, Léopold Sédar-Senghor, Amos Tutuola, and David Diop. “The Sacrificial Egg” is Achebe’s first story published in the United States, and its timing supports the US release of his novel Things Fall Apart. Unlike that classic novel, the story begins in a recognizably modern Nigeria, with a young clerk named Julius Obi sitting alone in a colonial shipping office, gazing at his typewriter.

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