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Happy Modernisms

By Lorraine Sim,

Can modernism be happy? Or perhaps the question should be: can modernist studies be happy? These questions started to preoccupy me some time ago when I was seven weeks into teaching my undergraduate course in modernist literature at Western Sydney University. As we were about to turn our attention to Jean Rhys’s novel Voyage in the Dark (1934), I felt compelled to apologize to my students. I was asking them to delve into yet another textual universe of trauma, alienation, and unease. The only somewhat playful relief on offer that semester was Un Chien Andalou (1929)—hardly a set piece for eudaimonia. I assured my students that modernism was not all doom and gloom: modernists had fun, they could throw a good party. At the conclusion of the course, I routinely show archival footage of people dancing the Charleston to demonstrate just how much fun modernism can be. But in all seriousness, this experience prompted me to start thinking about the question of modernism and happiness, and why it has remained such a conspicuously absent topic in modernist studies both past and present.

Literary Labor: Radclyffe Hall’s Reproductive Futures

By Hannah Roche,

Calling for the suppression of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness in the August 19, 1928 edition of the Sunday Express, moralist-sensationalist James Douglas claimed that he “would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel. Poison kills the body, but moral poison kills the soul.” This, of course, is not news. As Laura Doan has argued, the provocative “poison” passage has been quoted or misquoted in countless accounts of The Well and its trials, with Douglas’s “resonant acid sound bite”

“I will show you where your son lies”: Relocating Kipling’s “The Gardener” in 1920s Print Culture

By John Drew,

If an old-fashioned liberal humanist excuse were needed for revisiting Kipling’s “The Gardener” it could be found through combining Phillip Mallett’s contention that “Kipling is the greatest English writer of the short story” with Edmund Wilson’s roundabout confession that he is “not sure that [The Gardener] is not really the best story that Kipling ever wrote.”[1] Greatness and hierarchies aside, the cultural materialist might find

Counterfaiths: Religious Visual Culture and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea

By Jack Dudley,

“Well, I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told anyone else,” Jean Rhys, shortly before her death in 1979, said to David Plante, as he relates it in Difficult Women (1983). Rhys cautioned that the story would sound familiar; however, she had told him “part of it, but not all” (Plante, Difficult Women, 47). The familiar part involved Rhys and her husband, Max, at their cottage in Devon, the stress of that time in her life, and how she, by that point, “quite gave up” on working on Wide Sargasso Sea, the Caribbean text that would mark her celebrated return to the literary scene in 1966, decades after her European, metropolitan novels of the thirties (48).

All Articles

Happy Modernisms

By Lorraine Sim

Literary Labor: Radclyffe Hall’s Reproductive Futures

By Hannah Roche

“I will show you where your son lies”: Relocating Kipling’s “The Gardener” in 1920s Print Culture

By John Drew

Counterfaiths: Religious Visual Culture and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea

By Jack Dudley

Zora Neale Hurston’s Recorder

By Kristin Rivero

When Zora Neale Hurston commented on the variations of African American dialect for her contribution to Nancy Cunard’s landmark anthology of Black writing in 1934, little did she know how her own personal combination of transparency and opacity—the ways in which, so to speak, she appears “clearly enunciated” “as a subject . . . but slurred as an object”—would shape her then emergent career. Hurston’s comment on how the vernacular can encode intimacy signals this article’s interest in the centrality of mediation to understanding Hurston and her exploration of the racialized subject.

Forgetting, Knowledge, and Action: Gertrude Stein’s Modernist Terms

By Jennifer Soong

In 1910 Gertrude Stein wrote the lines, “She is forgetting anything. This is not a disturbing thing, this is not a distressing thing, this is not an important thing. She is forgetting anything and she is remembering that thing, she is remembering that she is forgetting anything.” The piece was “Many Many Women” (1933), a genre-bending work featuring a series of paragraphs all describing unidentified women referred to by the pronoun “she.”

The Meteorological Device: Literary Modernism, the Daily Weather Forecast and the Productions of Anxiety

By Barry Sheils

If we were to attempt a history of the end of history, of how the conceptualization of the modern state produced the now familiarly assembled phenomena of governmentality, globalization, and climate change, then we would do well to look at the history of the modern weather forecast. There are several good reasons for this.

First, most generally, any such history of science returns the epistemological foundations of the present to the anthropology of modern scientific culture, enabling a comparative perspective on how environmental knowledge is gathered and used. Second, modern weather science represents a systematic understanding o

A Language of Esoteric Signs: Deciphering Jewish and Masonic Gestures in Viennese Expressionism

By Nathan J. Timpano

In his dryly sardonic “praise” of Jewish patronage in relation to the then-dominant Secessionist aesthetic, the polemical critic Karl Kraus (1874–1936)—who, not insignificantly, had renounced Judaism one year earlier—implicitly conveys his belief that the Wiener Moderne style was as superficial as the Jewish-owned, Jugendstil homes that populated Vienna at the fin de siècle. Here, Kraus’s words were likely meant to recall those of his close friend, the modern architect Adolf Loos (1870–1933). Loos had argued in April 1900 that the Vienna Secession (which had been formed in 1897) was now synonymous with the Jewish bourgeoisie

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