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A Cabinet of Curiosities: Bad Godots and Lucky’s Brain Science

By S. E. Gontarski,

Samuel Beckett was something of an accidental dramatist, or at least his earliest completed plays were written as something of a sideline, a diversion, a respite from the long narrative flights he was developing in something of a white heat in the aftermath of the Second World War, the grouping of French novels now loosely called The Trilogy.

“Rolls Rough”: William Carlos Williams on the Thrills and Ills of Automobility

Black and white photo of towers and Conveyors, River Rouge Plant, Ford, 1927

By Joel Duncan,

William Carlos Williams has consistently been coupled with automobiles both in the popular imagination and in his scholarly reception. In Jim Jarmusch’s 2016 film Paterson, Adam Driver’s character drives around Paterson, New Jersey, writing and reading poetry, not least that by Williams. The wonderful Voices & Visions documentary on Williams, aired on PBS in 1988, begins with a driver on the open road who then stops to write poetry on his “William C. Williams, M.D.” prescription pad. The coupling of driving with the long poem Paterson (1946–1958), which Jarmusch’s film solidifies, is anac

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.

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A Cabinet of Curiosities: Bad Godots and Lucky’s Brain Science

By S. E. Gontarski

Samuel Beckett was something of an accidental dramatist, or at least his earliest completed plays were written as something of a sideline, a diversion, a respite from the long narrative flights he

“Rolls Rough”: William Carlos Williams on the Thrills and Ills of Automobility

By Joel Duncan

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

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

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.

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.

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