Articles
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.
Poetry’s Plastic Medium: The Example of W. S. Graham
By David Nowell Smith, University of East Anglia
Major advances in modernist poetics have long occurred through contact with experiments in the visual and plastic arts: one need only think of the “cubist” poetics of Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Pierre Reverdy, and Gertrude Stein, of the New York School’s links to Abstract Expressionism, or, most recently, of conceptual writing’s regular citation of Brion Gysin’s claim that “writing is fifty years behind painting." Poets would find their community amongst artists; but also, the poetics itself would emerge out of critical engagement with the work of the poets’ artist peers: adapting compositional practices and techniques; adopting conceptual vocabularies. At times, this leads to intermedia experiment (Calligrammes, collage, concrete work); at others, to a renewed focus on the medium–specificity of poetry: both the peculiar possibilities of language as material and resource for art–making, and the repertoire of techniques and conventions through which this material is deployed.
“The Baritone with Muscles in his Throat”: Vaughn Monroe and Masculine Sentimentality during the Second World War
By Andrew Berish, University of South Florida
During the Second World War sentimentality reclaimed the mainstream of American popular music. Ballad recordings—slow, romantic love songs—increasingly pushed aside the hot jazz sounds of the era’s dance bands. The singers of these songs were an assortment of old and new faces—Bing Crosby, Dick Haymes, Vaughn Monroe, and Frank Sinatra. Their hit songs, recordings such as “I’ll Be Seeing You,” “Together,” “My Devotion,” and “There Are Such Things,” exchanged cynicism and irony for optimistic expressions of love, faithfulness, and devotion. These popular ballads shared in a broader wave of sentimentality that suffused the era’s mass culture—Hollywood film, commercial popular music, and radio programming.[1] 1940s sentimentality, although responding to new social conditions produced by the war, was modeled on and nourished by a historical tradition of sentimental culture stretching back into the mid-nineteenth century.
Broadcasting “Howl”
By Lisa Hollenbach, Oklahoma State University
On a late December evening in 1956, public radio station KPFA-FM in Berkeley, California, broadcast a poetry reading by a young writer whose first book, Howl and Other Poems, had just appeared that fall from local publisher City Lights Books. Allen Ginsberg, who had recorded the tape in KPFA’s studios a few months earlier, performed three poems from the book, including the long poem “Howl.”[1] The broadcast was Ginsberg’s first appearance on radio and the first sound recording of “Howl” to reach a public audience.
Media Studies 1932: Nancy Cunard in the Archive of Claude McKay
By Jeremy Braddock, Cornell University
In June, 1946 Nancy Cunard wrote an angry, detailed letter to Ezra Pound at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C. In it Cunard described returning to the north of France after the war, discovering her house to have been looted by Nazi soldiers or French collaborators, her African art destroyed, her massive printing press smashed, a copy of Pound’s Cantos propped in a shattered window.
Modern Art in Late Colonial Korea: A Research Experiment
By Joan Kee, University of Michigan
A young woman sits in the center of a room crammed with laboratory equipment (fig. 1). Behind her are glass flasks filled with unknown liquids and neatly arranged in rows. A large table juts from the painting’s right edge. It groans under the accumulated weight of numerous implements all intended to measure, gauge, and subsequently coax into orderly submission the unruly world of the living. Next to the woman is a kymograph, used for measuring physiological response in animals. Battery powered, it records responses transmitted through electrodes attached to the subjects and is frequently used in pharmacological experiments monitoring the effects of drugs.[1] Two white rabbits housed in round wire-mesh cages below the table await their fate. Particularly conspicuous against the general pallor of the laboratory space is a black microscope placed on one corner of the table. It is positioned to the right of the young woman, who wears a laboratory coat of such dazzling whiteness that it seems to thrust her body toward the painting’s surface.
Mrs. Miniver Builds the Home Front: Architecture and Household Objects as Wartime Propaganda
By Melissa Dinsman, York College, The City University of New York
In an evocative statement on his 1942 film Mrs. Miniver, William Wyler, famed Hollywood director and vocal advocate for wartime intervention, argues that his film “about a family” is, for all intents and purposes, propaganda. Watching Mrs. Miniver today, the film’s interventionist position is impossible to miss. That art can also be propaganda is, of course, an argument frequently made by cultural critics such as Walter Benjamin (in the final pages of “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”) or George Orwell, who famously claimed that “all art is propaganda” but “not all propaganda is art." But Wyler’s reflection holds special significance for its focus on the politics of the family drama and his suggestion that the domestic is political. As I will argue, Mrs. Miniver and similar family-centered films are propaganda not only because of their wartime content and release dates, but because they are shaped by an underlying structure of melodrama, which, by the 1940s, already had a theatrical and cinematic reputation for making social and economic appeals.
Extremism in Poiesis and Praxis: Hugh MacDiarmid, Malcolm X, and Barry Goldwater, Oxford 1964
By Corey Gibson, University of Groningen
Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice; moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.
—Oxford Union Debate, December 3, 1964[1]
This motion was adapted from Barry Goldwater’s speech at the Republican National Convention on July 16, 1964, in which he accepted the party’s presidential nomination. One month after Lyndon B. Johnson’s landslide victory over the firebrand conservative, the motion was debated in an altogether different though no less performative context. Amongst those speaking for the motion at the Oxford Union were two unlikely bedfellows: the poet, Hugh MacDiarmid, an avant-gardist in the cultural sphere and vanguardist in the political, outspoken Scottish nationalist, and professed communist ideologue, and the political activist and cultural icon, Malcolm X, former Nation of Islam minister, revolutionary black nationalist, and, increasingly during this period, anti-colonial internationalist.[2]
Stratigraphy of Andromeda: Giorgio de Chirico, Alberto Savinio, Origins, and Originality
By Alessandro Giammei, Princeton University
© 2018 Johns Hopkins University Press
vivam, parsque mei multa superstes erit
—Ovid, Amores[1]