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“And words were images to him”: Narrative Remediation in Rockwell Kent

By Jonathan Najarian,
In early 1912, when Walt Kuhn, Walter Pach, and Arthur Davies convened to begin planning the International Exhibit of Modern Art, they decided that the show would need to include the most important artists working in the contemporary avant-garde. The 1913 Armory Show, as the exhibit came to be called, effectively brought experimental European art to the United States; for the first time in a major exhibit, artists like Matisse, Picasso, and Duchamp were brought together for American audiences.
Chorus Girl Modernity: Of Salamanders and Periodical Culture

By Ruth Mayer, Leibniz University
Lower-middle-class and working-class girls coming to the big city in the early twentieth century made all sorts of life choices, but in the popular fiction of the period a disproportionate number of them end up as chorus girls. Chorines turned into icons of American urban modernity—versatile, daring, sexy, and young.
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

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