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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
“Move Forward and Ascend!” Temporality and the Politics of Form in Turkish Modernist Literature
By Kaitlin Staudt,
This article addresses a phenomenon which literary critics frequently suggest might not exist: the Turkish modernist novel. In an article on modernism and the Turkish novel, Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk programmatically claims: in Turkey, “we did not have modernism in the true sense of the word.” Emphasizing stream of consciousness techniques, fragmented narratives, and a limited period of emergence, he points to a laundry list of modernism’s standard definitional features, all of which he claims are not appropriate for understanding the development of the Turkish novel. However, a deeper look into the Turkish novel of