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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

Chorus Girl Confusion, or: Where’s Doré? Illustration by Everett Shinn

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

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

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

By Jonathan Najarian

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 o

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.

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