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John Middleton Murry and Ethical (Anti-) Modernism

John Middleton Murry, photograph by Lady Ottoline Morrell, 1917.

By Bridget Chalk, Manhattan College

A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasure of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause.

“Objects Worthy of Attention”: Modernism and the Travel Guide

A typical page of the Bradshaw’s Monthly Railroad and Steam Navigation Guide, January 1863.

By Jesse Schotter, Ohio State University

In her 1926 essay “Impassioned Prose,” Virginia Woolf seeks to distinguish herself from her Edwardian predecessors, writing that “they ignore [the mind’s] thoughts, its rhapsodies, its dreams . . . while prose itself . . . will be fit . . . to write nothing but the immortal works of Bradshaw and Baedeker.”[1] Like her fellow modern novelists E. M. Forster and Henry James, like Mina Loy with her Lost Lunar Baedeker or T. S. Eliot with his “Burbank with a Baedeker; Bleistein with a Cigar,” Woolf mentions the famously popular Baedeker travel guides of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Woolf here seems unconcerned with what the Baedekers and similar guidebooks have to say about changing patterns of tourism and travel, or about how they mediate the relationship between cultures. The content of travel guides—what Roland Barthes sees as the “disease of essence,” the tendency to reduce cultures to “types”—is not the issue for Woolf.[2] Instead, Woolf uses the Baedekers to characterize the language of Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy: a language perfect for the simplest forms of communication, but unsuited to creative expression. The “Bradshaw” to which Woolf refers is probably the Bradshaw railway guide—a textual form reduced to a list of times and city names. Bradshaws and Baedekers impart information, but they don’t express; they don’t, as she says, dream. Woolf defines the modern novel against the travel guide, yet the persistent invocation of guidebooks in fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries points to a deeper connection between them. While the modernist novel and the travel guide both claim to be totalizing genres that can more fully represent the reality of cities or countries, they each confront the limits of that endeavor. Both genres are characterized, I argue, by their selectiveness rather than by their expansiveness. While they attempt synecdochally to construct an encyclopedic portrait of a nation or metropolis, they are faced with the need to choose which people or places or events should be focused on, or, in the words of the Bradshaw, what “objects” are “worthy of attention.”[3

Another Nature Speaks to the Camera: Natural History and Film Theory

The water flea frontal view (bottom). Water Folk, British Instructional Films, 1931.

By Caroline Hovanec, University of Tampa

The London Film Society was founded in 1925 with a mission of bringing avant-garde and foreign films to British audiences. Its programming included a number of films that have gone down in history as landmarks of experimental cinema: Ballet mécanique and Entr’acte from France, the German expressionist classics The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler, and Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin and October from the Soviet Union. These selections gave the Film Society a certain modernist cachet, and its screenings attracted the likes of Roger Fry and Virginia and Leonard Woolf. Alongside these ambitious international films, however, the Film Society also had a curious liking for a humbler, more homegrown kind of programming: the natural history short

Keller’s Zak, Duchamp’s Mutt, and the Art of the Ruse

Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917, photograph by Alfred Steiglitz following the 1917 Society of Independent Artists exhibit. Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

By Brett Nathan Boutwell, Louisiana State University

Surveying American Late Modernism: Partisan Review and the Cultural Politics of the Questionnaire

Participant list for “Our Country and Our Culture” Symposium, 1952. Courtesy of the Howard Gottlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University.

By Ian Afflerbach, University of North Georgia

From 1920 to 1932, the Literary Digest—a weekly American magazine—accurately predicted the winner of each presidential election in the United States by conducting massive straw polls. In 1936, however, the magazine fell into irreparable ignominy when, after distributing over ten million questionnaires, the editors predicted a landslide victory for Republican candidate Alf Landon, only to have Franklin Roosevelt win handily, securing sixty-one percent of the popular vote. George Gallup’s American Institute of Public Opinion, founded just the year before, gained widespread notoriety for not only correctly predicting the election’s outcome using only 50,000 respondents, but also estimating the Digest poll’s error in advance of their publication, with a sample of just 3,000.[1] Gallup took the technique of the questionnaire, made politically potent by mass print culture, yet still employed as a blunt instrument, and infused it with a newfound statistical rigor.[2] Gallup’s confrontation with the Digest at once exemplified and accelerated the growing influence that questionnaires had in American culture in the 1930s, and particularly highlighted how modern periodicals might thrive—or wither—by using this technique to actively engage national political debates.[3] The Literary Digest, founded in 1890, endured its shame only briefly, being sold in 1938 and shortly thereafter dissolved into Henry Luce’s Time.[4] Gallup’s Institute, meanwhile, became a leading authority in evaluating public opinion, his name soon treated as metonymic for the use of modern, quantitative polling.

The Weak Powers of Digital Modernist Studies

Fig. 1. A visualization of Willa Cather’s correspondents (derived from “A Calendar of the Letters of Willa Cather,” ed. Andrew Jewell and Janis P. Stout, Willa Cather Archive, Center for Digital Research, University of Nebraska-Lincoln).

By Gabriel Hankins, Clemson University

Are digital methods weak or strong? How should we understand the conjunction of digital tools and methods with modernist studies? In some accounts of the rise of weak theories in literary studies, weak theory and digital methods like distant reading are taken as correlative terms, with associative logic and epistemological modesty common to both.[1] Yet a nearly opposite set of arguments is as familiar: digital literary methods are too “strong,” so goes the claim, because they conceal naïvely positivist notions of evidence and proof, reductively quantify cultural production, or advance a neoliberal agenda within the academy.[2] Digital methods appear both too weak and too strong for use on literary objects, particularly objects so delicately rebarbative as those of modernism.

Unrarified Air: Alfred Stieglitz and the Modernism of Equivalence

Alfred Stieglitz, Equivalent, 1930, gelatin silver print, 9.3 x 11.9 cm, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL.

By Kate Stanley, Western University, Ontario

In 1923 Alfred Stieglitz published “How I Came to Photograph Clouds,” a short essay in which he writes:

“Leaving hardly a sign—and no memories”: Roger Casement and the Metamodernist Archive

By Alison Garden, University College Dublin

On Friday, 11th May 1923, the New York Evening Post ran an article entitled “Conrad and Casement Hut Mates in Africa.”[1] In it, the journalist John Powell detailed his encounter with Joseph Conrad and Conrad’s thoughts on his one-time friend, the former darling of the British Empire turned Irish nationalist rebel, Roger Casement. Conrad told Powell of “[h]is first impression of Casement”; a tale told “so vividly that it stands out with the clearness and blackness of a silhouette caught unexpectedly in a lonely place, casting a hint of ill omen.”[2] Despite the earlier friendship that had existed between Casement and Conrad, in the profile of Casement drawn from Conrad’s words, Casement is an unknowable, malevolent figure:

Fixing the Interwar Meal: Positive Eugenics and Jewish Assimilation in Betty Miller’s Farewell Leicester Square

By Kate M. Nash, Boston University

Betty Miller opens her 1946 “Notes for an Unwritten Autobiography” provocatively, branding herself a “Fifth Columnist” who had at one time worked to undermine her country from within. Rather than any clandestine operation that she participated in as an adult, however, Miller’s stint as a “Fifth Columnist” occurred when she was just a child. While a young girl in a nursery in Ireland, Miller increasingly became captivated by the image of the German Kaiser Wilhelm II. Although Miller understood that the Kaiser must be “the most wicked man on earth,” she nevertheless felt a combination of powerful fascination and pity because he was so seemingly friendless and ostracized.

The Optics of Orientation: Walter Benjamin and Mikhail Kaufman in Moscow

By John Hoffmann, Johns Hopkins University

How would a film look if Walter Benjamin had been behind the movie camera? Miriam Hansen entertains this possibility in Cinema and Experience (2012) when she speculates about an “imaginary city film” made according to Benjamin’s aesthetic principles. Such a film, Hansen writes, would include a variety of avant-garde techniques “from French Impressionism to Soviet experimental cinema, in particular montage (that is, discontinuous and rhythmic editing), nonconventional and expressive framing, and camera movement.” Yet Hansen’s version of a Benjaminian film practice is inferred almost entirely from Benjamin’s film theory, while his descriptive essays on European cities—“Naples,” “Marseilles,” and the focus of this article, “Moscow” (1927)—are missing from her authoritative survey of Benjamin’s thought.

Spontaneity, Intimacy, and Friendship in Morton Feldman’s Music of the 1950s

By Ryan Dohoney, Northwestern University

Morton Feldman became a full-time composer at the age of forty. He had worked in the family business—a children’s coat factory near LaGuardia Airport in New York City—since his early twenties and been disparaged by Pierre Boulez as a dilettante because of it. In the spring of 1966, Feldman wrote to John Cage that the business “went kaput, and now I’m blessed with total insecurity.” His insecurity was hardly total. Through a chance meeting that year following a performance of Merce Cunningham’s Summerspace

Nude Vibrations: Isadora Duncan’s Creatural Aesthetic

By Carrie Rohman, Lafayette College

It is perhaps only the advent of animal studies in the last decade that allows us to return to the often-cited comment above and link it in a serious intellectual manner with Isadora Duncan’s own understanding of her dancing and of the dancing body as she was helping to shape and articulate it in modernism. While recent work on Duncan emphasizes her interest in the machine, her

Can You Tell Me How to Get to the Warsaw Ghetto?

By Benjamin Paloff, University of Michigan

In the courtyard behind the apartment building at 55 Sienna Street, one can still visit a rare fragment of the wall that, for a brief period between November 1940 and October 1941, marked the southern boundary of the Warsaw Ghetto. Though situated just northwest of the Central Train Station, in the heart of the Polish capital’s downtown, it is remarkably hard to find. To approach its east side, you have to be buzzed through a gate by a guard who, though unseen, is apparently keeping watch for visitors, who are invariably checking a map or guidebook against the addresses on the adjacent buildings, certain that if they were in the right place there would be a sign to direct them to a site of such importance.

The Uncanny Golden Country: Late-Modernist Utopia in Nineteen Eighty-Four

By Kunio Shin, Aoyama Gakuin University

“My new book is a Utopia in the form of a novel”—this is how George Orwell characterized Nineteen Eighty-Four in a letter to a friend on 4 February 1949. As its reception history abundantly documents, it turned out to be an interpretive challenge to read the novel as a utopia.

Images in Crisis: Three Lives’s Vanishing Women

By Alix Beeston, University of Sydney

In 1876, Francis Galton, the cousin of Charles Darwin and the founder of eugenics, reported to the Anthropological Institute of London his newest physiognomic method for uncovering and defining human "types." Galton’s composite portraiture was an exercise in re-photography that co-opted the mechanical precision of the photograph for a pseudoscience of predetermined sociological and biological categories.