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Hollywood, Exile, and New Types of Pictures: Günther Anders’s 1941 California Diary “Washing the Corpses of History”

Employee examining boots at Western Costume Company, Bronson Building, Los Angeles, 1935

By Christopher John Müller,

When Günther Anders arrived in New York in 1936, following three years of exile in Paris, he tried to achieve “‘a typically American’ breakthrough” (Interviews, 37).[3] One of the first ventures this involved was writing a script for a Charlie Chaplin movie, a script, as Anders adds, that “probably went straight into the bin of some Hollywood agent” (37). For those familiar with Anders’s prolific postwar writings, especially the media theory advanced in the two uncannily prescient volumes of Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen (The Obsolescence of Human Beings), these Hollywood aspirations might come as a surprise.

Washing the Corpses of History: The Hollywood Costume Palace, a 1941 Exile Diary by Günther Anders

By Christopher John Müller,

Vita brevis? No, nobody will make me believe that life is short. It’s long—not because of long boredom, but because of its genuinely long duration. At least moving backwards, life is endless. “My” childhood in Breslau stretches into the depths of paleontological prehistory. My mind can only persuade me for a few seconds that my erstwhile namesake and I are one and the same —he must have been a distant ancestor.

Virginia Woolf’s Armchair

Virginia Woolf, photograph by Ottoline Morrell

By Aimée Gasston,

Virginia Woolf’s memoirs resonate richly with seating, beginning with the rocking chair from which she heard her father drop books to the floor at Hyde Park Gate. Leslie Stephen had “written all his books lying sunk in that deep rocking chair,” Woolf would recall in the essay “A Sketch of the Past,” his feet clear of the ground, a writing board across his lap. Yet Woolf did not herself begin as an armchair storyteller.

Translation as Alienation: Sufi Hermeneutics and Literary Modernism in Bijan Elahi’s Translations

By Kayvan Tahmasebian, University of Birmingham

The history of Iranian modernism is inseparable from the history of literary translation. In most accounts of Iranian literary history, the translation of European literary works played a formative role in the redefinition of poetic discourse as well as in the introduction of new literary genres, such as the short story and the novel, to modern Persian literature. In his landmark study of Iranian literary modernism, Mohammad Reza Shafiʿi-Kadkani rejects the ascription of originality to Iranian modernism.

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Erika Mann, the BBC German Service, and Foreign-Language Broadcasting during WWII

By Vike Martina Plock, University of Exeter

Three Articles of Posthuman Modernism: The Meta-Cinema of Marcel L’Herbier (and Friends)

By Ruben Borg, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

On October 4, 1923, the American composer George Antheil made his highly anticipated Paris debut at the Champs Elysées Theatre, in front of a rioting audience. A few minutes into the recital the crowd became unsettled; members of the audience started to protest the offensive nature of the music, others jumped to the musician’s defence, and before long the house was out of control. Unbeknownst to Antheil, the riot was in fact staged by his friends Marcel L’Herbier and Georgette Leblanc, who needed to film just such a scene for their upcoming movie, The Inhuman Woman. The ruse would only be revealed to him about a year after the incident.

Elizabeth Bowen and 1916: An Architecture of Suspense

By Kelly Sullivan, New York University

On Easter Monday, April 24, 1916, in the midst of World War I, fifteen hundred volunteer troops staged a violent uprising in the Irish capital of Dublin and in strategic positions across the then-British colony. In retaliation, the English deployed ground troops and sailed the gunboat Helga up the Liffey River. In the ensuing fighting, Dublin’s main thoroughfare, Sackville Street, was almost utterly destroyed, and over three hundred buildings were damaged in the city, including many major landmarks.

Serving Man: The United Nations Art Collection, Mid-century Modernisms, and the Apparition of Universality

By Nico Israel, CUNY Graduate Center and Hunter College

“Respectfully submitted for your perusal—a Kanamit. Height: a little over nine feet. Weight: in the neighborhood of three hundred and fifty pounds. Origin: unknown.” So begins Rod Serling’s characteristically clipped voice-over narration near the beginning of “To Serve Man,” a 1962 episode of the cannily uncanny half-hour television series The Twilight Zone, in which one such Kanamit arrives in his spaceship in New York City and soon afterward appears before the Security Council of the United Nations. There the hyperintelligent giant, speaking perfect English (though without moving his lips) offers Earthlings freedom from war, hunger, and disease—problems that the Kanamits themselves, he says, long ago overcame.

H.D.’s Interfaces

By Kent Emerson, University of Tulsa

During the early period of her work, from her Imagist poetry until around 1927, H.D. experimented with an array of real and imagined techniques for seeing into, casting light onto, and gaining access to otherwise obstructed areas of knowledge and history. Through the artistic affordances of what she variously called the “over-mind” consciousness, “a special layer or stratum of thought,” “a state containing past and future,” and “an intermediate place or plane,” she developed a radically new way to organize and retrieve information: one which, in addition to facilitating wider access to neglected materials, also provided her with the freedom to manipulate and reassemble fragments from literature and history.[2] I propose that we call this method an “interface.” The concept of the “interface”—a collection of media effects that we today associate mainly with digital technology—best captures the many different functions that H.D. developed to gain access to a buried women’s tradition. H.D.’s interfaces are, simultaneously, an expression of her creativity on multiple media platforms and of her feminist critique of women’s secondary status in the literary and historical tradition.

Limitless Museum: P. M. Bardi's Aesthetic Reeducation

By Adrian Anagnost, Tulane University

“The task of a museum,” wrote Italian critic and curator Pietro Maria Bardi in 1951, “should be to make resound, to interpret with perspicacity and appropriate technique, those monuments that sing: thus will be avoided the risk of useless sentimentalities, dangerous neutralities, hybrid educations, and eclecticism.”

“A Quickening of the Heart”: Night Mail, Paul Bunyan, and the Multimodal Rhythms of Late Modernism

By Patrick Milian, Green River College

In the editorial statement of the first issue of Rhythm, John Middleton Murry writes: “Our intention is to provide art, be it drawing, literature or criticism, which shall be vigorous, determined, which shall have its roots below the surface, and be the rhythmical echo of the life with which it is in touch.”[1] He would later explain that the magazine treated rhythm as “the distinctive element in all the arts, and that the real purpose of ‘this modern movement’ . . . was to reassert the preeminence of rhythm.”[2]

Henry Green’s Pigeons

By Beryl Pong, University of Sheffield

Birds and certain varieties of birds have long been potent symbols related to war and conflict. But as airplane technologies developed in rapid tandem with the coming and arrival of the Second World War, the connection between avian and aviation reached new heights in the cultural imagination.