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Marianne Moore’s Tone Technologies: Elocution, Poetry, Phonograph

By Allison Neal,

“Still Able to Make Sounds”: American Poetry on Record

Primitivisms in Dispute: Production and Reception of the Works of two Brazilian Artists in Paris in the 1920s

By Ana Paula Cavalcanti Simioni,

The condition of Paris as the main artistic capital from the end of the 19^th to the mid-20^th century caused it to attract an expressive contingent of foreign artists, and among those, dozens of Brazilian artists who were attracted by what was seen as the world capital of arts. They encountered, however, an extremely competitive universe, in which national origins were important components to recognition.

A Feeling for Wood Itself: Lynd Ward’s Arboreal Modernism

Lynd Ward, wood engraving from Wild Pilgrimage (1932) depicting the protagonist

By Olivia Badoi, SLU Madrid

Walking among a series of prints by the American wood engraver Lynd Ward (1905–85), Art Spiegelman was surprised to find himself transported from a chic Binghamton art gallery into a primordial forest. Though he had not left the gallery, Spiegelman was surrounded by networks of branches, trees, and woods reaching out at him from the prints on the wall. Within this gallery-turned-forest, Spiegelman gained a new appreciation of the power of Ward’s arboreal aesthetic. Singling out a particularly noteworthy print, Spiegelman describes “a panoramic treescape of a young man in shadows, groping and climbing through the dense neuronal wickerwork of dappled trunks and branches, carefully exploring and working his way through the maze of marks that surround him.”

Towards an Oceanian Modernism

By Matthew Hayward,

In an essay on Herman Melville, D. H. Lawrence describes the Pacific Islands as “a vast vacuum, in which, mirage-like, continues the life of myriads of ages back.” Modernist studies has yet to awaken from this dream of Oceania as the hazy antithesis of modernity, a place “not come to any modern consciousness”: although the tide is turning, the Pacific has typically been treated not as an active site of cultural production, but as a tropical backdrop for the adventures of the likes of Gauguin, Stevenson, and Melville (Lawrence, “Herman Melville,” 114). Uncalculated as this scholarly exclusion may be, it cannot but reinforce the sense that modernism and modernity demand an unmodern Other, figuring Pacific peoples in binaries that the new modernist studies has worked to undermine.

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Ideology with an /i/: Reading Dada with Kurt Schwitters

By J. Brandon Pelcher, University of Colorado, Boulder

Anarchism and the Hermeneutics of Faith

By Roger Rothman, Bucknell University

Even more than the attacks on it from the right, it has been the attacks on it from the left that have relegated anarchism to the margins of academic discourse. It appears however that anarchism’s fortunes are changing. Though the casual dismissal of it as simply “some vague embrace of chaos, anti-intellectualism, or disorganized violence” is still commonplace, a more complex reception of anarchism has been developing since the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle.[1] In 2002, David Graeber was among the first to propose that academics need to come to grips with the fact that “most of the creative energy for radical politics is now coming from anarchism” and that “taking this movement seriously will necessarily also mean a respectful engagement with it.”[2] Eight years later, Todd May declared similarly, but with a focus on anarchism’s adherents, rather than detractors: “Anarchism is back on the scene. Theoretically as well as practically, anti-authoritarian thought is in a resurgence that has probably surprised many of those who have been involved in it in one way or another over the years.”[3] May, in fact, has proposed that we are witnessing a “third wave” of anarchist discourse (after the first wave in the late 1800s–early 1900s and the second in the 1960s) (May, introduction to New Perspectives on Anarchism, 1).

Modernism and its Discontents: The Case of Cahiers d’Art and Surrealism in 1928

By Raymond Spiteri, Victoria University

In 1927, Christian Zervos, the editor of the prominent art magazine Cahiers d’Art, published an article on the “Dernières œuvres de Picasso.”[1] This article discussed the new direction in Pablo Picasso’s recent body of surrealist-influenced paintings: unlike the restrained compositions of the postwar rappel à ordre, these paintings demonstrated a new expressive dynamism, and signaled Picasso’s openness to novel, disruptive currents in the cultural life of les années folles. For Zervos, this body of work exemplified the path forward for contemporary painting in the wake of cubism, a return to a more expressive pictorial form—a tendency sometimes described as a type of néo-fauvisme.

The Historical Avant-Garde from 1830 to 1939: l’art pour l’art, blague, and Gesamtkunstwerk

By Doug Singsen, University of Wisconsin, Parkside

For a book weighing in at just under 100 pages, not counting various forewords and introductions, Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde has had an enormously outsized influence. How many books can claim to have engendered an entire volume of responses just two years after their initial publication?[1] However, as the book’s many critics have noted, Bürger oversimplifies the complex and multifarious phenomenon of the avant-garde, pays scant attention to the specificities of individual works and artists, is overly restrictive in its selection of artists and movements, and, most infamously, dismisses the neo-avant-garde as a mere empty repetition of the historical avant-garde.

Translating Desire: Queer Affect, Autobiography, and Involuntary Love in Dorothy Strachey’s Olivia

By Chris Roulston, University of Western Ontario

Dorothy Strachey, the older sister of the biographer and essayist Lytton Strachey, and of the psychoanalyst and translator of Sigmund Freud, James Strachey, published her only novel, Olivia, in 1949, under the pseudonym of “Olivia.”[1]

“A Film of Landscapes”: Andean Modernities and Avant-garde Poetry in 1920s Peru

By Valentino Gianuzzi, University of Manchester

If later testimonies are to be believed, around 1927 Peruvian poet Carlos Oquendo de Amat (1905-1936) published in Lima, under the title Celuloide (Celluloid), a magazine devoted

“The World’s Heavy Gaze”: Cin-aereality in the Postwar Avant-Gardes

By Paula Amad, University of Iowa

Fernand Léger’s curious throw-away line linking cinema and aviation appears in an essay he wrote in 1931 titled “Speaking of Cinema” (“A Propos du cinéma”), one of only a few short pieces that the artist, arguably the modernist painter most obsessed with the cinema, devoted entirely to film.

The Revolutionary Gardens of Imagism

By Margaret Konkol, Old Dominion University

On February 8, 1912, Canadian activist Gertrude Harding orchestrated a protest in the form of a midnight destruction of rare orchids in Kew Gardens.[1] Since the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew operated as a central node in Britain’s colonial network, a “depot for the interchange of plants wherever it saw commercial possibilities,” Harding’s targeted liberation of colonial subjects struck at the deceptively ornamental center of English power.[2] Acting in the name of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), Harding delivered a message: cultivated orchids would no longer be complicit in England’s botanic imperial schemes.