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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:

Is the Trans in Transnational the Trans in Transgender?

By Jessica Berman, University of Maryland

When Orlando falls into his transformative trance at the mid-point of Virginia Woolf’s romp of a novel, he is an agent of the British Empire in Constantinople, at the moment of receiving his newly conferred Dukedom. The ceremony is a pageant of Empire, which gathers “people of all nationalities” to celebrate Orlando’s status, while the text makes frequent reference to the show of British superiority in this event.

Hamlin Garland, Multimedia Modern

By Sarah Gleeson-White, University of Sydney

Hamlin Garland is principally remembered today as a late-nineteenth-century Midwestern regionalist whose fiction and nonfiction—including his fine collection of short stories, Main-Travelled Roads (1891) and his memoir of sorts, A Son of the Middle Border (1917)—depict the hardships of pioneer life on the Middle Border.

“But If You Listen You Can Hear”: War Experience, Modernist Noise, and the Soundscape of The Forbidden Zone

By Nora Lambrecht, Johns Hopkins University

Interviewed by the BBC a half-century after his service in the Royal Welch Fusiliers, Robert Graves recalled the impossibility of relating his World War I experience to family in England

Graves: [T]he idea of being and staying at home was awful because you were with people who didn’t understand what this was all about.

Esperantic Modernism: Joyce, Universal Language, and Political Gesture

By Nico Israel, CUNY Graduate Center and Hunter College

In the 1965 movie Incubus, a pre-Star Trek William Shatner, with characteristic avidity, plays the role of Marc, a wounded soldier who comes to the village of Nomen Tuum in search of curative water (fig. 1). While there, he is seduced by a beautiful young succubus, whose appointed task is to prevent Marc’s recuperation and instead deliver his soul to hell. What transpires is a bit too complicated, or silly, to merit recounting in detail, but suffice it to say

The Statues Still Stood: The Third Man and Third Spaces

By Jacqueline Shin, Towson University

Both blind and mute, often weathered by the sun, by wind and rain, by snow that drips or slides off in a kind of despair, statues on their own can tell us little except that time passes. Typically, we barely notice them, as they form the decorative backdrop to the drama of a place.

Moving Pictures: Magic Lanterns, Portable Projection, and Urban Advertising in the Nineteenth Century

By Ellery E. Foutch, Middlebury College

In 1896, bodybuilder Eugen Sandow sat at a desk to devote himself to a mental task, rather than a physical one. He had recently returned to England from a trip to the United States, where he had collaborated with inventor W. K. L. Dickson on a mutoscope reel, an early moving-picture technology, and had posed for X-ray photographs after indicating his interest in the subject to Thomas Edison, who was proudly advertising his patented process for X-rays and fluoroscopes.

Lawrence Atkinson, Sculpture, and Vorticist Multimediality

By Nathan Waddell, University of Nottingham

Seven years after the “little magazine” BLAST published the Vorticist manifesto, one of its signatories won the Grand Prix for sculpture at the 1921 Milan Exhibition. The prize was given to a work titled L’Oiseau, and the artist in question was Lawrence Atkinson (1873-1931).

At the time, Atkinson had also made his name as a painter, poet, and music teacher, and especially as an acclaimed performer of classical lieder.

Introduction: Who’s Afraid of the Inhuman Woolf?

By Aaron Jaffe, Florida State University

It runs like this: First, a film has to contain two female characters; second, they have to talk to one other; third: they have to talk about something besides a man.

Who today hasn’t heard of the Bechdel test? Having gone viral, it increasingly serves as a litmus test in class discussion for marking outsized gender bias in texts. The test provides a handy algorithm, generating a consistent output: a fundamental feminist insight that far too many texts do not contain women who talk about anything besides a man.