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Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times and the Minstrel Tradition

By Robert Birdwell,

At the culmination of Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 film Modern Times, the Factory Worker (commonly called “the Tramp”) breaks his long silence and sings. The moment is justly famous, as if audiences had been waiting decades to hear the voice of the downtrodden Worker. The Worker, however, does not quite attain to the voice, or the song, that he and his companion, the Gamin, had planned. The Worker has just lost his lyrics, which the Gamin has written on his shirt cuffs. These cuffs fly off his wrists at the start of his dance before the café crowd. “Sing! Nevermind the words,” urges the Gamin in an intertitle.

The Transcontinental Book Trade: Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company and Victoria Ocampo’s Sur Enterprise

Second Receipt for Books Purchased at Shakespeare and Company

By Nora Benedict,

In the second volume of her Testimonios, Victoria Ocampo recalls how her friend, Virginia Woolf, insisted that she must “guardar el dinero para la revista [Sur] y los libros” (save money for her journal [Sur] and books).[1] Drawing on her own publishing experience with the Hogarth Press, Woolf acknowledges both the literary importance of Ocampo’s journal as well as the inherent financial strain of maintaining it. The world of publishing involves great risk, but the rewards can be even greater, as Woolf notes: “¿Sabe usted que nosotros vivimos de la Hogarth Press?” (Did you know that we live off of the Hogarth Press?).

The Fabric of the City: Magazines, Dressmakers, and Madrid’s Gran Vía

Alfonso Sánchez García, Un grupo de modistillas con bandera republicana

By Maite Barragán,

In February 1928, the popular magazine Estampa published an unassuming centerfold photograph of a large group of people strolling through Madrid. The jovial crowd pictured is so large that they take over the sidewalk and spill into the avenue (fig. 1). At the center of the image, cheerful female dressmakers walk with synchronized steps. Nearby pedestrians take note of the group’s energetic display for the photographer and pause to look at them.

T. S. Eliot and the Color Line of St. Louis

Whipple’s Fire Insurance Map of 1897 showing the 2600 blocks of Washington and Locust Street

By Frances Dickey, University of Missouri, Columbia

“Is not segregation an existential expression of man’s tragic separation, his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness?” wrote Martin Luther King, Jr., in words that resonate unexpectedly with the work of another noted twentieth-century Christian, T. S.

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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.

Philip K. Dick, Late Modernism, and the Chinese Logic of American Totality

By Seo Hee Im, Hanyang University

How did the novel, which shared most of its history with the rise and consolidation of the modern nation-state, adapt to a new world order scrambled by war, colonialism, and migration?

Absence and Containment: English-Language Transnational Literary Modernist Studies Today

By Sonita Sarker, Macalester College

New. Now. Motion. Speed. Acceleration. Expansion. Pause. Renew. Now, again.

In the early twentieth century, there is no such thing as transnational literary modernism. Yet, in the early twenty-first century, there is transnational modernist studies.

Modernist Afterlives In Performance—Playing the Avant-Garde: The Aesthetics, Narratives, and Communities of Video Game Vanguards

By Mike Sell, Indiana University of Pennsylvania

My son sits at the desk, knee propped on its edge, keyboard in lap. Nearby, a television bolted to the wall displays a high-definition humanoid, clad in luminous armor inscribed with obscure heraldry, dancing with ecstatic abandon. Were it not odd enough that they are dancing in the lugubrious depths of a biomorphic dreadnaught inhabited by a terrible and hostile alien race intent on destroying the earth and everything upon it, the dance they dance is the “Carlton,” made famous by actor Alfonso Ribeiro on the 1990s sit-com The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.

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