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“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:

D’Arcy McNickle’s Reservation Modernism

By Leif Sorensen, Colorado State University

In 1936 Dodd Mead published D’Arcy McNickle’s novel The Surrounded. Set on the Flathead reservation in northwestern Montana, the novel entered the field of literary culture as a doubly regional work. Firstly, for American publishers Montana was part of a marginal region associated with popular genre fiction. Secondly, the Flathead reservation was not widely known outside of Montana because it had not attracted popular curiosity like the reservations of the southwestern U.S.

The Japanese Art of Fascist Modernism: Yasuda Yukihiko’s The Arrival of Yoshitsune/Camp at Kisegawa (1940-41)

By Asato Ikeda, Fordham University

In 2011, the Japanese government designated Yasuda Yukihiko’s Camp at Kisegawa (Kisegawa no jin, 1940-41) as an Important Cultural Property (Jūyō bunkazai). The left half of the painting, which portrays Minamoto Yoshitsune (1159-1189), a famous warrior from the Kamakura period (1185-1333), was initially produced and exhibited in 1940 as The Arrival of Yoshitsune (Yoshitsune sanchaku). The right half, which depicts Yoshitsune’s older brother Yoritomo (1147-1199), was added later, and the artist then titled the completed work Camp at Kisegawa (Kisegawa no jin). The finished painting, executed in ink on two paper folding screens, shows the much-desired reunion between the two men before their battle against the rival Heike clan.

“Never twice the same”: Fantômas’s Early Seriality

By Ruth Mayer, Leibniz University

When Fantômas, the futuristic master criminal and terrorist, first enters the stage of modern mass culture in 1911, he complies with the associations raised by his name and does not really take shape. Phantomlike, he gives evidence of his existence through his actions rather than personal appearances. Like other famous creatures appearing on the mass cultural scene of the day—Dracula comes to mind—Fantômas proceeds through dispersal, diffusion, and distraction, figuring forth a flickering presence, not yet here and already gone.

Elaborations of the Machine: The Automata Ballets

By Linda M. Austin, Oklahoma State University

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a number of ballets entered the classical repertory that featured marionettes and activated dolls. Arlequinada (1900), Die Puppenfee (1903), Petrouchka (1911), and the immediate parent of these productions, Coppélia (1870), all focus on the imitation of living people through the movements of automatized figures. Coppélia, the first of these pieces, opened during a prolonged period of malaise—stretching back to the 1850s—in European ballet, in which dancing veered more toward repetitive athletic feats than expressive movement.

“Mammy of the South / Silence Your Mouth”: The Silencing of Race Radicalism in Contempo Magazine

By Suzanne W. Churchill, Davidson College

Writing of the Great Depression, historian John Egerton observes that, “The whole country was in pain, and the South, by almost any measure you could apply, was suffering much more than the rest of the United States." Economic distress heightened racial tensions, as southern whites tightened their hold on the precious little wealth and privilege available to signal their supremacy. Despite the grip of poverty and rigid racial hierarchies, the 1930s was a period of cultural ferment, particularly in the literary and political realms, and especially in the South. The decade witnessed a brief (but ill-fated) marriage between literary experimentation and revolutionary politics, as writers such as John Dos Passos, Langston Hughes, and Muriel Rukeyser attempted to wed modernist formal experimentation with leftist social protest.