Articles

No one in Europe knows how to scream anymore. —Antonin Artaud

Click links to download “ The Fool Next Door,” “ The Image-breaker,” and “ The Man Who Came Back.” The post-World War II novels of the Bengali writer S. N. (Sudhin or Sudhindra Nath) Ghose (1899–1965) received critical recognition in India, Europe, and the United States; however, the short stories and plays he published in London in the early 1920s have been largely neglected. He published stories in Sylvia Pankhurst’s East London newspaper, the Workers’ Dreadnought, and literary magazine...

By the mid-1930s, the literary works of the aging Russian naturalist author Mikhail Prishvin abounded in the Soviet press, from children’s books to literary journals. But despite a long list of publications, the author has been relegated to a secondary position in the Soviet literary canon. It has only been with the recent publication of his vast and detailed diaries that Prishvin’s authorial persona has sparked growing scholarship and interest. And it was not until December 2015 that viewers...

Weakness: not a word that would seem, at first blush, to have anything to say to modernism. Modernism doesn’t blush; it blasts. Its reputation is for strength in extremis—for steep critiques of modernity, energetic convention busting, the breaking of vessels. In the words of its early theorists, modernism is “rebellion against authority,” a “revolution of the word,” “kicking over old walls” and “breaking of ‘Do Nots.’” Nothing small-bore about revolt, nothing weak about making it new. Surely...

Major advances in modernist poetics have long occurred through contact with experiments in the visual and plastic arts: one need only think of the “cubist” poetics of Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Pierre Reverdy, and Gertrude Stein, of the New York School’s links to Abstract Expressionism, or, most recently, of conceptual writing’s regular citation of Brion Gysin’s claim that “writing is fifty years behind painting.” Poets would find their community amongst artists; but also, the poetics...

During the Second World War sentimentality reclaimed the mainstream of American popular music. Ballad recordings—slow, romantic love songs—increasingly pushed aside the hot jazz sounds of the era’s dance bands. The singers of these songs were an assortment of old and new faces—Bing Crosby, Dick Haymes, Vaughn Monroe, and Frank Sinatra. Their hit songs, recordings such as “I’ll Be Seeing You,” “Together,” “My Devotion,” and “There Are Such Things,” exchanged cynicism and irony for optimistic...

On a late December evening in 1956, public radio station KPFA-FM in Berkeley, California, broadcast a poetry reading by a young writer whose first book, Howl and Other Poems, had just appeared that fall from local publisher City Lights Books. Allen Ginsberg, who had recorded the tape in KPFA’s studios a few months earlier, performed three poems from the book, including the long poem “Howl.” The broadcast was Ginsberg’s first appearance on radio and the first sound recording of “Howl” to reach a...

In June, 1946 Nancy Cunard wrote an angry, detailed letter to Ezra Pound at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C. In it Cunard described returning to the north of France after the war, discovering her house to have been looted by Nazi soldiers or French collaborators, her African art destroyed, her massive printing press smashed, a copy of Pound’s Cantos propped in a shattered window. Given this testimony, it should not be surprising that the Harry Ransom Center’s rich and various Cunard...

A young woman sits in the center of a room crammed with laboratory equipment (fig. 1). Behind her are glass flasks filled with unknown liquids and neatly arranged in rows. A large table juts from the painting’s right edge. It groans under the accumulated weight of numerous implements all intended to measure, gauge, and subsequently coax into orderly submission the unruly world of the living. Next to the woman is a kymograph, used for measuring physiological response in animals. Battery powered...

To make propaganda, you must be successful and your film must be successful. . . . The most satisfaction I get out of a film aside from its critical and financial success, is its contribution to the thinking of people, socially or politically. In this sense, every film is propaganda. But, of course, propaganda must not look like propaganda. As I saw it, Mrs. Miniver was perfect as propaganda for the British because it was a story about a family, about the kind of people audiences would care...

Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice; moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue. —Oxford Union Debate, December 3, 1964

vivam, parsque mei multa superstes erit

On Friday, 11th May 1923, the New York Evening Post ran an article entitled “Conrad and Casement Hut Mates in Africa.” In it, the journalist John Powell detailed his encounter with Joseph Conrad and Conrad’s thoughts on his one-time friend, the former darling of the British Empire turned Irish nationalist rebel, Roger Casement. Conrad told Powell of “[h]is first impression of Casement”; a tale told “so vividly that it stands out with the clearness and blackness of a silhouette caught...

Betty Miller opens her 1946 “Notes for an Unwritten Autobiography” provocatively, branding herself a “Fifth Columnist” who had at one time worked to undermine her country from within. Rather than any clandestine operation that she participated in as an adult, however, Miller’s stint as a “Fifth Columnist” occurred when she was just a child. While a young girl in a nursery in Ireland, Miller increasingly became captivated by the image of the German Kaiser Wilhelm II. Although Miller understood...

How would a film look if Walter Benjamin had been behind the movie camera? Miriam Hansen entertains this possibility in Cinema and Experience (2012) when she speculates about an “imaginary city film” made according to Benjamin’s aesthetic principles. Such a film, Hansen writes, would include a variety of avant-garde techniques “from French Impressionism to Soviet experimental cinema, in particular montage (that is, discontinuous and rhythmic editing), nonconventional and expressive framing, and...

The problem of music, of course, is that it is, by its very nature, a public art. . . . Yet somehow there is something demeaning in the fact that there is no other dimension for music than this public one. —Morton Feldman, “The Anxiety of Art”

—Max Eastman It is perhaps only the advent of animal studies in the last decade that allows us to return to the often-cited comment above and link it in a serious intellectual manner with Isadora Duncan’s own understanding of her dancing and of the dancing body as she was helping to shape and articulate it in modernism. While recent work on Duncan emphasizes her interest in the machine, her aesthetic commitments are more fully articulated by elucidating the pivotal animal and elemental strains...

“An enormous cap of dark grey smoke above the Extinct City in the Capital maintains, with the weight of its material, the reality of the fiction that is the emptiness: the City in the City, the City that no longer is.”

“My new book is a Utopia in the form of a novel”—this is how George Orwell characterized Nineteen Eighty-Four in a letter to a friend on 4 February 1949. As its reception history abundantly documents, it turned out to be an interpretive challenge to read the novel as a utopia. Instead, many early readers chose to read it as the very opposite, as an anti-utopia or dystopia—a form centrally defined by its negative reaction against any attempt at realizing or imagining a utopia. Identifying the...

In 1876, Francis Galton, the cousin of Charles Darwin and the founder of eugenics, reported to the Anthropological Institute of London his newest physiognomic method for uncovering and defining human “types.” Galton’s composite portraiture was an exercise in re-photography that co-opted the mechanical precision of the photograph for a pseudoscience of predetermined sociological and biological categories. Galton gathered sets of standardized quarter-length portraits of criminals and the infirm...