Clusters
Precarity, Caregiving, and Covid
In the years after the Spanish Flu, no one wanted to talk about it. Elizabeth Outka describes this phenomenon of cultural erasure in her timely book Viral Modernism (2019). [1] A global pandemic that killed more people than World War I was rarely represented directly in modernist literature. Illness was harder to memorialize than war; it challenged narrative structures; it was a...
Jul 24, 2024
The World of Shakespeare and Company
What’s left to learn about Shakespeare and Company, Sylvia Beach’s bookshop and lending library in interwar Paris? The story of Shakespeare and Company has been told and retold—by Beach herself in Shakespeare and Company (1959) and The Letters of Sylvia Beach (2010), by Noël Riley Fitch in Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation (1984), and by Laure Murat in ...
May 28, 2024
Blogs
Woman with a Movie Camera: Marie Menken’s Visual Variations on Noguchi (1945)
As I watched Marie Menken’s short film, Visual Variations on Noguchi (1945)—screened as part of an exhibit at the Noguchi Museum earlier this year—I found myself thinking about Gertrude Stein. Specifically, I recalled the letter Stein wrote to Samuel Steward in 1940, thanking him for a gift he had sent her and Alice B. Toklas: a countertop stand mixer known as the Sunbeam Mix Master...
Aug 8, 2024
Queer “Orientations” as Counterblast Manifesto
When Alice Oswald delivered her final lecture as Oxford Professor of Poetry in 2023, she (once again) made new the modernist manifesto. Counterblast! (a manifesto for poetry) launches the futurists on a rocket ship back to Homer via stanzas containing questions about how we come to sense each other in a vortex, since “after all humans are dark inland pools full of anguish and panic-...
May 16, 2024
Responses
Responses to the Responses to the Special Issue on Weak Theory
It’s been nearly a year now since the publication of M/m’s special issue on Weak Theory, a year of conversations both here on Print Plus—and, as Aarthi Vadde and Melanie Micir point out, across a range of other professional and para-professional spaces of engagement. Many thanks to all who have taken part! As we bring this Year of Weak Theory to a close with responses from the original...
Aug 15, 2019
Responses to the Special Issue on Weak Theory, Part V
This late entry in our responses to the Weak Theory issue began as the keynote address for this summer’s conference of The Space Between Society, “Staging the Space Between,” at South Dakota State University.
Aug 5, 2019
What Are You Reading?
A Forum for capsule review of recent books of interest to our readers.
If you would like to write a capsule review (250-300 words) of one of the books featured in the Books of Interest section of our more recent print issues, we would welcome your submission at mmlittlereviews@gmail.com . Please include the issue number in which the book is listed in your correspondence.
Oct 19, 2021
A forum for reviews of recent publications and important books we may have missed the first time around. It also includes "Race in the Modernism/modernity Archives: The Harlem Renaissance and Beyond."
Feb 17, 2021