Clusters
In 1954, Maya Angelou performed in a production of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess that toured through Italy. This United States-sponsored initiative brought African American performance to European stages in an effort to combat Soviet propaganda about American racism. As Melanie Masterton Sherazi shows in her contribution to this cluster, Angelou’s own memoirs of the trip recall not...
Oct 15, 2019
Reading the Modern Magazine in an Interdisciplinary Humanities Lab
This essay cluster begins with an ending. Specifically, it began with the ending of Patrick Collier’s “What Is Modern Periodical Studies?,” which concludes with a provocation to find a new way to read and study modern periodicals. In order to develop coherent methodological approaches to modern periodicals, Collier argues, we need to resist the urge to “decid[e] in advance where [a] periodical...
Jul 3, 2019
Blogs
Modernism’s Hauntological Architecture: A View from South Africa
The specter of modernism has haunted South African culture for quite some time. In Katharine Kilalea’s recent novel, O.K. Mr. Field (2018), it takes the form of “the House for the Study of Water,” a replica of Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, transplanted from its original setting in Poissy, France, to the coastal cliffs of South Africa’s Cape Peninsula. [1] After an accident that leaves...
Feb 19, 2020
Varieties of Educational Experience
In my first stab at drafting an inaugural post as the new editor of this forum, I went the Raymond Carver route, writing “What We Talk About When We Talk About the Discipline” across the top of a blank page. When that imagined dialogue hung fire for several weeks, I ventured greater specificity, replacing “We” with “I.” Pronouncements still unforthcoming, I searched my hard drive for toeholds...
Feb 5, 2020
Discussions
A venue for brief articles that intervene in debates in modernist studies.
Nov 22, 2017
What Are You Reading?
A forum for reviewing handbooks, companions, pedagogical volumes, introductions, etc.
Aug 14, 2018