Blogs
Writing the Senior Thesis: A Conversation
May 28, 2019
In this conversation about Process, Jacquelyn Ardam and her undergraduate advisee, Cole Walsh, demystify the senior thesis. Cole’s thesis, “Mak[ing] Bright the Arrows: Recovering the Political Poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay,” examines the poetry of the underserved Millay, whose work with the sonnet, Cole argues, deploys its “memorable speech” to intervene within the isolationist politics of the United States. Here the two collaborators talk about the marginalization of poets within...
On Not Knowing How to Dance
Feb 28, 2019
It’s rare to read an account of the process of learning about a new artform or medium from the beginning. Maybe because, at least for me, it’s hard to remember the first time I read a poem or a novel or saw a painting or heard a piece of music. Or maybe because that experience merges uncomfortably with a non-critical stance of “appreciation,” a word that doesn’t deserve some of the pejorative associations attached to it.
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On Global Modernism and Academic Precarity: A Reply to Claire Barber-Stetson
Jun 20, 2019
A dance by Mavo, a multidisciplinary Japanese avant-garde group and one of the chief representatives of Japanese modernism. Hagiwara Kyojiro, who was associated with the group, appears in the Global Modernists on Modernism anthology. This image was first published in 1924, in the third issue of the group's Mavo magazine.
In the Modernism/modernity Print Plus cluster on “...
Looking Backward on a Strike
Mar 10, 2019
When the cold January turned to an even colder February, I would have loved nothing more than to begin teaching Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward as part of my class on twentieth-century utopian literature. But instead of going to class, I put on my wool socks, three layers of clothes, a winter coat, and snow boots to spend hours standing in the frigid Midwestern climes outside the main entrance of my university, sign in my hands, equal parts exasperation and anxiety in my heart. My...
Joyce & the Dems: Ulysses, Politics, and Cultural Capital
Apr 29, 2019
“We are still learning to be Joyce's contemporaries,” intones Richard Ellmann, the first words of his James Joyce , published in 1959. [1] Sixty years later, Joyce’s most famous book (and second-hardest to read) has become a talking point and prop of two Democrat candidates in the race for the US presidential nomination. Ulysses , over a century since avant-garde magazines started publishing it serially, has been seen trending on...
In and Out of the Archive with the Letters of Mary Butts
Mar 29, 2019
Located in Special Collections at the University of Victoria is a little studied folder that contains fifty-one letters written by the British modernist author Mary Butts (1890-1937) to friend and fellow British modernist Douglas Goldring (1887-...
A Case for “Site-Activated” Modernism: Elmina Asafo Aesthetics
Apr 22, 2019
Those of us who work in traditions considered “global” within US and, to varying degrees, European academies are often pulled in two professional directions. On the one hand, many of us feel rightly accountable to a kind of work most welcome in area studies: granular, situated, concerned with historical depth over what can feel like untenable generalization. On the other, we feel the sting of exclusion from the field’s “big” conversations, and seek broad conceptual discussion of “the...