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...
Ways of Seeing Art in a Pandemic
Aug 5, 2020
For their final writing assignment in a course on contemporary art, my students were required to analyze a single artwork from the last sixty or so years. The point was to encourage them to apply the theories of visuality that we’d studied throughout the quarter, and the assignment had one nonnegotiable stipulation: the artwork must be accessible somewhere in Chicago, where our class was held.
Varieties of Educational Experience
Feb 5, 2020
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. What have I talked about when I’ve talked about the discipline? My Documents folders...
Typestruck: On Women and Writing Machines
Jul 28, 2020
The crown jewel in the 1937 Hollywood musical Ready, Willing, & Able is an elaborate song-and-dance number called “Too Marvelous for Words.” A lovestruck male theater producer, attempting to write a love letter by dictation, is surrounded by an army of female secretaries: hanging on his words, clinging to ladders, sitting at typewriters. As the music picks up tempo, the secretaries tap their keys in time.
This Chaotic Earth: On Clarence Larkin’s Charts
Mar 2, 2020
The apocalypse stressed me out. This is an obviously true, maybe irresponsibly glib statement in material terms—the sixth extinction, global pandemic, nuclear annihilation, space rocks, methane farts, these all terrify me daily in ways that I have the luxury to be terrified.
The “eBay Archive”: Recovering Early Women Type Designers
Sep 4, 2019
Southern Vancouver Island’s 100-kilometer-long BC-14 Highway slides predominantly east to west along British Columbia coastline through traditional Coast Salish territory. Beneath the old-growth trees that are the marrow of this lush ecosystem is the small, unincorporated community of Shirley, and the Cook Kettle Press (fig.1). Though small, the press is a regional hotbed of letterpress activity. As a print shop, it provides opportunities for...
The Aura of Autographs
Oct 9, 2019
Always mornings. Early. And there should be coffee. Breakfast will come later, but the best hours are now—when the world is still blanketed, the mind “puddled in dream melt.” [1] There are particular parameters for the page. The margins must be wide. The font Goudy Old Style or Garamond in a squeeze. Carriage returns between paragraphs. No indentation. I once justified my text; now I like the ragged edges. To write The Names...
She Works Too Hard for the Money
Apr 8, 2020
Shortly after starting as an executive assistant in development at a nonprofit organization in 2012—my first nonacademic job following a three-year postdoctoral position—I joked to my new boss one night after everyone else had gone home that she should only hire former academics because we have no idea how not to work all the time. She laughed, as I guessed she would. Ever the court jester, I like to think I know my audience and I knew that, while not an academic herself, she could relate....
Rummaging through E. M. Forster’s Loot
Oct 13, 2020
By the time I moved to Cairo to research Forster’s years in Egypt, late in the summer of 2018, I was already familiar with his cabinet of lost artifacts and vanished statues.
Poetry from Afar: Distant Reading, Global Poetics, and the Digital Humanities
Jun 5, 2020
Fig 1. “Deconstructing poetry with wind. To use nature to physically deconstruct a well-known poem by letting words individually blow in the breeze, when released from the tree. To have the public involved in reconstructing the poem by catching/collecting the words and recording the randomly reassembled new form. The reassembled poem(s) would be displayed as they appear. A contemporary art moment in the spirit of Robert Rauschenberg’s erased de Kooning drawing in 1953.” Kelly Rogers, “The Poet...Oppositions in the Modernist Archive
Mar 23, 2020
In the opening days of 2020 modernists may have rejoiced over two significant events. On January 1, works published in 1924 entered the public domain. On January 2, Princeton University opened to the public the recently uncrated 1,131 letters from T. S. Eliot to Emily Hale. In these two opposing examples of the modernist archive 2020 stages a central tension between diffusion and enclosure, between the dream of a universal library—which paradoxically and simultaneously enacts a “library...
On the Verge of Tears
May 13, 2020
Glass tears do not leave a trace. In Man Ray’s photograph, Les Larmes de Verre (Glass Tears) (1932), they rest on the model’s cheekbones—hard, cold drops, threatening to fall (fig. 1). The tears are too smooth, too round, too still. If the tears were to slide off her face, they would scatter like tiny marbles across the studio floor.
Fig. 1. Man Ray, Les Larmes de Verre (Glass Tears) , 1932. Courtesy of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.Man Ray worked on the...
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.
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 “ Modernism’s...
Movement Literacy
Aug 31, 2020
In his latest work, contemporary choreographer William Forsythe tries to create, in his own words, a “short-term literacy” in his audience. The piece begins without music in order to isolate the individual phrases of movement: “it might be perceived that there has been a subtraction, which would be music. But in fact, dancers being the musical engines behind any dance, their breathing alone causes you to understand the phrase.” [1]...
Modernism’s Queer Pedagogies
Jun 8, 2020
How did people learn to be queer in an era before stable identities, lifestyles, or representations of sexual outsiders were readily available or, for that matter, before they even existed?
Modernism’s Hauntological Architecture: A View from South Africa
Feb 19, 2020
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 him unable to continue his career as a...
Modernism, Eco-anxiety, and the Climate Crisis
Nov 21, 2019
Fig. 1. Hannah Rothstein, National Parks 2050: Great Smoky Mountains , 2017. Limited edition print. https://www.hrothstein.com/#/national-parks-2050/ . Reproduction of original WPA poster by Ranger Doug’s Enterprises .Our task is...
Modernism, Cybernetics, and Systems Theory: Disciplinary Relevance in a STEM-focused World
Nov 17, 2020
In 1926, Gertrude Stein delivered the lecture “ Composition as Explanation ” to the Cambridge Literary Club at Oxford University (fig. 1). The talk couches a description of her own evolution as an experimental author within a broader discussion of history, culture, and art as a series of distinct “composition[s].”As Kristin Bergen helpfully explains, the “multivocal term” composition at once designates “...
Modernism after Modernism
Oct 25, 2019
In the introduction to his superb book Realism after Modernism , Devin Fore describes a “shared modernist aspiration to achieve conditions of perception and consciousness outside of what is customarily arrogated to the human.” [1] He sees this as the tie that binds avant-garde movements across early twentieth-century Europe: from José Ortega y Gasset to Jean-François Lyotard, Paul Cezanne to Velimir Khlebnikov, modernism...
Looking like a Modernist
Aug 5, 2019
Mirror, mirror, on the wall, or so the story goes. For Snow White’s stepmother, the evil Queen, the terrible magic of the mirror is its unimpeachable veracity, its devotion to the truth. The mirror doesn’t lie about what it knows; and what the mirror knows, it knows precisely; and what the mirror knows precisely, it knows visually. Who is the fairest one of all? It sees what it knows and it knows what it sees.
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...
Keyword: Pacification
Jan 30, 2020
A couple of years ago, I published a book that worried the quantitative conception of information, by suggesting that “information” constituted a problem not because it lacked ways of being defined, but because it could be defined at once in so many competing and oftentimes contradictory ways. In the book, I was concerned specifically with radio broadcasting and the wartime literary field; but also, at a methodological level I was not entirely aware of until late in the composition process,...
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-...
Handiwork: Mina Loy, Collage, and the En Dehors Garde
Oct 21, 2020
Although Mina Loy consorted with nearly every historical avant-garde movement, she was contained by none and is rarely mentioned in their histories. She’s not alone in this regard. Canonical histories and theories of the avant-garde typically marginalize the work of women, people of color, queer, and disabled artists. Despite significant efforts to articulate the importance of gender, sexuality, and race to the avant-garde, scholars have yet to offer a comprehensive theory of the avant-garde...
Grievability, COVID-19, and the Modernists’ Pandemic
May 21, 2020
For the past five years, I have been immersed in research on the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic and the unexpected ways it weaves its way into modernism. My book on the topic came out last October, about two months before a worrisome new illness began to emerge in Wuhan, China. [1] We all want our research to be relevant, to be able to articulate the critical “so what” question we struggle to answer in grant requests and cover...
Do Look Down: Surveying the Field from Aotearoa/New Zealand
Aug 14, 2019
Fig. 1. Hirini Melbourne (1949-2003). Photograph courtesy of the University of Waikato.What is this thing called modernist studies ? And what does it look like when viewed from the—for most—faraway islands of Aotearoa/New Zealand?
A Bird’s-Eye View
Such a shift in perspective, I want to suggest, can prompt a new way of writing and thinking about modernism. Modernism itself is full of such shifts in perspective, of course. Think, for example, of the radical new...
Digital (Re)Visions: May Watkis and the Women Film Pioneers Project
Aug 17, 2020
This article is part of a special series on the Visualities blog exploring digital archives connected to modernism’s visual cultures. Over the next few months, contributors to the forum will introduce and model the uses of online resources spanning art, film, media, book history, print cultures, and more. In attending to specific visual artifacts from these collections, they will also reflect...
Dear Nella: What Did You See?
Nov 13, 2019
Dear Nella,
I was terribly disappointed that you didn’t get here last week. And I was furious with myself for mentioning the damned wedding to you because it turned out that I didn’t go. People kept coming in and then deciding not to go on to the wedding, so we were here until eight o’clock. Then we went out to dinner. It was very amusing too because the sandwiches kept getting fewer and fewer, and I kept rescuing them from hungry guests and saying firmly, “You’ll have to leave some...
Beyond Recovery: Towards a New Feminist Methodology of the Archive
Nov 12, 2020
In Towards a Feminist Life , Sara Ahmed writes of feminism as “a fragile archive, a body assembled from shattering, from splattering, an archive whose fragility gives us responsibility.” [1] From this tenuous archive, I seek an affirming inclusion in modernist studies: Urmila Seshagiri explains in a recent Modernism/modernity Print Plus...
Beginning Further Back: Dylan Thomas’s Early Work
Jan 18, 2020
To begin at the beginning is a cliché, Dylan Thomas knew, worth opening with, and also a task more difficult than it seems.
Aesthetic Education for the Anthropocene
Aug 27, 2019
Austral summer on the Antarctic Peninsula. Eight of us climb out of our zodiac onto the shore of Petermann Island. This place dazzles and overwhelms the senses. The luminous blue icebergs, granite streaked pink with penguin guano, the weakly green cryoplankton spread across the snow. Antarctica is not the white continent of popular imagination. And it isn’t quiet either. The plangent groans of glaciers crawl across the landscape, reverberating through our bodies. Gentoo penguins squawk atop...
A River Unaligned: The Danube in Film and Cold War
Oct 22, 2020
From its contested origins in Germany’s Black Forest to the Black Sea, Europe’s second longest river connects ten countries and its watershed four more. Navigable along the entire route, the Danube river serves as the artery and border of a diverse geographic region, and frustrates attempts to divide Europe from non-Europe even as it facilitates the flow of transnational environmental, economic, and cultural exchange. Diversity along the Danube has long eluded stable political arrangement;...
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...