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Finding Africa in Benaras: Postcolonial Citation in Jai Baba Felunath (1979)
Jan 26, 2023
This summer, as I was wrapping up my dissertation and packing my boxes in upstate New York, I started watching Satyajit Ray’s Jai Baba Felunath ( The Elephant God , 1979) after what felt like a lifetime. The film is based on a novel from Ray’s own children’s detective series featuring the celebrated Bengali private investigator Prodosh C. Mitter, aka Felu-da (“da” being an affectionate honorific for elder brother). In a 1980 review, Gene Moscowitz calls it “Ray’s bow to...
Modernism, Energy, and Environment
Conrad’s Dynamite Time
Dec 9, 2022
On February 15, 1894, a bomb went off in Greenwich Park near the Royal Observatory. The event set off a media frenzy that, thirteen years later, resulted in Joseph Conrad writing The Secret Agent (1907). Recent readings of the novel have begun to explore how in constructing his ironic re-mediation of the event, Conrad also began to lay bare some of the complex energy infrastructures of his historical moment. In Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination ,...
James Joyce, “according to the pictures postcard”
Nov 30, 2022
James Joyce was an avid postcard writer at a time when the western world’s fascination with postcards was at its peak. We know of nearly a thousand postcards that he sent, dating from a Christmas card to Frances Sheehy Skeffington in 1898 to a card to his brother Stanislaus in early January 1941 announcing his arrival in Zurich only a week before his death. Postal correspondence is a fundamental point of reference in both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake , their texts replete...
Fitzi’s Dog: Lost Auto/biographical Presence in Nightwood
Nov 16, 2022
Archival research in the 1990s involved #2 pencils and handwritten transcriptions, later painstakingly typed into a desktop computer. The archival research I undertook then as a grad student was a labor of love, a “passion project” in the spirit of Melanie Micir’s phrase for feminist modernist recovery work. Copying over (twice!) the letters and diaries of modernists like Djuna Barnes or Jean Rhys engraved their words deep in my memory. While researching early draft versions of Barnes’s ...