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...
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...
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...
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 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 “ Modernism’s...
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 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-...
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...
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...
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 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...