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Gertrude Stein’s Landscapes, and Other Things That Are All at Once
Dec 3, 2025
I have always liked things that were all at once. Not abundance so much as excess. But excess is not quite the correct word. What I am thinking about, what I have many times tried to make, what I have often loved, is the exuberance of too much possibility. Too much: those things that capture, or at least organize and aestheticize, the ways the world is often too much.
“Read a Dirty Book”: James Joyce, Samuel Steward, and the Orientations of Literary Rebellion
Nov 20, 2025
In March of 2020, right before the COVID-19 lockdown, we—then-undergraduate Marissa Stinson and her Rider University professor Laurel Harris—visited the Special Collections at Princeton University’s Firestone Library to sift through boxes of Sylvia Beach’s papers . Rider is a fifteen-minute car ride down Route 206 from Beach’s hometown of Princeton. The accessibility of Beach’s and the Shakespeare and Company’s archives offered us a local connection to James Joyce’s iconic Irish...
Modernism, Energy, and Environment
Introduction to “Letters from the Field”
Sep 10, 2025
I have been tasked with introducing “Letters from the Field”, a new series of blog correspondences on doing modernist studies while living through climate change and calamities. “Letters from the Field” grows out of conversations that have taken place at online and in-person events organized by the MSA’s Modernism and the Environment special interest group (SIG) over the past two years. We bring these conversations to forum on Modernism, Energy, and Environment in the hope of having the...
The Crossword and the Sword: Puzzling Modernism and War
Jul 23, 2025
The first crossword puzzle appeared December 21, 1913 in the FUN pages of The New York World, Pulitzer’s paper. It was the creation of Liverpool-born journalist, Arthur Wynne, originally called a word-cross but misprinted shortly after to its familiar form, an early victim to own imposition of anarchic plasticity onto language. With understated transatlantic modesty, Wynne claimed crosswords were as old as Pompei. Back home, old poet Housman would name these the “days when heaven...