Over the last decade, #MeToo and the work of activists like Tarana Burke have brought attention to tacitly permitted sexual exploitation on university campuses and in work environments both on and off the clock. As #MeToo transformed the world around me, rumors I had come across in my scholarship regarding a poet laureate from nearly two centuries ago took on new significance. The rumors hinted at coercion and violation experienced by young women who found themselves in the company of Alfred...

Samuel Beckett was something of an accidental dramatist, or at least his earliest completed plays were written as something of a sideline, a diversion, a respite from the long narrative flights he was developing in something of a white heat in the aftermath of the Second World War, the grouping of French novels now loosely called The Trilogy. Theater, he would subsequently acknowledge, was “relaxing” because of its plasticity, its concreteness, its treatment of particular people (more or less) in particular spaces (more or less). He could not have anticipated how thoroughly these exercises in creative relaxation, his dabbling in the most public of the literary arts, something of a hybrid between a necessarily incomplete script and its embodied, performative, commercial realization, between private labor and commodity economics, between, say, use-value and exchange-value, would violate his creative autonomy since theater’s collaborative nature invites, indeed relies on, a complex division of labor, creative interventions, and more overt alliances with commerce than the narrative or lyrical arts—the path to realization suggesting, as well, theater’s fragility and vulnerability as it enters the chain of exchange-value. Theater, something of an afterthought in the late 1940s, would subsequently come to dominate Beckett’s creative labor. When En attendant Godot ( Waiting for Godot), the second of these exercises in relaxation, premiered in Paris at the Théâtre de Babylon on 19 January, 1953, the forty-seven-year-old debut playwright had been a full-time writer and translator for some twenty-three years. He published his first freestanding work, the long poem Whoroscope, in 1930, which he wrote in several hours on June 15 for a contest on the subject of time sponsored by Richard Aldington and Nancy Cunard. The poem ridiculed the personal peccadillos of philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650) and, with its awkward, intrusive footnotes, laid waste to T. S. Eliot’s landmark mosaic of Western decline, The Waste Land. It won first prize.

He is a walking paradox: a loner who desires the crowd, “a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito,” a spectator who casts off his air of detachment, a skeptic who can experience states of childlike wonder, “an ‘I’ with an insatiable appetite for the ‘non-I.’” More gaze than body, he is a phantom of the arcade, “a mirror as vast as the crowd itself . . . a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness” (Baudelaire, “Painter,” 9). Who is this person? “Observer, philosopher . . . —call him what you will,” the flâneur is the modern man par excellence, an urban stroller who will always be encountered, en passant, in the act of capturing “the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent”—that is, the contradictory, enigmatic, and elusive condition otherwise known as modernity (13). This origin story has long dominated critical discussions of flânerie, a term I take to signify a way of moving through urban space as well as a first-person narrative form that documents that movement. The flâneur’s vein of solitary, melancholic, and aimless walking—typically coeval with the modernization of a global city—has become synonymous with strolls through nineteenth-century Paris. Even recent efforts to chart the spread of flânerie into other global cities have rehearsed this particular story, looking to Parisian flânerie as the initial tradition that contemporary walkers rail against or continue in. The rhyme between Paris, flânerie, and modernity has endured for many reasons, but it generally attests to the success of Charles Baudelaire and his afterlife in the writings of Walter Benjamin. Rare is the treatment of streetwalking that does not acknowledge Baudelaire’s legendary typology of the flâneur in “The Painter of Modern Life” (1863). And if Baudelaire’s efforts were not enough, the association between the flâneur, France, and modernity was enshrined a century later, when Benjamin hailed Paris as “the promised land of the flâneur” in his unfinished yet exhaustive index of the city, The Arcades Project.

In the urgency of what sounds initially like an auteur’s command, the fictional “Director” of Adrienne Kennedy’s 1973 play-within-a-play, An Evening with Dead Essex, discloses the unnegotiable terms of his own captivity before the phantasmal image. It is in the frequent repetition of a one-word imperative from the Director—to “flash”—that its operational binding (as the instruction by which to advance photographic images in a slide projector) can be perceived to shred. The demand is at once a managerial spur for his actors to make headway in grasping their subject matter, and an abyssal first step in the momentum of the collective going-under necessitated by its deepest realization .

What is the impact of remapping one site of mass entertainment—in this case, vaudeville—on wider assumptions and conversations about modernity? And what are the challenges to a settler scholar of popular culture—in this case, me—contributing to the return of Indigenous figures in this historical venue to broader visibility?

all the ad hoc committees, all the picket lines . . . all the tools of agitprop straight across the spectrum, do not confer upon anyone any ipso facto virtue. —Joan Didion

This article is the final installment of a special series on the Visualities blog exploring digital archives connected to modernism’s visual cultures. Contributors to the series 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 also reflect on issues of methodology raised by developing and using digital archives, including in times of crisis and remote working...

Originally constructed in 1817, Auburn Correctional Facility in Upstate New York stands as the oldest continually functional maximum-security penitentiary in the United States. [1] I doubt that its designers would have predicted that 200 years later the US would come to incarcerate more people than any other country in history. We currently make up only 5% of the world’s population, but confine about 21% of its prisoners.