Pardis Dabashi is Assistant Professor of English and Film Studies at Bryn Mawr College. She is coeditor, with Alix Beeston, of the Visualities forum on Modernism/modernity Print+. Her first book, Losing the Plot: Film and Feeling in the Modern Novel, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2023.
Pardis Dabashi
Contributions
Judging by its Cover, Part 2
The first section of “Judging by its Cover” consists of pieces that are interested in the cover as a form of compensation, a covering over, as a piece of gorgeous textile can mask or stand in for what one doesn’t want to confront, or what can’t be confronted for whatever nefarious, oblivious, or self-deceptive reason.
Judging by its Cover, Part 1
On October 26, 1936, T. S. Eliot wrote a letter to American writer and host of an influential Parisian literary salon, Natalie Barney. In it he admitted with discernible embarrassment that his most recent author at Faber & Faber, Djuna Barnes—whose Ladies Almanack (1928) was about Barney’s salon and featured her as the character Dame Evangeline Musset—did not approve of the design for the first edition of Nightwood. “I must explain,” he writes,
Dear Nella: What Did You See?
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 for Nella Larsen Imes and Elmer.” Then when you didn’t appear they accused me of trying to save the food.
Visualities
Critical and creative engagements with modernism's cultures, objects, and problems of sight.