Amy E. Elkins is Associate Professor of English at Macalester College. She is the author of Crafting Feminism from Literary Modernism to the Multimedia Present (Oxford University Press, 2022) and editor of the Orientations forum on Print Plus. As a multimedia artist and interdisciplinary scholar, Amy is interested in creative practice as both a theory and method. Her research centers on queer approaches to the archive and questions of community, wellbeing, and resistance.
Amy E. Elkins
Contributions
Queer “Orientations” as Counterblast Manifesto
When Alice Oswald delivered her final lecture as Oxford Professor of Poetry in 2023, she (once again) made new the modernist manifesto. Counterblast!
Orientations
A space for reorienting ourselves as scholars, teachers, writers, and practitioners of interdisciplinary modernist studies to the feminist, to the queer—and also a space for sustained orientation to feminist and queer modernisms.
Typestruck: On Women and Writing Machines
The crown jewel in the 1937 Hollywood musical Ready, Willing, & Able is an elaborate song-and-dance number called “Too Marvelous for Words.” A lovestruck male theater producer, attempting to write a love letter by dictation, is surrounded by an army of female secretaries: hanging on his words, clinging to ladders, sitting at typewriters. As the music picks up tempo, the secretaries tap their keys in time.