Alix Beeston is Reader in English at Cardiff University. She is the author of In and Out of Sight: Modernist Writing and the Photographic Unseen (Oxford University Press, 2018, paperback 2023) and the coeditor, with Stefan Solomon, of Incomplete: The Feminist Possibilities of the Unfinished Film (University of California Press, 2023). She is the founder and now coeditor, with Pardis Dabashi, of the Visualities forum at Modernism/modernity Print+.
Alix Beeston
Contributions
Five Years of Visualities
Five years ago, in August 2019, the Visualities forum was established as a site for thinking through the visual relations and ocular regimes of modernity. It posed three broad provocations: “In what new ways might we discuss the visual as a special category—aesthetic, epistemological, political—in modernism? How do different modes and practices of vision interact within the contested terrain of modernity?
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,