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Abstract: This essay discusses how surrealist automatic writing may break an impasse in the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno's work.1 Adorno argues that, since the advent of instrumental rationality in modernity, the subject has repressed an aspect of her self—mimesis—that expresses the desire to attain proximity to an object through imitation rather than conceptualization (Aesthetic Theory, 145–46). This aspect, which is a mode of experience, is employed so that the subject may cognize the object without discursive control. However, since the promise of modernity—to emancipate the subject through rational freedom—has been broken and distorted by late capitalism, the status of mimesis has been thrown in doubt. Adorno argues ... Read More PubDate: 2023-07-21T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Australian writer Randolph Stow arrived in New Guinea's Trobriand Islands in 1959 with Bronislaw Malinowski's Trobriand ethnographies under his arm: Argonauts of the Western Pacific, Coral Gardens and their Magic and The Sexual Life of Savages. The 24-year-old was a Cadet Patrol Officer for the Australian colonial administration in New Guinea. Stow had already published three novels, one of which, To the Islands, had won the Miles Franklin, Australia's most prestigious award for fiction. However, now he was an aspiring anthropologist and had completed the first year of an anthropology degree at the University of Sydney.Seven months later Stow had a nervous breakdown. He was taken to Port Moresby hospital and then ... Read More PubDate: 2023-07-21T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Sylvia Townsend Warner and her partner Valentine Ackland arrived in Barcelona in the fall of 1936, two months after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. They had come to help with the relief operations being organized by the Communist Party of Great Britain to support the Republican side after the military coup by Francisco Franco. The nonintervention agreement that had been signed at the beginning of the conflict by several democratic nations, including Britain, prevented British citizens from obtaining visas to visit Spain. Ackland's diary records that they had to make three attempts to cross the Spanish frontier at the Pyrenees, eventually reaching Barcelona on September 26, 1936.1 Warner and Ackland were ... Read More PubDate: 2023-07-21T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: When T. S. Eliot was asked to contribute a profile of the artist and graphic designer Edward McKnight Kauffer in 1949, the poet spoke in glowing terms about the artist, but he was wary of saying too much about their clear resemblance in facial profile:I think it was at the end, or shortly after the end of the first World War that I met McKnight Kauffer, who was already, I think, better known and remarked among the younger artists than I was amongst the men of letters … I cannot venture to say much about his appearance, because there is said to be a facial resemblance between Kauffer and myself—at any rate, when I have asked for him at the building in which he lives, several successive porters have taken for ... Read More PubDate: 2023-07-21T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: One postwar summer day in 1948, the poet Yvan Goll typed up a short note from his Paris hotel room. He wrote to another modernist veteran, Maria Jolas, to send her poems for publication. In the late 1920s, this would not have been a very extraordinary occurrence.1 By 1948, however, the musketeers of modernism had mostly scattered from Paris. Maria's husband Eugene Jolas, the editor of the legendary little magazine transition, was in and out of German commissions as a journalist; Goll himself had been diagnosed with leukemia and knew he did not have long to live. [T]ransition, out of print for ten eventful years, already belonged to a different era. Maria and Yvan, who had lost touch after a falling out in 1940, had ... Read More PubDate: 2023-07-21T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Claude McKay's novels, particularly Home to Harlem (1928) and Banjo: A Story Without a Plot (1929), present food and eating in ways that are deliberately provocative both to stereotypes of African American food cultures and to early twentieth-century discourse about health, restraint, and civic duty. His characters often eat and drink to excess. They eat racially coded Southern foods such as fried chicken and corn pone, but they also sample and are connoisseurs of international flavors. They get sensual enjoyment from eating and drinking and do not especially trouble about nutrition or health. They are, anyway, very healthy. Hedonism is comforting for them; comfort food is wholesome. McKay presents his characters' ... Read More PubDate: 2023-07-21T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Wallace Stevens confronts Plato's rebuff of poetry head-on. In the first canto of "The Auroras of Autumn," he is frustrated in his search for poetic transfiguration by "another image at the end of the cave." He concludes, finally, that his endeavor amounts merely to "form gulping after formlessness."1 This image brings together the analogy of the cave that Plato employs in the Republic—which casts what we perceive as misleading appearances—with Stevens's own anxiety over poetry's embodiment of truth: does verse form ever license insights that are not recondite abstractions, or, as Plato insists, does a rupture between appearance and reality leave poetic truth an ever elusive pursuit' These lines in Stevens's poem ... Read More PubDate: 2023-07-21T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In 1961, the Venezuelan artist Elsa Gramcko (1925–94) completed Sin título (Untitled; fig. 1). In the work, cratered sheets of corroded metal are caught in a permanent stasis of decomposition. Ochre and burnt sienna spread from the tarnished and oxidized surfaces of the irregularly shaped pieces of metal, creating a chromatic palette both earthen and industrial. Facture engenders form, as each metal piece assumes its character from the haptic quality produced from its own process of corrosion. According to an apocryphal story, the fragments of metal Gramcko affixed to the surface of this work were harvested from the side panels of a jeep she discovered abandoned at the coast.1 To control the found metal's ... Read More PubDate: 2023-07-21T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: My title, "Making Us New," alludes to the rallying cry of modernist art, "Make it New," put forward by Ezra Pound—a slogan that "summed up the aspirations of more than one generation of modernists."1 This desire for the new, as Michael North points out, flowed in both revolutionary and reactionary directions, and applied to myriad aspects of art and culture.2 At around the same time modernist artists sought to make art new, and as part of the same cultural infatuation with novelty, a wide array of thinkers from all points on the ideological spectrum and various disciplines in the social and biological sciences sought to make humans new, to improve "the race."3In exploring the origin of Pound's phrase, North points ... Read More PubDate: 2023-07-21T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Film scholarship on Indian cinema has often explored how ideologies of the nation, national identity, and national turmoil fold into cinematic narratives. In Rochona Majumdar's Art Cinema and India's Forgotten Futures, cinema is posited as a mode of doing history. The author focuses on Bengali-language art cinema of the immediate post-Independence era, in particular the films of three world-renowned directors working in the medium: Ritwik Ghatak, Mrinal Sen, and Satyajit Ray. Art cinema, in the author's understanding, is a means to apprehend the postcolonial moment within the moving image to critically engage with the contradictions of an age. Majumdar bases her analysis of cinema as history/historiography on the ... Read More PubDate: 2023-07-21T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Bette Davis was at times horrifyingly, awfully white. In Little Foxes and again in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane', Davis designed for her characters an arresting maquillage of white to express something of their cruelty or derangement. In the creative and often surprising Bette Davis Black and White, Julia A. Stern takes up these two films along with Jezebel, In This Our Life, the made-for-TV White Mama, and others in order to explore the way Davis's career onand offscreen indexes the possibilities and limitations of cross-racial identification. As Stern puts it, "I ponder why Bette Davis shone so brightly in films involving African American slavery, fictive kinship in Jezebel, and the struggle for civil and human ... Read More PubDate: 2023-07-21T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: What is diplomatic literature' According to the French essayist Albert Thibaudet, whose essay "Paysages" is one of the touchstones of Diplomacy and Modern Literature, it is the new fiction of movement, "la littérature de la valise," "a cosmopolitan literature that … awaited the formation of a universal language of sleeper cars and cinema, … a cosmopolitan literature of trips, capital cities, beings that join in solidarity with the diplomatic vocation" (quoted in Daunais and Hepburn, Diplomacy, 86–87). According to the volume itself, it is also something, or several somethings, else: novels written by diplomats, diplomatic memoirs-a-clèf, literature whose heroes, or fall guys, are diplomatic personnel. As evident ... Read More PubDate: 2023-07-21T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts, Daniel Albright describes two methodologies for conducting interdisciplinary scholarship. The first traces "horizontal lines of development," for example by breaking an opera into its distinct parts (the libretto, the stage design, and the score) and examining "the patterns of reinforcement or weakening generated from the superimposition of these three independent media."1 A different approach, the one Albright adopts, is vertical: "Perhaps there are chords in which one element is a musical note, another element is a word, and a third element is a picture—chords that compose themselves out of different layers of sensuous reality" ... Read More PubDate: 2023-07-21T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: James Dowthwaite's Ezra Pound and 20th-Century Theories of Language: Faith with the Word is a fascinating study that uncovers "Pound's role in twentieth-century debates around language" and historicizes his work in the context of these debates (2). The methodological sweep of the book is original and unusual: it explores a wide range of Pound's poems, critical essays, and nonfiction texts through theories of language that transcend dominant structuralist and post-structuralist approaches. As part of its interdisciplinary framework, the book attends to a range of concerns: Germanic philology; the relation of Chinese written characters to Pound's "modernist commitment to internal reality and consciousness"; ... Read More PubDate: 2023-07-21T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In "Theses on the Philosophy of History," Walter Benjamin presents the unforgettable image of Paul Klee's monoprint Angelus Novus. We face "the angel of history" who seeks to wrap his arms around wreckage while being propelled interminably into the future.1 Critics are haunted by the circumstances of Benjamin's suicide in 1940, and the attachment to the imagined image of lost things emerges as a metonym for what is unseen in the paining and thus occupies our critical vantage: sacrificed human life and impossible sanctuary.In the twenty-first century, this image has lost none of its descriptive power. It was repeatedly on my mind while reading Sarah Wasserman's The Death of Things, a study of postwar American ... Read More PubDate: 2023-07-21T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Lisa Robertson's 2001 book The Weather is a classic of the post-pastoral, in which the "architecture" of constantly shifting patterns of clouds and vapors supplants the nostalgia of landscape. A note at the end of the book tells us that it resulted partly from "an intense yet eccentric research in the rhetorical structure of English meteorological description."1 BBC shipping forecasts, William Wordsworth's The Prelude, William Cobbett's Rural Rides, and the cloud sketches of John Constable were among Robertson's sources, as was the delightfully titled Essay on the Modification of Clouds by the nineteenth-century amateur meteorologist Luke Howard. First published in 1832, Howard's book gave us the terms for cloud ... Read More PubDate: 2023-07-21T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Time is having its moment. The subject of time has blossomed across literary and cultural studies, and for good reason. With climate change and the fate of the planet at stake in our daily lives, and the concept of the Anthropocene helping to shape the understanding of how we got here and where we are going, interest in time has profound consequences. It thus feels urgent to understand deep time, to consider distant futures, and to mark the effects of time on our ecologies, our bodies, and our communities. Scholars have accordingly leapt into this terrain with a sense of high stakes. In popular culture, the focus on time is perhaps less existential, but the play with time is similarly ubiquitous—of course the ... Read More PubDate: 2023-07-21T00:00:00-05:00
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