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The Dispossessing of Sylvia Beach: Property, Autonomy, Personhood

By Robert Spoo,

Sylvia Beach was a woman of property. Her “passion projects,” as Melanie Micir calls the rich variety of “queer feminist modernist practice[s]” that Beach and other creative women engaged in, included the founding of her Paris bookshop and lending library; her role as publisher, seller, and distributor of James Joyce’s Ulysses; and the writing of her memoir, Shakespeare and Company (1959). Beach took pride in giving the same name to her memoir that she had given to her bookshop. It was the pride of a property owner,

Mystic Realism & Collage: Robert Duncan’s THE WAR (1968)

By Vincent Hiscock,

Robert Duncan’s “Introduction” was the final piece that he composed for his 1968 collection of poetry Bending the Bow. The effort preoccupied him throughout much of 1967, a year in which Duncan, alongside many other creative practitioners, recognized that his art was undergoing a formal crisis that stemmed from an increasing awareness of US atrocities in Vietnam. Duncan’s effort to reckon with this crisis of practice yielded a startling manifesto that, despite being positioned as the “Introduction” to the collection he had already composed, in fact theorizes an aesthetic orientation that appears only occasionally and nascently in the collection itself. The piece, written in a dense, vertiginous, and original prose, comes in five short sections.

The Lyrical Literature of Distant Listening

By Emilie Morin,

Distant listening—a practice born with radio amateurism, known as DXing among American radio enthusiasts—was the term used to designate an essential dimension of radio during the interwar period: the capacity to listen to radio stations far away. What this involved was not just the fine-tuning of a wireless set, but educated guesses about foreign identification signals, languages and speech patterns, and frequent battles against unwanted noise and distortions. As the British radio pioneer Peter Eckersley recalled in his memoirs, for the fleeting thrill of capturing a foreign broadcast one had to endure, in the early years at least, “long periods of virtual rigor mortis waiting for [an] identification signal” and much parasitic noise:

Suffrage Journalism against State Brutality: Surveillance Art in Votes for Women and The Suffragette, 1910–1914

By Stephanie J. Brown,

Between 1910 and 1914, as militant activists faced down physical violence from a variety of state agents in the final years of the campaign for women’s suffrage, the newspapers published by the militant suffragist Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) mobilized brutality as a framework through which to categorize the state’s actions.

All Articles

The Dispossessing of Sylvia Beach: Property, Autonomy, Personhood

By Robert Spoo

Mystic Realism & Collage: Robert Duncan’s THE WAR (1968)

By Vincent Hiscock

The Lyrical Literature of Distant Listening

By Emilie Morin

Suffrage Journalism against State Brutality: Surveillance Art in Votes for Women and The Suffragette, 1910–1914

By Stephanie J. Brown

Between 1910 and 1914, as militant activists faced down physical violence from a variety of state agents in the final years of the campaign for women’s suffrage, the newspapers published by the mil

Afterword: Rising to the Challenge

By Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Rutgers University

In the work I’ve been doing over the past ten years, I have discussed the emergence of historically new examples of multilingual literature, culture, and entertainment and called for new ways of counting, organizing, and valuing languages inside and outside the university. I have sought to explain how, why, and when artworks began to use languages differently, where they have drawn on early twentieth-century modernist paradigms and where they have diverged. Along the way, I have highlighted two approaches to the history of modernism and language that have shaped our understanding of multilingualism as a concept and a philosophy.

Reading Against the Frame: Photomontage and Trans Aesthetics in the Russian Avant-Garde

By Michael M. Weinstein

Avant-garde art and transgender identification begin from a common crisis of representation: a sense that, in Jacques Rancière’s words, “[t]here is something unpresentable at the heart of thought which wishes to give itself material form.” In diverse instances of modernist cultural production and trans gender alike, such a recognition spurs attempts to reconfigure the contours of the sensible in ways that affirm the salience and shareability of this “something.” Yet avant-garde practitioners’ experiments attest to a structuring ambivalence about whether and how the “unpresentable” might be made visible on the surface, whether of a body or a body of work. In the context of the Russian Revolution of 1917, this ambivalence assumes heightened political stakes, and art objects appear correspondingly riven with dialectical tensions; much as they celebrate the destructive potential of their own novelty, they cannot quite relinquish the dream of the artwork as seamless totality. How answerable must the made body be, they ask, to a public? To history? Thus, I suggest that we might understand the art of the early Soviet avant-garde—both in its motivating questions and in the answers its new forms encode—as surprisingly trans.

The Eye and the Hand in Kafka’s Drawings

By Nicholas Sawicki

In the years leading up to the recent centennial of Franz Kafka’s death, perhaps the most significant revelation to emerge about the paragon of twentieth-century literature is that he had a strong interest in drawing. Over one hundred pages of drawings by Kafka, most of them previously unknown, were made public in 2021 by the National Library of Israel in an online repository, and they have opened the door to new consideration of the place of visual production in Kafka’s life and work. An extensive illustrated catalog with reproductions of all of Kafka’s known renderings, Franz Kafka: The Drawings, was published later that same year by Andreas Kilcher, and both the images and the book have inspired extensive commentary and reflection.

Virginia Woolf in Circulation: The Hogarth Press Order Books, Modernist Bookselling and Digital Praxis

By Alice Staveley, Stanford University

Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse famously opens with six-year old James Ramsay, “sitting on the floor cutting out pictures from the illustrated catalogue of the Army & Navy Stores.” With the awkward dexterity of a young child, James carefully guides his scissors around “a picture of a refrigerator,” endowing the image “with heavenly bliss” under the loving but watchful gaze of his mother. The scene has long captured critical attention, but less so the consumerist allusion to a popular shop on the book’s first page. The Army & Navy Stores was a well-known London department store, over a quarter-century old by the time James shreds its marquee catalogue.

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