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Counterfaiths: Religious Visual Culture and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea

By Jack Dudley,

“Well, I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told anyone else,” Jean Rhys, shortly before her death in 1979, said to David Plante, as he relates it in Difficult Women (1983). Rhys cautioned that the story would sound familiar; however, she had told him “part of it, but not all” (Plante, Difficult Women, 47). The familiar part involved Rhys and her husband, Max, at their cottage in Devon, the stress of that time in her life, and how she, by that point, “quite gave up” on working on Wide Sargasso Sea, the Caribbean text that would mark her celebrated return to the literary scene in 1966, decades after her European, metropolitan novels of the thirties (48).

Zora Neale Hurston’s Recorder

By Kristin Rivero,

When Zora Neale Hurston commented on the variations of African American dialect for her contribution to Nancy Cunard’s landmark anthology of Black writing in 1934, little did she know how her own personal combination of transparency and opacity—the ways in which, so to speak, she appears “clearly enunciated” “as a subject . . . but slurred as an object”—would shape her then emergent career. Hurston’s comment on how the vernacular can encode intimacy signals this article’s interest in the centrality of mediation to understanding Hurston and her exploration of the racialized subject.

Forgetting, Knowledge, and Action: Gertrude Stein’s Modernist Terms

By Jennifer Soong,

In 1910 Gertrude Stein wrote the lines, “She is forgetting anything. This is not a disturbing thing, this is not a distressing thing, this is not an important thing. She is forgetting anything and she is remembering that thing, she is remembering that she is forgetting anything.” The piece was “Many Many Women” (1933), a genre-bending work featuring a series of paragraphs all describing unidentified women referred to by the pronoun “she.”

The Meteorological Device: Literary Modernism, the Daily Weather Forecast and the Productions of Anxiety

By Barry Sheils,

If we were to attempt a history of the end of history, of how the conceptualization of the modern state produced the now familiarly assembled phenomena of governmentality, globalization, and climate change, then we would do well to look at the history of the modern weather forecast. There are several good reasons for this.

First, most generally, any such history of science returns the epistemological foundations of the present to the anthropology of modern scientific culture, enabling a comparative perspective on how environmental knowledge is gathered and used. Second, modern weather science represents a systematic understanding o

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“Rolls Rough”: William Carlos Williams on the Thrills and Ills of Automobility

By Joel Duncan

William Carlos Williams has consistently been coupled with automobiles both in the popular imagination and in his scholarly reception. In Jim Jarmusch’s 2016 film Paterson, Adam Driver’s character drives around Paterson, New Jersey, writing and reading poetry, not least that by Williams. The wonderful Voices & Visions documentary on Williams, aired on PBS in 1988, begins with a driver on the open road who then stops to write poetry on his “William C. Williams, M.D.” prescription pad. The coupling of driving with the long poem Paterson (1946–1958), which Jarmusch’s film solidifies, is anac

For the Record: Voice and Orality in Guillaume Apollinaire’s “Lettre-Océan”

By Irina Markina

The poet Guillaume Apollinaire was for the record. Between 1913 and 1914, he wrote repeatedly about the impact of recording technology on lyric poetry.

Corrosive Littoral: On the Beach with Kenneth Slessor

By Peter Kirkpatrick

The modernity of colonial nations has often seemed belated, but in Australia it has been especially troubled by ongoing doubts about the authenticity of the nation itself.

Global Autofictional Flânerie

By Shaj Mathew

He is a walking paradox: a loner who desires the crowd, “a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito,” a spectator who casts off his air of detachment, a skeptic who can experience states of childlike wonder, “an ‘I’ with an insatiable appetite for the ‘non-I.’” More gaze than body, he is a phantom of the arcade, “a mirror as vast as the crowd itself . . . a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness” (Baudelaire, “Painter,” 9). Who is this person? “Observer, philosopher . . . —call him what you will,” the flâneur is the modern man par excellence, an urban stroller who will always be encountered, en passant, in the act of capturing “the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent”—that is, the contradictory, enigmatic, and elusive condition otherwise known as modernity (13).

The Loose Mass, The Open Society, and the Co-operative Commonwealth: Altermodernities Between the Wars

By Randi Koppen

In their book Commonwealth from 2009, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri look forward to a commonwealth of the future, a true democracy of the multitude; reconceptualized forms of sociality and conviviality; a new culture and new modes of life, whose realization will require nothing less than “anthropological transformation.” While this new democracy is yet to come, for Hardt and Negri it has antecedents in a partially submerged history of altermodernity: a critical tradition in political modernism that proposes different alternatives to capitalist modernity while attempting to circumvent the negative dialectic of modernity/antimodernity.

Hart Crane: The “Architectural Art”

By Jo Gill

In the near-century since the publication of The Bridge (1930), Hart Crane has been widely recognized as the poet of urban modernity, or, in his own words, as a “suitable Pindar for the dawn of the machine age." He has been acclaimed as celebrant and critic, by turn, of America’s myth of itself and as a pioneer cartographer of the queer spaces of the modern metropolis. Paradoxically, perhaps, it is his rendering of the late nineteenth-century Brooklyn Bridge (designed by John Roebling, started in 1869 and opened in 1883), which has been taken as central to his vision of early twentieth-century America’s tensile complexity.

Tapestried Landscape: The Queer Influence of Roberto Burle Marx on Elizabeth Bishop’s Brazil

By Christopher Schmidt

“Marvelous and somehow sad, flamboyant, and threatening.”

The words are Elizabeth Bishop’s, writing in a letter to describe the extraordinary tropical plant life encountered at the Sítio Burle Marx, the hundred-acre home and nursery of Roberto Burle Marx, Brazil’s best-known landscape architect and a key figure in the country’s modernist movement. Although Bishop had already lived in Brazil for ten years when she wrote this, the Sítio Burle Marx, located on the western outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, was and continues to be an incomparably rich showcase for botanical exotica collected on the designer’s many scouting expeditions to remote Brazilian biomes.

Pillars of Process: Muriel Rukeyser, Franz Boas, and the Poetics of Birth

By Rowena Kennedy-Epstein, University of Bristol

In a 1947 letter to Ernst Boas, the son of anthropologist Franz Boas, the American writer Muriel Rukeyser confesses, “May I tell you how, as it begins to open before me, how much this inquiry into your father’s life is meaning to me? The stories are very beautiful, the clues to further meaning are illuminating. I begin to see the power of the connections. I am very happy to be doing this.” In the same letter she writes that she is pregnant, a “happy” complication to the work.