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Happy Modernisms

By Lorraine Sim,

Can modernism be happy? Or perhaps the question should be: can modernist studies be happy? These questions started to preoccupy me some time ago when I was seven weeks into teaching my undergraduate course in modernist literature at Western Sydney University. As we were about to turn our attention to Jean Rhys’s novel Voyage in the Dark (1934), I felt compelled to apologize to my students.

Literary Labor: Radclyffe Hall’s Reproductive Futures

By Hannah Roche,

Calling for the suppression of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness in the August 19, 1928 edition of the Sunday Express, moralist-sensationalist James Douglas claimed that he “would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel. Poison kills the body, but moral poison kills the soul.” This, of course, is not news. As Laura Doan has argued, the provocative “poison” passage has been quoted or misquoted in countless accounts of The Well and its trials, with Douglas’s “resonant acid sound bite”

“I will show you where your son lies”: Relocating Kipling’s “The Gardener” in 1920s Print Culture

By John Drew,

If an old-fashioned liberal humanist excuse were needed for revisiting Kipling’s “The Gardener” it could be found through combining Phillip Mallett’s contention that “Kipling is the greatest English writer of the short story” with Edmund Wilson’s roundabout confession that he is “not sure that [The Gardener] is not really the best story that Kipling ever wrote.”[1] Greatness and hierarchies aside, the cultural materialist might find

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).

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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.

Postcolonial Modernism and the Camera Eye: Eliot Elisofon’s Photographs of African Art

By Emily Hyde, Rowan University

1959: The Atlantic magazine devotes its April issue to “Africa South of the Sahara.” Articles on the politics of decolonization frame a large number of contributions on art and culture. A short story by Chinua Achebe appears alongside the work of Nadine Gordimer, Tom Mboya, Léon Damas, Léopold Sédar-Senghor, Amos Tutuola, and David Diop. “The Sacrificial Egg” is Achebe’s first story published in the United States, and its timing supports the US release of his novel Things Fall Apart. Unlike that classic novel, the story begins in a recognizably modern Nigeria, with a young clerk named Julius Obi sitting alone in a colonial shipping office, gazing at his typewriter.

Elizabeth Bishop and the Schizoaffectivity of Whiteness

By Michael Abraham

In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1993), Toni Morrison calls for “studies of the technical ways in which an Africanist character is used to limn out and enforce the invention and implications of whiteness. . . . Such studies,” she continues, “will reveal the process of establishing others in order to know them, to display knowledge of the other so as to ease and to order external and internal chaos.” In demonstrating the reflexive role that Africanist personae play in white American literature—the manner by which white people construct blackness as a screen for the projections that enable, through simultaneous disavowal and enforcement, their identifications as white—“Such studies will reveal the process by which it is made possible to explore and penetrate one’s own body in the guise of the sexuality, vulnerability, and anarchy of the other” (Morrison, Playing, 53).

Schlegel Capitalism: E. M. Forster and the Cultural Form of Modernist Adventure

By Sam Waterman, NCH

Margaret’s plea to her somewhat work-phobic younger brother might sound a little odd, since she does not—work, that is. Instead, as she enigmatically puts it in the preceding line, she “pretends” to work, engaging in a host of cultural activities with an energy redolent of work, perhaps, but with few of its economic imperatives. What this strange formulation pretending to work might mean in the context of E. M. Forster’s 1910 novel—indeed, in the context of 1910 more broadly—is one way to frame the question posed by this essay.

Maus, Modernism, and the Mass Ornament

By Georgiana Banita

A seemingly minor episode in Françoise Mouly’s biography holds special significance for the intersection of comics and the avant-garde during Art Spiegelman’s early career. In 1975, having arrived in New York with only $200 in her pocket and eager to improve her English by reading comics, Mouly had a part in Richard Foreman’s play Pandering to the Masses: A Misrepresentation, performed by his Ontological-Hysteric Theater at 491 Broadway. Despite her shaky command of English, Mouly had no trouble slipping into her role. Almost none of the dialogue was delivered live by the actors. The avant-garde director, seated on the edge of the stage with an electronic keyboard that spliced together music and speech, narrated the entire event. The play was a hit.

Willa Cather’s Queer Economy

By Joseph Dimuro

Whenever she found that monied interests were shaping aesthetic taste in American culture, Willa Cather decried the deleterious effects their contrary values had on what she called genuine art. In interviews, essays, stories, and novels written throughout the opening decades of the twentieth century, Cather’s critique of consumerism, in particular, took on what John N. Swift calls a “protest against a pervasive materialist commodity culture” and led her to create characters that Guy J. Reynolds claims “embody Cather’s suspicion of the corrosive impact of acquisitiveness, allied to her wariness about how economic modernism [was] producing an increasingly consumerist society.”

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