Clusters
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Precarity, Caregiving, and Covid
Jul 24, 2024
In the years after the Spanish Flu, no one wanted to talk about it. Elizabeth Outka describes this phenomenon of cultural erasure in her timely book Viral Modernism (2019). [1] A global pandemic that killed more people than World War I was rarely represented directly in modernist literature. Illness was harder to memorialize than war; it challenged narrative structures; it was a miasma rather than a blast. In examining...
The World of Shakespeare and Company
May 28, 2024
What’s left to learn about Shakespeare and Company, Sylvia Beach’s bookshop and lending library in interwar Paris? The story of Shakespeare and Company has been told and retold—by Beach herself in Shakespeare and Company (1959) and The Letters of Sylvia Beach (2010), by Noël Riley Fitch in Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation (1984), and by Laure Murat in Passage de l’Odéon (2003). Ernest Hemingway mythologized the bookshop and lending library in A...
Global South Cinephilias
Mar 28, 2024
Though the term cinephilia simply means “love of cinema,” historically it has been used to mark a love of cinema with a difference. Whether it is understood broadly or in its most limited, conventional sense—as an impassioned, discriminating fervor for film that takes its cues from the film societies and cinémathèques of interwar and postwar France—cinephilia typically sets itself apart from “ordinary” film fans’ intense attachment to stars, genres, and visual spectacle, however generative...
Modernist Periodical Studies and the Transnational Turn
Dec 19, 2023
In his 1916 essay “Trans-national America,” Randolph Bourne rejects an anglophone, “Anglo-Saxon” vision of US society and culture. Like many of his contemporary writer-editors in multilingual New York, Bourne’s vision of a modern US literature was polyglot and polyvocal. And yet, with the essay rooted as it is in Bourne’s response to World War I, he continually restates the implications of borders alongside the uncomfortable reality of the strains of “orthodox nationalistic” sentiment...