Living and writing in Reaganite America, Kathy Acker’s fiction is a sustained interrogation of the feasibility of classical revolutions in neoliberal late capitalism. This reading of Empire of the Senseless (1988) traces some of the overlooked affinities between Acker’s “punk feminism” and the feminist strand of futurism that challenges the Italian futurists’ anarchic and imperialist vision of technotopias. [1] Instead of passively accepting subjugation by a programmatic utopia that promises...

all the ad hoc committees, all the picket lines . . . all the tools of agitprop straight across the spectrum, do not confer upon anyone any ipso facto virtue. —Joan Didion

“Respectfully submitted for your perusal—a Kanamit. Height: a little over nine feet. Weight: in the neighborhood of three hundred and fifty pounds. Origin: unknown.” So begins Rod Serling’s characteristically clipped voice-over narration near the beginning of “To Serve Man,” a 1962 episode of the cannily uncanny half-hour television series The Twilight Zone, in which one such Kanamit arrives in his spaceship in New York City and soon afterward appears before the Security Council of the United Nations. There the hyperintelligent giant, speaking perfect English (though without moving his lips) offers Earthlings freedom from war, hunger, and disease—problems that the Kanamits themselves, he says, long ago overcame.[[{"fid":"2967","view_mode":"default","fields":{"format":"default","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"Stills from “To Serve Man.\"","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false},"type":"media","field_deltas":{"1":{"format":"default","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"Stills from “To Serve Man.\"","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false}},"link_text":null,"attributes":{"alt":"Stills from “To Serve Man.\"","class":"media-element file-default","data-delta":"1"}}]] Argentinian, French, and Soviet UN delegates are initially somewhat suspicious of the colossally-brained Kanamit, and pepper him politely but forcefully with questions in accented English, but after he passes a lie detector test, they (and, it seems, the entire UN General Assembly) are placated. The story focuses on Michael Chambers, an American “decoding specialist” whose initial responsibility it is to decipher the large book that the eloquent Kanamit leaves at the UN, the title of which Chambers’s assistant Patty soon renders as To Serve Man. But as the Kanamit’s promises have been borne out in a short time––there is no longer disease, hunger, or war anywhere in the world—Chambers’s task seems less and less necessary. Like many other Earthlings, he is planning to visit the plentiful, peaceful planet of the Kanamits, who have now established embassies in every major country on Earth. Just as Chambers is preparing to enter the Kanamits’ spaceship for his interplanetary journey, Patty, who has, off-screen, apparently been working assiduously on the translation, rushes toward the boarding ramp and, held back by a dapper Kanamit security guard, frantically cries out, “Mr. Chambers, don’t get on that ship! The rest of the book To Serve Man: it’s . . . it’s a cookbook!” But she is too late: the ramp is quickly closed and the spaceship lifts off in spectacularly low-tech fashion. The episode ends with Chambers on board the vessel being offered food gesturally by a Kanamit and verbally by his sinisterly unctuous voice: “Enjoy! Eat Hearty!”

French surrealism at mid-twentieth century was marked (some would say, marred) by André Breton’s new-found interest in esoteric knowledge—a period, argues Gavin Parkinson in his latest book, in which surrealism “willingly entered a critical and theoretical wilderness with its advocacy of magic and occultism in its art, poetry and theory, and its insistence on the ‘indispensable condition of enchantment’—the impenetrable nucleus of resistance to human inquiry that exists within any system of knowledge” (322). Parkinson’s justification for what he calls surrealism’s “journey into obscurity,” is an accomplished revisionist account of what has been treated as surrealism’s most misguided moment, one that Parkinson has successfully complicated—and recuperated—with the movement’s engagement with metaphor, symbolism, regional medievalism, and abstraction, as articulated by Breton’s concurrent assessment of fin-de-siècle French painting (323).

In the editorial statement of the first issue of Rhythm, John Middleton Murry writes: “Our intention is to provide art, be it drawing, literature or criticism, which shall be vigorous, determined, which shall have its roots below the surface, and be the rhythmical echo of the life with which it is in touch.” He would later explain that the magazine treated rhythm as “the distinctive element in all the arts, and that the real purpose of ‘this modern movement’ . . . was to reassert the preeminence of rhythm.” In 1911, Murry was articulating two foundational tenets of his conception of modernist art: first, different artistic media can and ought to be brought together and, second, rhythm is the principle under which the various arts can be unified. Though Rhythm, like many of the small magazines, had a narrow distribution and short print run, it is representative of a certain school of thought within modernism: one that understands particular formal structures and aesthetic principles as points of contact allowing for the co-existence and co-constitution of multiple artistic practices within one phenomenal space. The common and preeminent rhythmic elements of different media, this school of thought suggests, facilitate the composition of multimedial art. In the same way that fiction, poetry, and visual art could occupy the space between Rhythm’s covers, rhythm, as a distinctive element, could facilitate a combination of these individual practices. An aesthetic cornerstone of literature, visual art, music, film, and dance, rhythm also operates as a common principle such that it can extend beyond any singular mode and allow for the development of multimedial and multimodal works defining of this modern movement. Benjamin Britten and W. H. Auden, members of the generation that followed Murry’s, take up a similar theory of rhythm as unifying compositional principle in their collaborations; moreover, they extend and develop their theory of rhythmically organized art in order to utilize it in effecting zones of co-identification, such that the roots below the surface of various media can be understood as the same roots facilitating affective collectivization. One of the best-known teams in Anglophone vocal music, Britten and Auden worked together in the composition and setting of several pieces, but their collaborations on the documentary film Night Mail (1936) and their only full-length opera Paul Bunyan (1941) are their most ambitious in terms of the number and variety of incorporated media. Night Mail, a documentary produced by the GPO Film Unit, narrates and celebrates the mail’s nightly journey by train from southern England to Scotland, showcasing how the railway, like the Film Unit itself, provides a technological network of mediated connectivity across the country. Similarly, in Paul Bunyan (produced by Columbia University), the zone of the multimedia work itself, within which separate medial components are enjoined, mirrors the spatio-temporal zones in which social and affective communality occurs. Ultimately, it is the interconnected rhythms of music, text, and moving images that allow for the creation of a cohesive multimodality. I argue that what served a strictly aesthetic function in Murry’s conceptualization of multimodal modernism takes on, in late modernism, a social function. No longer is rhythm simply a feature shared by the arts and thus a potential point of connection among them; it is a feature with such collectivizing potential that the interconnected arts become a vehicle for affective interconnection among audiences.

Given the tradition that the Analects contain nothing superfluous, I was puzzled by the verses re length of the night-gown and the predilection for ginger. . . . Those passages of the Analects are, as I see it, there to insist that Confucius was a Chinaman, not born of a dragon, not in any way supernatural, but remarkably possessed of good sense. —Ezra Pound, The Confucian Analects

In the introduction to his superb book Realism after Modernism, Devin Fore describes a “shared modernist aspiration to achieve conditions of perception and consciousness outside of what is customarily arrogated to the human.” [1] He sees this as the tie that binds avant-garde movements across early twentieth-century Europe: from José Ortega y Gasset to Jean-François Lyotard, Paul Cezanne to Velimir Khlebnikov, modernism was a radically diverse enterprise with an eye to the aesthetic...

From 1920 to 1932, the Literary Digest—a weekly American magazine—accurately predicted the winner of each presidential election in the United States by conducting massive straw polls. In 1936, however, the magazine fell into irreparable ignominy when, after distributing over ten million questionnaires, the editors predicted a landslide victory for Republican candidate Alf Landon, only to have Franklin Roosevelt win handily, securing sixty-one percent of the popular vote. George Gallup’s American Institute of Public Opinion, founded just the year before, gained widespread notoriety for not only correctly predicting the election’s outcome using only 50,000 respondents, but also estimating the Digest poll’s error in advance of their publication, with a sample of just 3,000. Gallup took the technique of the questionnaire, made politically potent by mass print culture, yet still employed as a blunt instrument, and infused it with a newfound statistical rigor. Gallup’s confrontation with the Digest at once exemplified and accelerated the growing influence that questionnaires had in American culture in the 1930s, and particularly highlighted how modern periodicals might thrive—or wither—by using this technique to actively engage national political debates. The Literary Digest, founded in 1890, endured its shame only briefly, being sold in 1938 and shortly thereafter dissolved into Henry Luce’s Time. Gallup’s Institute, meanwhile, became a leading authority in evaluating public opinion, his name soon treated as metonymic for the use of modern, quantitative polling. Not all questionnaires from this transformative era in America culture, however, sought out quantitative consensus. Partisan Review, generally considered the most influential modernist “little magazine” in the United States from the 1930s through the 1950s, consistently employed questionnaires as a means to prompt its impressive network of authors and intellectuals into debating philosophical ideals, artistic movements, and political struggles. These questionnaires, or “symposia” as they were interchangeably called by Partisan Review’s editors, evince the magazine’s evolving commitments across its decades of cultural influence, from its early years as an organ of the Communist Party, signaled by “What is Americanism? A Symposium on Marxism and the American Tradition” in 1936, to its gradual turn towards a postwar liberal anticommunism, signaled by “Our Country and Our Culture” in 1952. For many critics, Partisan Review’s shift from the radicalism of the 1930s to the liberalism of the 1950s has served as an index for the growing aesthetic orthodoxy, and thus dwindling cultural vitality, of literary modernism, for which Partisan Review served as a leading institutional champion in the United States during these years. Even the preeminent, multivolume Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines (2012) neatly recapitulates this tragic narrative, proposing that “something had been lost or forgotten” as the “bohemian left intellectual environment of the 1910s and Masses had morphed through a period of Marxist position-taking into the emerging hegemony of the New York intellectuals, accompanied by a stable, conservative literary modernism.”

A brilliant and timely book, The Extinct Scene joins the growing list of scholarly works that deal with Anglo-British modernism in the middle of the twentieth century, such as Tyrus Miller’s Late Modernism (1999), Marina MacKay’s Modernism and World War II (2007), Leo Mellor’s Reading the Ruins (2011), Peter Kalliney’s Commonwealth of Letters (2013), and Gill Plain’s Literature of the 1940s (2013). These works establish continuities from the interwar years through the Second World War and into the era of British decolonization.