Showing papers in "Modernism/modernity in 2016"

The Modern Synthesis: Genetics and Dystopia in the Huxley Circle

Abstract: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) has influenced public debates over genetics more profoundly than any other work of literature, with the possible exception of Frankenstein. Both works have been misremembered, misunderstood, and misused in polemical contexts more often than not. In Huxley’s case, the problem arises from readers failing to admit that his satire cuts in more than one direction. The novelist was witness to the birth of the modern synthesis in biology, and he was a strong advocate of the biological sciences. But he was a moral relativist and a satirist too, and he was always ready to satirize the people he loved and the ideas he embraced. He had the curse of being able to see through everything. To grasp the real meaning of Brave New World for society today, we need to understand Huxley’s relationship to both the modern synthesis and the art of satire. To scientists, “the modern synthesis” names the shift in biology that occurred in the years between the two world wars when scientists brought together Darwin’s theory of evolution with the new science of genetics. One of the pioneers of the modern synthesis was J. B. S. Haldane, a longtime friend of Aldous Huxley; another proponent was the novelist’s older brother, Julian Huxley. Haldane (along with R. A. Fisher and Sewall Wright) demonstrated with compelling mathematical analyses that Darwin was correct to assert that natural selection was the primary cause of evolution. Adding genetics to the theory of evolution supplied one of the key elements missing from Darwin’s concept, namely an understanding of how the inheritance of traits actually took m ode rnism / modernity

"Never twice the same": Fantômas's Early Seriality

Abstract: the chair of American Studies at Leibniz University in Hannover, Germany. Her most recent book publication is Serial Fu Manchu: The Chinese Super-Villain and the Spread of Yellow Peril Ideology (Temple University Press, 2014). She is a member of the research unit “Popular Seriality: Aesthetics and Practice” (BerlinHannover-Göttingen), where she is currently directing a project on the cultural productivity of film serials from 1910 to 1940. “Never twice the same”: Fantômas’s Early Seriality

Moving Pictures: Magic Lanterns, Portable Projection, and Urban Advertising in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract: In 1896, bodybuilder Eugen Sandow sat at a desk to devote himself to a mental task, rather than a physical one. He had recently returned to England from a trip to the United States, where he had collaborated with inventor W. K. L. Dickson on a mutoscope reel, an early moving-picture technology, and had posed for X-ray photographs after indicating his interest in the subject to Thomas Edison, who was proudly advertising his patented process for X-rays and fluoroscopes.1 Now, though, Sandow was working on his own invention. Self-consciously identifying himself as a “Professional Athlete,” he drafted a patent application for what he called a “novel and effective portable method of advertising” (figs. 1, 2).2 This mobile moving-picture device was to be mounted on a human body that would walk the streets while projecting lantern slides or films, bringing novel meaning to the newly developing media and the bandied-about terms of “moving pictures” and “living pictures.” Sandow’s device for portable projection engaged with and re-conceptualized contemporary issues of mobility, technology, consumption, and urban spectacle. Although the proposed machine was never brought into mass production, this patent transforms our understanding of the history of “screen practice,” as articulated by Charles Musser, by proposing a mobile screen borne on the body of a pedestrian, meant to circulate through the city at night; it also expands our view of broader practices of urban advertising, media experimentation, and perception.3 The patent specification, emerging only a few m ode rnism / modernity

"Cosmopolitan Sympathies": Poetry of the First Global War

Abstract: Paul Fussell’s judgment of Rosenberg’s “Break of Day in the Trenches” (1916) as perhaps “the greatest poem of the war,” or at least one of the best, still finds broad assent in Great War scholarship.2 But in one of several departures from Fussell’s groundbreaking book, The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), recent criticism has begun to address the global dimensions of a global war—for example, recovering the experience and cultural expression of soldiers from the dominions and colonies, as of observers elsewhere far from the Western Front.3 Rosenberg’s poem reminds us that, for all the traditional emphasis on the English upbringing and values behind much well-known war poetry, even such quintessentially “English” war poems sometimes also have a transnational reach, if we take seriously their “cosmopolitan sympathies.” Not that Rosenberg’s “Break of Day in the Trenches” is representative. Most Great War poetry is either nationalist or panimperial, famously exemplified by Rupert Brooke’s anglicization of earth and heaven in “The Soldier” and John McCrae’s bellicose torch toss in “In Flanders Fields.” Such works demonstrate, if m ode rnism / modernity volum e twe nty thre e , num b e r four, p p 855–874. © 2016

A Fugue on Camp

Abstract: Camp is a midwife in the birth of melodrama. Allan Pero is Associate Professor of English and a member of the core faculty at the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at the University of Western Ontario. He is currently working as editor and contributor to An Encyclopedia of Cultural Theory for the University of Toronto Press and is coediting (with Gyllian Phillips) an essay collection on Edith Sitwell. He is also working on a booklength study of camp and modernism. modernism / modernity volume twenty three, number one, pp 28–36. © 2016

Elaborations of the Machine: The Automata Ballets

Abstract: In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a number of ballets entered the classical repertory that featured marionettes and activated dolls. Arlequinada (1900), Die Puppenfee (1903), Petrouchka (1911), and the immediate parent of these productions, Coppélia (1870), all focus on the imitation of living people through the movements of automatized figures. Coppélia, the first of these pieces, opened during a prolonged period of malaise—stretching back to the 1850s—in European ballet, in which dancing veered more toward repetitive athletic feats than expressive movement.1 Four decades later, Petrouchka continued the satirical work of Coppélia. Impressed by the unfettered movements of Isadora Duncan, whom he had seen perform several years before, Michel Fokine, Petrouchka’s choreographer, used marionettes and automata to mock the mechanical virtuosity at the heart of ballet’s aesthetic and to display the oppressive control and regimentation of individual bodies by the maîtres de ballet en chef. Yet the full explanation of why suddenly there were performances featuring automata remains untold and extends well beyond the world of dance into late nineteenth-century automata manufacture and physiological studies of human automatism. Although the automata used in the ballets recalled older exhibition figures like Wolfgang von Kempelen’s automaton chess player (“the Turk”), they more immediately resembled the small and affordable toys manufactured for individual purchase by Parisian toymakers.2 These objects showcased the ever-expanding capabilities of moving machines, just as a branch of contemporary science was questioning the physiological distinctions between modernism / modernity

Cybernetic Modernism and the Feedback Loop: Ezra Pound's Poetics of Transmission

Abstract: Fed up with the crowded and cacophonous world of early twentieth-century media culture, Ezra Pound makes this grouchy declaration in the early pages of his 1938 Guide to Kulchur.1 As he sees it, the world is becoming ever more saturated with disorganized information, and readers of all persuasions are in desperate need of tools to help them negotiate their social reality. These sentiments underscore Pound’s commitment, in both his critical writing and his poetry, to developing communication strategies capable of sifting through and making sense of modernity’s “heteroclite mass of undigested information.” In the pages to come, I trace how this ambition permeates the infamous Radio Rome broadcasts and finds powerful creative expression in the poetics of the Chinese History Cantos. Most crucially, though, I cast this valence, which is not only an aspect of Pound’s writing but also literary modernism more broadly, as an aesthetic counterpart to the technological and scientific discourse of World War II cybernetics. Cybernetics was the brainchild of Norbert Wiener, an MIT mathematician who maintained such a highly fraught influence on the field of twentieth-century communication technology that recent biographers have hailed him as the “dark hero of the information age.”2 Wiener coined “cybernetics” by adapting the modernism / modernity

Out of the Archive: Woolfian Domestic Economies

Abstract: a Reader in English at the University of Sussex, where she codirects the Centre for Modernist Studies. In addition to articles on James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Dada, and affective states such as sulking, she is the author of Prosaic Desires: Modernist Knowledge, Boredom, Laughter, and Anticipation (2010). She edited Stories and Essays of Mina Loy (2011) and edited, with Peter Nicholls, On Bathos: Literature, Art, Music (2010; 2012). She is currently completing a book on Mina Loy and satire. Out of the Archive: Woolfian Domestic Economies

Atomic Screen Test

Abstract: sociate Professor of Cinema and Media Arts and English at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of Theaters of Occupation: Hollywood and the Reeducation of Postwar German (University of Minnesota Press, 2008) and co-author of Film Noir: Hard-Boiled Modernity and the Cultures of Globalization (Routledge, 2010). Her current project is tentatively titled Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene. modernism / modernity

Modernism and the Medicalization of Sunlight: D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, and the Sun Cure

Abstract: The sunset seems to arrive from nowhere, “a hint of heavenly bright petals.” Mansfield’s description suggests an echoic opening and closing between the sunset and Mansfield’s own body’s response to it. The day opens for the sunset, unfolding: “I had thought the day folded and sealed,” and there’s a sudden softening in Mansfield’s own emotions: “that hard thing in my breast melted and broke.” The description blurs the boundaries between Mansfield and the sunset, as if she is imbibing it (“I drank the sky”). When Mansfield mentions the “whisper” it’s not clear what it is that is whispering, though it seems to pick up on the soundscape of Mansfield’s own thoughts: “that hard thing in my breast . . . broke into the smallest fountain murmuring.” There’s a sense of disorientation, too, as Mansfield grasps for what is happening to her with a shape-changing metaphor, moving from the vague reference to “that hard thing in my breast,” which breaks into “the smallest fountain.” All of this disorientation and sense of infiltration by the sunlight and vague ungraspable transformation prompts, finally, a reflection on force and submission. modernism / modernity volume twenty three, number two, pp 423–441. © 2016

Histories of the Future: The Institute of Contemporary Arts and the Reconstruction of Modernism in Post-war Britain

Abstract: turer in 20th and 21st century British Literature at the University of Southhampton. He is the author of articles on Samuel Beckett, Doris Lessing, and coeditor of Doris Lessing and the Forming of History, forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press. He is currently working on a book on the relationship between the postwar novel and visual art. Histories of the Future: The Institute of Contemporary Arts and the Reconstruction of Modernism in Postwar Britain

What Meaning Follows Form?: Miss Lonelyhearts 's Inhuman Aesthetics

Abstract: Assistant Professor of American Literature and American Studies at the University of East Piedmont, Vercelli, Italy, and teaches in the Master in American Studies program at the University of Torino. She is author of Effetti Teorici: critica culturale e nuova storiografia letteraria Americana (2002), Giusto il tempo di esplodere: il romanzo pop di Nathanael West (2004), and Spell it Modern: Modernity and the Question of Literature (2009). modernism / modernity volume twenty three, number three, pp 573–592. © 2016

Sur l'Eau, or How to Read Adorno: Guy de Maupassant and the Negative Dialectic of Utopia

Abstract: It is doubtful that Theodor Adorno ever saw the results of his appeals to Walter Benjamin to read Guy de Maupassant’s “La nuit. Cauchemar” (1887). With Benjamin’s death in September of 1940 the revision of the Baudelaire essay mentioned above was not published until well after Adorno had also passed away.2 Five years after Benjamin’s final letter, however, Maupassant makes an appearance in one of Adorno’s own works, Minima Moralia (1951), at the conclusion of an aphorism that would itself appear to stand in a dialectical relation to both the solitude of “La nuit” and the crowd and metaphysical “crime” of Edgar Allan Poe’s m ode rnism / modernity

Re-Reading the Arab Darwin: The Lewis Affair and Naguib Mahfouz's Palace of Desire

Abstract: On July 19, 1882, a professor of chemistry and geology, Dr. Edwin Lewis, cited the work of Charles Darwin in a commencement address to the graduating class of medical students at the Syrian Protestant College in Beirut. His reference was part of a talk entitled al-Ma‘rifah wa-l-‘ilm wa-l-h· ikmah (Knowledge, Science, and Wisdom) and centered more broadly on modern science and its relation to knowledge than on any lengthy exploration of Darwin’s theories.1 Nonetheless, in the years to come, this brief allusion ignited an intense series of debates that played out in academic journals, the popular press, and scholarly circles across the Arab world. In most of these discussions what was at stake was not merely Darwin’s propositions regarding the origin of man, but key epistemological assumptions about the boundaries of human reason and the explanatory force of empirical science. For Lewis, Darwin’s theories were important to an argument for the pursuit of scientific knowledge and, in his estimation, especially well suited to the graduating class. For the director of the College and others in the audience, the speech was heard as wholly inappropriate. The ensuing controversy sparked what would come to be known as the Lewis Affair and threatened to dissolve the Syrian Protestant College entirely. Darwin’s resonance was by no means limited to the Syrian Protestant College. In 1957, when the Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz published the second volume of his Cairo Trilogy, Qasr al-shawq (Palace of Desire), he devoted a chapter to a discussion of Darwin.2 The Trilogy, overall, becomes the site in modernism / modernity

Unfinished Transitions: The Dialectics of Rural Modernization in Latin American Fiction

Abstract: Associate Professor of Romance Languages at the University of Pennsylvania. Her first book, Capital Fictions: The Literature of Latin America’s Export Age (University of Minnesota Press), was published in 2013. She is currently writing a book on rural modernization and modernity in twentieth-century Latin America. Unfinished Transitions: The Dialectics of Rural Modernization in Latin American Fiction

Woolf's Secular Imaginary

Abstract: But the religious question long asked in modernist studies— what does modernism have to say about religion in a secularizing age—hinges on a more awkward question, the question that pushes the background of this question about religion into the foreground: what does modernism have to say about secularization? How have these writers imagined the emergence of secular social spheres and practices, and what have they taken these to be? What resources does modernism provide for the difficult, ongoing task of conceptualizing the secular as a distinctive cultural formation? In the modernizing West, the religious question is inseparable from the problem of the secular, yet in many fields of cultural analysis the secular frequently has been taken as an unproblematic norm against which to evaluate religion as the complex, aberrant, or fascinating cultural phenomenon in need of explanation. Much as whiteness once held the position among many in North America and Europe of an unremarkable racial category, or even a non-racial category, against which all others were considered remarkable, the secular too often has been taken in academic inquiry as qualitatively neutral, a condition that does not bear mentioning because it is itself unconditioned.1 As Talal Asad acknowledges at the beginning of his influential anthropological investigation of the secular, “because [it] is so much part of our modern life, it is not easy to grasp it directly. I think it is best pursued through its shadows, as it were.”2 Modernism, as a m ode rnism / modernity

Buenos Aires Bohème: Argentina and the Transatlantic Bohemian Renaissance, 1890–1910

Abstract: When best-selling Argentine novelist and intellectual giant Manuel Gálvez released the first volume of his memoirs in 1944, he expected readers to be surprised, even dismayed, by one of its revelations. “Thousands of people alien to the little world of writers, or those who live far from the literary scene, and even some young writers today, are convinced that between roughly 1900 and 1906 there existed in Buenos Aires a true bohemia, formed by men of letters and by journalists.”1 Nonsense, he scoffed. Fantasy! No such bohemian coast had ever existed on Argentine shores, declared Gálvez, who would only admit the presence of a few pathetic “pseudobohemians” in the Buenos Aires of his youth—all of them pale shadows of the heroic, penniless Parisian artists and writers of the 1840s made famous by Henri Murger’s Scènes de la vie de bohème (1849–51). “I read Murger’s novel,” snarled the great master, “exactly in those years of our pseudobohemia”; the experience, he claimed, left him with a “clear idea” of “what the life of bohemia was” and “what it has continued to be, more or less, until today, in Paris, the fatherland of bohemians” (Amigos y maestros, 134–35). Buenos Aires fell far short of the mark, as it so often did for the acerbic Gálvez, whose moralizing novels—in particular El mal metafísico (1916), Nacha Regules (1918), and Historia de arrabal (1922)—had long before established his distaste for the modern city, café life, and popular culture.2 Now he set his sights on another aspect of urban modernity. “I am going to destroy the legend” of Argentina’s “pseudobohemia,” he announced with considerable relish (134). modernism / modernity

Mexican Modernity, Science Magazines, and Scientific Personality: Santiago Sierra's El Mundo Científico (1877–78)

Abstract: co is Associate Professor in Spanish American Literature and Fellow in Spanish at Trinity College, University of Oxford. She is the author of Ghost-Watching American Modernity: Haunting, Landscape, and the Hemispheric Imagination (Fordham, 2012). Her current book project, Modernist Laboratories, explores the intersections of science and aesthetics in Spanish American print cultures from 1870 to 1910. Mexican Modernity, Science Magazines, and Scientific Personality: Santiago Sierra’s El Mundo Científico (1877–78)

The Institutionalization of the Postwar Poet

Abstract: Through the window of his first room in Center Building in St. Elizabeths Hospital, Ezra Pound could see the dome of the United States Capitol.1 When, over a century earlier and on the other side of the Atlantic, Shelley wrote that poets were the unacknowledged legislators of the world, he did not have in mind anything like the literal example of Pound, whose unmetaphorical attempts to be a political actor on the world stage had left him acknowledged by his own government as a traitor.2 Pound’s confinement within St. Elizabeths put him in more than merely literal, geographic proximity to the sources of official power that he had allegedly betrayed. From December 21, 1945, until his release on May 6, 1958, Ezra Pound, in a manner of speaking, held office in Washington, DC. Pound served as an unofficial poet laureate in the postwar period, both embodying and crucially helping to construct a powerful model of what a poet was— dangerous, dissenting, visionary, marginal, and, above all, mad. Pound, though, was not the only poet living in Washington, DC in the postwar years who commanded a view of the Capitol. If Pound was the unofficial poet laureate of the United States, then the consultant in poetry in the English language at the Library of Congress was the nation’s official unofficial poet laureate.3 The consultant’s view confirmed this more official status; whereas Pound could make out the distant Washington skyline through the hemlocks outside his window, the Capitol dome filled the modernism / modernity

Camp Modernism Introduction

Abstract: Professor of English and Distinguished Teaching Scholar at the University of Florida, and an associate editor for Contemporary Women’s Writing. Her most recent book is Women’s Poetry and Popular Culture; she is also the author of Auden and Documentary in the 1930s and the editor of Photo-Textualities: Reading Photographs and Literature. Douglas Mao is Professor of English at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Solid Objects: Modernism and the Test of Production and Fateful Beauty: Aesthetic Environments, Juvenile Development, and Literature 1860–1960 as well as the editor of the Longman Cultural Edition of E. M. Forster’s Howards End and the coeditor, with Rebecca Walkowitz, of Bad Modernisms. Camp Modernism Introduction

Lady Macbeth Goes to Hollywood

Abstract: An iconic photograph taken at a party at New York’s Gotham Book Mart commemorates Edith and Osbert Sitwell’s first lecture tour of the United States in 1948, and, more specifically, Edith Sitwell’s triumphant performance of Façade at the Museum of Modern Art. The Sitwells, seated on chairs, stare with great dignity into the camera, relics of a high modernist moment several decades past, while American literati, including Marianne Moore, Tennessee Williams, and Elizabeth Bishop, gather around them, standing, kneeling, leaning against bookshelves, even hanging off a ladder, to fit into the frame. By all accounts, the tour was a success, with the Sitwells giving readings and interviews and being feted as literary royalty in parties around the city and across the country. When Edith Sitwell returned to the United States two years later for the second tour, she had even bigger plans: more dates, and more cities, including a trip to Hollywood, where she would meet with George Cukor, who was considering a film based on her 1946 Fanfare for Elizabeth. Importantly, the attention would all be on her this time, as Osbert was by then too weak from Parkinson’s to participate. Lincoln Kirstein planned a staged spectacle starring Sitwell for the opening of her tour at MoMA, centered on a new poem he had commissioned her to write about the role of England in poetry, set to an original score and accompanied by dancers from his School of American Ballet. As Kirstein envisioned it, Sitwell would appear as “an Elizabethan Queen figure, partly conceived as a chess piece, partly out of Zuccaro.”56 When these plans fell through, in part because Stravinsky, Sitwell’s choice of composer, declined to participate, Sitwell insisted on taking the stage as Lady Macbeth to perform Melissa Bradshaw, whose research focuses on publicity, personality, and fandom in twentieth-century American literature and popular culture, teaches at Loyola University Chicago. Her book Amy Lowell, Diva Poet won the 2011 MLA Book Prize for Independent Scholars. She is currently working on an edition of Amy Lowell’s collected letters and a book on early twentiethcentury female poets and material culture titled “Collectable Women: Ephemera and the Poetry Archive.” modernism / modernity volume twenty three, number one, pp 23–27. © 2016