Project MUSE®: Modernism/modernity - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/131
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Modernism/modernity.daily12026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 1 (1994) through current issueLatest Articles: Modernism/modernityTWOProject MUSE®Modernism/modernity1080-66011071-6068Latest articles in Modernism/modernity. Feed provided by Project MUSE®The Dispossessing of Sylvia Beach: Property, Autonomy, Personhood
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989243
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Sylvia Beach was a woman of property. Her “passion projects,” as Melanie Micir calls the rich variety of “queer feminist modernist practice[s]” that Beach and other creative women engaged in, included the founding of her Paris bookshop and lending library; her role as publisher, seller, and distributor of James Joyce’s Ulysses; and the writing of her memoir, Shakespeare and Company (1959).1 Beach took pride in giving the same name to her memoir that she had given to her bookshop. It was the pride of a property owner, but not one who sought to appropriate all things to herself; her phrase “and Company” signified hospitality: the variety of offerings on her bookshelves, the welcome traffic of writers and readers that
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/131/image/coversmallThe Dispossessing of Sylvia Beach: Property, Autonomy, Personhood2026-04-29text/htmlen-USThe Dispossessing of Sylvia Beach: Property, Autonomy, Personhood2026-04-292026TWOProject MUSE®1185442026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-29Roy Fisher’s City and the Affective Landscapes of Modernization
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989244
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Roy Fisher’s 1961 prose-poem City is an attempt to think through the cycles of urban unmaking and remaking as they imprint themselves on the city’s affective landscapes. On one hand, it is an intensely local poem, recalling Fisher’s native Birmingham in the postwar period. Like so many cities in Britain, Birmingham witnessed its own partial disappearance, not only in the form of wartime bombing but also in slum clearance and replanning programs, some dating to the interwar period. Yet, the “city” of the poem remains anonymous, speculative, and fragmentary. It resists the recuperative gestures of the postwar, which took both political and poetical form, and instead focuses on registering the affects of loss without
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/131/image/coversmallRoy Fisher’s City and the Affective Landscapes of Modernization2026-04-29text/htmlen-USRoy Fisher’s City and the Affective Landscapes of Modernization2026-04-292026TWOProject MUSE®1047892026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-29The Interracial Screen Kiss: Haptic Cinema and Racial Politics in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989245
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A kiss forms the punchline of Edwin S. Porter’s one-minute comedy film, What Happened in the Tunnel (1903).1A white man (Gilbert M. “Broncho Billy” Anderson) flirts with (or harasses) a white woman in a train carriage, while her Black maid (Bertha Regustus) looks on. The train passes through a tunnel and the screen plunges into darkness. As the train emerges into light, the man is revealed kissing the maid who has switched places with the other woman in order to play a “joke” on the man. The two women laugh, apparently in league with one another. The “joke” at face value both collapses class hierarchy and hinges upon the racist assumption that a Black woman would not be a proper object of desire for a white man.
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/131/image/coversmallThe Interracial Screen Kiss: Haptic Cinema and Racial Politics in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World2026-04-29text/htmlen-USThe Interracial Screen Kiss: Haptic Cinema and Racial Politics in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World2026-04-292026TWOProject MUSE®975892026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-29Joyce’s Syphilis Play: Pedagogy and the Public in “Circe”
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989246
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In the “Lestrygonians” episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses, as Leopold Bloom walks toward the Liffey around lunchtime, the flowing water triggers his memory of an advertisement posted above Dublin’s urinals. “That quack doctor for the clap used to be stuck up in all the greenhouses,” he recalls.1 “Strictly confidential. Dr. Hy Franks. Didn’t cost him a red . . . self advertisement. Got fellows to stick them up himself for that matter on the q. t. running in to loosen a button. Flybynight. Just the place too. POST NO BILLS. POST 110 PILLS. Some chap with a dose burning him” (Joyce, Ulysses, 8.98–101). Bloom, an advertising man himself, admires the diligence of Dr. Hy Franks’s cheap, self–made campaign and the aptitude
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/131/image/coversmallJoyce’s Syphilis Play: Pedagogy and the Public in “Circe”2026-04-29text/htmlen-USJoyce’s Syphilis Play: Pedagogy and the Public in “Circe”2026-04-292026TWOProject MUSE®1204282026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-29What was an Emotion? T. S. Eliot and Bertrand Russell
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989247
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In 1927, T. S. Eliot gave Bertrand Russell a piece of advice: “Why don’t you stick to mathematics?”1 Russell’s attempts to become a public philosopher were, he felt, an embarrassment. Why I Am Not a Christian (1927), for instance, was quite simply a “pathetic . . . document.”2 This was a predictable response, perhaps, from a recent convert—indeed, Eliot later claimed that “the spectacle of Bertie” was a contributing factor to his conversion (Letters, 6:562). However, Russell’s guide to atheism was also a risible intellectual performance (Eliot deemed himself familiar with its arguments since “the age of six or eight” [3:568]). Russell was a many-headed hydra in Eliot’s eyes: he was a deeply credulous man who liked
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/131/image/coversmallWhat was an Emotion? T. S. Eliot and Bertrand Russell2026-04-29text/htmlen-USWhat was an Emotion? T. S. Eliot and Bertrand Russell2026-04-292026TWOProject MUSE®993302026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-29Late Modernism’s “Sick Souls”: The Modernist Mind Science of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989248
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“But I would somewhere near as soon die (or enter a narcotic world) as undergo full psychoanalysis. I don’t trust anyone on earth that much; and I see in every psychoanalyzed face a look of deep spiritual humiliation or defeat; to which I prefer at least a painful degree of spiritual pain and sickness.”1The “spiritual pain and sickness” James Agee prefers over psychoanalysis invites a reconsideration of his collaboration with Walker Evans in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1936/1941) from the perspective of Harvard philosopher and psychologist William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), specifically through the lens of the “sick soul” in search of both spiritual regeneration and psychic
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/131/image/coversmallLate Modernism’s “Sick Souls”: The Modernist Mind Science of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men2026-04-29text/htmlen-USLate Modernism’s “Sick Souls”: The Modernist Mind Science of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men2026-04-292026TWOProject MUSE®1156322026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-29The Ethical Labor of Reading James Agee’s Ekphratic Descriptions
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989249
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James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) is, among other things—a Depression-era documentary photobook, a personal confession, a scathing critique of the state of journalism—a reflection on the relationship between text and image. The book documents the lives of three families of white, Alabama tenant farmers in several dozens of Evans’s photographs and over four-hundred pages of Agee’s prose. In his preface, Agee describes the two media as “co-equal, mutually independent, and fully collaborative,” thus refuting the idea that the photographs are merely “illustrative” or subordinate to his text.1 In fact, he frequently and emphatically declares Evans’s medium superior to his own as a means
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/131/image/coversmallThe Ethical Labor of Reading James Agee’s Ekphratic Descriptions2026-04-29text/htmlen-USThe Ethical Labor of Reading James Agee’s Ekphratic Descriptions2026-04-292026TWOProject MUSE®1075532026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-29Paper Processors: Modern Manuscripts and the Pre-History of Digital Humanities by Alex Christie, and: Poetry’s Data: Digital Humanities and the History of Prosody by Meredith Martin (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989250
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In the first flush of text-based, web-published digital humanities projects, modernist literary studies has had a fairly thin representation, excluded largely by an accident of copyright. Literary scholarship from the Victorian period and earlier has relied on open-access text to build digital editions, digitizing, encoding, and circulating texts for scholarly and public audiences. Modernist literature’s exclusion from the public domain has, on one hand, delayed modernist scholarly participation in text encoding and web publishing.1 And on the other, it has produced projects that work against the grain of these restrictions, focusing instead on metadata, archival context, or creative response.2 Nevertheless, the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/131/image/coversmallPaper Processors: Modern Manuscripts and the Pre-History of Digital Humanities by Alex Christie, and: Poetry’s Data: Digital Humanities and the History of Prosody by Meredith Martin (review)2026-04-29text/htmlen-USPaper Processors: Modern Manuscripts and the Pre-History of Digital Humanities by Alex Christie, and: Poetry’s Data: Digital Humanities and the History of Prosody by Meredith Martin (review)2026-04-292026TWOProject MUSE®277202026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-29Engagements with Aimé Césaire: Thinking with Spirits by Jason Allen-Paisant (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989251
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“Ringing Othello,” the first poem in Jason Allen-Paisant’s 2023 collection Self-Portrait as Othello, ends with a summons:These are apt words to describe his latest book, Engagements with Aimé Césaire: Thinking with Spirits. This time, Allen-Paisant does not ring Shakespeare’s Othello but the Martinican poet and statesman Césaire. It is a fulsome ringing: a call, an invocation, a record, a type of worship (as in the ring shout of enslaved Africans in the United States). Allen-Paisant is uniquely equipped for it, as another Caribbean poet who cut his teeth at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, Césaire’s alma mater. His poetic practice and multilingualism prime him to recognize the interoperability of Césaire’s
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/131/image/coversmallEngagements with Aimé Césaire: Thinking with Spirits by Jason Allen-Paisant (review)2026-04-29text/htmlen-USEngagements with Aimé Césaire: Thinking with Spirits by Jason Allen-Paisant (review)2026-04-292026TWOProject MUSE®155022026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-29Chaos and the Clean Line: Writings on Franco-British Modernism by Stephen Romer (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989252
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Stephen Romer’s Chaos and the Clean Line: Writings on Franco-British Modernism gathers essays, reviews, and papers written and mostly published between 1986–2023; a couple of the essays were written for this volume, and several papers that were never previously published have been redacted and further developed for inclusion here. But if it were not for Romer’s “Notes on the Text” I rather doubt I would have noticed. Everything here feels of our moment. What’s more, collected in this way, these essays produce a cumulative impact that is both pointed and powerful. A respected poet himself, as well as a scholar whose work has long resisted the dogma of academic fashion, Romer cares deeply about language and poetic
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/131/image/coversmallChaos and the Clean Line: Writings on Franco-British Modernism by Stephen Romer (review)2026-04-29text/htmlen-USChaos and the Clean Line: Writings on Franco-British Modernism by Stephen Romer (review)2026-04-292026TWOProject MUSE®141362026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-29Lineages of the Global City: Occult Modernism and the Spiritualization of Democracy by Shiben Banerji (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989253
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Shiben Banerji’s remarkable, must-read monograph, Lineages of the Global City: Occult Modernism and the Spiritualization of Democracy, brings readers into the imagined urban spaces of modernist designers and architects working for and dreaming about a new age. Bewitched by occult teachings of Theosophists like Madame Blavatsky and Annie Besant and Anthroposophists Rudolph Steiner and Guenther Wachsmuth, Banerji’s occult modernists attempted through verbal, visual, and built representations to produce a new subject who would abandon the false promises of political movements and institutions for the more certain elevations of spirit conjured by plans for urban spaces. Through the architects’ mediations, ordinary
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/131/image/coversmallLineages of the Global City: Occult Modernism and the Spiritualization of Democracy by Shiben Banerji (review)2026-04-29text/htmlen-USLineages of the Global City: Occult Modernism and the Spiritualization of Democracy by Shiben Banerji (review)2026-04-292026TWOProject MUSE®115322026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-29Genetic Criticism and its Logics: The Draft and the Text by Daniel Ferrer (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989254
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Daniel Ferrer’s extensive contributions to genetic criticism come to a perfect culmination in his monograph, Genetic Criticism and its Logics. Whereas most of his previous genetic interventions focus on specific authors like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Émile Zola, and Gustave Flaubert, Genetic Criticism and its Logics: The Draft and the Text intermixes literature, paintings, films, photographs, and cooking recipes and explores the essence of genetic criticism across multiple media. The book was originally published in French, titled Logiques du brouillon: Modèles pour une critique génétique by Éditions du Seuil in 2011 and enriched a robust array of French language genetic critical studies. The book has now been
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/131/image/coversmallGenetic Criticism and its Logics: The Draft and the Text by Daniel Ferrer (review)2026-04-29text/htmlen-USGenetic Criticism and its Logics: The Draft and the Text by Daniel Ferrer (review)2026-04-292026TWOProject MUSE®130572026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-29The Idea of Indian Literature: Gender, Genre, and Comparative Method by Preetha Mani (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989255
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Preetha Mani’s The Idea of Indian Literature is a valuable addition to recent scholarship that counters several deeply entrenched tendencies in the study of Indian languages and literatures. The study of South Asian literatures in the West has often been indifferent to the relation between its literary history and the diversity of regional languages. Eighteenth-century Europe imposed on South Asian literary studies conceptual models preoccupied with origins and lines of descent, evidenced by the fascination with Sanskrit, which was coded as pure, original, and classical. The plurality of languages and their dynamic interactions, which characterized the early-modern Indian literary cultures, were rarely recognized
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/131/image/coversmallThe Idea of Indian Literature: Gender, Genre, and Comparative Method by Preetha Mani (review)2026-04-29text/htmlen-USThe Idea of Indian Literature: Gender, Genre, and Comparative Method by Preetha Mani (review)2026-04-292026TWOProject MUSE®135572026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-29The Dialectic of Cosmopolitan Time by Shaj Mathew (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989256
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Readers of Modernism/modernity will find a useful new instrument in their critical toolbox with Shaj Mathew’s Dialectic of Cosmopolitan Time. Responding to the fields of comparative literature and postcolonial studies, Mathew’s “project of non-secular criticism” “proposes a new aspect of cosmopolitanism: the temporal quality of cultural ‘coexistence’” (22, 3). It does so through a reframing of temporal understanding that aims to move beyond earlier models of time, specifically those that emerged during and after the colonial period and produced “the experience of belatedness that modernity imposed onto the Global South” (10). To do so, Mathew first guides readers in a pithy introductory chapter through the robust
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/131/image/coversmallThe Dialectic of Cosmopolitan Time by Shaj Mathew (review)2026-04-29text/htmlen-USThe Dialectic of Cosmopolitan Time by Shaj Mathew (review)2026-04-292026TWOProject MUSE®105642026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-29Enchanted But Enchained: Harriet Monroe, W. E. B. Du Bois, and the Grand Canyon
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989327
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Scholars often foreground the centrality of the urban environments of Paris, London, New York, and Dublin (among others) as the inspiration for modernism’s formal experimentation.1 As the narrative traditionally goes, the fragmented quality of modernist aesthetics reflects the complexities of urban technological experience, an experience which, critics argue, is rife with disorienting stimuli and new technologies.2 What’s less well-known is that some of modernism’s most important tastemakers and power brokers, particularly in the US context, turned at the same time to the newly emergent national parks as a resource for experimentation and artistic innovation.In this article, I plumb the surprising depth of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/131/image/coversmallEnchanted But Enchained: Harriet Monroe, W. E. B. Du Bois, and the Grand Canyon2026-04-29text/htmlen-USEnchanted But Enchained: Harriet Monroe, W. E. B. Du Bois, and the Grand Canyon2026-04-292026TWOProject MUSE®1084242026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-29