Postmodern Genres
Review of Weimar On the Pacific
German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism.
Erhard Bahr. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007. Pp. xvii + 358. $39.95 (cloth).
Modernism/Modernity, 15, 2 (2008)
Between 1933 when Hitler came to power and the end of the Second World War, Los Angeles became the (mostly temporary) home of an illustrious set […]
The Search for “Prime Words”: Pound, Duchamp and the Nominalist Ethos
Paideuma, 32, 1-3 (2003), 205-28. Also in Ezra Pound and Referentiality (Paris; Presses de l’UniversitÈ de Paris-Sorbonne, 2003): 191-210.
but Wanjina is, shall we say, Ouan Jin
or the man with an education
and whose mouth was removed by his father
because he made too many things
whereby cluttered the bushman’s baggage.
[…]
Victorian Modernism
Victorian Modernism: Pragmatism and the Varieties of Aesthetic Experience
Jessica R. Feldman. Cambridge and London: Cambridge University Press, 2002. xiii + 261pp. $60.00.
“From the modernism that you want,” the poet David Antin has quipped, “you get the postmodernism you deserve.” It is an adage that applies nicely to Jessica R. Feldman’s argument: from the modernism that she wants, she gets […]
Hugh Kenner and the Invention of Modernism
“Art,” quips Hugh Kenner in A Homemade World (1975) “lifts the saying out of the zone of things said.”1 The reference is to William Carlos Williams’s poems, such as “The Red Wheelbarrow,” that don’t seem to “say” anything profound and yet are brilliantly articulated. It is a notion close to Wittgenstein’s adage “that a poem, although it is composed in the language of […]
Modernism Now
The great revolution of the early twentieth century designated by the term Modernism—a term that refers not only to a period (roughly 1900-1930) but to an ethos—remains, at the beginning of our own century, incomplete and open to the future […]
The Aura of Modernism
published in Modernist Cultures, Vol. 1: Issue 1, Spring 2005.
In a discussion of Walter Benjamin’s famous “Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproducibility,” Andreas Huyssen writes:
In the context of social and cultural theory Benjamin conceptualized what Marcel Duchamp had already shown in 1919 in […]
English As A Second Language
MINA LOY’S “ANGLO-MONGRELS AND THE ROSE”
published in Mina Loy: Woman and Poet, ed. Maeera Schreiber and Keith Tuma (National Poetry Foundation, 1996), pp. 131-48. Rpt. in French translation in Après l’usure de toutes les routes: Retour sur l’épopée, Volumes 49-50 of in ‘hui, ed. Jacques Darras (Brussels, 1997): 127-145; trans. Dominque Goy-Blanquet
“These girls,” wrote Ezra Pound in the Little Review (1918), referring to […]