Transatlantic Modernism And The Us Lecture Tour

Many Americans' first encounter with international modernism came, not on the page, but in person--through the widespread phenomenon of the US lecture tour. Attending to these encounters, Transatlantic Modernism and the US Lecture Tour reroutes our understanding of modernism away from the magazines and other mass media that have so far characterized its circulation and toward the unique form of cultural distribution that coalesced around the tour. Offering many new and compelling archival insights, this volume works across an admirably broad cultural landscape to reveal the US lecture tour as a primary mover of modernism. The study highlights the role this circuit played in the formation of transatlantic modernism by following a diverse group of authors--Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats, Rabindranath Tagore, Gertrude Stein, and W. H. Auden--on their whistle-stop tours across America, illuminating in the process how this extremely physical form of circulation transformed authors into object-like commodities to be sold in a variety of performance venues. Moreover, it shows how these writers responded to such wide-ranging distribution by stretching their own ideas about modernist authorship. In doing so, Transatlantic Modernism and the US Lecture Tour adds to a critical tradition of exposing those popular dimensions of modernism that far exceeded its standard coterie definition while also uncovering something else: how the circuit's particular diversity of social contexts forced modernists to take on a new authorial flexibility that would allow them to make in-roads with practically any audience--elite, popular, and everything in between.

Marianne Moore and the Archives features new archival research to explore the work of a major American modernist poet, providing innovative approaches to Moore’s career as it is documented in her archives in Philadelphia. This volume is also the first that draws upon the Marianne Moore Digital Archive (MMDA).

Silent Film and the Formations of U.S. Literary Culture: Literature in Motion discovers the considerable impact of motion pictures on literary culture across the early decades of the twentieth century by exploring how motion pictures spurred change in twentieth century literature.

In Cybernetic Aesthetics, Heather A. Love makes a new contribution to ongoing debates about modern communication networks and information culture. This book draws from cybernetics theory and terminology to interpret experimental modernist texts, illustrating how cybernetic approaches to communication emerged long before World War II.

Modernism in Europe and modernism in the United States - at first glance these two concepts seem to be quite different if not opposing. European modernism, it appears, is innovative and even iconoclastic (Joyce, Schonberg, Gropius, Schwitters). American modernism, it would seem, is rather reconciliatory and even conservative (Fitzgerald, Gershwin, Wright and Hopper). The collection of essays in Transatlantic Modernism disproves this point. Transatlantic Modernism tackles the modes of transfer, translation, cross-fertilization and reinterpretation which actually characterize the complex relations between European and American cultures within the period of modernism. The essays collected in this volume cover a broad array of forms of cultural expression: literature (Doblin, Dos Passos, Faulkner etc.), philosophy (Bergson, James, Dewey), painting (Gleizes, Stella, Shahn), photography (Ray, Steichen, Sheeler), fashion (Poiret, Delaunay, Schiaparelli), film (Fox, Stroheim, Lubitsch), architecture (Bauhaus, Johnson, Hitchcock) and opera (Thomson, Stein).

A revisionary account of the evolution of twentieth-century modernism, concentrating on expressions of cultural localism in the modernist transatlantic.

“A cogent and innovative account of the politics of literary and artistic modernism in the early years of the Cold War . . . an exceptional book.” —Transatlantica In Transatlantic Aliens, Will Norman reorients our understanding of midcentury American culture by thinking dialectically about the interfusion of aesthetic and intellectual practices across both the cultural hierarchy and the Atlantic. Norman relays this critical narrative through a series of interlinked case studies of key figures, including C. L. R. James, Theodor Adorno, George Grosz, Raymond Chandler, Simone de Beauvoir, Vladimir Nabokov, and Saul Steinberg. He discovers the strange afterlives of European modernism in disorientating and uncanny juxtapositions: the aesthetics of French symbolism flicker among the neon signs of a small town in the dead of night, and echoes of Mondrian’s grids are observed in the form of a boardroom sales chart. At the heart of Transatlantic Aliens is a conception of alienation that encompasses both its political and aesthetic valences. What unites the exilic figures it addresses is the desire to transform the practical experience of alienation into a positive resource for criticizing and coping with a reconfigured postwar landscape. Addressed to scholars and readers of American and comparative literatures as well as of cultural history and visual culture, the book combines assessments of individual artworks, novels, and other texts with more distant readings spanning time and space. A gallery of color plates beautifully illuminates the book’s analysis. Examining hardboiled fiction through Flaubert, New Yorker cartoons through modernist painting, and Bette Davis through Hegel and Marx, Transatlantic Aliens challenges and changes the way we understand modernism’s place in midcentury American culture.

In studies of psychology’s role in modernism, Carl Jung is usually relegated to a cameo appearance, if he appears at all. This book rethinks his place in modernist culture during its formative years, mapping Jung’s influence on a surprisingly vast transatlantic network of artists, writers, and thinkers. Jay Sherry sheds light on how this network grew and how Jung applied his unique view of the image-making capacity of the psyche to interpret such modernist icons as James Joyce and Pablo Picasso. His ambition to bridge the divide between the natural and human sciences resulted in a body of work that attracted a cohort of feminists and progressives involved in modern art, early childhood education, dance, and theater.