Modern American Research Articles

Poetic Repetition in Paterson

Paterson is a poem and a film about a man and a town, both called Paterson. Jim Jarmusch’s adaptation is a contemporary tribute not only to William Carlos Williams, Paterson’s author and a prominent figure of American modernity, but to the poetry of everyday life. Focusing on the repetition and transformation of scenes and gestures of daily routine as well as of characters, this analysis traces how poetry is adapted to the media of film, slowly revealing the beauty of ordinary existence, an essential theme in the work of Williams. Besides, questions of identity in the context of tradition are also discussed examining twins, a salient example of repetition in Jarmusch’s film.

New Directions in Print Culture Studies: Archives, Materiality, and Modern American Culture

New Directions in Print Culture Studies: Archives, Materiality, and Modern American Culture

The Narrative of Simulation in José Asunción Silva's De sobremesa

This article examines the narrative of simulation in De sobremesa [After-Dinner Conversation] (1925) by José Asunción Silva (1865-1896). Since its publication, De sobremesa has been read as an autobiographical novel, leading to an interpretation of the protagonist’s life as Silva’s own. This article expands on such critical approaches and sees the impetus behind the novel as Silva’s desire to obliterate his real-life circumstances. Through an analysis of the central element of simulation as the articulation between life and oeuvre, I interweave the novel’s characteristic narrative of excess and Silva’s life of loss and economic scarcity. By examining the accounts of Silva’s contemporaries and reading his correspondence, I explore the way he disfigures and reconfigures his real condition and financial bankruptcy in De sobremesa to project a world defined by wealth and luxury. In so doing, he rewrites his loss and constructs himself as an artifice, a literary sign, that has its fictitious counterpart in the character of José Fernández. The article proposes a reading of De sobremesa that reveals an intricate relationship between author and character, being and appearing, writing and consuming, and writing and simulating in late nineteenth-century Latin American modernity.

Placing ‘moderns’ in a ‘classic’ series: the case of J. M. Dent’s Everyman’s Library

AbstractThis study offers a reappraisal of Everyman’s Library, the mass-market series of world 'classics' launched by the British publisher J. M. Dent & Sons in 1906. The collection’s reliance on the 1842 and 1911 Copyright Acts has fostered a misconception within literary studies: namely, that reprint series were ‘impervious to novelty’. Conversely, I argue that ‘liveliness’ and ‘timeliness’—being in line with current trends and (re)printed at the right moment—became fundamental ‘classic’ attributes during the interwar years. Everyman advanced a rhetoric of the ‘new’ besides a rhetoric of the ‘old’, based on the idea that what consecrated both terms was only the passage of time, a gaze from the future. When Dent’s series started featuring more contemporaneous authors, the American Modern Library (1917), formally considered its modern(ist) alter ego, began including more ‘classic’ literature instead. Both series exploited the tension between ancients and moderns as profitable: Confucius and Horace were advertised as ‘the classics which are still modern: the modern works which have become classics’. Exploring the blurry boundaries between ‘classic’ and ‘modern’ as marketing categories, this paper draws on the J. M. Dent & Sons Records, Chapel Hill to bridge the gap between modernism and mass production.

Modern American History and the Smithsonian

Modern American History and the Smithsonian

Innovation through anachronism: The Pony Express, media, and American modernities

Historically, the relationship between innovation and technology has formed an important element of Euro-American identity. However, such a view ignores older or alternative media forms and practices, contributing to a conception of modernity as future-oriented, obscuring the importance of transitional moments during which the value and meaning of new media develop and new senses of community identity can be defined. As we live through a transitional moment with new forms of technological media emerging in shortening cycles of time and with American identity in conflict and flux, re-assessing the relationship between innovation, technological media, and modernity is urgent. The mid-19th century likewise was a time of social, technological, and cultural change. Following a media archeological method, I focus on a messaging system from the 19th century, the Pony Express, which was in operation for only 18 months, but became a media phenomenon whose imaginative influence lasted into the 21st century. The Pony Express’s success as a messenger demonstrates how an anachronistic communications system solved a problem of American modernization – the need for networked connection across long distances – and shows how such a system provided imaginative and iconographic frameworks for maintaining a sense of American identity at a time of change.

Concepts of Domestic Space and the New Family in Rabbit Hole and Clybourne Park

This article examines two modern American plays, Rabbit Hole (2006) by David Lindsay-Abaire and Clybourne Park (2010) by Bruce Norris, in order to demonstrate the changing characteristics of domestic spaces. These plays depict the ways in which characters’ identities and familial dynamics are influenced by disruptions to their home lives, shifts in representations of femininity, the decline of patriarchy, and the generation gap. Although domestic dramas are often criticized for perpetuating negative stereotypes about women, these plays challenge these perceptions in several ways. The families depicted in both plays are white, heterosexual, and relatively affluent, and while they may conform to societal norms in terms of race, sexuality, and wealth, they still reflect changes in power dynamics within contemporary American society. These families have become a site for social progress and a symbol of the weakening of patriarchal structures. This trend is slow but steady, offering insight into the evolving dynamics of family values and gender roles, and providing a clear picture of the ongoing changes within families. Both plays address a variety of issues that contemporary American families face, from dysfunctionality to communication breakdowns, and offer innovative solutions while presenting a different family structure than that of previous generations.

Transmission and Development of Musical Art

American music has developed over a relatively long period of time, but it was only in the early part of the last century that it developed a unique style that has an important place in the musical development of the world. The American environment has seen the formation of different ethnic and national music, as well as different musical styles, which have influenced and blended with each other to promote the development of American music. American modern music has gone through several stages of development, and it has not only formed a certain influence on the local American culture but also influenced the development of music throughout the world. This paper analyzes the heritage and development history of musical art and explains its influential role.

Come‐from‐behind victories under ranked‐choice voting and runoff: The impact on voter satisfaction

AbstractBoth ranked‐choice voting (RCV) and runoff seek to prevent the election of candidates with only minority support by enabling more broadly approved rivals to win through come‐from‐behind victories (CFBVs). Although CFBVs are intrinsic to RCV and runoff, they have received little scholarly attention. This study suggests that, amid voters' status quo bias, CFBVs provoke dissatisfaction. In a survey experiment fielded on U.S. voters, CFBVs under RCV significantly reduced satisfaction, while there was a weaker negative effect under runoff. Similarly, RCV was repealed or faced a visible repeal attempt in the vast majority of U.S. jurisdictions that experienced a CFBV in the first or second use of the rule. This was not the case for runoff. We encourage greater voter education, including regarding the rationale for and mechanics of CFBVs under RCV as well as consideration of runoff and other rules that encourage the election of candidates with majority support.Related ArticlesMcCarthy, Devin, and Jack Santucci. 2021. “Ranked Choice Voting as a Generational Issue in Modern American Politics.” Politics & Policy 49(1): 33–60. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12390.Nielson, Lindsay. 2017. “Ranked Choice Voting and Attitudes toward Democracy in the United States: Results from a Survey Experiment.” Politics & Policy 45(4): 535–70. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12212.Stiers, Dieter. 2019. “Static and Dynamic Models of Retrospective Voting: A Clarification and Application to the Individual Level.” Politics & Policy 47(5): 859–76. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12324.

Coeval Dancefutures in the Nordics

This paper looks at the conceptual boundaries of dance-as-art in the Nordics and discusses strategies towards coeval dancefutures away from contemporaneity as a colonial idea(l) of time. The future of dance-as-art in the Nordics needs to be pluralised for the artform to be representative of the regional demography and, as such, stay relevant. This paper proposes two research strands that can contribute to this pluralisation. The first investigates how the conceptual boundaries of dance-as-art shape the leading dance education courses in the Nordics in terms of curricula and student mass, and how these could be expanded. The second strand focuses on diversifying the professional field through artistic research in choreography as a format of speculative future fiction that can suggest new, coeval dancefutures.
 Dance-as-art is frequently equated with the genre referred to as Contemporary Dance, a highly contradictory term. Rather than denoting all dance forms of the present, it commonly implies a specific set of formalized dance techniques and choreographic formats derived from Western-European and North American modern dance of the twentieth century. Contemporary Dance holds a somewhat exclusive access to formal dance education, art funding as well as networks of dissemination and distribution in the Nordics. Other dance forms are often met with a denial of coeavalness by the Contemporary Dance field, hence largely excluded from the realm of art.
 This paper argues for the creation of structures for a large variety of coeval dancefutures through revising professional and ethical standards in the Nordic dance field. Instead of continuing to claim the defining power of what constitutes dance-as-art, those of us who currently do have access to education, funding, and dissemination need to take responsibility for challenging and expanding these systems to create a diverse, cultural sustainability within dance-as-art.

Introduction

Introduction

John T. Lowney (1957–2022)

This past September admired friend and respected scholar, John T. Lowney, passed away at the age of 65. John was professor of English at St John’s University in Queens, New York.John’s work explored the cultural politics of how modernism has been constructed in the literary history of the United States. His first book, The American Avant-Garde Tradition: William Carlos Williams, Postmodern Poetry, and the Politics of Cultural Memory (Bucknell UP, 1997), focused on Williams as an avant-garde writer in the early modernist period during and after World War 1 and elaborated the complex literary and cultural politics of Williams’s reception as a poet through the late 1950s and 1960s. His scholarship on twentieth-century American poetry and literary culture continued in History, Memory, and the Literary Left: Modern American Poetry, 1935–1968 (U of Iowa P, 2006).Over the years, his writing on Williams included other essays and reviews—including, most recently, “Williams: The New Poetries and Legacy” in The Cambridge Companion to William Carlos Williams (Cambridge UP, 2016) and “Reflections on Bryce Conrad’s Historiography” in the William Carlos Williams Review (2018). In addition, John’s scholarship in African American literary and cultural studies, and jazz literature, includes Jazz Internationalism: Literary Afro-Modernism and the Cultural Politics of Black Music (U of Illinois P, 2017) as well as essays in American Literature, The Langston Hughes Review, Melus, and The African American Review. His intellectual work was recognized with grants from the Donald C. Gallup Fellowship in American Literature at Yale’s Beinecke Library and a National Endowment for the Humanities Study Grant.During our PhD studies, writing about Williams, we both read John’s work. We also remember John as approachable and engaging, quietly spoken and sharply intelligent, with a sense of humor amid the often overly serious atmosphere of academic conference. Moreover, he was a generous and sensitive reviewer, including a review of Ian’s first book that came out of the PhD studies his own work had helped along. We celebrate his contributions as we mourn the loss of a colleague and friend. Though we are confident that John’s voice will continue to inspire continuing explorations of Williams’s ongoing presence in the tradition of American poetry and poetics.

Fascination: Trance, Enchantment, and American Modernity by Patrick Kindig (review)

Fascination: Trance, Enchantment, and American Modernity by Patrick Kindig (review)

What Scene, What’s Seen, What’s in A… Word: Thoughts in and on Artists’ Writings

Abstract While the humanities have become a multimodal domain in which visual culture is immanent and various new cross-disciplinary perspectives and theories are being employed to investigate the relationship between artistic and literary forms of representation, artists’ writings remain understudied and underappreciated. Art/literature studies often proceed by pairing a specific work of art with a particular literary text or an aesthetic style with a poetics or a narrative technique, but they rarely consider situations when both elements of the chosen pair come from the same source — an artist-writer. But questions related to whether and how an artist’s ‘natural’ visual disposition may impact on how she/he approaches and handles verbal language and vice versa need to be asked to illuminate what is still a shadow zone in word and image studies. Citing examples of major representatives of American modernism in art and literature, the essay addresses some of the problematic issues involved in studying verbal expression by visual artists and the cogency of posited correlations between the painterly and writerly intuitions and competences at play in artworks and texts produced by artist-writers.

THE ESSENCE OF AN IMAGE IN ENGLISH-AMERICAN IMAGISM: SINGULAR VERSUS UNIVERSAL

The paper is aimed at filling the gap in learning the formative image peculiarities of the English and American Imagistic poetry by analyzing the correspondence of the internal and the external and their correlation. This is where the answer lies, why T.S. Eliot called Imagism “an opening salvo” of English/ American Modernist poetry. It also explains the reason for a long-term effect of this short-term “school” in the English poetry of the twentieth century. Imagism hasn’t left any extended or profound theory as far as the criteria for producing “hard, dry images” (T.E.Hulme) are concerned. Since then the problem has been under-studied and calls for more in-depth analysis. The modern theoretical background of the paper includes the ideas of S. Averintsev and M. Gasparov, Paul Ricoeur and Gaston Bachelard; the criticism of the Imagism founders (T.E. Hulme and E. Pound) as well as its present-day English and American researchers. The major theoretical points highlight the important features of image transformation in Imagism: the dual (semantic and psychological) nature of an image (P. Ricoeur); loss of its axiological constituent thus forfeiting its wholeness (M. Girshman); its non-permanent essence (G. Bachelard). All these “new” sides underlie too general and vague definition of an image as “an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time” given by Ezra Pound, his definitive denial of using images as “ornaments” and the emphasis on the image affiliation with speech, not language. The fight doesn’t have to be limited only to opposing Romanticism (as in Hulme’s “Romanticism and Classicism”). Equally significant and far more sophisticated is the distinction between Symbolic and Imagistic essence of an image (Pound’s “Retrospect” and “Gaudier Brzeska”). For Pound, the main criterion is the receptive potential of an image, its semantic openness which offsets its meaning as finally fixed in some symbol. The paper examines the possibility to apply Roland Barthes’s idea (“L`imagination du signe”, 1962) of the crucial influence of the interior (symbolic) relationship and two exterior (paradigmatic and syntagmatic) relationships on the formation of both single image and the total imagery of a certain type of art conscience – consequently, of Symbolism, Romanticism and Imagism. In the early period of Imagism development (the poetry of F. Flint, E. Storer, to a lesser extent, of T.E. Hulme) the images still preserve the inner affinity with the signified objects (concepts) as seen in Romantic and Symbolic image “patterns”. And throughout Imagism development, this inner affinity is being weakened until a distant outer resemblance is left. It is clearly seen in Hulme’s “Autumn”, Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro”, H.D.’s “Oread”, “Hermes of the Ways” et al. The close reading of the W.C. Williams’s poem “The Red Wheelbarrow” is carried out in front of the “Tall Nettles” by Edward Thomas (1878–1917), his contemporary, who is now considered to be one of the “non-Modernist modern” poets. It is stated that the central image of the red wheelbarrow in its every detail constitutes a modern pastoral while Thomas’s nettles stand for psychological matrix of personal melancholy and despair. Syntagmatic relations also involve the further interaction of signs in the form of “superposition”, forming montage as one of the important Мodernist techniques not only in poetry, but also in Мodernist prose. And it becomes evident that it is not a mechanically borrowed cinema technique, as it is commonly viewed, but a deeper, “syntagmatic” similarity. The result of the research, based on the analysis undertaken, seems to prove its initial point: the poems of T.E. Hulme, Ezra Pound, W. Carlos Williams, Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) taken as models, manifest that the image in Imagism is every time constructed as a new actual syntagma of the common imagination of a poet and a reader to become the unique image for every single poem without its further “universal” use in any virtual paradigm.

For the Pragmatic and Semantic Understanding of Lexeme "War" in English Media Discourse

The semantic perception of the lexeme "war" and its pragmatic understanding is a very interesting process from the linguistic perspectives. The recent negative situation in the world has especially strengthened the semantic perception of the socio-political event (war) and its pragmatic understanding in the linguistic context, which is revealed by our mini-observation and study. Accordingly, the main goal of our research is the pragmatic and semantic understanding of the lexeme "war" and the media discourse (British and American modern newspapers magazines, such as The Guardian, USA Today, BBC News. etc.) is selected as the principal analytical source for our study.

Review Essay: Whence Came the Modern American Right?

For scholars of American political history, the 2016 election was a moment of methodological reassessment. After Donald Trump eviscerated his seemingly “respectable” GOP challengers in the Republican presidential primary and went on to win the general election, historians and theorists of the American Right rethought the reigning “ostracization thesis,” a memorable phrase Edward H. Miller uses to describe a historiographical narrative grounded in the theory that American conservatives, led by Ronald Reagan, had prevailed in the 1980s by systematically purging their movement of extremists in the 1960s and 1970s (258). In 2017, Rick Perlstein, one of the most celebrated popular historians of the conservative movement, published an essay in the New York Times memorably titled “I Thought I Understood the American Right. Trump Proved Me Wrong.” In it, he expressed regret for helping to forge this narrative in his first book, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (Hill and Wang, 2001). Cory Robin updated his influential book The Reactionary Mind (Oxford University Press, 2011; 2018) to account for Trump's ascendance. “Like most observers of American politics,” Robin wrote in the preface to the second edition, “I was shocked by Trump's victory in the 2016 presidential election.” But if the 2016 election prompted a critical reassessment, then the 2020 election and its chaotic coda (i.e., the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021) prompted a scholarly reckoning not only with modern American conservatism, but also with the broader narrative arc of twentieth-century American politics. The four recent books under review here, which were all published after the 2020 election, represent some of the first revisionist fruits of this reckoning.

The War on the EPA: America's Endangered Environmental Protections. By William M.Alley and RosemarieAlleyRowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.2020. pp. 289, ISBN: 978‐1‐5381‐3150‐3 U.S. List Price $33.00

The War on the <scp>EPA</scp>: America's Endangered Environmental Protections. By William M.Alley and RosemarieAlleyRowman &amp; Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.2020. pp. 289, <scp>ISBN</scp>: 978‐1‐5381‐3150‐3 U.S. List Price $33.00

Three Women Artists: Expanding Abstract Expressionism in the American West by Amy Von Lintel and Bonnie Roos

Reviewed by: Three Women Artists: Expanding Abstract Expressionism in the American West by Amy Von Lintel and Bonnie Roos Randolph K. Tibbits Three Women Artists: Expanding Abstract Expressionism in the American West. By Amy Von Lintel and Bonnie Roos. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2022. Pp. 341. Illustrations, appendix, notes, bibliography, index.) From the late 1950s onward, Abstract Expressionism (Ab-Ex), which reigned supreme in the New York art world at mid-century but had begun to fade there, found renewed life and a new home in a seemingly unlikely location: the Texas Panhandle and surrounding areas. This development occurred thanks to a symbiotic partnership between a "closeted gay man" (2) and a number of New York City-based Ab-Ex artists, mostly women, who were underappreciated in the big city. That is one of the bold propositions advanced by the authors of this interesting and beautiful new book. [End Page 599] The Three Women Artists of the title, painter Elaine de Kooning, mosaic artist Jeanne Reynal, and sculptor Louise Nevelson, were not unknown in their lifetimes, but they have become the subjects of increased interest and regard in recent years as scholars and the viewing public have taken a closer look at the art and careers of women artists throughout history. Amarillo gallerist, teacher, and art promoter Dord Fitz, the closeted gay man, is little known, even to those who have an active interest in the art history of Texas. One of the valuable contributions of the book is its deft presentation of a rich and provocative story of "decentered" modernism, as the authors call it (2), in which important contemporary American art was as vital on the High Plains of Texas as in the sometimes myopic New York art world, with both places giving as well as taking as far the art itself was concerned. Fitz, an Oklahoman who had to reinvent himself after being fired from a plum academic job at the University of Kentucky following a 1951 arrest on morals charges, returned with his wife and children to Bannister Ranch in the western part of the state. He applied his experience in art and education to teaching art classes in northwest Oklahoma and surrounding areas of Kansas and Texas, fostering a patron base on which he could build when he opened his art gallery in Amarillo, and began showing and promoting avant-garde New York art. Through annual trips to New York, he established relationships with the artists he wished to show. He found De Kooning, Reynal, and Nevelson particularly responsive because he offered them the prospect of an appreciative public, and additional income from art sales and teaching, on a more gender-level playing field than they faced in New York, where male artists received significantly more attention. The authors assert that Fitz and the women artists who became his gallery stars meshed in part because of their shared experiences navigating gender and sexuality hurdles as they operated in male- and hetero-dominated environments. This is another of the refreshingly exciting threads of the story the book tells, one only recently being addressed in either Texas history or art history. Clearly Fitz thrived based on his connections to the New Yorkers, but the artists, and their art, profited too. All three spent time in Amarillo, where Fitz made sure they had the Texas experience. But in addition to entertaining visits, all three, especially De Kooning, who is quoted as saying, "I love Texas" (21), sold art, found new influences for their work, and developed mutually beneficial relationships with local patrons and students. This in a place that stereotypes often cast as indifferent, even hostile, to such things as abstract art. Von Lintel has already done a masterful job of showing how the Texas experience helped shape the art of the preeminent American Modernist, Georgia O'Keeffe. With this new volume, she and co-author Roos have made an equally important contribution to broadening our understanding [End Page 600] of Texas as both receptive home and active contributor to American art of this later era. Randolph K. Tibbits Houston Earlier Texas Art Group Copyright © 2022 The Texas State Historical Association

The Metamorphoses of Myth in Fiction since 1960 by Kathryn Hume

Reviewed by: The Metamorphoses of Myth in Fiction since 1960 by Kathryn Hume Fiona Cox The Metamorphoses of Myth in Fiction since 1960. By Kathryn Hume. New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic. 2020. xii+192 pp. £85 (pbk £28.99). ISBN 978–1–5013–5987–3 (pbk 978–1–5013–7824–9). Kathryn Hume opens the volume by asking: 'Why should contemporary Anglophone writers use myths from ancient Greece and Rome, from Pharaonic Egypt, from the Viking north, from Africa's west coast, and from Hebrew and Christian traditions?' (p. i). This is, of course, a big question eliciting a range of responses, and the wide, inclusive sweep of mythologies indicates the vast scope of this volume, a breadth that is all the more striking since the book is relatively short. Hume's extraordinarily wide-ranging expertise and reading are evidenced throughout the volume as we move from Mailer to Acker to Vonnegut, Pullman, and Calvino (the one non-Anglophone writer), and many more. The dizzying array of primary sources is indicated in the chapter titles—for example, the final chapter, Chapter 6, is entitled 'The Contemporary Functions of Myth as Artistic Tool: Pynchon, Arthurian stories, Faber, Pullman, Morrow, Ducornet, Marcus, Atwood, Vonnegut, Naylor, Morrison, Silko, Östergren, Winterson, Grossman, Rucker'. This is an astonishing range of writers and subjects to cover in just 28 pages. Previous chapters take as their focus 'Multiple Selves and Egyptian Mythology', 'Mythological Worlds and Death', 'Orpheus and Eurydice: Variations on a Theme', 'Invented Myth: The Problem of Power', and 'Situational Myth: Posthuman Metamorphoses'. All promise a wide selection of sources enriching the discussion. Hume writes well and engagingly and I read the book with pleasure and profit. I learnt a great deal and was introduced to a range of authors whose works I have not yet considered. I particularly enjoyed the nuanced discussion of Janette Turner Hospital's Orpheus Lost. The presentation of Neil Gaiman's work and thought was also especially suggestive and persuasive. There is a particular emphasis in the volume on dystopian fiction, which has been understudied to date, at least in the area of classical reception. The virtues of the volume are, however, directly tied to [End Page 241] what might be perceived as its shortcomings. There were many times when I would greatly have welcomed far more detailed discussion of an author or a work, but found myself tantalized with a brief analysis before the discussion moved on to the next book or the next author. Since so many authors and texts are covered there is a lot of introductory discussion, which sometimes comes at the cost of more probing analysis. I also think that much of the exposition could have been enriched by closer engagement with other scholarly works within the field. Certainly there has been much work on contemporary literature and classical reception which is absent from the Bibliography and which could have added texture to the discussion of authors such as Winterson, Byatt, and Morrison. I am thinking particularly of studies such as Tessa Roynon, The Classical Tradition in Modern American Fiction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021), and Judith Fletcher, Myths of the Underworld in Contemporary Culture: The Backward Gaze (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). I am aware, however, that a more focused and substantial engagement of selected authors would have reduced the extraordinary scope of this volume, and that would have been to its detriment. I closed the book wishing that there was much more, but grateful for the pleasure of being introduced to so much fresh material. This is a book that will open the eyes of any reader to unfamiliar worlds and undiscovered texts and which makes a genuine contribution to the expanding field of engagements with, and rewritings of, classical Greek and Roman myths in fiction of the last sixty years. Fiona Cox University of Exeter Copyright © 2023 Modern Humanities Research Association