Van Vechten Research Articles

Optoelectronic Properties of Ternary Tetrahedral Semiconductors

The dielectric interpretation of crystal ionicity evolved by Phillips and Van Vechten (P.V.V) has been utilized to evaluate various ground state properties for broad range of semiconductors and insulators. Although, the relevance of P.V.V dielectric theory has been restricted to only simple ANB8-N structured compounds, which have a particular bond. Levine has broadened P.V.V. theory of ionicity to multiple bond and complex crystals and evaluated many bond parameters for ternary tetrahedral semiconductors. Some other researchers have extended Levine’s work with a concept of ionic charge product and nearest neighbour distance to binary and ternary tetrahedral crystals to evaluate the ground state properties. In this paper, a new hypothesis of average atomic number of the elements in a compound has been used to understand the some electronic and optical properties such as ionic gap (Ec), average energy gap (Eg), crystal ionicity (fi), electronic susceptibility (χ), and dielectric constant (ϵ) of ternary tetrahedral (AIIBIV and AIBIII) semiconductors. A reasonably acceptable agreement has been noticed between our evaluated values and other researchers reported values.

Decadence in the Age of Modernism ed. by Kate Hext and Alex Murray

Reviewed by: Decadence in the Age of Modernism ed. by Kate Hext and Alex Murray Richard A. Kaye Decadence in the Age of Modernism. Ed. Kate Hext and Alex Murray. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019. Pp. 304. $54.95 (cloth); $54.95 (eBook). This collection brings new attention to modernism's self-repression—and the repression by critics—of its origins in fin-de-siècle decadent poetics. Examining a tantalizing range of Anglo-American writers, the contributors variously make a case for decadent writing as entwined with modernist achievements. Running through the volume, too, is an emphasis on the ways in which decadent literature determined a queer poetics that stood astride modernism in the writing of familiar writers such as Djuna Barnes, Ronald Firbank, Gertrude Stein, D.H. Lawrence, Mina Loy, H.D., Hart Crane, and Carl Van Vechten as well as lesser-known figures such as Margaret Sackville, Ada Leverson, Bruce Nugent, and Donald Evans. The trio of decadent/queer/modernist concerns informs the essay by Vincent Sherry, whose 2018 book Modernism and the Reinvention of Decadence is itself a pioneering work tracing the neglected sinews linking modernist artistry and decadent aesthetics. Here Sherry considers the legacy of decadence in the fiction of Woolf, Joyce, Barnes, and Beckett, in which queer, minor characters (St. John Alaric Hurst of Woolf's The Voyage Out, Baron Felix in Barnes's Nightwood) wander like ghosts from the Wildean past. Drawing on the argument of Lee Edelman's No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Sherry suggests that these writers found considerable value in forgoing a viable, erotically normative future. The modernist reliance on a decadent midVictorian legacy informs Howard Booth's essay on Lawrence's adoption of Swinburnean tropes in his fiction, particularly Swinburne's use of the Pan figure and the theme of nympholepsy, the belief originating with the Ancient Greeks that human beings could be inhabited by nymphs. For Lawrence, such tropes "imagine a resolution of the split and division between humankind and the world" (186). In later fiction such as St. Mawr (1924), however, Lawrence will come to see such breaches as unbridgeable as he sought to conceive of a futurity beyond or without modernity. [End Page 797] Wilde's imprisonment for "gross indecency" casts a shadow over much of this volume. Nick Freeman explores post-1895 writers such as John Edmund, Max Beerbohm, and Hector Hugh Munro (Saki), all of whom borrowed the stylistic strategies of decadent writing while dispensing with, through playful satire and elegant evasiveness, its immoral or scandalous scenarios. Kristin Mahoney revisits the career of Wilde's friend Ada Leverson, whose parodic fictions provided a light critique of dandyism even as they sought to find a place in decadence for feminist aspirations. Joseph Bristow brings fresh insight to the legacy of late-Victorian aestheticism in the work of another feminist, the poet and pacifist Margaret Sackville. Sarah Parker explores the Baudelairean elements in the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay, who sought to invigorate the spirit of Les Fleurs du Mal (she was one of the volume's first female translators) with irony, humor, and a markedly American idiom. This volume resurrects a number of forgotten modernists indebted to the decadent movement. Douglas Mao discusses the literary career of the Greenwich Village poet Donald Evans, whose press Claire Marie published Stein's writing. Mao considers the place of "cuteness" and "naughtiness" in Evans and Stein's work, two features of 1890s sensibility that become denigrated in an age of high modernist seriousness and austerity. Kirsten MacLeod offers a fine reading of Van Vechten's 1923 Jazz-age novel The Blind Bow-Boy, where decadent and camp aesthetics commingle (the novel's title is a campily lascivious reference to a line in Romeo and Juliet: "… the very pin of his heart cleft with the blind bow-boy's butt shaft"). Michèle Mendelssohn draws on original archival research to explore the life and work of the African-American writer Bruce Nugent, whom Mendelssohn describes as "one of the few African American writers" of the Harlem Renaissance "with the audacity to challenge homophobic prejudice and explicitly portray interracial sensuality" (a characterization that perhaps overly...

The Blind Bow-Boy by Carl Van VechtenKirsten MacLeod

 Reviews in the opening lines of Casa Guidi Windows, the snatches of stornelli that distract the painter in ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’), James Joyce (the one-legged sailor who wanders through Dublin in Ulysses, growling out lines from ‘e Death of Nelson’), Virginia Woolf (the unintelligible singing of an ancient woman, heard by both Peter Walsh and Rezia Smith outside Regent’s Park Tube Station in Mrs. Dalloway), to Marcel Proust (early morning Paris street cries driing up to the windows of the narrator in La Prisonière, volume  of A la recherche du temps perdu). roughout, Karlin pursues complicated strands of meaning borne by street songs or cries to show an author’s triumphant use of them in a different literary design. e volume concludes with a final chapter on Walt Whitman (a knife-grinder in ‘Sparkles from the Wheel’)—the sole American example and the only instance where sight rather than sound provides the design for a literary composition. Perhaps the best way to read this book is simply to take pleasure in what it provides. But if one did want to use the evidence of these seven case studies to think about larger questions, what would these be? I have already suggested one: how do writers translate song (or sound) into a written text? In some chapters, Karlin attends to this question more than in others, where the role of song slips into that of the figure of the singer, on which he has written well elsewhere. Alternatively one might ask: can these studies tell us anything about the way people heard street songs and cries in the places and times covered—what they listened to but also what registered on their consciousness, how and why? One would need either to argue that these cases are particularly representative or to examine a lot more of them—including works by popular writers. But those are questions for other studies. is book concludes, with lovely structural circularity, where it began: with ‘the art of appropriation’ (p. ). Building on the work of his chapters, Karlin closes with a tribute to (at least some of) his writers: ‘Whitman—like Wordsworth, or Joyce, or Woolf, or Proust—can afford to be as generous as he is unscrupulous. Only the great artists pay such tribute to the treasure they plunder’ (p. ). U  C E H e Blind Bow-Boy. By C V V. Ed. by K ML. (MHRA Critical Texts) Cambridge: Modern Humanities Research Association. . xxviii+ pp. £.. ISBN ––––. In the past decade, many modernist texts have become available as they move out of copyright and into the public domain. In addition, letters and archival material, also previously underused and kept out of print, have been allowed to become accessible to scholars. As a result, once popular and influential works can now be re-examined and new understandings of oen read and taught novels can be constructed, in turn illuminating the importance of an entire network of long forgotten modernist writers and artists. Because American modernism is so deeply connected to American nationalism, the re-emergence of these understudied and in many cases MLR, .,   suppressed texts forces a reassessment of deeply held scholarly beliefs about not just modernism, but the idea of a national literature as a whole. Kirsten MacLeod’s new edition of Carl Van Vechten’s e Blind Bow-Boy () does exactly that with its extensive and well-researched apparatus thoroughly demonstrating the importance of this once well-known novel. e Blind Bow-Boy follows Harold Prewett, ‘a naïve young man who has led a sheltered life, and his initiation into a life of pleasure-seeking’ (p. xi). His father, who le him to be raised by a harsh aunt, summons him at eighteen years old, presumably to take up the mantle of his cloak and suit business. When Harold blurts out that he has no interest in the business, his father, instead of being upset, praises him and agrees to finance his next years exploring New York with ‘worldly man-about-town Paul Moody’ (p. xi). In a complicated twist of reverse psychology, he expects his son to be so fed up with corruption and...

Strange Characters: Dialogic Selves and Cosmopolitanism in Carl Van Vechten's Peter Whiffle

Carl Van Vechten's novel Peter Whiffle. His Life and Works (1922) is a work of ‘autobiografiction’, merging biography and autobiography, and drawing attention to the fictional elements of life writing. It problematizes authorship and posits selfhood as a dialogic, polyphonic construct, dependent on the strategies, content and structure of narrative. The article explores the complex intertextual presence of George Moore's Confessions of a Young Man in Van Vechten's novel: they both propose different aspects of a similar story of two friends with cosmopolitan and refined tastes, whose subjectivities are mediated by constant references to other literary characters, and who depend on one another's narratives to have access to their own selves, or at least to become authors of works of art about themselves. Drawing on Adriana Cavarero's and Lucia Boldrini's studies on auto/biographical selves, and on Rebecca Walkowitz's and Homi Bhabha's theories of cosmopolitanism, the article argues that Peter Whiffle's emphasis on dialogic subjectivity questions the notion of authorship and creates a problematic, parodic form of cosmopolitanism. This type of cosmopolitanism does not contribute to any productive experiences of self-knowledge or of knowledge of the foreign ‘other’, but rather asks crucial questions on the very possibility of these experiences.

‘Puppet of skeletal escapade’: Dance Dialogues in Mina Loy and Carl Van Vechten

In an undated letter, likely composed in late 1914, Mina Loy reflected on the recent aesthetic experiences that had greatly affected her, writing that the ‘things that have made [her] gasp were a few Picassos, Windham [ sic] Lewis, Nijinski dancing – perfection is infrequent’. The letter was addressed to her American agent Carl Van Vechten, a dance and music critic at the New York Times, who played a highly influential role in shaping discourses around ballet and modern dance both in the US and internationally. This article conjoins Loy and Van Vechten's modernist oeuvres – crossing genres including poetry, novels, newspaper reviews, and photography – in order to reveal the importance of dance to their shifting aesthetic commitments and shared interest in the expressive capacities of the human form. Dancing bodies, moving fluently across the work of this modernist pair, variously transcribe Futurist satires, Decadent revivals, and a primitivist fascination with the erotic aspects of dance, crystallising in Loy and Van Vechten's responses to the Harlem Renaissance.

Rethinking the Origins of Camp: The Queer Correspondence of Carl Van Vechten and Ronald Firbank

Rethinking the Origins of Camp: The Queer Correspondence of Carl Van Vechten and Ronald Firbank

Eugene O'Neill Remembered

Eugene O'Neill Remembered

Selected Letters of Langston Hughes ed. by Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel with Christa Fratantoro

Reviewed by: Selected Letters of Langston Hughes ed. by Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel with Christa Fratantoro John Edgar Tidwell SELECTED LETTERS OF LANGSTON HUGHES. Edited by Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel with Christa Fratantoro. New York: Alfred A. Knopf Publisher. 2015. Assembling a collection of correspondence can be as loose as what Richard Wright once said about anthology-making: get a pot of glue and a pair of sharp scissors, and cut and paste the works together. Or, the process can be exacting, following the model of Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel, who crafted Selected Letters of Langston Hughes. The editorial principle determining which of the voluminous body of letters to include illustrates their careful thought. Overall, their goal was to offer "a life in letters." In so doing, they created a documentary record that complements Hughes's two autobiographies, the artfully-conceived biographies of Hughes, and previous collections of correspondence, especially The Hughes-Bontemps Letters, 1925-1967 and Remember Me To Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, 1925-1964. Reading Selected Letters against these other texts becomes a pleasure as we discover how it enlarges our understanding and insight into a life too often described as transparent and uncomplicated. The organizational structure of the collection is chronological and divided into fve decades, beginning in 1921 when his first nationally-published poem—"The Negro Speaks of Rivers"—appeared. The collection ends shortly before his death in 1967. In between these two markers are placed a number of letters that tease out, from Hughes's perspective, relationships with Arna Bontemps, Noel Sullivan, and Carl Va n Vechten. Letters to these three individuals, however, are merely the tip of an epistolary iceberg. In a career spanning more than forty years, he had occasion to correspond with writers, politicians, and friends—many of whom are well-known to us today and just as many who were once prominent but now lost to historical anonymity—from Europe, Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, South America, and Mexico. The total collection is so massive that as Hughes sought to organize his letters for donation to Yale's James Weldon Johnson Collection he found a considerable number of unopened pieces. He often started his replies with an apology for being so slow to respond. But he could hardly be faulted for his tardiness. He typically received as many as thirty letters a day, often forcing him to choose between being a creative writer or a correspondent. [End Page 223] Some readers of Selected Letters will no doubt be disappointed because the ones revealing personal or intimate relations are missing or destroyed and are therefore unavailable to support a number of theories about the personal life Hughes jealously guarded. The ones included here show him to be, in one respect, quite like his irascible father. Langston, like his father James Nathaniel Hughes, was a business man and seemed extremely well organized in all of his financial affairs. Perhaps he had to be. By his own admission, he was the first writer of color to make a living solely from his writing. Herein lies the rub. Generally, the labor to support himself (and, at times, various family members) yielded little financial return. Thus he was often reduced to borrowing money from friends or living with them for free. The effort to achieve financial independence required him to accept writing assignments in many genres: the novel, short fiction, drama, lyrics, news columns, essays, libretti, and more. Guest lectures became a way of receiving honoraria as well as selling autographed copies of his work. In moments of humorous self-deprecation, he referred to himself as "a literary sharecropper," since he felt he was at the mercy of publishers, promoters, and others who "controlled" his life and livelihood. This collection, unburdened by a scholarly apparatus and introduced by genial editorial comments and informative notes, achieves its goal of being "a life in letters." It reveals a personality that, for the most part, was balanced, affable, and simply outgoing. But there are demonstrations of anger and frustration too. The "tactful" refusal to endorse William Faulkner—whom he referred to as "the leading Southern cracker novelist"—for a major literary...

The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man: Norton Critical Edition ed. by Jacqueline Goldsby (review)

GOLDSBY, JACQUELINE, ed. The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man: Norton Critical Edition. By James Weldon Johnson. New York: W. W. Norton, 2015. 439 pp. $13.12 paperback. James Weldon Johnson is remembered for penning the lyrics of the black civil rights anthem Lift Every Voice and Sing and for serving as the first African American executive secretary of the NAACP (1920-1930). Just as Johnson's activism prefigured the tactics of later waves of civil-rights protest--he led silent march against lynching in New York City during the summer of 1917--his literary innovations placed him at the avant-garde of both the New Negro arts movement and Anglo-American modernism. In her 2015 Norton Critical Edition of Johnson's novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (ECM), Jacqueline Goldsby foregrounds Johnson's modernism and avant-garde stats, building on approaches taken by Henry Louis Gates, in his introduction to the 1989 Vintage edition, and William L. Andrews, in his preface to the 1990 Penguin edition. Goldsby's is the first annotated, scholarly edition that allows readers to explore how Johnson's ECM--as well as its publication and reception history--challenges our notions of what makes work modern and what counts as novel. Goldsby provides excerpts from drafts of ECM, historical sources, correspondence relating to the novel's publication and composition, and reviews contemporary with its 1912, 1927, and 1948 printings, along with copious explanatory footnotes. This material illuminates Johnson's engagement with the African American novel, American literary modernism, and 1940s mass culture, making this edition valuable resource for scholars and graduate students looking for way into Johnson's eclectic and enigmatic career. Goldsby's edition of addresses the racial politics of American literary production, especially the demand for African American writers to emphasize objectivity and personal experience over creativity and imagination. She observes that ECM was not received as and asks, Why was that misreading possible? (xlvii). Citing Carl Van Vechten's description of as a composite autobiography of the Negro race (121), Goldsby observes that even those readers who knew was fiction, not autobiography, praised its dispassionate, objective portrayal of social facts rather than its style, characterization, and narrative innovations. Goldsby offers reason for this misreading: to acknowledge the creativity of black writers in the early twentieth century granted fiction writers intellectual authority that American society otherwise denied black people (xxiv), and categorizing literature produced by black authors as documentary rather than inventive was way of containing this authority. In her introduction, Goldsby reverses that treatment, highlighting how Johnson's manipulation of time, setting, point of view, and stream of consciousness places in conversation with works by Virginia Woolf, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Nella Larsen. Emphasizing Johnson's heretical distortions of the autobiographical tradition from Douglass to DuBois and his rejection of melodrama and allegory, Goldsby sketches out Johnson's role in constructing modernism's future (lvi) by creating novel whose formal departures reflect its political stakes. In addition to illuminating Johnson's formal breakthroughs, Goldsby's edition of highlights the novel's connections with non-literary media and its status as commodity. …

Party-Going in Fitzgerald and His Contemporaries

Abstract This essay examines the visual techniques that Fitzgerald applies in the party-scenes in his fiction. It explores the tension between spectatorship and participation throughout and argues that he draws on the resources of the cinema in his fine control of perspective, close-up, and long shots—as well as montage. Although he acquired the reputation of the chronicler of the new generation, the essay argues that Fitzgerald constantly brought out the ironies of parties, particularly their fleeting and theatrical aspects, especially their dependence on material display. Comparisons are drawn with Zelda Fitzgerald's party scenes and with contemporaries such as Carl Van Vechten in order to bring out Fitzgerald's implicitly critical dramatization of sexual motifs.

The Great God Pan/Brown

Abstract Examining the origins of the phrase “the Great God Pan,” and similarities between Eugene O'Neill's play The Great God Brown (1925) and Arthur Machen's Victorian horror novel The Great God Pan (1894), reveals that these works share more than similar titles. Correspondences in tone, theme, and other details suggest that Machen's novel might have influenced O'Neill, opening new possibilities for interpreting the ideas and stylistic affinities of O'Neill's elusive play. The possibility of connection is strengthened by the authors' overlapping social spheres during the 1920s, with Carl Van Vechten as the linking figure. As such, a groundbreaking Victorian horror story, which O'Neill might have heard as a boy, could have helped shape O'Neill's sort of modernism.

The Great God Pan/Brown

Abstract Examining the origins of the phrase “the Great God Pan,” and similarities between Eugene O'Neill's play The Great God Brown (1925) and Arthur Machen's Victorian horror novel The Great God Pan (1894), reveals that these works share more than similar titles. Correspondences in tone, theme, and other details suggest that Machen's novel might have influenced O'Neill, opening new possibilities for interpreting the ideas and stylistic affinities of O'Neill's elusive play. The possibility of connection is strengthened by the authors' overlapping social spheres during the 1920s, with Carl Van Vechten as the linking figure. As such, a groundbreaking Victorian horror story, which O'Neill might have heard as a boy, could have helped shape O'Neill's sort of modernism.

Party-Going in Fitzgerald and His Contemporaries

AbstractThis essay examines the visual techniques that Fitzgerald applies in the party-scenes in his fiction. It explores the tension between spectatorship and participation throughout and argues that he draws on the resources of the cinema in his fine control of perspective, close-up, and long shots—as well as montage. Although he acquired the reputation of the chronicler of the new generation, the essay argues that Fitzgerald constantly brought out the ironies of parties, particularly their fleeting and theatrical aspects, especially their dependence on material display. Comparisons are drawn with Zelda Fitzgerald's party scenes and with contemporaries such as Carl Van Vechten in order to bring out Fitzgerald's implicitly critical dramatization of sexual motifs.

Langston Hughes and Performing Transnational Presence: Scottsboro Limited and Harvest

Theatre revealed shifts between movements black modernism of 1920s and 1930s. As Langston Hughes recalls his autobiography Big Sea (1940) the 1920's were years of Manhattan's black Renaissance.... [T]he musical revue, Shuffle Along ... gave a scintillating send-off to vogue Manhattan, which reached its peak just before crash of 1929, crash sent ... all rolling down hill toward Works Progress Administration. (1) Hughes wrote Scottsboro Limited (1931) just before visiting Soviet Union. Hughes co-authored Harvest with Ella Winter and Ann Hawkins shortly after returning to United States but left play unfinished 1934. Both scripts provoke politically while experimenting theatrical forms to aestheticize narratives of recent upheaval United States. Following Hughes's markers for what he calls that vogue, Scottsboro Limited and Harvest fall chronologically between Shuffle Along (1921) and plays of WPA's Federal Theatre Project (1935-39). These plays remain powerful indicators of a transitional cultural moment which Soviet drama was also vogue. Attending to these plays reasserts theatre as a ubiquitous and influential medium 1930s cultures of United States. Analysis of these plays participates debates on status of transnational modernism at large, while clarifying a crucial element of Hughes's exchange with Soviet culture missing from recent literary studies. Internationally renowned as a poet, Langston Hughes has received renewed critical attention recent years with valuable research on transnational characteristics of his life, poetry, autobiography, and short stories. (2) Theatre, however, has received relatively little attention this critical revival, despite its centrality to Hughes's broad cultural consumption and to his literary work (as is evident from assessments of his biographers and from his correspondence with Carl Van Vechten). This essay reads Hughes's plays Scottsboro Limited and Harvest as theatrical representations of prisoners and workers specific to US contexts mirror Soviet-dominated internationalist film, journalistic theatre, and pageants. Hughes's 1930s participation a transnational aesthetic community of theatrical innovation devoted to developing proletarian theatre remains under-researched. His plays from period embody collaboration and emotional commitment across national lines. Hughes's travel supported circulation and translation of his works journals such as Soviet International Literature (with publications multiple languages) and many Spanish-language journals such as Contemporaneos, Sur, Revista de La Habana, El Diario de la Marina, Cristol, and El Mono Azul. (3) I argue Hughes's work revises Soviet cinematic and theatrical conventions, and these aesthetic choices affirm internationalism. Hughes modifies Soviet forms an act of international exchange, echoing Soviet calls for revolution, while challenging Comintern's Black Belt Nation Thesis and its implications for his poetics. (4) Hughes ends article Moscow: In a Land Where There Is No Jim Crow for International Literature with an English translation of Russian poem KINSHIR (5) For Hughes, Julian Anisimov's poem claims kinship in art between The Russian and Negro through the blood of Pushkin with a vision of unity between cultural nationalities in International. (6) Hughes's work and travel enacted an internationalism dialogue with Anisimov's vision, but Hughes resisted Moscow's authority within ideology of Soviet Internationalism as worldwide communist revolution. Still, Hughes celebrates impression Moscow there are no color bars, and very nature of Soviet system can never admit any sort of discriminatory racial separation, or setting apart from general worker's life of Negroes or any other minority group. …

Portrait of My Teacher, Fräulein Sophie von Prieser: Florine Stettheimer.

The dreamlike spectacle that can pop from a painting byFlorineStettheimer (1871-1944)defies easydescription. What to make, for example, of the merry group in SundayAfternoon in the Country that includes a guest gleefully performing a handstand under a pink cotton candy–like tree, and another lying lopsided on his back with a precariously balanced parasol? There seems to be little place for the douranddismalhere, andpartof the fun is the stories that suggest themselves in these sometimespsychedelic scenarios. It’s all in the spirit of savoring the joys of life. Stettheimer was born in Rochester, New York, but she lived in Stuttgart and Berlin, Germany, at times during childhood. Florine’s father Joseph Stettheimer did not remain with the family after the birth of the youngest child, and mother Rosetta and children moved to Germany. Of the 5 children, the 3 youngest were sisters Carrie, Florine, and Ettie, none of whom ever married. What could be little guessed by the sisters in these early years is that they would someday host and mingle with the glittering avant garde of artistic innovation in their New York City salon. As a young girl, Florine was a student at the Priesersches Institut in Stuttgart, and later in life portrayed its directress in Portrait of My Teacher, Fraulein Sophie von Prieser (Muhling M, Althaus K, Boller S, eds. Florine Stettheimer. Munich, Germany: Stadtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau/Hirmer Verlag GmbH; 2014:1-192). InPortrait, adignifiedwoman inadarkdress trimmedwith lace at the wrists jauntily holds aloft a lorgnette. Stettheimer painted this likenessof vonPrieserplaced ina settingof awellappointed room bounded by a balcony overlooking a palace. An image of a youngFlorine inwhite frock andbrunette locks is reflected in a mirror hanging above the mantel ledge (http://www.portlandartmuseum.us/mwebcgi/mweb.exe ?request=record;id=11685;type=101). Her teacher’s name is worked into the balcony railing behindwhich children appear to be playing a game on the lawn. A filigree chair with plush rosy quilted cushion allows for repose while gazing upon the scenery and goings-on. Florine’s sister Ettie described the classical head resting on themantel as a bust of the goddess Juno (Bloemink BJ. The Life and Art of Florine Stettheimer. NewHaven, CT/London, UK: Yale University Press; 1995:i-303). Posies in a blue and white vase sit atop the tasseledwhite table linen, echoing the pattern of the wall covering. Given the conventions of the era, von Prieser was a woman of some distinction and accomplishment, and exemplifies the contributions and wisdom to be gained from elders. Back in New York City in the 1890s, Stettheimer received tutelage from teachers at the Art Students League who included Kenyon Cox, James Carroll Beckwith, and Harry SiddonsMowbray.Subsequent travel inEuropewith familyprovided an opportunity for extensive exposure to art and culture, but at the onset of World War I, the Stettheimers returned to NewYork, and Florinewould not see Europe again. The use of clear, brilliant pigments by the French artist Henri Matisse was a guiding principle for Stettheimer in her own vivid renderings andwas reflected in her paintings even when her energetic personal style began tomove beyond the early influences. She experiencedher inaugural (itwould also serve as a finale) solo show in 1916; thereafter, she would exhibit in group venues. A turning point in her career occurred in following years that marked a transformation of her work to that of intriguing originality. Indeed, it has been suggested that much of her more important art appeared inmid to later life (Bloemink, pp ix-x). One source of inspiration for her later pictures was to be found in the hubbub and hilarity of family and friends, perhaps exemplified by the antics of beachgoers in her exuberant Lake Placid. The dynamic character of her paintings paralleled the vibe of the 1920s, and the writer Carl Van Vechten suggested that her work could be considered to be the visual counterpart of jazz. OperaalsobecamepartofStettheimer’sartisticoeuvre,and she was asked to participate in designing costumes and sets for Four Saints in Three Acts,which featured a Gertrude Stein libretto. Her contribution to the opera was favorably received, and thus itwasaroundage63 that sheexperienced this measure of public acclaim. Another honor occurred with the contribution of her work to an American art retrospective to be held in 1938 at the Jeu de Paume in Paris. It was not only through the personalities in her paintings that Stettheimerwas able to conveyher enjoyment of life; she also expressed her emotions through poetry. In her posthumously published Crystal Flowers, an entry reads as follows: “Our Parties/Our Picnics/Our Banquets/Our Friends/Have at last a raison d’etre/Seen in color and design/It amusesme/To recreate them/To paint them.”

Phase Diagram of (CuInSe2)1−x(FeSe)x alloys

Polycrystalline samples of the (CuInSe2)1−x(FeSe)x alloy system in the composition range 0⩽x⩽1 were prepared by the melt and anneal technique. X-ray Diffraction (XRD) and Differential Thermal Analysis (DTA) techniques were used to characterize the products. From the analysis of the experimental results a T–x phase diagram was proposed. It was found that at 600K, two single phase fields (chalcopyrite and a semi-ordered phase in space group P4¯2c) were separated by a relative narrow two phase field in the composition range 0<x<0.4. For higher values of x, a secondary phase identified as γ-Fe7Se8 coexist with the semi-ordered phase for 0.4<x<0.7 and with a stannite phase for 0.7<x<0.95. The variation with composition of the order–disorder phase transition was well described by an extension of Van Vechten theory.

The Unknown Van Vechten and His Impact on His Times

Abstract Edward White's study of Carl Van Vechten is both a biography and a critical study of his multifaceted career—as novelist, essayist, photographer, and patron of the Harlem Renaissance. White also argues that Van Vechten anticipates the present-day interest in gay studies, for he focuses on a little-known side of Van Vechten's life, his homosexuality and his collection of gay erotica. Although White talks intelligently about Van Vechten's essays on the blues and his friendship with and advocacy of Gertrude Stein, he merely skims the surface when discussing Van Vechten's fiction, especially his most important and controversial novel, Nigger Heaven (1926). Although White is right to call Van Vechten a modernist, he exaggerates when he calls him a “tastemaker.” H. L. Mencken had a far greater influence on his generation, as Walter Lippman noted in 1926.

The Unknown Van Vechten and His Impact on His Times

Abstract Edward White's study of Carl Van Vechten is both a biography and a critical study of his multifaceted career—as novelist, essayist, photographer, and patron of the Harlem Renaissance. White also argues that Van Vechten anticipates the present-day interest in gay studies, for he focuses on a little-known side of Van Vechten's life, his homosexuality and his collection of gay erotica. Although White talks intelligently about Van Vechten's essays on the blues and his friendship with and advocacy of Gertrude Stein, he merely skims the surface when discussing Van Vechten's fiction, especially his most important and controversial novel, Nigger Heaven (1926). Although White is right to call Van Vechten a modernist, he exaggerates when he calls him a “tastemaker.” H. L. Mencken had a far greater influence on his generation, as Walter Lippman noted in 1926.

“Dogs Bark”: War, Narrative, and Historical Syncopation in Gertrude Stein's Late Work

In 1937, with bloody civil war dividing his native and Fascist power consolidating across Europe, Pablo Picasso began to produce his most explicitly politicized compositions. As he completed final version of his celebrated protest against German bombing of Guernica, his friend and artistic collaborator, Gertrude Stein, was at work on rather different project: short study of Picasso himself, his painting, and status of aesthetic production in twentieth century. Picasso, her first major work written in French, appeared in 1938 as part of series of art books published by Librairie Floury and was later translated by Alice Toklas for English and American publication. Written in Stein's ostensibly more accessible style, book incorporates biography and art criticism into an effort to explain her friend's (and her own) aesthetic intentions and, by extension, to continue her sustained project of defining poiesis adequate to contemporary moment. In its tone, celebratory and even cheerful, it seems to emanate from different world-one that had not just produced and (1937).Although original French edition of Picasso refers to un grand tableau sur l'Espagne: Guernica (a painting about Spain: Guernica), by 1938 mural's title has been quietly redacted from Englishlanguage translation.1 There, appears in last pages only obliquely, as nameless large picture about Spain whose only significance is that it marked Picasso's triumphant return to painting after brief and painful withdrawal. Stein attributes his renouvellement (translated as effervescence) to civil war, but forecloses political interpretation of its effect on him: It was not events themselves that were happening in which awoke Picasso but fact that they were happening in Spain. She makes no mention of painting's content or context, describing only formal quality of its calligraphy.2The brief epilogue following passage is breathless encomium to airplanes and destruction that refrains from acknowledging their terrible historical intimacy.3 earth seen from an airplane is more than from any earthbound perspective and reminds Stein of the lines of cubism . . . mingling lines of Picasso, coming and going, developing and destroying themselves. The twentieth century is splendid for this reason and because it is a time when everything cracks, where everything is destroyed; Picasso's lies in his uncanny vision of world as if seen from an airplane (without his having flown in one) and of things destroyed as they never have been destroyed.1 But is there modern painting whose perspective is more emphatically ground level than that of Guernica? Considered next to Picasso's contemporaneous treatment of these same subjects, Stein's might seem almost obscene. How, in book about Picasso, who has just stunned world with Guernica, can Stein write so gaily of airplanes and destruction?Juxtaposition of their two projects might seem to validate criticism voiced by both Stein's contemporaries and our own that, in her literary work as in her personal opinion, she was politically oblivious, at best. At moment when, as Carl Van Vechten wrote to her, [e]ven Muriel Draper is holding communist meetings in her pretty room and talking like mad about Sacco and Vanzetti and Scottsboro Boys over telephone, Stein seems content to write about beauty and splendor of Picasso's painting, and of her charming friendship with him.s This sort of criticism intensifies when turned to her wartime writings: even as she and Toklas served as ambulance drivers while Great War raged all around them, Stein's literary attention remained focused on formal innovations of sort developed in Tender Buttons (1913); her World War II writings, most of which address war explicitly, attracted still greater derision. …

“Heavy jokes”: Festive unpleasure in the interwar novel

Festivity has long been a central concern of literary critics wishing to track the formal, social, and cultural relation of literature and play. In accounts from Bakhtin onwards, carnival excess fosters renewal of the social realm. Yet the “festive vision” of restoration and rebirth offered by a Bakhtinian critique fails to account for the divergent nature of party literature in the period after World War I. During the interwar period, satirical novels from both sides of the Atlantic represented the decay of modern sociability. When play is transformed into work, a carnival vision becomes untenable; the party is no longer a source of social, emotional, or sacral renewal, but instead the site of what Sianne Ngai has theorized as ugly feelings. In representative novels by Anthony Powell and Carl Van Vechten, disgust and boredom, rather than pleasure and interest, dominate the festive landscape.