A “Leg Show Dance” in a Skyscraper: The Sequenced Mechanics of John Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer

PMLA ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 131 (3) ◽  
pp. 636-651 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alix Beeston
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Early Writing ◽  
Popular Entertainment ◽  
Center Stage ◽  
High Modernism ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Modernist Studies ◽  
Modernist Fiction

Performing a historicized analysis of John Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer (1925), this essay returns this understudied author to the center stage of modernist studies and includes the popular stage in accounts of the technologized mechanisms of modernist writing. By disclosing a deep correlation between the composite narrative tactics of Dos Passos's multilinear novel and the mass entertainments of this period, particularly Florenz Ziegfeld's annual Follies revues, it supplies new parameters for theorizing strategies of narration and characterization in modernist fiction vis-à-vis the technologies of popular entertainment and display in the early twentieth century. The discussion of Dos Passos's broad critique of the gendered specular economy of the modern metropolis in the era of Taylorism repositions his early writing as integral to the development of high modernism in the 1920s.

Building a Green Dam: Environmental Modernism and the Canadian-American Libby Dam Project

2010 ◽  
Vol 79 (3) ◽  
pp. 418-453 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Van Huizen
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
First Nations ◽  
River Basin ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
Environmental Movement ◽  
Mitigation Measures ◽  
High Modernism ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Fundamental Shift

This article examines a fundamental shift in ideas about development, from high modernism in the early twentieth century to environmental modernism after 1960, illustrated by the promotion and construction of the Libby Dam Project in the Canadian-American Kootenay River Basin. In the 1940s Canadian and U.S. planners originally promoted the dam by stressing the rational conquest of nature through science and technology. When construction began in 1966, however, pressure from a growing environmental movement changed how planners designed and constructed the Libby Dam and its reservoir, Lake Koocanusa. The later planners implemented mitigation measures, "blended" the dam and reservoir into the landscape, and appropriated First Nations' symbols to make the project seem like a natural part of the Canadian-American Kootenay Basin. Thus, in both countries, planners reflected the shift from high modernism to environmental modernism.

Hieroglyphic Modernisms

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Schotter
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Media ◽  
British Museum ◽  
Silent Film ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Rosetta Stone ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Modernist Fiction

In the British Museum, one object attracts more tourists than any other: the Rosetta Stone. The decipherment of the Stone by Jean-François Champollion and the discovery of King Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922 contributed to creating a worldwide vogue for all things Egyptian. This fascination was shared by early-twentieth-century authors who invoked Egyptian writing to paint a more complicated picture of European interest in non-Western languages. Hieroglyphs can be found everywhere in modernist novels and in discussions of silent film, appearing at moments when writers and theorists seek to understand the similarities or differences between writing and new recording technologies. Hieroglyphic Modernisms explores this conjunction of hieroglyphs and modernist fiction and film, revealing how the challenge of new media spurred a fertile interplay among practitioners of old and new media forms. Showing how novelists and film theorists in the modernist period defined their respective media in relation to each other, the book shifts the focus in modernism from China, poetry, and the avant-garde to Egypt, narrative, and film.

scholarly journals Choreographic Re-embodiment between Text and Dance

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Jones
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Samuel Beckett ◽  
Joseph Conrad ◽  
Emotional State ◽  
The Body ◽  
Mechanical Function ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Body Rhythm ◽  
Look Back ◽  
Modernist Fiction

This chapter explores the aesthetics of the experimental modernist fiction of Joseph Conrad and Samuel Beckett to open up debates about reenactment of dance in the twentieth century. Using the theories of Gabriele Brandstetter and Paul Ricoeur to explore correspondences in dance and literary skepticism about narrative, the discussion shows how both writers interpolate their stories with fleeting passages of gesture or movement phrases that syncopate and undermine the teleological flow of narrative. This discussion suggests a choreographic re-embodiment between dance and text that focuses on communication beyond words. The similarity of Conrad and Beckett lies in their uses of gesture, but while Conrad’s movement phrases re-embody early twentieth-century expressivism, Beckett’s look back to early twentieth-century innovations in abstraction which examine the mechanical function of the body, rhythm in time and space. Beckett does not reference a mental (or emotional) state, whereas Conrad’s gestures are affective, identifying an emotional interiority.

Teddy Brown and the Art of Performing for the British Variety Stage

2009 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 379-390
Author(s):  
Oliver Double
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Complex Relationship ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
Popular Entertainment ◽  
Senior Lecturer ◽  
Stand Up Comedy ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The University ◽  
British Variety

British variety theatre has been largely ignored by theatre historians, in spite of its huge popularity in the early twentieth century. Here, Oliver Double examines variety through its exemplification in the work of one performer, Teddy Brown, a virtuoso xylophone player whose career coincided with the heyday of the variety stage between and just after the two world wars. The key historical and stylistic aspects of the form typified by Brown's success included the development of a stage persona, novelty, skill, participation, a distinctive musical style, and the ability to exploit the complex relationship between variety and the other types of popular entertainment of the time, notably cinema, revue, and radio. Former comedian Oliver Double is a Senior Lecturer in Drama at the University of Kent, and is the author of Stand-Up! On Being a Comedian (Methuen, 1997) and Getting the Joke: the Inner Workings of Stand-Up Comedy (Methuen, 2005). His stand-up comedy DVD Saint Pancreas is available from the University of Kent website.

scholarly journals Copywriting Gertrude Stein: Advertising, Anonymity, Autobiography

2016 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 331-350
Author(s):  
Rod Rosenquist
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Gertrude Stein ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
The Other ◽  
Ordinary Objects ◽  
Public Expectations ◽  
High Modernism ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Twentieth Century America

This article traces the parallel, though in some ways inverted, early careers of Gertrude Stein and Helen Woodward: one a celebrated but little-read modernist author and the other a widely-read but largely anonymous copywriter. The first section draws comparisons between early twentieth-century changes in advertising copy and Stein's literary innovations, focusing on the techniques used by Stein and copywriters like Woodward to direct attention to ordinary objects or promote branded products by appealing to the individual reader's experience and subjectivity. The second section goes on to consider the contrasting definitions and public expectations of the author within the contexts of high modernism and modern advertising, respectively. The article concludes with brief analysis of the techniques of attribution, promotion and anonymity within the autobiographies of these two writers, suggesting that the contrast in approaches to life writing were largely due to how creative and corporate authors held highly contrasting public positions in early twentieth-century America.

scholarly journals “One does what one can (on fait ce qu’on peut)”: Joseph Conrad as Translator

2019 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-62
Author(s):  
Randall Stevenson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Early Life ◽  
Cultural Difference ◽  
Joseph Conrad ◽  
Foreign Languages ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Key Factor ◽  
Modernist Fiction

Abstract Joseph Conrad’s fiction – Lord Jim especially – contains several instances of characters struggling with translation, or with foreign languages more generally, or transferring speech or syntactic patterns from one language to another. These features have much to suggest about Conrad’s own multilingual early life and his eventual adoption of English for his writing. They also have wider implications concerning his vision and tactics as a novelist – including his reliance on French fiction, and his regular emphases on cultural difference and on the cognitive and epistemological challenges of communicating experience. These challenges, in turn, initiate or anticipate concerns widely apparent in modernist fiction, indicating stresses in an advancing, globalised modernity which made its innovations so necessary. Appreciating Conrad’s interest in translation elucidates and confirms Fredric Jameson’s judgement of his writing as a key factor in the emergence of modernism in the early twentieth century.

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