On Digressions and Detours

Posted on July 20, 2017 by mns

My research and writing time, always too hard to come by, have taken me in various directions, but Tinsel is patiently waiting for me to do more than update the CV and instead to begin using it again as a record of my work, plans, inquiries. So here I am.

A piece long in the pipeline, “Gender Identity and Promiscuous Identification: Reading (in) Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier,” has recently been published in The Journal of Modern Literature 40.3 (in the company of a “Woolf cluster!” Oh lucky day!). The paper has been described in this way:

Jenny Baldry, the narrator of Rebecca West’s First World War novel _The Return of the Soldier_, has traditionally been discussed as a detached observer or unreliable raconteur of the narrative’s wartime love triangle. But she may be productively understood not only as one who tells the story, but as one who reads and interprets it. Positioned as reader, Jenny breaches appropriate boundaries between herself and the “characters” or primary participants in the events, exhibiting a radical empathy that Susan David Bernstein calls “promiscuous identification.” In doing so, she destabilizes not only her family and class loyalties but her very self. Jenny absorbs and appropriates others’ passions, and, even more strikingly, unsettles her gender identity through zealous identification with her male cousin Chris, even attempting to psychically access the masculine battlefield. Jenny’s desire, class allegiance, and gender identity, all complicated by her reading practice, challenge the novel’s stated moral and its seemingly inevitable conclusion.*

Additionally, the book From Page to Place: American Literary Tourism and the Afterlives of Authors (U Mass P, 2017, eds. Hilary Iris Lowe and Jennifer Harris) has recently come out and includes my chapter, “‘Afoot with my Vision’: Whitmania and Tourism in the Digital Age,” a piece that is meaningful to me in many ways, but not least because it grew out of a fantastic teaching experience, funded by the NEH as the multi-university project Looking for Whitman. The chapter is described in this way:

This essay draws upon my experience as a teacher of a digitally-inflected seminar on the American poet Walt Whitman in examining how our practices and experiences as literary tourists are affected by the promises of accessibility and immediacy on the internet. The essay raises questions about what “seeing things” really means, questions that are entwined for me with Whitman’s own exhortations: “You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, [. . .] nor feed on the spectres of books,” he tells us, “You shall not look through my eyes either.” What is the difference between our eyes and the lens of the digitizing scanner or photographer? How do we “remember” something we see in person when the digital images of it that are available are all of higher quality but framed by someone else? When we tour online, are we taking things at second or third-hand? Or, instead, are we fooling ourselves that we are really, truly seeing through an author’s eyes and not just our own when we stand in the author’s prior physical spaces?**

My slow work on the poetess/periodicals and my somewhat-too-immersive work on literature of the Great War (and all things GW) have also inspired conference papers on H.D. and Charlotte Mew, at the unspeakably awesome conference H.D. and Feminist Poetics in Bethlehem PA, and on Mary Borden (new but relatively intense person of interest, sure to reappear) in a seminar on the First World War at MSA in 2015.

Phew.

The poetess is again a little bit on hold as I am currently working on another article, the premise of which has been knocking around in my brain for awhile, which focuses on H.D’s use of tropes and language of telegraphy and Morse code across several works. An earlier paper at SAMLA began this process, including some exploration of the artist-inventory Samuel Morse himself (an interesting but unpleasant fellow tbh) and starting to sketch out some ideas I have about the figure of the “active receiver” in H.D.’s aesthetic theory. So I’ve been reading a LOT about telegraphic history etc. and trying to grasp why a modernist writer, in an era literally defined by the rapid pace of its technological inventions, repeatedly turns on multiple occasions to a not-obsolete-but-decidely-19th-century-and-problematically-connected-to-news-of-tragedy-in-WWI technology. Gentle reader, to be continued….

… .. –. -. .. -. –. / — ..-. ..-.

* mns obsessions here noted: fluid gender identity; promiscuous identification and emotional contagion aka Why I Have a Long List of Books I Can Barely Think About Let Alone Teach Because They Make Me Too Emotional or Crazy; the Great War; madwomen; things the beautiful Rebecca West wears on her head especially beaded headdresses and sooomething on the cover of Time that could be an alien face or a coded yonic symbol.

self-evident

the beaded headdress

** mns obsessions here noted: the aged WW and his eyes; literary tourism and graveyards; my Whitmaniacs of 2009-10; the haversack; the Civil War in Virginia; the word “hirsute” but not hirsutism.

Interlude: On Progressive Poetics and Unexpected Invitations

Posted on May 27, 2015 by mns

Recently I got an invitation to participate in a fascinating collective project led by H.L. Hix of the University of Wyoming. (Not often does something so lovely come unbidden, am I right?) Called Progressive Poetics, the work lives now on his blog, inquire, and describes itself as follows:

The Progressive Poetics project asks each contributor to respond, in light of something she or he has already said in print, to this question:

“Poetry makes nothing happen.” (W. H. Auden, 1939)

“To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” (Theodor Adorno, 1949)*

Though often cited as timeless, authoritative truths about poetry, those two pronouncements were made at particular historical moments, in particular cultural contexts, and from particular subject positions. But we (choose any “we” from those of us alive now) occupy various subject positions, live in various circumstances, and stand nearer the mid-twenty-first century than the mid-twentieth. It is not self-evident that we should (continue to) defer to Auden and Adorno, so:

What must or might be said now about poetry?

It resonated with me in many ways: because it is a collaborative undertaking; because of my interest (obsession) with questions of literature and ethics, literature of witness; because the fraught place of poetry in the contemporary world is something I make students talk about to excess when I teach Contemporary Poetry–(one semester we all wore this button to spread the word)– etc. Both poets and critics are part of Hix’s project, which he hopes to eventually move from his blog to a book, though in some ways the sheer size of what the blog can hold makes it a perfect receptacle (see: my still-unwritten essay on “the capacious blog”).

What H.L. Hix sent me was a “string” with some responses he’d already gotten from others (Cherry Smyth and Cynthia Hogue**) for the project that he felt resonated with my own words. They were followed by a quotation he’d chosen from my chapter, “Introduction: Hearing Over,” in the volume that Chad Engbers and I co-edited, Poetry and Dialogism: Hearing Over (Palgrave, 2014). Calling it a “one-question interview,” H.L. Hix asks that in 200 words a contributor respond to her own quotation and/or to the claims by Auden and Adorno on and against which he has formed the Progressive Poetics project. (200 words??? Gah.)

Here, then, is my small bit in a really large utterance.

Thank you, Harvey Hix, for your kind invitation.

* Hell yeah I linked Adorno to Wikipedia. Don’t blame H.L. Hix for that outrage.

** Such company! It makes one’s head woozy with pleasure.

Of Sabbaticals Past and Research Future: The Poetess and Affect

Posted on December 19, 2014 by mns

I have been away from Tinsel in February for much too long, immersed in new classes on the Great War that should have been making their way here. But I return to continue the thread begun earlier of periodicals and poetry– and even, to some degree, impersonality.

In summer 2015 I am again slated to teach my online course called Modernism, Poetry, and Periodicals, which I first did a few years ago as part of UMW’s Online Learning Initiative. The experience I had in that course in some ways sparked my interest in the poetess. I had framed the course in part like this:

You may think of Modernism as a specific time, aesthetic, practice, ideology, set of socio-historical circumstances, etc.—and I could certainly attempt to provide you with that semi-stable definition. But the study of the little magazine Poetry offers us a chance to come at Modernism differently, to experience the debates and changes essentially emergently rather than wholly in retrospect. Let’s think of our intellectual approach as something closer to archeology, using Poetry and the MJP as our dig site: what can we construct or learn or intuit about Modernism, or more specifically Modern poetry, based on the evidence we excavate from the little magazine’s issues? What kind of insight to a culture or people (editors, poets, reviewers, publishers) can we get from print (digital) artifact rather than ethnographic observation?

Well, I meant it, but in retrospect I understand that I thought I had a good idea what they would find when they sifted in the digital archive. To my surprise, though led along to some degree by readings I had identified myself, the class began to focus on poets and poems to which I had paid very little attention, many of them women poets, and to use that work to help shape the parameters of what they were calling Modernism. Since then, my auto-didactic journey into periodical studies has made me realize even more clearly that they were meeting some of the potentialities of the cover-to-cover initiative, not mining for the works of post-ordained greats. And I began, too, to think about the role of these poets in the literary debates, culture, and output of the time– specifically, I wondered about the twentieth-century manifestations of what I had thought of mostly as a nineteenth-century phenomenon (or problem): the poetess.

Fast forward, Fall 2014: sabbatical a distant memory of yoga pants and reading time, and the Modernist Studies Association conference on the horizon, for which I had registered for a seminar called “The Feeling(s) of Modernism,” led by Claire Barber and Meghan Marie Hammond, with special guests Todd Cronan and Angus Fletcher. Confession: I’m not extremely interested in the study of affect to the degree that it bleeds into cognitive theories and empiricism–indeed, I’m not extremely interested in bringing science to literary studies at all. But it was a fantastic seminar with many brilliant participants (thank you, everyone!), and it gave me an opportunity to begin working through some of my thoughts about the poetesses, the description of whom intersects in interesting ways with descriptions of affect (the body, gender, agency, artist-audience relationship, form).

Trusting that any soul happening upon this blog will handle my work with respect and honesty, and with the intention of re-igniting Tinsel as a fluid record of my work, I include here the short paper that was distributed to my seminar colleagues:

Scanlon, MSA 14 seminar

A Generic Post (with images of some usual suspects)

Posted on March 23, 2014 by mns

Aristotle

Genre is something I do, so to speak, and have done for awhile. Most of my colleagues specialize in a particular genre, and they (genres, not colleagues) are of course often used to shape ads for professorial employment. My specialty, so to speak, genre is poetry in various forms, though there are as well novels I consider to be mine.* But in addition I teach genre theory or genre studies** in various courses, and so it is extra shameful that I fall into a group of those shamed, so to speak, by periodical studies.

MM Bakhtin

Croce

Well, before shame, a detour that interests me. A good chunk of my poetic genre studies have been on the vaunted and authoritative genre of the epic, and one of the things that I have mused about with this particular beast is that there is no such thing as a failed or bad epic. If it is bad, then it is simply not an epic– that is to say, some concept of quality is built right into the working sense of the genre itself. That’s not so of other literary genres: we have failed novels, bad lyrics, poorly wrought plays, really, really lame short stories—well, so to speak. But “epic” implies greatness, including in contemporary slang***. I have been thinking about the fact that the same thing is basically true of the genre little magazine. Vaunted. Authoritative even as it sometimes eschews authority (I’m NOT looking at you, Wyndham Lewis). Exactly

Derrida

what makes something a little magazine**** and whether or not it should be seen as different than other periodicals that also included or reviewed literature and art is pretty hotly debated, but its quality or importance, or at least its epic, so to speak, reach, is assumed. And this is (possibly) pertinent: it cannot be a failed little magazine because failure (of finances,of circulation, of endurance) is pretty much part of its definition.

Okay, to the shame, and I better ‘fess up immediately: I have been among the unenlightened who have mined periodicals for specific works and authors.

Frye

I’m not proud of it, but there it is. And of course doing so, seeing the magazine “too often […] essentially as aggregations of otherwise autonomous works,” like an anthology (Brad Evans in Brooker and Thacker Volume II, 145: “a media venue for the collection and distribution of material, as we customarily think of magazines”) is not attending well to its own genre and to the bibliographic/periodical code.***** Funny (strange, laughable): I don’t really do this for contemporary periodicals. I see articles in a context, even if digital: The Journal of International Women’s Studies; People (to name just a few elitist academic publications). But when I poke around in the MJP, I have been more liable to search for specific authors or pieces.****** But reading cover to cover, in order, is not part of the expected generic behavior for a magazine. Unlike the reading expectations for a novel, in which one is intended to move from beginning to end (which one may or may not always do, as long as one is

Devitt

confessing), reading expectations for a magazine most likely presume skipping around or skipping altogether, reading just what is of interest, pausing on images or text that catch one’s attention but thumbing/clicking past other items.

Miller

But even so, obviously, once one thinks of it, the context matters– Scholes and Wulfman say that it is an “error” to think of a story that is published in both a magazine and a book as the same, even if every word is consistent– what is around it (even if you skip it), its layout, etc.– these are inextricable from meaning (75). A painting in a museum is not the same as a superior forgery of that painting or a high quality reproduction of that painting OR–here’s the clincher–that same painting in someone’s living room.

My echo, so to speak, for this post, but one that others note as well: sifting the modernist magazines to isolate specific chunks of gold (first published poem by H.D., an earlier version of a Stevens poem) has dangers (among them: “I got a rock”) that mimic the dangers of traditional Modernist studies: distinguishing, even cloistering,the artistic geniuses/genii from a rich, dialogic context.

*e.g., Mrs. Dalloway (step off, Lorentzen and Foss) or The Return of the Soldier.

** that link is to Wikipedia, and it’s a surprisingly rich page.

Wittgenstein

*** and that link is to the urban dictionary, and it’s a not-surprisingly profane page. You have been warned.

**** a favorite, from Faith Binckes’s book Modernism, Magazines, and the British Avant-Garde: “the familiar representation [is] of little magazines as small, independent guerrilla units, who are subject to war and insurrection but are rarely open to diplomacy or trade” (40). Now I AM looking at you, Wyndham Lewis.

Another favorite: “We must learn to stop talking, writing, and thinking as if the category of ‘little magazines’ represents something real in the textual world. It is a dream category, an attempt to unite periodicals of which the uniter approves and exclude those lacking such approval” ( Scholes and Wulfman, Modernism in the Magazines: An Introduction 60). This gets at my point about the assumed excellence of this (apparently specious) genre.

*****Sean Latham and Robert Scholes, “The Rise of Periodical Studies,” PMLA 121.2 (March 2006), 521. “Bibliographic code” is an idea usually traced to Jerome McGann, and in their massive Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker argue for a “periodical code” in the study of periodicals, as do some others. One of the things at stake here is the preservation of ads in periodicals, which have frequently been preserved with such elements excised, thus further/falsely divorcing the intellectual/social/political content from its material circumstances and, as well, obliterating clues about intended audience and periodical networks.

“There are different genres of magazines,” says my eleven-year-old, looking over my shoulder, “but I don’t think a magazine is a genre.” Generational shame.

****** Conflict? Attend to periodical publications in their entirety, as a genre– but also, as called for strongly by Scholes and Wulfman in Modernism in the Magazines: An Introduction, to digitize them with sophisticated search engines that avert the need to browse and to visualize works and authors in full context.

A Few Don’ts by a Periodical Student

Posted on March 9, 2014 by mns

Scholars of Modernism have long noted the period’s propensity for…. well, ism(s): Surrealism, Fauvism, Imagism(e), Vorticisim, Cubism, Dadaism, Futurism, (Post-)Impressionism, Symbolism… While most dictionaries still discuss “ism” according to its lowly history as a noun suffix, “ism” (noun) is understood as an informal term meaning a distinctive (often derogatory or oppressive) ideology or practice. Even without the implications of derogation, an ism certainly has strictures, rules– at a minimum firmly articulated best practices. As a noun, “ism” is a word that punctuates the discussion of the modernist periodicals; one of the ways in which each is characterized is whether it does, or does not, act as a mouthpiece for a particular ism, something traceable in editorial statements, manifestos, aesthetic philosophies, or simply the creative work gathered within the covers. The term is present even in the periodicals themselves, as when Jane Heap wrote in 1926 in The Little Review that it has “unostentatiously presented all the new systems of art to America . . . about twenty Isms, in the last few years.”*

Of course, isms can be proactive and exhortative, and they can, as well, be exclusionary and prescriptive. One of the things that has surprised me about my reading in periodical studies as a discipline (a punishment to correct disobedience; a branch of knowledge) is the extent to which it is also an ism of sorts, with more explicitly expressed rules for best practice than perhaps any other field I’ve encountered in my scholarship.

The most obvious (easily perceived; lacking in subtlety) example so far is from the foundational text by Robert Scholes and Clifford Wulfman called Modernism in the Magazines: An Introduction (Yale UP, 2010). Foundational architects of the MJP, Scholes and Wulfman use their book in part to give suggestions and set guidelines for teaching and scholarship with modernist periodicals. [Sidenote: the emphasis on teaching is exemplary (model, rather than cautionary) in the MJP and its offshoots.] In this particular book, I find phrases such as “reading any magazine from the past must start by taking up a single issue of that magazine” (ideally in one’s hands, with digital access as a lesser but acceptable substitute); or, “The best way to begin reading a magazine like this is simply to read it–to read every page.” Though Scholes and Wulfman are explicitly directive, it is only their tone, rather than their intent, that distinguishes statements like this from some of my other readings in the field.

Perhaps the sense that one is being given directions (a course to follow; supervision or control), even step-by-step ones, is intensified by the language of/attention to data. It’s not a word we encounter a lot in literary studies, but it appears rather frequently in the Scholes and Wulfman text as they set out the primary (early; of chief importance) goal of the painstaking (diligent or assiduous; plodding or dogged) task of collecting, listing, graphing information about the modernist periodicals such as price (and changes thereof), editors (and changes thereof), years of publication, size and length (and changes thereof), place of publication (and etc.), and more. I have also been working through the massive, rich (heavy or full-flavored; plentiful; fertile) volumes of The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, and I note formulaic qualities to the essays there as well, which, in addition to their more varied and discursive histories of the personalities, finances, and purposes that shape a given periodical, tend to catalogue information about cover design, paper, major authors published . . .that is to say, data.

Undoubtedly, timelines, lists, tables, and graphs of this information will be invaluable to scholars of the magazines–in no way do I mean to question that. Rather, I am noting the discourse and collection of data, of clearly articulated or even prescribed best practice, that distinguishes some of the work in this field. Because my thinking tends to find echoes, I see some interesting parallels to the period of Modernism itself, a time not only of isms and manifestos but also of the increasing professionalization (first known use of “professionalize”: 1856) of literary studies and criticism, motivated partly by the increasing social reliance on skilled scientific interpretation of data as a fundamental way of understanding our world.

* quoted on page 82 of Alan Golding’s “The Little Review (1914-29).” The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines Vol. II: North American 1894-1960. Eds. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012. 61-84.

One more word on (im)personality

Posted on March 6, 2014 by mns

from William Carlos Williams:

I had wanted to see established some central or sectional agency which would recognize, and where possible, support little magazines. I was wrong. It must be a person who does it, a person, a fallible person, subject to devotions and accidents.

—Autobiography, 266.

On (Im)personality

Posted on February 18, 2014 by mns

The materiality of periodicals is something I intend to focus more on, because terms like bibliographic or periodical codes are newish to me, even if the characteristics they refer to are not. And an interest in the artifact is part of what brought me to my current course of study– even if it is only the thrill of seeing it digitized rather than holding or smelling it.

But what is striking about my first few weeks of reading deeply in (twentieth-century, so far mostly British) periodical studies is how much the field is biographical as much or more than bibliographic. Of course, the Eliotic Modernism that came to be canonical espoused rather an escape from personality, and to some degree the professed approach of contemporary critics has also foregrounded the material-historical, not the social-biographical (or frequently even the literary), so this makes for a strange conundrum. I suppose it’s obvious that, even for the publications that were not specific iterations of an artistic manifesto, the editors’ politics, finances, religion will shape what is sought and accepted for print. But a common sense of a journal is that it has an inherent integrity or being, that it exists as it is, and its contents and the trajectory of its run are somehow determined by the identity of (“direct treatment of”) the thing itself. Even without being blind to the fingerprints or quotation marks of all those who produce the text, I am surprised to find my readings framed coolly by timelines, price comparisons, advertisement info, and then burrowing into a warren of personalities: John Middleton Murry, Katherine Mansfield, Ford Madox Ford, Dora Marsden, Harriet Monroe, Harold Monro, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound (They Who Need Not Be Linked), A.R. Orage, Wyndham Lewis and more…plus myriad contributors, patrons, assistants, advisers. They were introduced at parties and lectures, went to Oxford together, quarreled, broke up marriages, gave each other paid work, switched allegiances, jockeyed for leadership of, or to speak for, a new literature, new society, new woman, new financial system, new theory.

What I mean is that it’s striking how much the inspiration for, founding and funding of, work on and of, and eventual success or failure of the modernist magazines is personal, even intimate, and the research on them reflects that, giving ample space to biographical, or private, information that underlies these brave forays into the public sphere. How will this affect the direction of my interest in specific titles, and how will it affect my reading of literary works or essays withing the covers?

Some faces:

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On Tentativeness and Permanence

Posted on February 8, 2014 by mns

Fingers above keys. Well, two fingers, the middle ones. . .in my high school back in the day, only those NOT going to college were taught to type. Somehow I missed the part where going to college was going to get me a secretary. Though I am reasonably fast and accurate all things considered, this fact seems worth mentioning as I begin a blog that will, in part, reflect on changing technologies and their relationship to reading, research, writing.

Hesitance to commit words to a medium that carries those words to others is something I have been thinking about (struggling with) this week. This blog is rooted in my sabbatical project for Spring 2014 (thank you, UMW). The project has a rather brave abstract:

This project focuses on four of my primary areas of research and teaching: poetry, women’s writing, literary Modernism, and digital humanities. It centers on the digital archive of periodicals called the Modernist Journals Project. I anticipate producing a scholarly article on the presence of “the poetesses” in these journals; maintaining a professional blog on my reading/research; designing a new course for the English major called Modernism in the Magazines; and contributing pedagogical materials to the MJP site.

More specifically, my proposal said:

I understand the last major element of my proposal as a hybrid of process and product. My past and proposed work in the MJP archive grows directly out of my vibrant interest in digital humanities. I do find, however, that the work in literary studies on digital scholarship and teaching lags well behind that in, say, history. The research I do in the MJP archive will obviously make use of the primary resources available only through digitalization, but I propose to use meaningful technologies also in disseminating that research. Specifically, I plan to use an active, specialized blog to record, cultivate, and share my ongoing pedagogical and professional work in the archive. The “Looking for Whitman” project vaulted me from being a blog facilitator to a literary blogger, but with a voice largely distributed across my teaching blogs on UMWBlogs, so it is a job (identity?) that I hope to refine more intentionally in the next few years.

My reading thus far has focused on the field of periodical studies, especially in the Modernist period. Some of the lead writers and editors of the little magazines churned out thousands of words of copy a week–reviews, manifestos, retorts, editorials, poems, stories. Without the benefit of hyperlinks, periodicals engaged in elaborate cross-reference and dialogue. Was it less anxiety-producing to write for those modernist periodical writers, producing language and ideas at such a tremendous rate that, even when undistracted by tweets, kiks, messages, alerts, vines, snapchats, it must have been nearly impossible to refine them, to feel secure about and committed to them? (Okay, at least for everyone but Ezra, the Evil Godfather of Modernism.)

By nature the periodical challenges the sense of permanence that characterizes our widespread understanding of literature; it’s not just the bunk about timeless universality, but also the physicality of books. (Remember them? That thing made of paper that the e-book is supposed to make extinct? As one who festishes my books and also owns an e-reader, I frequently find that I download the books I don’t care if I “have forever”–see what I mean?) Periodicals are to be read and recycled, replaced in quick succession by the next issue. They are in waiting rooms, newsstands, mail boxes, art classes where they get cut up for collages. Even literary periodicals like Poetry, begun by the bad ass Harriet Monroe, are focused on the contents of one issue and maybe give a tease about what to expect in the next issue. The periodical is also a forward-looking genre, then, pitching itself through weeks or months, trying to keep its subscribers hooked for the next round.

crossroads of past and future Even those with the funds to produce on thick paper or with stronger covers couldn’t have imagined that, a century later, the issues would be digitized cover to cover and made available to millions of potential readers– and furthermore, that the genre defined by impermanence and expectancy would be thereby transformed into an artifact, impervious to rot, ripe for study. Permanent.

Like the little magazine, a blog follows a logic of periodicity and therefore of replacement. People subscribe to blogs in anticipation of what is still to come. Although blogs have archives, it is timeliness rather than timelessness that characterizes the genre. And yet one never knows how the copy produced, how the language and ideas thus published and disseminated, will travel and live. But the journey begins.

montblanc fountain pen

Sabbatical 2014 Blog

Posted on February 6, 2014 by mns

Coming soon!