Demented ^annotated^ Particulars: Samuel Beckett's Murphy after the Notebooks.
Chris Ackerley (University of Otago, New Zealand)
Working from clearly-defined principles of validity in annotation, I propose to revisit my annotations to Samuel Beckett’s Murphy, which were published as Demented Particulars (Journal of Beckett Studies Books, 1998; 2nd ed., rev. and expanded, 2004; rpt. U Edinburgh P, 2010). My annotations were written perforce without reference to the six notebooks that constitute the final manuscript of the novel, these having been in private hands until 2013, when they were acquired by the University of Reading. The concept of validity that is central to the art of annotation arises from the principles of scientific method (as articulated by Karl Popper); it thus follows that the addition of significant new materials to the existing archive should initiate the testing of previous hypotheses and, where appropriate, the formulation of better ones. With respect to my Murphy annotations, I do not anticipate a major paradigm shift, but I propose to revaluate my previous notes, correcting the inevitable small errors that the Notebooks will reveal, and offering revised insights in accordance with any new evidence that they might offer.
Brilliant Modernism: Electric Light and Modernist Poetics
Nicoletta Asciuto (University of York, UK)
When news of the novel electric light reached Great Britain in the late 1870s, the new technology was received ‘not with a bang, but with a whimper’. By mid-1920s, however, electric light had become a familiar presence at least in the public spaces of North American and Western Europe, while full domestication of the electric light in the domestic sphere will have to wait until the latter half of the 1930s. In my research, I investigate the ways in which the new artificial sources of light, gas light first and electric light afterwards, are absorbed and incorporated into late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century British poetry. In this paper, I will focus on how electric light is effectively “domesticated” in the poetic discourse as a new technology stirring the popular and literary imagination. Initial feelings of Victorian hostility towards the new, non-poetic lighting source mutate to a certain excitement for electric signs and advertisements, light bulbs and arc lamps, which are fully incorporated into poetry by the mid-1920s. I shall discuss examples from anonymous popular music-hall songs as well as from more widely recognized poets such as Mina Loy (1882-1966), D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930), and T. S. Eliot (1888-1965), in conjunction with archival and historical resources.
The Political Turn in Beckett Studies and Beyond
Helen Bailey and William Davies (University of Reading, UK)
Reflecting on what is often referred to as the ‘historical turn’ in Modernist Studies (prompted by the wealth of archival and biographical material that has become available), this co-authored paper looks ahead to a new frontier of criticism revolving around what we call ‘the political turn’. Focussing on Beckett Studies in particular, we argue that attempts to uncover overlooked political dimensions of Samuel Beckett’s work have been significantly shaped by historical approaches to his writing. As Emilie Morin (2017), Seán Kennedy (2010) and others have demonstrated, contrary to the writer’s own protests, and to the largely misappropriated claims of his ‘apoliticism’ and ‘ahistoricism’ by early commentators of his work, Beckett’s immersion in significant historico-political events during the 20th century was an important source of inspiration for him. He frequently sought abstraction and literary alienation by way of objects, place names and historical figures that appear as ‘elements in flux’. His politically motivated acts include his support of and contribution to Nancy Cunard’s important but largely neglected 1934 anthology, Negro, his critique of the Irish Free State, his approval of an all-black production of Waiting For Godot in apartheid South Africa, and his signing of a petition in support of Salman Rushdie in 1989. While historical approaches reveal important political contexts, they only scratch the surface of the ‘political’ itself, which encompasses not only historical events and movements, but also intricate ideas around morality, power structures and dynamics, disenfranchisement, language, and discrimination by omission or commission. We argue that these historical identifications not only lead to productive studies of the contexts of Beckett’s writing, but also foreground an important change of focus towards the political in Beckett Studies, Modernist Studies and critical and cultural theory more widely.
Values and validity in Beckett studies
Iain Bailey (University of Manchester, UK)
On the whole, the archival turn in Beckett studies has encouraged a methodological framework that gives priority to questions of validity over questions of value. This is not to say that archival work on Beckett has neglected questions of value, or even that it considers them to be of lesser importance, but that it tends to take judgments of validity about the facts and data of the historical record as a necessary foundation for all research into Beckett’s life and writing. In concrete terms, thinking about the politics, ethics, or aesthetics of Beckett’s work (all of which remain major areas of interest for the field) should be underpinned by objectively valid knowledge, grounded in philological method. The main critical differences in the field at present have to do with the opposition between this kind of position and those which take an enquiry into questions of value to be the necessary basis for judgments of validity. It seems clear that the engagement of many Beckett scholars with empiricism and falsifiability is also bound up with values of clarity, accuracy, authority, and truth, all of which have both specific disciplinary and broader, urgent political implications. The question has been whether an enquiry into Beckett’s niggling at all of these values ought to be the starting point for research, a literary criticism grounded in close reading and metacritique, or whether in order to espouse or even examine such values the discipline needs to have a grounding in objective validity—and if so, how it can be established.
Preparing ‘Woolf Notes: Virginia Woolf’s Reading and Research Notes Online’
Michèle Barrett (Queen Mary, University of London, UK)
This paper will describe progress on a project, undertaken jointly with Brenda Silver in the USA, to produce a digital edition of Virginia Woolf’s reading and research notes. We plan to make available online over 4000 pages of these notes.
Publication of these research notes will demonstrate the importance of education, research and disciplined reading to the work of this writer. The notes evidence a range of skills and deploy languages other than English, not only her well-known interest in Greek but some French, Italian and German. The notes she made for Leonard Woolf’s Empire and Commerce in Africa include a considerable amount of quantified data. The project falls into two stages, based on the two main archives of Woolf’s research notes. Stage 1 covers the materials at Sussex and is reasonably well advanced, drawing on funding from the Leverhulme Trust and the British Academy. This will include the Sussex reading notebooks, each one accompanied by the relevant extract from Brenda Silver’s authoritative index (published Princeton UP 1983 and currently being digitised) and the Empire and Commerce notes. A projected Stage 2 will cover materials held in the USA, and is under discussion.
Digitising Marianne Moore’s Archive
Victoria Bazin, (Northumbria University, UK)
Marianne Moore described herself as a literary magpie, ‘picking and choosing’ textual fragments from reading, listening and viewing the twentieth century as it was mediated through magazines, newspapers, film and radio. She stored her collections in the 122 notebooks she kept from 1905 to the 1960s. Many of these notebooks also contain parts or early versions of poems as well as conversations with family, friends and fellow modernists. Moore had notebooks devoted specifically to poetry as well as to music, finance, travel and to capturing the words of her life-time collaborator, her mother. While Moore’s correspondence, manuscripts, photographs and the contents of her Greenwich Village living room all form part of the archive at the Rosenbach Museum and Library, the notebooks are a particularly rich resource, offering a unique insight into Moore’s writing practice as well as the cultural history of the twentieth century.
It is no surprise, then, that when Cristanne Miller began developing the idea of digitising Moore’s archive, she turned firstly to the notebooks. The Marianne Moore Digital Archives Project is making available and freely accessible, for the first time, many of Moore’s notebooks. This paper will examine the ways in which digitising Moore’s notebooks will transform the ways in which we read and understand her poetry.
Looking for John Dos Passos, Finding Anna Held
Alix Beeston (University of Cardiff, UK)
In a brown-cover notebook used by John Dos Passos in the early 1920s, theauthor made reference to a moment in theatre, media, and pinup girl history: “AnnaHeld in a Parlor Match at the Herald Sq. Theatre.” Nested in a series of roughsketches of tumbling trapeze artists, ball-balancing seals, and top-hatted figures, the allusion is to the off-Broadway debut of Anna Held, the Parisian singer and performer who arrived in New York City in September 1896 to appear in the farce A Parlor Match.
I came across this scribbled line while working my way through the Dos Passos papers at the University of Virginia. It opened up a new—and newly historicized—way of reading the experimental narration of Dos Passos’s first major novel, Manhattan Transfer (1925). The novel’s episodic, multilinear form has long been understood in connection with the montage techniques of avant-garde cinema. But the presence of Anna Held in the archive reveals the ahistoricity of this transmedial analogy even as it suggests other spectatorial contexts for the novel. This archival discovery formed the basis of my 2016 PMLA article, “A ‘Leg Show Dance’ in a Skyscraper,” as well as a longer chapter on Dos Passos in my new book, In and Out of Sight: Modernist Writing and the Photographic Unseen. In this paper, I reflect on archival work as an intellectual and creative process by which we might complicate routine claims about modernist literature’s relationship to other aesthetic, cultural, and technological forms.
The Uniqueness of David Jones
Tom Berenato (University of Virginia, US)
Uniqueness was a quality dear to David Jones. Jones cherished his own idiosyncrasy and cultivated its indulgence in his intimates. He was quick to counter any suggestion that another poet had exerted an influence on his way of writing. He mourned the damage photographic reproduction did to the aura of his artworks. He insisted on the anthropological identity of Homo sapiens and Homo faber. He founded his subscription to the Catholic faith on its exclusive equation of artefacture and religious act—a theological particularity that affords Catholicism its claim to cultural universality. Uniqueness, for Jones, underwrites all pretension to “significance.”
Much of the scholarship on Jones has taken the man and his friends at their word, positing the uniqueness of his project, and that project’s vision of uniqueness, as its point of departure. Recent attention to Jones’s archive has begun to uncover ground on which to gauge the real extent of this artist’s idiosyncrasy. His uniqueness, I argue in this paper, is best approached as a “true myth,” a cultural artefact whose function Jones himself in a 1942 essay on “The Myth of Arthur” understands to be “to make significant for the present what the past holds.” The myth of Jones’s uniqueness is genuine insofar as it has conserved what we must now, in the glare of the archive, leave behind. To gain a purchase on this problem I present for discussion a manuscript among the Jones Papers at the National Library of Wales in which Jones mounts a critique of the “courage” of one of his unacknowledged influences, the German writer and warrior Ernst Jünger.
May Sinclair’s intertextual (dis)orderly archive
Rebecca Bowler (Keele University, US)
This paper will outline the holdings of May Sinclair’s main archive, The Kislak Center at UPenn, which holds galleys of the first editions of Sinclair’s novels, page proofs (with authorial emendations), typescripts, manuscripts and workbooks, with references also to the University of Sussex Special Collections, who hold a ‘series of typed and handwritten drafts of short stories and philosophical essays, some annotated’. This collection has been recently donated and has not been fully catalogued or consulted.
I am General Editor on the Edinburgh Critical Editions of the Works of May Sinclair. We are publishing Sinclair’s non-fiction and fiction in interdisciplinary tranches (thematically and not chronologically) so that the dialogues between each can be explored. Sinclair’s fiction and her non-fiction were often written in tandem, and there are cross-references to be traced between each. Every text has its own structural intertextuality. One of the parallel (and contingent) projects I am working on alongside my editing is the digitisation and online publication of Sinclair’s workbooks, in collaboration with the Kislak Center. The workbooks are important artefacts because they are where she first sketched out ideas: notes for articles or reviews appear in between scraps of novels and drafts of philosophical and political writing. This paper will explore how the diversity and intertextual (dis)orderliness of the archive has influenced my practice as textual editor and the shape of the critical editions; and how future scholarship will in turn benefit from an account of Sinclair’s work as structurally (archivally) intertextual.
20s Feminism in the Archives: Scholarly editions and feminist recovery work today
Stephanie J Brown (University of Arizona, US)
The study of literary modernism has never been tied more closely to archival practice than it is in our current historical moment. In the US, this is in part because of the dominance of the New Modernist Studies and its investments, both concrete and theoretical, in projects that theorize the archive as a constitutive feature and form of modernity through specific archives. It is also the result of the recovery projects started in the 1960s and 70s by feminist scholars and scholars of color whose premise was that archival work was an effective weapon against the exclusive boundaries of the ‘high’ modernist. Although modernist archival recovery has been underway for several decades now, and although ours might seem to be a belated moment in feminist or other recovery projects, my talk will build on my experiences in preparing Edith Ayrton Zangwill’s middlebrow novel The Call (1924) for republication as a scholarly edition as a case study in the continuing relevance of this sort of archival work to the field’s professional and pedagogical development.
‘Let Me Be Free of Printers’: The Reception of Ezra Pound’s Generative Archive
Mark Byron (University of Sydney, Australia)
Ezra Pound produced an enormous amount of printed, broadcast, and performed material over a long and profoundly varied career. Yet, as many scholars have known all along, his archive – mostly in the Beinecke Library but its minor limbs scattered elsewhere – contains vast holdings of variant and draft versions of his published works, and enormous quantities of unpublished material. The slow recovery of this material has had a profound, if still only partially acknowledged effect on Pound scholarship. From the recovery of hundreds of radio speeches, propaganda items, and FBI dossiers, to draft novels, musical scores, abandoned canto drafts and hundreds of essays in English and Italian, the work of numerous scholars in recent years has brought into focus a much fuller picture of the poet and polemicist, and his troubled historical placement. This paper will provide an overview of this state of affairs, paying special attention to a small number of cases where the archive has fundamentally overturned the received view of Pound, even in the face of biographies and critical works that seek continuity in Pound’s profile and the reception of his work.
Yeats Now and in the Next Generation: The Legacy of the Archives
Wayne K. Chapman (Clemson University, US)
In the last fifty years—after the generation of Richard Ellmann, A. Norman Jeffares, Curtis Bradford, Jon Stallworthy, Thomas Parkinson, and David R. Clark pioneered Yeats studies with work begun in the poet’s personal library when yet in the care of his family—the once single archive gradually migrated in pieces to collections in the National Library of Ireland and elsewhere. Apart from selected lots obtained by auction or negotiated sale to persons or libraries in Britain, the United States, and Japan, the lion’s share found a permanent home in Ireland due to a series of gifts to the NLI between 1939 and the present day. Because I am of the generation that followed the pioneers to deposits made by Mrs. Yeats through the 1960s and began publishing just as her example was matched by Senator Michael Yeats in 1985, I give testimony in my paper on the value that archives have bestowed upon the textual study of Yeats, and I close with a prediction about future prospecting for treasure in materials only recently acquired by the National Library from the Yeats family, in October 2017. In modernist studies, that means Yeats for the next generation.
“…There can be but the one "Sordello."/But Sordello, and my Sordello?”--The Pounds of the Pound Archives.
Michael Davis (Princeton Theological Seminary, US)
The Cantos are generally understood as at least a quasi-autobiographical poem. This forces thescholar to consider the poem’s intimate connection with the poet’s life as essential to an understanding and interpretation of the work. In fact, one might say that it is as if Pound wanted his “biography” to be read as inscribed in his work in a way that many other high modernists did not. Pound’s archive then would seem crucial to an understanding of both the life and work. However, because of Pound’s fascist commitments, His indictment for treason, his anti-Semitism, time in St. Elizabeths, there has been in Pound scholarship both periods of intense involvement and equally deliberate avoidance of the archive. These approaches result in diverse portrayals of the poet and the poetry. This paper will explore the approaches to Pound(s) which either embrace or avoid the archive and their methodological (ideological?) rationales. This will be undertaken within the context of the evolution of Pound studies post WWII and the role these approaches played in winning Pound his uneasy place in the academy as part Western/Modernist canon.
Richard Bruce Nugent’s Unpublished Queer Modernism
David Deutsch (University of Alabama, US)
The twenty-first century has seen a resurgence of interest in Richard Bruce Nugent. Nugent published one of the first explicitly queer Harlem Renaissance texts, “Smoke, Lillies and Jade” in the short lived journal Fire!! (1926). Marginalized to a great degree in the 1920s and 1930s by Renaissance editors and leaders because of his explicit and highly stylized, almost Beardsley-esque references to same-sex encounters, scholars have recently began publishing Nugent’s long forgotten work, such as a selected anthology of his writing and art in Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance (2002) and his novelGentleman Jigger (2008). This paper examines how although Nugent is often still portrayed as an imitator of late-nineteenth-century European queer styles, his yet-to-be published archive reveals his surprisingly deft handling of avant-garde modernist narrative techniques, which he uses to examine shifting and prismatic perceptions of effeminate queer men and their more masculine admirers in U.S. environments. I consider, moreover, how reframing his “Lunatique,” a selection published in Gay Rebel, via its unpublished novelist contexts, held by the Beinecke Library, offers a more complex and historically accurate understanding of the interstices of “queer” and “normal” desires in multi-racial contexts in the U.S. from the 1930s until the 1960s.
[B]it by dirty jew mania for World Domination”: Ezra Pound, Olivia Rossetti Agresti, and Graham Seton Hutchison
Svetlana Ehtee (University of New Brunswick, Canada)
Ezra Pound, a self-proclaimed literary activist, believed that both the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England had a monopoly over the control of the value of money and, therefore, the ability to alter its buying power. If these institutions were governed by the “big Jew,” Pound feared, then everyday finance capitalism was in the hands of “usurers.” This was Pound's welldocumented justification for his anti-Semitic sentiments at the time. Pound's irrational fears concerning the medical industry and his hypothesis that governments suppress the “honest truth” by controlling the media would only further fuel his fear of Jewish supremacy. John Kimsey’s description of Pound’s credo as “the grand conspiracy myth” is thus probably the most concise illustration of the poet’s convoluted sociopolitical theories to date. This paper explores the impetus behind and manifestations of Pound’s various theories by cross-examining the poet’s published epistolary exchange with Olivia Rossetti Agresti (1937-1959) and the unpublished correspondence between Pound and Lieutenant-Colonel Graham Seton Hutchison (1934-1936).
The Yeatses in Conversation: Re-visioning Yeats’s Dialogic Aesthetics Through the Vision Papers
Tiana M. Fischer (National University of Ireland, Galway)
Recent years have seen a rise of scholarly interest in W.B. Yeats’s collaborations, on the one hand, and his occultiana, theosophy, and the different editions of A Vision, on the other. Whilst the former indicates a re-conceptualisation of modernist authorship – stressing its inherently collaborative and dialogic nature – the latter begs the question of reviewing the Yeatses’ Vision Papers and dialogic automatic script, which have received little, or mostly belittling, attention. In view of Margaret Mills Harper’s and Ann Saddlemyer’s important work, shedding light on George Yeats’s significant role – and hand – in much of her husband’s later oeuvre, this paper returns to the question of Yeats’s dialogic aesthetics, and his use of poetic masks/personae. Arguing for a ‘re-visioning’ of both, it shows, firstly, how George Yeats’s mediumship – in particular her role as ‘communicator’ and ‘interpreter’ – flows into the female ‘masks’ and ‘personae’ featuring in Yeats’s dialogue poems, which begin to surge with The Wilde Swans at Coole (1919), as the automatic writing peaked; and, secondly, how Yeats’s Nietzschean theories of the mask – and his initial dialogic conception of A Vision – are indebted to his long-time engagement with Castiglione’s Cortegiano (1528), the philosophical dialogue Lady Gregory introduced him to, and which features a female mediator as key-figure.
Appeasement and Narratives of Hesitation
Finn Fordham (Royal Holloway, University of London, UK)
To what extent did novels written or published from after Munich (September 1938) to the Fall of France (May 1940) reflect the historical condition of appeasement and its consequences, as 'Peace with Honour' oscillated with 'Peace with Shame'. I will look in particular at moments of hesitation which precede sudden action within novels, and how the tension that hesitation has always brought narratives ('Pat now might I do it,' as Hamlet says) is intensified because of the historical context. This was an intensification which was in fact often lost to readers at the time as the world was engulfed in action which left fictional worlds behind ('Oh history turn thy pages fast,' as Stevie Smith wrote in 1940). Included amongst the novels I will examine Woolf's 'Between the Acts', Hamilton's 'Hangover Square', and Noel Streatfeild's 'Luke'. And there will be time there will be time to explore the modernist possibiltiies in hesitation, as powerful moments of powerlessness are stretched ('Do I dare eat a peach?'), and moral ambiguities pile up.
Joyce in the age of the ‘Complete Works’
James Fraser (Exeter, UK)
As copyright lapses on the literary works of the major modernists, the time is ripe for a re-evaluation of the relative and varied status of the full corpus of these authors’ words. In a coming age of complete, unguarded access to an author’s ‘writings,’ readers are increasingly confronted with an undifferentiated mass of text that is effectively anarchistic. ‘Publishers’ with names like ‘e-artnow’ offer largely unedited, unorganised collections of available materials without significant distinction between achieved literary work and paratext. This mode of publication is utopic in its aspiration to open-access, but it raises serious questions for a mode of editorial criticism that has dominated literary studies for a century. This paper will consider the case of James Joyce’s varied non-fiction writings, which have had a contested status since their discovery and dissemination (largely) in the 1950s and 1960s. By paying close attention to the specific moments of their composition and to the ideological and critical assumptions that continue to determine the place of this writing within the decidedly achieved work of Joyce’s fiction, I will consider what it might mean to produce a fully realised ‘writings’; that is, a representative, non-distortive corpus of Joycean composition.
In search of “Old Scratch”: editing Dylan Thomas’s Fifth Notebook
John Goodby and Adrian Osbourne (Swansea University, UK)
November 2014 saw the revelation of the existence - and sale at Sotheby’s - of the hitherto-unknown fifth notebook (N5) of Dylan Thomas. It was bought and digitised by Swansea University. With the assistance of a dedicated research student (Adrian Osbourne), the editor of Thomas’s Collected Poems, Professor John Goodby, has been preparing the first edition of the notebook since early 2015. N5, written between early summer 1934 and August 1935, in London, Swansea, Cheshire and Donegal, contains the only known MSS versions of Thomas’s two most complex modernist lyric works, ‘Altarwise by Owl-light’ and ‘I, in my intricate image’, as well as of several other poems (there are 19 in all). It also contains several new stanzas and many reworked variant passages for poems such as ‘The seed-at-zero’ and ‘I dreamed my genesis’. The revisions – often radical ones – evidence Thomas’s writing processes at the most explosive and modernist phase of his development, and shed new light on the meaning of the poems, demonstrating as they do a steady increase in verbal density and quantity of revision; the poems are viewed, for the first time, in their final moments of composition, as Thomas gives them a last surreal sharpening.
Djuna Barnes on the page, on the stage and in the margins
Alex Goody (Oxford Brookes University, UK)
This paper examines Djuna Barnes’ writing for and about the stage, drawing from the archives to consider how she engages with and reflects on the place of theatre and the theatrical in twentieth-century writing and culture. From her early engagement with the Provincetown Players to her last major publication, the 1958 play The Antiphon, Barnes demonstrates a persistent engagement with drama and the spaces and dynamics of the stage. However, although some of Barnes’ plays were produced, her drama has an uneven history and much of it now rests as archival remainders or is dismissed as ‘closet’ drama. In addition, Barnes wrote about theatre and the stage for newspapers and other periodical publications for three decades, but this critical writing remains uncollected, and in some cases unattributed until very recently. Archival letters too demonstrate Barnes’ central engagement with key figures in twentieth-century drama, and her library reveals extensive reading in the theory and practice of the theatre. My paper proposes the importance of the archive for reassessing Barnes as a dramatist and critic, but not as the repository of hidden but otherwise complete source. I argue that recuperating and reassembling Barnes’ dramatic writing and theatre criticism requires a consideration of proximity and networks and an active attention to material connections and performance practice; the result will shift Barnes from a marginal position in twentieth-century drama to the significant position she deserves.
Samuel Beckett’s ‘Psychology Notes’ and The Unnamable
Reza Habibi (University of Bergen, Norway)
This paper reexamines Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable by treating his ‘Psychology Notes’ as part of the genetic dossier for this text. Through both probable and provable connections, this article will demonstrate that some of the psychosomatic symptoms suffered by the unnamable voice are traceable in the Notes. Beckett thus assigns a psychoanalytic language to the unnamable voice that it deploys, but is never exhaustively defined by. The genetic identification of these intertextual connections is enhanced by the availability of Samuel Beckett Digital Manuscript Project. By means of the same tool, this paper also examines some of the variations between the English and the French versions of the text where exogenetic and/or endogenetic changes are introduced by the author, in order to shed further light on the significance of the Notes to the manuscript corpus of L’Innommable/The Unnamable.
From Modernist Small Press Publisher to “Pornographer Royal”: John Rodker’s Ovid Press and Casanova Society
Evi Heinz (Independent Researcher)
The Ovid Press, operated by John Rodker between 1919-1920, issued hand printed editions of poetry by Pound and Eliot and graphic work by Wyndham Lewis and Gaudier-Breszka. Its focus on the craft of printing and providing a space for avant-garde experimentation beyond the commercial publishing world is recognised as programmatic for the modernist small press more broadly. Yet, a comparison of the Ovid Press with Rodker’s second venture, the Casanova Society, brings to light a more various set of strategies pursued by modernist publishers. Hitherto neglected archival records relating to the Casanova Society show that the firm was initially set up for the sole purpose of publishing a luxurious reprint edition of The Memoirs of Casanova, aimed at wealthy bibliophiles. Representing modes of book production and distribution which were more explicitly geared towards turning a financial profit and which afford a link to the erotic private presses of the nineteenth century, the Casanova Society reveals an alternative history of modernist publishing and its economic and institutional contexts. Examining the two presses side-by-side, this paper argues for a recontextualisation of the modernist small press within the wider creative and economic networks of the contemporary publishing landscape.
Finding aids and the study of modernist authors.
Archie Henderson (Centre for the Analysis of the Radical Right, US)
I propose to speak on the subject of online finding aids as an indispensable tool for the study of modernist authors in the broadest possible historical and social context. An author's archive needs to be seen not as a self-contained collection or collections of documents at one or at most a handful of libraries, but as a "virtual" archive distributed across many discrete locations. As my recent guide to archives of the right-wing and the extreme right makes clear, materials by or about modernist authors frequently extend across dozens or, in some cases, hundreds of archives and collections. The rapid proliferation on the internet of readily accessible, detailed finding aids marks an "archival turn" that will spur the examination of modernist authors in unprecedented ways.
“which values are important”: new light on Q.D. Leavis and the “rise of English”
Miranda Hickman (McGill University, Canada)
This paper addresses how recent additions to Q.D. Leavis’s papers at Girton College, Cambridge, can augment understanding of the convictions and sociocultural coordinates of a literary critic significantly influential during the modernist period—especially understanding of the gendered and classed position behind Leavis’s notoriously excoriating review of Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas in 1938. Although in her landmark Fiction and the Reading Public (1932), Leavis elevated Woolf’s work as among the best new fiction that provided the stimulation of a “first-class fully aware mind,” the publication of Three Guineas drew her intense ire for a perspective and form of feminism Leavis found blind to the needs and lives of women outside of Woolf’s privileged class. This new material in the archives, contributed by Leavis’s daughter in 2006, enhances understanding of the sociocultural conditions behind the standpoint, and standards, that shaped not only QDL’s ambivalence about Woolf but the patterns of her criticism more generally—its sometime celebration and sometime hostility to modernist writers and frequent preference for writers of the nineteenth century. Framing this reevaluation of QDL’s critical perspective is awareness of ways QDL carried on sociocultural dimensions of the work of I.A. Richards, her doctoral supervisor at Cambridge, and as F.R. Leavis acknowledged, with her research informed the major moves of early Leavisite criticism. More generally, this new trove of archival material, read through intersectional feminism, sheds new light on allegiances behind what Terry Eagleton has called the “Rise of English” in British contexts—the values underwriting the sense of mission driving the growth of “English Studies” in Britain during the modernist years, afterward carried to the U.S. as the New Critics transposed that sense of project, inspired by Richards and the Leavises, into the terms of the American South.
“The words, a flesh that lives on, as spirit, after we are gone”, or, Charles Henri Ford and the Modernist Archive
Alex Howard (University of Sydney, Australia)
I stumbled upon this handwritten remark scribbled in one of Charles Henri Ford’s many journals whilst working as a research fellow in the summer of 2014. I was in Austin, Texas, at the time. The World Cup was on. England were typically rubbish. It was generally quite hot. The manuscript room in the Harry Ransom Center was air-conditioned though. I was at the HRC because I was harvesting archival material for what eventually became my Charles Henri Ford: Between Modernism and Postmodernism. As I hope to demonstrate in this paper, the idea of the archive was always extremely important for Ford. This was a man who always made sure – over the best part of eight decades working in the arts – to document pretty much all of his literary dealings and ideas in notebooks, workbooks, and journals. These unpublished materials, I want to argue, are vital for two main reasons. First: they provide us with useful critical means with which to fully understand this hitherto unduly marginalised modernist figure. Second: they afford us the opportunity to revisit and revise some of our assumptions pertaining to the by now barnacle-encrusted and worryingly rusted cultural logics of modernism (and postmodernism). In this sense, then, Ford’s archive, replete as it also is with lively correspondence with modernism’s boldest and the brightest (as well as some of postmodernism’s shining stars), furnishes us not only with a unique opportunity to debate the artistic legacies of a single man: it also enables us to reconsider some of the things we often take for granted when discussing cultural production in the twentieth century.
New Insights from Lost Footage: David Jones’s 1965 Writers World Interview
Jasmine Hunter Evans (Bath Spa University, UK)
On March 15th 1965 the BBC aired an interview between the artist and writer David Jones and the Welsh nationalist poet Saunders Lewis. This interview, which until its recent rediscovery was lost to Jones scholars, represents the earliest extant filmed recording of Jones and the one in which he is at his most articulate. Through examining this film contextually and intellectually, this paper will draw together the process of discovery with the subtle ways this interview shapes our understanding of Jones’s complex ideas, including the relationships between Rome and Wales, transubstantiation and art, and letter writing and inscriptions. While Jones viewed this film as an unparalleled success due to the ‘special common view’ he shared with Lewis, he doubted the efficacy of interviews: ‘When you consider how bloody difficult it is to say anything remotely accurate in writing a considered article […], it becomes ludicrously crude […] when asked point blank some direct question’. The labyrinthine pursuit of this film through multiple archives and the issues the interview highlights around the value attributed to variant sources, whether textual or visual, published or draft, whole or fragmented, raises intriguing methodological questions for our future approach to Jones’s disparate and dense archives.
Modernist (dis)location: The Case of Katherine Mansfield
Gerri Kimber (University of Northampton, UK)
This paper will reveal the background to the genesis and development of the Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield, incorporating a broader discussion on the repositioning of Mansfield within the modernist literary canon as a result of the edition. Until the Edinburgh edition, there had never been a true scholarly edition of Mansfield’s writing, with the exception of the five volumes of her letters (OUP, 1984-2008). This state of affairs led to my devising the Edinburgh edition, and becoming the Series Editor, with the publication, in 2012, of the two-volumes of fiction with co-editor Vincent O’Sullivan, followed by a third, non-fiction volume in 2014, comprising all of Mansfield’s essays, reviews, translations, parodies and poetry, co-edited by Angela Smith, and a fourth and final volume in 2016, co-edited by Claire Davison, which remaps Mansfield’s personal writing. A significant amount of new material was uncovered in various archives, and incorporated into all four volumes.
Modernism did not arrive in Britain in the early years of the twentieth century as a ready-made concept. It was a response to a variety of stimuli – cultural, political, historical and literary. In the case of Mansfield, the cultural landscape she had grown up with in New Zealand and chose to dislocate herself from, enabled her to view modernity from a postcolonial viewpoint. In much of her work she merged both concepts, as she experimented and honed her skills as a writer. In incorporating everything Mansfield wrote, whether complete or incomplete, the edition is able to map Mansfield’s development as one of Britain’s key exponents of literary modernism, redefining her status within the modernist canon, and regenerating scholarship in this iconic New Zealand writer.
Pound’s Doggerel
Michael Kindellan (University of Sheffield, UK)
Ezra Pound was, for the most part, a profoundly serious poet. This much at least is true of the latter half of his career. From the 1930s onwards, i.e., from the time when his poetry took on an especially political complexion, there was little room for joking around. There are exceptions to the rule of course, but the verses that comprise Rock-Drill (1955) and Thrones (1959) are frequently rebarbative and austere. And yet the manuscript drafts for these sections of The Cantos also contain doggerel poems, that is to say, comic lines composed in irregular, poorly syncopated rhythmic patterns. In my paper I propose to think about these rare specimens of verse not as unpublished foils to the kind of real work that Pound was eager to get into wider circulation, but to find ways of conceptualising a more radical continuity between them. I want to suggest that the fragmentary, undigested verse in Rock-Drill and Thrones might itself be construed as doggerel, or what Northrop Frye called poetic work that is the result of an unfinished creative process. More broadly, I will try to suggest that reading the archive, when it comes to Pound at least, could and probably should be of interest to more than just editors or philologists.
Consulting the Moot Papers
Jonas Kurlberg (University of Edinburgh, UK)
During the later years of the interwar era a small group of intellectuals gathered to catalyse a Christian cultural revolution in response to the totalitarian forces threatening to engulf Western civilisation. The intrigue of “the Moot” lies not only in its ambitions but also in the calibre and diversity of its members ranging from sociologist Karl Mannheim, poet T. S. Eliot, scientist and philosopher Michael Polanyi, economist Adolf Löwe, and educationists Fred Clarke and Walter Moberly to mention a few. The rich intellectual discussions within the Moot and their broad engagement with British intelligentsia offers a fascinating window into the raging debates of their period.
Indeed, historians have inherited a wealth of archival material from a group that was exceptionally well organised. The near to verbatim minutes, hundreds of position papers and the regular correspondence between the members provide rich archival resources for the intellectual historian. Until recently the Moot has primarily been brought to attention by scholars interested in the participation of some of the more outstanding members, namely T. S. Eliot and Karl Mannheim. In this paper, I will outline the extent and scope of the Moot material, how it has been used to date and provide some reflections for future research.
Aesthetic Anarchy and the Problem of Representing the New Germany: The Lost Archive of Nazi Art Criticism
Greg Maertz (St. John’s University, US)
The first project is an edited collection of art criticism, commentary, and journalism published in Germany between 1933 and 1945. This anthology of previously unreprinted texts will provide unique insight into the aesthetic anarchy--the chaos of competing visions of which artistic styles would embody National Socialist biocultural ideals--that was unleashed upon Adolf Hitler's accession to power. Conflicting accounts in the press and in Party-sponsored publications about what Nazi art should look like were further convoluted by the bizarre irony that Jewish art critics working for influential German newspapers were often assigned to cover the inaugural "Great German Art Exhibition"--a showcase of paintings and sculpture intended to embody the regime's aesthetic mission to transform the nation, physically and spiritually. In my talk I would review some of the most outstanding examples of the discordant proposals put forth in the early years of the Third Reich (1933-1937), at a time when artists associated with modernist movements, such as German Expressionism, New Realism (Neue Sachlichkeit), and Surrealism, were still considered by Party-friendly critics to be prime candidates to serve as the standard bearers of the Nazi vision for the German Volk. The appearance of my anthology (perhaps Bloomsbury would be interested?) will mark the first republication of these materials in the post-war period.
Will this Yowling Never Cease? The Pound/ Agresti correspondence and the changing scope of Ezra Pound Studies.
Alec Marsh (Muhlenberg College, US)
My talk will focus on “I Cease Not to Yowl”: Ezra Pound’s Letters to Olivia Rossetti Agresti (Illinois UP 1998) edited and annotated by Leon Surette and Demntres Tryphonopoulos. I consider the book a landmark in Pound studies—certainly for me it was a turning point, confirming suspicions I already had about the true nature of Pound’s politics. Olivia Rossetti Agresti, the daughter of William Rossetti, the famous late 19th c. critic was Mussolini’s English translator, and sometime speechwriter. She wrote the article on Fascism in the 1929 Brittanica which I had used in my undergraduate thesis on Pound and Fascism. The letters are mostly Pound’s and by the time they began corresponding in earnest, Pound was incarcerated and Agresti had lost much of her enthusiasm for Il Duce. Still, the correspondence confirms, unequivocally, Pound’s adherence to the regime during his 13 year confinement at St. Elizabeths and, as well, his American-style right-wing orientation, as he negotiated a shift from old-style fascist to new style Cold Warrior and McCarthyite. What’s interesting is that the Canadian editors seem not to believe what they are reading , so their notes resist the meaning of Pound’s texts or are simply absent, as though the editors could not believe or did not wish to believe what they were reading. The resulting fiasco inspired Archie Henderson to create his massive “I cease Not to Yowl” Reannotated, the most indispensible guide to Pound’s world view in post-war years and one of the most important works of Pound scholarship produced this century.
My talk will show why Pound/ Agresti correspondence is so important and how its original misreading led to a reorientation of Pound studies. Finally, I will address how the shift from the New Criticism (arguably in part designed to contain Pound and save him from himself) to the New Historicism of the 1980s and 90s reunited Pound with his political agenda. Thanks to the vast trove of archival material, mostly at Yale’s Beinecke, we now understand Pound all too well, so that his tremendous virtues as a poet are currently eclipsed by his radical right-wing politics.
The Presence of the Modernist Poet, In and Out of the Archive
Steven Matthews (University of Reading, UK)
This paper will consider two significant archival resources: the Houghton Library, Harvard, and Kings College Cambridge holdings relating to T.S. Eliot; and the Brotherton Library Collection, University of Leeds, relating to the self-proclaimed ‘late modernist’ poet, Geoffrey Hill. Given that presence, absence, and displacement, are key features of ‘modernism’, the paper will think through questions such as ‘what figure of the poet emerges from the deposited resources’?; ‘how does the archive enhance or deflect from a reading of the work?’; ‘how far is “difficulty” intricate with the processes of creation of the poetry, as recoverable from the archival sources?’; ‘how far is it possible to theorise a modernist poetic out of the archive?’. Eliot’s archives contain many typescripts of the works which do not reveal much about the origins or development of his major texts. Hill’s archives on the other hand contain a welter of notebooks and even separate small cards on which he rehearses again and again the shape of his works. This and other contrasts between Eliot and Hill, who was much influenced by him, will lead to a larger consideration of the importance of archives for study of modernist poetry, its musicality, formal innovation, allusiveness, and craftedness.
The psychotechnographic genesis of Krapp’s Last Tape
Jonathan McAllister (University of Nottingham, UK)
On 7 March 1958, after writing the first draft of Krapp’s Last Tape, Samuel Beckett wrote to Donald McWhinnie: ‘I have written a short stage monologue for Magee (definitely non-radio). It involves a tape-recorder with the mechanics of which I am unfamiliar.’ This paper provides a critical analysis informed by psychotechnography of the genesis of Krapp’s Last Tape (1958), to explore the writing of cognition into the machine that couples the mind and technology in a dialectics of memory. Beckett sought to stage a relation of the biological organism and technological apparatus, recognizing that the play was ‘definitely non-radio’, which evinces the importance of staging the materiality of both the body and tape-recorder in a post-Cartesian exploration of the entanglement of cognition and materiality. Moreover, through an analysis of the MS UoR 1227/7/7/1 (EM) notebook, which represents the earliest version of the play, this paper reveals thatBeckett encoded the subversion of Manichean duality that critics have identified into thishuman-machine relation through obfuscating the dichotomy of on/off that is integral to modern conceptions of technology. Ultimately, I argue that an analysis of the genesis of the play demonstrates that technological lexical terms index Beckett’s process of thinking through the tape-recorder, and that a conceptual triad of psyche, machine and writing allows us to critically engage with the intersection between the materiality of the taperecorder and Beckett’s innovative play.
'A House in the Cinders': A review of the Hulme archives
Henry Mead (Teesside University, UK)
This paper reviews my work on the Hulme archives at Keele University, St. John's College, Cambridge, and several North American collections (McMaster, NYPL, and the Harry Ransom Centre). The archives were a key source for my book in the Historicising Modernism series, shedding light on Hulme's turbulent student days, and his tense involvement with several Edwardian institutions (Newcastle Grammar School, St. John's, and UCL): spurned 'gateways' to professional status, academic 'sorting machines' seeking to make sense of an indigestible element. I show how the archives reveal the developing networks of early modernism, highlighting crucial missives -- postcards, invitations, and private notes -- that help us reconstruct the beginnings of the Imagist circle, and which intersect with various other modernist networks and archives. I give special attention to the loosely-filed collection of notes held at Keele, which, edited and published by Herbert Read as 'Notes on Language and Style', had a huge impact on the development of modernism, despite its coherence relying on posthumous, dubious reconstruction. Conversely, Hulme's unfinished book on Epstein's sculpture was destroyed in the war, leaving only an enigmatic photograph album, suggestive of a lost modernist cornerstone. Such disjointed fragments and scraps of evidence are presented as evidence of Hulme's archetypal modernist return to Christian faith, and I give as evidence posthumous letters regarding Hulme's late religiosity by Ramiro de Maeztu to his partner Kate Lechmere. In close connection, Hulme's and Lechmere's love-letters, held at Texas, are considered as a collaborative treatise on eroticism, religion, and art that my book had no space to compass. I also review recollections of Hulme gathered by his biographers, Michael Roberts, Alan Jones, Samuel Hynes, and Robert Ferguson, ending with an account of the Keele collection as it currently stands, including among recent accessions newly-discovered philosophical notes that add detail to our sense of Hulme's career.
Wyndham Lewis and Publishers Archives - The Limits of Compromise
Gareth Mills (University of Reading, UK)
Doom of Youth, Lewis’ most neglected book, is both an intriguing anti-populist parody that is fiercely critical of the persuasive power of media ideologies, and a provocative, self-aware rant by a narrator in the unescapable grip of his own dogma. This paper suggests that the book’s tortuous duplicity is a feature of Lewis’ uneasy reliance on his publisher, Chatto and Windus, whose unique relationship with him was one of a corporate patron. When they rejected his satirical fiction because of libel fears, Chatto effectively encouraged Lewis to focus on his non-fiction. However, by departing from experimental fiction, Lewis did not ‘cease to compete with Joyce and Virginia Woolf for the ear of a sophisticated readership’ (Constable, 1995), but continued his stylistic subversion of the ‘fluid’ work of Joyce and Woolf from within the constrained sphere of the popular polemic. Archival evidence from the Chatto archive at Reading helps to frame this text economically, and by comparing the book version of Doom of Youth with its more restrained, quasi-feminist predecessor, ‘Youth-Politics’, published in Time and Tide, I will show that despite Lewis’ and his critics’ dismissal of this book, it is an important example of a turn in literary history that shows how Lewis’ critique of both ‘highbrow’ literature and the mass market reader was transformed and exaggerated by the pressures of the book trade.
“Showing it As it Is”: American Modernism and the Archive
Michelle E. Moore (College of DuPage, US)
On March 26, 1932, Ernest Hemingway wrote to Dos Passos: “You can write the best of any of the bastards writing now and you’ve been around the worst—you write better all the time—For Christ sake don’t try to do good—keep on showing it as it is. If you can show it as it really is you will do good—If you try to do good you’ll not do any good nor will you show it.” Hemingway’s advice might as well be to the literary scholar rummaging through his archive at the JFK library in Boston, or any of the other archives I’ve looked through for my book: The Little Room Minutes, Sherwood Anderson’s Papers, and Henry Blake Fuller’s Papers in the Newberry Library; Harriet Monroe’s and Poetry magazine’s papers at University of Chicago, The Little Review Collection at the University of Milwaukee, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s papers at Princeton. Modernist writers were extremely self-aware of themselves and their place in time, which manifested in secret passions for collecting and saving. This idea of passionate and sometimes random collecting stands at odds with the idea of a traditional or “institutional archive” where everything is neatly ordered in boxes and labeled.
The first part of my paper will present a survey of the state of the archives listed above, emphasizing the difficulties in ordering such extensive, messy, and passionately collected papers and ephemera. I will be particularly concerned with the way in which digital collections and newly published and edited collections of letters changes the way in which an archive is presented to a researcher by making it appear neat and ordered. The second part will examine the ways in which copyright laws, sometimes accurately applied by librarians and scholars, sometimes not, binds the uses of archival material and effects modernist scholarship. Sometimes the material has considered too personal for scholarship and so, as particularly in the case of Willa Cather and William Faulkner, restrictions have, until recently, prevented open uses of archival material.
The Legacy of Gray Archives: The Letters of Samuel Beckett
Lois More Overbeck (Emory University, US)
How can research steeped in primary and archival sources be preserved and shared, when documents are widely dispersed among archives and private ownership?
Location Register of Samuel Beckett’s Letters. The Letters of Samuel Beckett is a selected edition in four volumes. Of the 16,000 letters consulted and transcribed since 1985, only about 20% are in the published edition. Beckett’s is a relatively young archive: ownership is still in flux and new letters continue to emerge The Location Register will identify widely dispersed materials, encourage the transfer of letters from private to public collections, and stimulate future research. Designed for sustainability, the Location Register will be model for other long-term projects for which publication represents only the tip of the research iceberg.
Linked Data Project, The Letters of Samuel Beckett. Based upon the Location Register, we envision a web project of linked metadata drawn from the contents of each Beckett letter (persons, places, and entities; Beckett’s writing (publication, production, translation, adaptation); his reading and attendance (at plays, sporting events, concerts, exhibitions ). Chronologies, interviews, and photographs will enhance visualization; linked finding aids of corollary materials will enrich contextualization. The project is designed to dovetail with already developed databases of Beckett material.
Post-War Cinema and Its Contexts in Beckett’s Letters
Anthony Paraskeva (University of Roehampton, UK)
This paper will consider the uses and limits of Beckett’s recently published letters, with a particular focus on references to his film-going and his contact and complicity with post-war film culture and its attendant networks. He was clearly aware of the ‘young cinéastes’, as he called the incipient nouvelle vague, in a 1959 letter to John Manning. The letters include references, for instance, to Resnais, Rogosin, Godard, and indicate his correspondence with figures such as Richard Roud and Sydney Meyers. What also emerges from the letters is a sense of Beckett’s reliance on friends, collaborators, directors and technicians who were ‘in the swim’ as regards contemporary film culture. Yet while the letters clearly indicate regular habits of film-going from the thirties to the fifties, they do not offer a comprehensive guide. Beckett’s letters, after the international success of Waiting for Godot, and then, years later, when he begins his career as a director, are characterized by a general reluctance to discuss or even mention his ‘private appreciations’, and this, I would argue, reinforces his work’s resistance to neat categories and contexts.
Gertrude Stein’s contested author status and the discourse of mental capacity in To-day and To-morrow
Isabelle Parkinson (Queen Mary, University of London, UK)
This paper situates the mid-1920’s dispute over the appropriateness of Stein’s designation as ‘author’ in the context of discussions of mental capacity in the pamphlet series To-day and To-morrow. The debate over Stein’s author status occurs across a range of publication contexts in this period, including the magazine (The Transatlantic Review and The Dial), the monograph (Time and Western Man; A Survey of Modernist Poetry) and the newspaper (The Nation and Athenaeum), as well as appearing in the pamphlet series itself in John Rodker’s The Future of Futurism. On one side of the debate, Stein’s writing is presented as the product of an ‘idiot’ or an ‘imbecile’, or as expressive of identifiable mental ‘defects’, and therefore not the work of an appropriate subject for author status. On the other, it is configured as a manifestation of new type of ‘intelligence’ required by and emerging with modern democracy. I will argue that locating the wrangle over Stein’s writing in the context of discussions of intelligence and mental capacity, a common theme in the To-day and To-morrow essays, reveals a parallel between the right to write and the right to self-determination, between the author and the democratic participant, and between authorship and the emerging discourse of human rights.
Virginia Woolf and the Modernist Archive: from modernism’s ‘exquisite flower’ to its assiduous researcher
Natasha Periyan (Goldsmiths, University of London, UK)
In the 1959 edition of the DNB Lord David Cecil celebrated Woolf as modernism’s ‘exquisite flower’. This is reflected in Bell’s 1978 view of his aunt as removed from political concerns, and more recently persists in Gordon’s 2010 description of her as the ‘high priestess of modernism’. This paper will suggest that archival approaches to Woolf consolidate a view of Woolf as aesthetic innovator and elucidate the complexities of her political engagements.
The paper will survey recent, archival approaches to Woolf. This includes genetic approaches that have reinforced the significance of her formal experimentalism (Fordham 2010) and explored the evolution of her feminist-socialist critique (Wood 2014). Archival work by Snaith (2000, 2013) and Jones (2016) have also demonstrated how closely Woolf’s aesthetics were linked to contextual concerns, and considered her organizational engagements.
The paper will focus especially on Woolf’s own close engagement with archival sources, considering the significance of Woolf as a reader of the work of others. This version of Woolf was instituted with the publication of Brenda Silver’s Virginia Woolf’s Reading Notebooks (1983) and recently consolidated in Barrett’s 2013 assessment of her work as research assistant, influencing her husband’s anti-imperialist politics and her own novel Night & Day. The paper argues that archival approaches to Woolf demonstrate how she was a careful reader who reinterpreted and assimilated the work of others in her literary output. It will explore examples from my recent and forthcoming research on The Years, The Waves and the ‘Introductory Letter’ to suggest that a close attentiveness to the documents and sources Woolf uses demonstrates that Woolf was not only an assiduous researcher, as Barrett has demonstrated, but that she manipulated the form and tone of her documentary sources to accord with both her aesthetic and political vision.
David Jones and the ‘Mabon’ Films, 1971
Anne Price-Owen (University of Wales, Trinity St. David, UK)
In 2013 the David Jones Society was gifted an assortment of film reels and accompanying sound tapes, from a man whose late mother had made a series of films about David Jones. The filming took place in 1971, just three years before his death in 1974.
This was a potentially exciting discovery: the only other known film that featured Jones had been aired on television in 1965, when Jones was interviewed by Saunders Lewis. Until this film was re-discovered in 2014, it was believed that there were no moving images of David Jones. To have another film featuring him would enrich the Jones Archive considerably. On examining the material comprising a number of 16mm film-footage together with ten sound tapes, it was clear that the visual and audio material required synchronising, and that the film would have to be digitalised in order to screen it before a 21st Century audience.
This discussion traces the evolution of the trials and triumphs of the research, detective work and forensic treatment that were required to make a film using original, degraded fragments of old films and sound tapes, to produce a coherent filmic interview of David Jones which can reveal further insights and truths about the poet-painter’s life and work.
Art School Confidential: W.B. Yeats’s Language of Sculpture
Jack Quin (Trinity College Dublin, Ireland)
W.B. Yeats the famous autodidact was in fact an art school kid, receiving a formal education at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art and the Royal Hibernian Academy (1884-1886). He studied alongside John Hughes and Oliver Sheppard, who would become the foremost Irish sculptors of the early twentieth century. In later years, Senator Yeats chaired the committee charged with designing the Irish Free State coinage (1926-1928). He was in conversation with the sculpture-writing of Wyndham Lewis, Henri Gaudier-Brzerska and Ezra Pound that proliferated in Modernist ‘little magazines’ of early-twentieth century London. His own writings on and contact with modernist sculptors – Constantin Brancusi, Carl Milles, Ivan Meštrović, Auguste Rodin – offer new perspectives on Yeats’s ambivalent engagement with Modernism as both a verbal and visual phenomenon in his later years.
This paper proposes an interdisciplinary approach to Yeats’s poetical and critical engagement with the art of sculpture. Drawing on archival research, I will show how Yeats’s art school education and engagement with sculpture informed his thinking on the Celtic Revival in conversation with George Russell, John Hughes and Oliver Sheppard. Yeats’s contemporaneous experiments in ekphrastic poetry and writing The Island of Statues was informed by his time at the so-called ‘Dublin South Kensington’. I will suggest that interdisciplinary and inter-arts approaches can provide illuminating and unfamiliar portraits of some of the most canonical modernist writers. For W.B. Yeats, the relationship between poetry and modern sculpture was theorised in dialogue with his Victorian art school training and Vorticist periodicals. Towards the end of his life, in ‘The Statues’ and The Death of Cuchulain, Yeats would return to the sculpture of Sheppard and an Arnoldian ‘sense of measure’ to stave off the ‘filthy modern tide’. By utilising visual artists’ archives to enrich our understanding of Modernist literary studies, and applying art historical theory to a poet’s ekphrastic or panaesthetic oeuvre, we can better understand the extent to which modernist writers were collaborative and ‘interdisciplinary’ avant la lettre.
Henry Miller’s Modernism
Guy Stevenson (Goldsmiths, University of London, UK)
When first published in the 1934 Henry Miller was lauded as one of the most important literary voices of the decade. From George Orwell and Aldous Huxley to Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, writers now regarded as pivotal to Anglo-American modernism found in Miller a new style that continued where they and their contemporaries had left off. Despite this, and his 1930s Paris works remaining his best read, academic and popular discussion of Miller tends to begin and end with his influence on the sexual revolution of the sixties. In this paper, Guy Stevenson uses archival materials to look beyond Miller’s challenge to the censor and into his career beginnings in modernist Europe. In doing so, Stevenson makes a case for the writer’s significance in the longer history of twentieth century literature and culture, and for a new approach to European modernism and the post-1945 American counterculture that reads the two periods as intimately, problematically intertwined. By highlighting Miller’s intermediary position between modernism and the counterculture, Stevenson poses broader questions about literature, morality and social politics in the mid-century and about unexpected continuities between modernism and the counterculture - stylistically, politically and in respect to the culture of celebrity that fuelled and sustains interest in both movements.
Textual History and Trauma: Djuna Barnes’s The Antiphon'
Julie Taylor (Northumbria University, UK)
Over recent decades, growing interest in Djuna Barnes has seen scholars drawing on this once neglected writer’s archive in a variety of illuminating ways. However, the critic who looks to the archive for clarity about this notoriously challenging author is destined for disappointment. Just as Barnes’s published works pique and thwart our desire to know, her archive is in no sense straightforwardly revelatory. This paper considers in particular the drafts for her late play The Antiphon to draw some conclusions about how we approach her archive, and archival research more generally. My account contradicts earlier critics’ assumptions that the drafts are primarily valuable in their revelation of a clear depiction of sexual abuse which was later expurgated by Barnes’s editor, T.S. Eliot. I critique the fantasy of a pure, uncorrupted, and unequivocally elucidating original text which might, through archival research, be ‘restored.’ Instead of providing clarity, Barnes’s drafts demonstrate that The Antiphon’s obscurities and opacities are powerfully connected to its theme, and that changes made during the play’s revisions need not be viewed with regret, but in fact produce a shift in emphasis that captures the performative nature of remembering trauma. In this sense, we must read the archive as we read Barnes: attending carefully to the texture of her obscurities rather than attempting to render her meaning transparent.
Exploring the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project as a Modernist Archive
Dirk Van Hulle and Pim Verhulst
The Beckett Digital Manuscript Project, co-directed by Dirk Van Hulle (University of Antwerp) and Mark Nixon (University of Reading) is referred to as an ‘archive’ in its url (www.beckettarchive.org) for the practical reason that it reunites in a digital environment all of Beckett’s manuscripts, which are scattered in holding libraries worldwide. In addition to providing facsimiles and transcriptions for every document, the BDMP also enables users to trace the genetic history of a single sentence throughout all the extant versions of a text and Beckett’s self-translations, as well as automatically compare versions in the CollateX engine and search for particular words or phrases. As the project grows over time and more modules are added, the BDMP also offers an illustration of how Beckett used his own papers in the sense of an archive, as some notes and reading traces are creatively repurposed while others lead to dead ends. Using examples from some of the most recent modules in the project (‘Molloy', 'Malone Meurt' / 'Malone Dies', 'En attendant Godot' / 'Waiting for Godot' and 'Fin de partie' / ‘Endgame'), we will demonstrate how this dynamic works and how Beckett’s intertextual practice relates to his late modernist style of writing.
The Joyce Archive Industry
Chrissie Van Mierlo (University of Nottingham, UK)
The fate of Joyce's compositional materials is arguably unique among those of the Anglophone modernists: the value of the manuscripts was recognised by collectors during the author's own lifetime, and a body of work concerned with the notebooks and drafts--the "workshop of Dedalus"--grew up comparatively quickly. In the late nineties and during the first decade of the twenty-first century, a distinct "sub-field" emerged in Joyce studies: Joycean genetic criticism borrowed much of its vocabulary and theoretical underpinnings from the French critique genetique. My paper considers some of the advantages and possible pitfalls of working with an archive that has received such intense scholarly attention. On the one hand, Joycean genetic criticism suffers from a certain lack of diversity and this branch of the Joyce industry has been traditionally gendered male. Genetic critics can be overly reliant on a vocabulary that is, at times, unnecessarily opaque and off-putting to "outsiders". On the other hand, the rich body of existing archival scholarship lays the foundations for important new directions in relation to the digital humanities, literary history and emerging forms of literary criticism.
New Modernist Editing : The Annotation Game
Wim Van Mierlo (Loughborough University, UK)
The term “New Modernist Editing” has been used in respect of a recent number of new and on-going scholarly editions: Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair, Wyndham Lewis. Samuel Beckett, and others. The “new” has already been variously interpreted as referring to new (types of) editions, new audiences,(new perspectives (i.c. that of gender – the author’s and, particularly, the editor’s), new challenges (the complexity of the archival and textual record which needs accounting for), and methodologies. After a brief consideration of the new models I want to concentrate on the implications of one particular issue – that of annotation and commentary – for the new modernist edition.
The problems surrounding annotation are numerous. First, whereas commentary is an integral part of the scholarly edition, there is no accepted model or clearly defined methodology. To devise a theory of scholarly annotation may not be entirely possible, but it would be useful to take a more systematic look at annotation practices and relate them to use, usefulness and user expectations. Key to this discussion is an argument about mediation: the manner in which the edition “re-presents” works from the past in the present, on the one hand; and the relation between edition and intended audience, on the one other. Different types of readers may not be served by one ‘standard’ type of edition.
The question about mediation points to a second problem that is specific to modernism. This problem concerns the “pastness” of modernist works. While it stands to reason that the works of Shakespeare and Milton need careful annotation and commentary as part of their remediation for contemporary audiences, this may not be the case for works from the early twentieth century. Not only are they full of allusions belonging to a shared culture that contemporary audiences would have understood but which now are fast becoming unrecognizable, they also contain deliberate puzzles and conundrums. Obscurity is integral to their aesthetic. In fact, the extent to which modernist works participate in a “shared culture” is itself under question.
The question regarding the ethics of modernist reading is thus an essential one for the new modernist editor. On the one hand, annotation and commentary must not do injustice to the difficulty of the work. On the other, the editor cannot forsake the task at hand: to mediate. As modernist works can no longer be seen simply as contemporaneous (pace Richard Ellmann) but are quickly receding into history, their “pastness” must be acknowledged.
Scandalous Materiality: New Directions in Selling the Archive
JT Welsch (University of York, UK)
This paper will consider the modernist press, New Directions (founded in 1936 by James Laughlin) and its recent efforts to construct a commercial archive inspired by modernist poetry. Over the past decade, New Directions has pioneered the use of finely printed and facsimile editions to provide a simulated access to rare modernist texts, including William Carlos Williams’ Spring and All (1923, republished in 2011) and Ezra Pound’s Cathay (1915, republished in 2016).
I’ll compare these replications with other recent New Directions books, including experiments with book form by contemporary poets like Anne Carson (2009’s Nox, for instance) and the press’s co-publications with gallery director Christine Burgin, which reproduced Emily Dickinson’s ‘envelope’ poems (2013) and Robert Walser’s ‘microscripts’ (2012) in vivid facsimile. In their design, pricing, and marketing, I’ll argue that New Directions’ reproduction of work across this historical span are connected by a slippage between the contemporary fetishisation of book objects and that fetish’s appeal to an idealised archive. In creating ‘books that are for reading, looking and touching in equal measure’, I see New Directions reconfiguring these texts’ ‘scandalous materiality’ (in Houtman and Meyer’s phrase) for a digital marketplace, while extending the quintessentially modernist practice of commoditising the archive.
Broadcasting Katherine Mansfield: The BBC Written Archive Collection
Janet Wilson (University of Northampton, UK)
Katherine Mansfield’s stories are celebrated as prime examples of modernist writing—fleeting, brief snapshots that exploit dialogue for dramatic effect with a focus on voice, gesture and thought processes. This paper will discuss how Mansfield’s stories were read, adapted and broadcast in the 1930s and early 40s, and from 1946-1981 for the Third Programme. It will refer to the holdings of the BBC Written Archive Collection in Caversham, Reading, which include story titles, programmes for which they were broadcast (Woman’s Hour, Book at Bedtime), names of adapters and readers, and often the scripts themselves. Some comparison will be made with broadcasts of Virginia Woolf’s stories made during the same period. In considering Mansfield’s reputation, I ask whether the BBC broadcasts of her stories helped shape the popular reception of her work in the decades after her death, and more generally whether broadcasting Woolf and Mansfield’s stories created any new public for the genre of the modernist short story.
James Joyce and the [Musical] Archive
Michelle Witen (University of Basel, Switzerland)
This paper will provide an overview of the rich archival material available when researching James Joyce, and how the outlook has changed since the compilation of the James Joyce Archive (1977-79) until now (2018). Since my own research primarily encompasses Modernism and music, I will speak briefly about how the availability of manuscript material and resources — online and through acquisitions — has influenced my Joyce and music project. However, this paper will also posit some predictions about how Joycean archival work can proliferate and develop in the coming years.
Papers and Politics: Reading and Editing the Woolf Archive
Alice Wood (De Montfort University, UK)
Leonard Woolf famously ignored his wife’s final request to ‘destroy all my papers’ (Letters 6, p. 487). At her death in 1941 Virginia Woolf left a mountain of notebooks, manuscript and typescript drafts, corrected proofs, letters and diaries, which are now scattered across institutions on both sides of the Atlantic. Archival work has long been important to critics of Woolf and has shaped the field in significant ways. This paper traces two major waves of archival interest within Woolf studies: the first sparked by the feminist reclamation of Woolf in the 1970s and 1980s as an important political thinker and social commentator; and the second propelled by recent endeavours to explore and present her works through twenty-first-century scholarly editing theory and practices. Moving from early published transcriptions of her novel drafts to the ongoing Cambridge Edition of Virginia Woolf and digital projects such as Woolf Online, this paper will map these waves of intensified archival activity against the broader backdrop of Woolf criticism, within which her private writings have become key source texts for students and scholars routinely used to support readings of her works informed by gender studies, queer theory, new historicism, psychoanalytic theory, post-colonialism or eco-criticism. I argue that archival and editorial work in Woolf studies remains a frequently politicised enterprise.