Interpreting an art-historical episode through the lenses of social and economic history, the aim of this essay is to reveal how the critical reception of American sculpture in the late 1920s and early 30s served as a proxy for broader conversations about economic value during a period of extraordinary financial volatility. Specifically, the essay examines a moment in which discursive parallels between sculpture and the mass market became especially vexed: at the staging and reception of a comprehensive survey show of contemporary works, mostly in cast bronze, organized by the National Sculpture Society (NSS) in San Francisco during the spring of 1929. Optimistically promoted as the biggest exhibition of its kind, the show drew unanimous rebuke for that reason. The show had too many works that critics had already seen, too many monumental versions of familiar table-top bronzes, too many ornate household objets d’art, and—above all else—just too many pieces. This line of criticism was aimed squarely at what might be called “cultural overproduction,” an aesthetic problem that ran exactly parallel to perceptions of excess in the marketplace at the same time. This essay offers a thorough reception history of the exhibit, Contemporary American Sculpture, and seeks to offer a model for an economically-informed social history of interwar aesthetics.
In this article, I discuss Dorothy Sayers’s BBC serial drama The Man Born to Be King, an allegorical version of the Gospels and the lead-up to World War II in twelve parts. Although primarily a national broadcast, The Man Born to Be King needs to be understood within a transnational wartime context, thereby challenging the tendency of critics to see British wartime literature as exclusively preoccupied with nation. Instead, I argue for a transnational understanding of late-modernism and suggest that Sayers participated in a larger British rebranding campaign that aimed to court continued U.S. support of the Allied war effort. By giving Christ a voice in her play-cycle, Sayers attempted to redefine Britain as a historically Christian nation, an argument T.S. Eliot also frequently made. Yet while Sayers hoped that The Man Born to Be King would unify Britain (and by extension her allies) through the Gospels, the play-cycle was instead effective because of its militarization of the Savior.
“Modernist Aphasia” examines the early and critically neglected work of Aldous Huxley in order to demonstrate that he foregrounds speech disorders in the service of lexical invention. In seeking out innovative sources for word-making, he attends to the pitfalls and pathologies of stuttering and aphasia in his short story “Half-holiday” (1925) and novel Point Counter Point (1928). In the course of disordering words, Huxley uncovers an aesthetic of novelty that is in fact critical to his agenda as a satirist. Through neologism, he works to restore an era of hackneyed intellectualism and sociocultural ennui. To reorder and rebuild words, he also turns to the scientific and taxonomic lexicon, imitating its models for formulating new words. Throughout these early writings, Huxley emphasizes production over product, suggesting that scientific discourse—whether aphasic language or taxonomic vocabulary—is a critical site for satirizing but also rebuilding modernity.
For an author clearly dedicated to violence, manliness, sporting culture, and pain, it is odd that Ernest Hemingway expresses an aesthetic discomfort in depictions of boxing, a discomfort that goes unremarked in critical studies of his work. As a cultural form tasked with voicing class, race, ethnic, and national conflict, the sport of boxing falls prey to what Hemingway identifies as the unwelcome “complications” of context. In response, Hemingway turns to the Spanish bullring as an apparent solution to this aesthetic problem; however, by exposing Hemingway’s frequent transposition of boxing into bullfighting, this essay argues that despite his best efforts, Hemingway cannot extricate “simple” aesthetic experience from “complex” racial experience, nor can he escape its Americanisms. By working outward from Hemingway’s work, this essay begins to map the routes of a transnational American racial imaginary lying submerged within the history of the modernist avant-garde, and aims to recognize the underappreciated ways in which boxing and boxers are an important part of that history.
This essay explores the problem of other minds in Dorothy Richardson’s Deadlock alongside Levinas’s and Merleau-Ponty’s critiques of self-consciousness, this arguing that Richardson’s lifelong autobiographical project enacts solipsism in order to encourage readers to engage more fully with the space between the narrator and protagonist. Richardson’s awareness of the ethical pitfalls and possibilities in her method manifest most clearly through Miriam, a character whose own advance through life continually runs up against the problems of self-interestedness, but through whom Richardson is able to explore the mechanics and limits of fiction. Deadlock demonstrates how Richardson acutely understands the difficulties of intersubjectivity and the high ethical stakes its articulation presents for modernist fiction and life writing.