Category Archives: Modernism

Samuel Beckett and the Politics of Closed Space

By | June 4, 2020
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Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about confinement.

How many steps from my desk to the fridge? (seven) How many from the fridge to the bathroom? (twelve) How many times per day do I track this route?

In October 1954, Samuel Beckett too was thinking of confinement. He was reading a letter from German prisoner Karl-Franz Lembke, who had translated, rehearsed and staged Beckett’s debut play, Waiting for Godot, behind bars. Beckett was clearly moved, as we can see in his response:

My Beckett: Alone Together

By | April 13, 2019
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Guest post by Arka Chattopadhyay 13th April is Samuel Beckett’s birthday. This date takes me back in time to my undergraduate days. I was an English literature student in Presidency College, Kolkata, India. It was there in 2004 that my obsession with the Nobel Prize winning Irish writer Samuel Beckett began. Yes, let me call… Read More »

Happy birthday, Samuel Beckett!

By | April 13, 2019
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Guest post by Dirk Van Hulle and Pim Verhulst Samuel Beckett came into the world on 13 April 1906. Not only was it a Friday the 13th, it was also a Good Friday, the Friday before Easter Sunday, on which the Christian Church commemorates the Crucifixion of Jesus at Calvary. To the superstitiously-minded, any life… Read More »

“The rot began before the war”: Rebecca West’s Sunflower and the Failure of British Liberalism

By | December 21, 2018
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Rebecca West was born on December 21, 1892. To celebrate the 126th anniversary of her birth, Laura Cowan explores one of her unfinished and posthumously published works. This recognition of West (née Cicely Isabel Fairfield) closely coincides with the centennial of the World War I Armistice on 11 November 1918, a topic central to West’s unfinished… Read More »

Modernism and the Law

By | November 3, 2018
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Guest post by Robert Spoo Let’s think about scarcity and law—a theme that I explore throughout Modernism and the Law. Laws seek to produce a kind of scarcity in many areas of human behavior and desire. Criminal libel laws, for example, were enforced to decrease the incidence of reputational attacks and, along with them, the… Read More »

2018 or 1918?

By | November 2, 2018
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Guest post by Celia Marshik and Allison Pease A polarized environment in which women argue that their experiences are different from men’s, that men oppress them, and that women have a right to claim their own experience. A moment of crisis that threatens men’s world of privilege; men fight back with anger, dismissal, and belligerence that… Read More »

Modernism’s Print Cultures

By | November 1, 2018
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Guest post by Faye Hammill and Mark Hussey Writing Modernism’s Print Cultures gave us an oddly divided perspective on modernism because our research soon made clear that what seems to recent scholars to be cutting edge work on periodicals and advertising, markets and commodities, networks and typography was in fact all invented a hundred years… Read More »

Modernism, Science, and Technology

By | October 31, 2018
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Guest post by Mark Morrisson When I was asked by the New Modernisms series editors to consider contributing a volume on modernism, science, and technology, I jumped at the chance.  I had long been researching the mutually informing and generative inter-relationships among the sciences and the arts and humanities during the period—indeed, the rich and… Read More »