Recent Scholarship

February 17, 2021 By: The Editors

A forum for reviews of recent publications and important books we may have missed the first time around. It also includes "Race in the Modernism/modernity Archives: The Harlem Renaissance and Beyond."

Review Essay: Paper Processors and Poetry’s Data

April 21, 2026 By: Emily Christina Murphy

In the first flush of text-based, web-published digital humanities projects, modernist literary studies has had a fairly thin representation, excluded largely by an accident of copyright. Literary scholarship from the Victorian period and earlier has relied on open-access text to build digital editions, digitizing, encoding, and circulating texts for scholarly and public audiences.

Twentieth-Century Literature and the Aftermath of War by Rachel Bryan

February 25, 2026 By: Allan Hepburn

© 2026 Johns Hopkins University Press Briony Tallis, the irksome thirteen-year-old writer in Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement (2001), ruins the lives of her sister, Cecilia, and, to an even greater degree, Robbie Turner, by telling a lie. Because of Briony’s untruthfulness, Robbie goes to prison, then to France at the start of the Second World War, where he dies of septicaemia on the beach at Dunkirk. During her decades-long writing career, Briony creates several stories about what happened between...

Metrics of Modernity: Art and Development in Postwar Turkey by Sarah-Neel Smith

December 17, 2025 By: Edward Mitchell

In 1973, the Municipality of Istanbul and the State Academy of Fine Arts sponsored a competition among Turkish sculptors. Fifty sculptures, each by a different artist, were to be erected in public spaces throughout the city. The purpose was to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Republic of Turkey. Due to practical constraints, the number of winning sculptures was reduced to twenty, which were then commissioned and erected in the specified locations. Of these twenty, only four remain in their original sites today. Three were stolen for the value of their metal. Three more were lost due to road work. Several were removed and lost when their sites were redesigned. Another was declared “meaningless” by a district mayor and jackhammered into oblivion.

Classical Hollywood, American Modernism: A Literary History of the Studio System by Jordan Brower

November 5, 2025 By: H. N. Lukes

The first notable aspect of Jordan Brower’s intensely researched book is that it mentions Theodore Adorno only twice, in passing, and Max Horkheimer not at all (poor Max). We get it by now: the culture industry qua oligarchy of the Hollywood studio system qua corporate personhood was propaganda, and scholars need to get on with more detailed work. As I write, the emergent rallying cry of “Stop the Oligarchy” analogizes more to the Gilded Age than to Classical Hollywood. Yet today’s anti-oligarchy sentiment is often directed at Silicon Valley tycoons, who have consumed much of Hollywood itself through streaming services, wrought a new kind of culture industry by commodifying our very attention beyond ideological propaganda, and are now trying to deaccession government itself. Brower’s account of the studio system provides an important analysis of how such oligarchical sausage once got made at the nexus of entertainment, art, and anti-trust law by charting how literary authors, the publishing industry, and classical studios adapted to each other, in every sense, for better or worse.

Duchamp’s Telegram: From Beaux-Arts to Art-in-General by Thierry de Duve

August 20, 2025 By: Martin Harries

Impish yet magisterial, Thierry de Duve continues a career’s investigation of what he now calls “Duchamp’s telegram.” The occasion of this telegram is the piece Duchamp dubbed Fountain (1917). From the start, de Duve is clear about what Fountain signifies: it “is situated at the juncture of two art worlds, one in which a urinal cannot possibly be art and one in which this urinal is art” (13). In this book, de Duve, among the most provocative of contemporary theorists of visual art, insistently identifies himself as an art historian. The questions the art historian pursues, with all the gathered evidence of

Modernism at the Beach: Queer Ecologies and the Coastal Commons by Hannah Freed-Thall

June 18, 2025 By: Jules O’Dwyer

Beaches occupy an interstitial position between water and land; their contours are rarely fixed but are rather subject to the vicissitudes of time and tide. The liminal quality of the beachscape as a geophysical formation is curiously echoed by its “vexed” and “contradictory” position as a cultural and aesthetic phenomenon (2). For while the beach is the privileged object of the touristic gaze, its longstanding association with otium and leisure, with rest and reprieve, belies its more ambivalent history as a site of colonial and anthropogenic domination. Although the beach has been thoroughly parsed within some traditions of spatial theorizing—notably in essays by French thinkers such as Roland Barthes, Jean-Didier Urbain, and Alain Corbin—it has largely eluded the attention of modernist scholars, due in part to the field’s longstanding affinities with the space of the city. And yet, as Hannah Freed-Thall writes compellingly, the modernist beachscape yields a rich cultural archive and a generative space through which to think questions of emplacement, improvisation, and relationality.

Cybernetic Aesthetics: Modernist Networks of Information and Data by Heather A. Love

March 26, 2025 By: Paul Jaussen

What is it like to write within a fold? Heather A. Love’s engaging new study argues that canonical modernist literature bends into a cybernetic future. Following Eve Sedgwick and Adam Frank’s transhistorical notion of the “cybernetic fold,” Love asks us to consider modernism as an art of informatics, data sets, entangled human-machines, and dynamic feedback loops, well before such notions had become self-consciously articulated. Combining both media and information theory, her book expands Bernard Scott’s claim that “cybernetics came into being before it had a nam

Inter-imperiality: Vying Empires, Gendered Labor, and the Literary Arts of Alliance by Laura Doyle

December 11, 2024 By: Anca Parvulescu

Among the most important books in literary studies in the last decade, Laura Doyle’s Inter-imperiality: Vying Empires, Gendered Labor, and the Literary Arts of Alliance deserves sustained attention. Situated between comparative literary studies, world history, decolonial theory, and gender studies, Inter-imperiality recasts literary history as a counterpoint to the world history of empires. Profoundly interdisciplinary, it makes a forceful case for the relevance of literary analysis to the comparative study of empires—and coloniality.

Europe Knows Nothing about the Orient: A Critical Discourse from the East (1872–1932). Edited by Zeynep Çelik

August 22, 2024 By: Shaj Mathew

A century before Edward Said, a robust critique of orientalism proliferated within the so-called Orient. Zeynep Çelik argues this point in an edited collection of journalism, polemic, and scholarship from the late Ottoman Empire and early Turkish Republic. Europe Knows Nothing about the Orient criticizes European knowledge production about Turkey through voices well known—such as Ahmed Midhat, Nâzım Hikmet, Halide Edib, and Tevfik Fikret—as well as those less so, including Şevket Süreyya and Ebüzziya. Translated into English from the original Turkish edition by Gregory Key, Nergis Perçinel, Micah Hughes, İlker Hepkaner, and Aron Aji, these modernist writers do not celebrate the arrival of European modernity so much as critique its transformation of nearly every facet of Turkish life: architecture, tourism, gender, and literature. This light paperback is therefore anything but: it is an essential companion to Orientalism (1978). While Said’s text has generated many memorable critiques, ranging from those of Aijaz Ahmad to Wael Hallaq, Çelik’s intervention gives voice to those who were “orientalized.” If orientalist scholarship constituted epistemic violence, this volume represents a trove of epistemic resistance.

Women Writing Jewish Modernity, 1919–1939 by Allison Schachter

June 19, 2024 By: Michal Peles-Almagor

Allison Schachter’s book Women Writing Jewish Modernity gives voice to the challenges Jewish women writers faced when they turned their pen to prose in the first half of the twentieth century. Scholarship has constructed literary genealogies of Jewish prose writing primarily in relation to male writers, ranging from Sholem Aleichem to Yosef Haim Brenner’s figure of the talush (the modern rootless Jew). Women Writing Jewish Modernity, in contrast, recovers the work of five interwar women writers: Fradl Shtok, Dvora Baron, Elisheva Bikhovsky, Leah Goldberg, and Debora Vogel, and reconfigures Jewish literary history

The Persistence of Realism in Modernist Fiction by Paul Stasi

February 21, 2024 By: Thomas A. Laughlin

Northrop Frye argued that behind every realist narrative was a displaced mythic structure that could explain the deeper meaning of its themes and patterns. Frye’s archetypal theory was in many ways a modernist one. Had not James Joyce and T. S. Eliot themselves sought to unify the seemingly random data of modern experience by indicating for their readers deep mythic structures undergirding their works? Myth was not held on to so much as a system of belief as for its ability to give a kind of formal unity—even if only latently—to the otherwise centrifugal force of the new and diverse material of modern life. In modernism, myth allied with literary form against the messy, debased business of daily existence in post-traditional society. But what if this is the wrong way to tell the story? This is the question posed by Paul Stasi in The Persistence of Realism in Modernist Fiction, which discovers behind modernism not myth but the displaced form of the realist novel.

A Violent Peace: Media, Truth, and Power at the League of Nations by Carolyn N. Biltoft

November 16, 2023 By: Alessandro Giammei

The title of this swift, powerfully written monograph on the archives of the League of Nations in Geneva offers a prodigious portrait of its real object of study: the so-called “interwar” period in European culture. Rather than a mere history of the League itself, A Violent Peace reads like a humanistic treatise on the most magmatic chronotope of western late-modernity: the ironically utopian, painfully bureaucratic, Freudianly fascist years that put into question, arguably for good, earlier concepts of reality, opinion, State, and world.

Poetics of Liveliness: Molecules, Fibers, Tissues, Clouds by Ada Smailbegović

July 20, 2023 By: Joshua Corey

Lisa Robertson’s 2001 book The Weather is a classic of the post-pastoral, in which the “architecture” of constantly shifting patterns of clouds and vapors supplants the nostalgia of landscape. A note at the end of the book tells us that it resulted partly from “an intense yet eccentric research in the rhetorical structure of English meteorological description.” BBC shipping forecasts, William Wordsworth’s The Prelude, William Cobbett’s Rural Rides, and the cloud sketches of John Constable were among Robertson’s sources, as was the delightfully titled Essay on the Modification of Clouds by the nineteenth-century amateur meteorologist Luke Howard.

Strange Likeness: Description and the Modernist Novel by Dora Zhang

January 9, 2023 By: Len Gutkin

With its tight focus on figuration in a hypercanonical trio of authors—Henry James, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf —Dora Zhang’s Strange Likeness feels almost deliberately unfashionable. Its fine readings, its deft deployment of narrative theory, its rigorous illuminations of the uses of description and metaphor in modernism, all read in many ways like the work of an earlier and more confident moment in the history of literary studies. It is refreshingly free of the cant that can seem everywhere now: the trumped-up claims for ethical urgency, the desperate engagements with novel and often barely relevant theoretical frameworks, and the confused substitution of criticism for politics. At a moment when not just modernist studies but literary studies writ large are facing institutional eclipse, it is thrilling to be reminded that, in the right hands, the old tools can still do so much. (This is not to imply that Zhang insulates herself from contemporary theoretical developments. In particular, she avails herself of some of the newer ways of talking about emotion that have become popular in recent years.) Zhang goes in chronological order—from James to Proust to Woolf—but I’m going to begin at the end, with Woolf. Zhang picks out a feature of Woolf’s writing that every reader of Woolf will recognize, even if they hadn’t been aware that they had noticed it before. That’s the tendency, in moments of charged epiphany, or baffled love and inarticulate affection, or accesses of transcendence or just the suspicion of transcendence, for Woolf’s free indirect discourse to resort to the demonstrative or the deictic, “This” or “That.” Think of Mrs. Dalloway’s “This moment of June,” or, more idiosyncratically, “She knew nothing; no language, no history; she scarcely read a book now, except memoirs in bed; and yet to her it was absolutely absorbing; all this; the cabs passing; and she would not say of Peter, she would not say of herse

Frame by Frame: A Materialist Aesthetics of Animated Cartoons by Hannah Frank

September 1, 2022 By: Matthew Levay

One cannot review Hannah Frank’s Frame by Frame without observing that it is a book marked by tragedy, specifically its author’s passing in 2017. That might have meant the end of the present volume—a lightly edited revision of Frank’s dissertation—had it not been for a few prominent advocates who saw it through to publication, even as they cautioned that, without much opportunity for revision, readers should consider Frame by Frame a work in progress. In his editor’s introduction, Daniel Morgan explains that the book “is basically the dissertation that Frank defended in August 2016,” and “not the book that she would have published,” as Frank had already begun planning extensive changes to the manuscript that she did not live to complete (xxii).

Florine Stettheimer: New Directions in Multimodal Modernism. Edited by Irene Gammel and Suzanne Zelazo

June 30, 2022 By: Mary Ann Caws

In 2017, at the Jewish Museum in New York, the exhibition “Florine Stettheimer: Painting Poetry” abounded in marvels for me and many others. Who was missing from the paintings mattered less than the astonishing presence of figures we all cared so about, presided over by Marcel Duchamp, on whose portraits and chess fascination Aaron Tucker expands so intelligently. There was Duchamp often, relaxed and no less brilliant than always.

Jim Crow Networks: African American Periodical Cultures by Eurie Dahn

June 9, 2022 By: Brooks E. Hefner

The last few years have witnessed the loss of a handful of longstanding and influential Black publications. The Chicago Defender ceased its print publication in 2019 (but remains online) and the Johnson Publishing Company—publishers of Jet and (until 2016) Ebony—was liquidated in the same year. These legendary publishers left a profound legacy on African American print culture and these recent changes have occasioned many eulogies and prompted more consideration of the influential history of twentieth-century Black publishing. While there is a rich tradition of scholarship on African American periodicals in the nineteenth century—from abolitionist newspapers and religious journals to international publications and children’s periodicals—scholarship on twentieth-century African American periodicals has not been quite as robust.

Iliazd: A Meta-Biography of a Modernist by Johanna Drucker

March 17, 2022 By: Richard Cavell

Modernity seems very much to be with us still. Yet that explosive moment on either side of 1900 is long over, and what has come after is either a pale shadow of its former self or actively contests it. It is precisely that gap that Johanna Drucker explores in Iliazd: A Meta-Biography of a Modernist, in terms of the book artist Iliazd (1894-1975) and of Drucker herself, who began her project as a graduate student in 1985 and returned to it in 2019 as the Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies and Distinguished Professor of Information Studies at UCLA.

Decadence in the Age of Modernism. Edited by Kate Hext and Alex Murray

February 24, 2022 By: Richard A. Kaye

This collection brings new attention to modernism’s self-repression—and the repression by critics—of its origins in fin-de-siècle decadent poetics. Examining a tantalizing range of Anglo-American writers, the contributors variously make a case for decadent writing as entwined with modernist achievements. Running through the volume, too, is an emphasis on the ways in which decadent literature determined a queer poetics that stood astride modernism in the writing of familiar writers such as Djuna Barnes, Ronald Firbank, Gertrude Stein, D.H. Lawrence, Mina Loy, H.D., Hart Crane, and Carl Van Vechten as well as lesser-known figures such as Margaret Sackville, Ada Leverson, Bruce Nugent, and Donald Evans.

Rethinking Faulkner in the “Black Lives Matter” Era

December 16, 2021 By: Greg Barnhisel

The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement has done an enormous amount of work to educate Americans and the rest of the world about how deeply embedded white supremacy is in our institutions, including cultural ones like art and literature. It has also demanded that we center the voices and perspectives of nonwhite people. So why is William Faulkner having another moment, right when it feels like we have heard quite enough of white people’s takes on race relations? And why is he still at the top of our pantheon of authors when so many other perfectly suitable successors, such as Toni Morrison, have emerged since Faulkner’s death fifty years ago?

Intransitive Encounter: Sino-U.S. Literatures and the Limits of Exchange by Nan Z. Da

November 22, 2021 By: Hsuan L. Hsu

A Chinese translation of “Rip Van Winkle.” A speech by Ralph Waldo Emerson honoring the Burlingame-Seward treaty. A translation of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “A Psalm of Life” inscribed on a Mandarin fan. The autobiography and poetry of Yale’s first Chinese graduate, who founded a school for Chinese exchange students in Hartford. Judging by the stature of the figures and institutions involved, we might expect that the archive of nineteenth-century literary encounters between China and the United States would have generated lasting networks of influence.

The Teaching Archive: A New History for Literary Study by Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan

September 7, 2021 By: Benjamin Hagen

Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan’s The Teaching Archive: A New History for Literary Study “declines to take up arms in the method wars” (9). But let’s not be fooled. This pacifism is not passive. This avoidance of “our metadiscourse” conditions an act of critical sabotage which defuses weapons of mass abstraction—i.e. formalism, historicism, ideology critique, postcritique, surface reading, distance reading, and so on (9). Buurma and Heffernan’s new history neither minds the gap nor suggests liberal, incremental readjustments. Rather, they make the claim—a revolutionary one—that what we “will watch,” “follow,” “see,” and “encounter” in the pages of their study “overturns,” “demolishes,” “scrambles,” “dispels,” and “dismisses” “nearly every major account of what the history of literary studies has been” (1, 6).

Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature by Jean-Christophe Cloutier

June 21, 2021 By: Laura E. Helton

A recurring dispute on Twitter in recent years revolves around claims of archival discovery. Announcements of scholars finding documents “lost in the archive” inevitably provoke exasperated reminders, often from archivists, that such documents had already been found—and perhaps even cataloged. But when Jean-Christophe Cloutier came upon Claude McKay’s last novel, Amiable with Big Teeth, few could dispute that discovery was the correct term. As a graduate student intern at Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library in 2009, Cloutier was processing the papers of literary agent and “all-around schemer” Samuel Roth when he encountered the lone copy of McKay’s unpublished manuscript, the existence of which surprised scholars and archivists alike (286).

Indigenous Vanguards: Education, National Liberation, and the Limits of Modernism by Ben Conisbee Baer

April 6, 2021 By: Ramsey McGlazer

Ben Conisbee Baer’s Indigenous Vanguards is about the education of modernist educators. But the book is also itself an education, combining range with rigor to alter our understanding of modernism and its limits. Baer focuses mainly on the interwar period and on primary education as it figures in the work of Alain Locke, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Aimé Césaire, D. H. Lawrence, and Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay, among others. Baer’s readings are riveting, and they will inform research in fields including postcolonial studies, Marxism, critical and political theory, and comparative literature.

Race in the Modernism/modernity Archives: The Harlem Renaissance and Beyond

February 17, 2021 By: Christopher Bush

We are pleased to be able to share here a selection of articles on race and modernism from past print issues of Modernism/modernity. Reflecting the history of the journal, many of these focus on the Harlem Renaissance, but we’ve also included articles on the Caribbean and Brazil as well as a more broadly comparative treatment of race...

Placeless People: Writing, Rights, and Refugees by Lyndsey Stonebridge

December 15, 2020 By: Sara Silverstein

In her stateless exile, Hannah Arendt read Franz Kafka. He was “rather uncannily adequate to the reality” of statelessness, she wrote (quoted in Stonebridge, 29). In 1933 Arendt had fled Germany through a house that sat on the border with Czechoslovakia (24). She ate dinner and left by the back door, into a legal void that exists on the fringes of the accepted world order of sovereign states and citizenship (24).

Changing Nationhood, Changeless Place: Bill Brandt/Henry Moore at the Hepworth Wakefield Gallery

October 22, 2020 By: Beryl Pong

Situated off the River Calder in West Yorkshire, the Hepworth Wakefield is a bright, airy gallery with ceiling to floor windows that draw in views of the waterfront and gardens outside; these demand to be taken in alongside the artwork within.

Art and Form: From Roger Fry to Global Modernism by Sam Rose

June 8, 2020 By: Patrick Fessenbecker

© 2020 Johns Hopkins University Press Sam Rose’s compelling new book Art and Form begins with the observation that modernist formalism has suffered severe blows to its reputation since its heyday in Clement Greenberg’s aesthetics, but argues that many of its critics have been attacking straw men. The supposed doxa of formalist aesthetics—that there is an autonomous realm of aesthetic experience, that this realm is radically separated from the world and available only to the sophisticated, and...

Affective Materialities: Reorienting the Body in Modernist Literature edited by Kara Watts, Molly Volanth Hall, and Robin Hackett

March 26, 2020 By: Marta Figlerowicz

© 2020 Johns Hopkins University Press As I read Affective Materialities: Reorienting the Body in Modernist Literature, my mind wandered to a 1929 essay by Theodor Adorno. The essay considers the late quartets of Ludwig van Beethoven and the early compositions of Franz Schubert. Adorno describes the transition between the two composers as follows: He who crosses the threshold between the years of Beethoven’s death and Schubert’s will shiver, like someone emerging into the painfully diaphanous...

Enchanted Ground: André Breton, Modernism and the Surrealist Appraisal of Fin-de-Siècle Painting by Gavin Parkinson

January 3, 2020 By: Susan Laxton

French surrealism at mid-twentieth century was marked (some would say, marred) by André Breton’s new-found interest in esoteric knowledge—a period, argues Gavin Parkinson in his latest book, in which surrealism “willingly entered a critical and theoretical wilderness with its advocacy of magic and occultism in its art, poetry and theory, and its insistence on the ‘indispensable condition of enchantment’—the impenetrable nucleus of resistance to human inquiry that exists within any system of knowledge” (322). Parkinson’s justification for what he calls surrealism’s “journey into obscurity,” is an accomplished revisionist account of what has been treated as surrealism’s most misguided moment, one that Parkinson has successfully complicated—and recuperated—with the movement’s engagement with metaphor, symbolism, regional medievalism, and abstraction, as articulated by Breton’s concurrent assessment of fin-de-siècle French painting (323).

Spanish Modernism and the Poetics of Youth: From Miguel de Unamuno to “La Joven Literatura” by Leslie J. Harkema

September 17, 2019 By: Ignacio Infante

The figure of Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) looms large in the development of modern Spanish literature, as thoroughly demonstrated by Leslie Harkema’s Spanish Modernism and the Poetics of Youth. By carefully tracing the literary and cultural impact of Unamuno’s writings, letters, and public lectures from the 1890s to the 1930s—four crucial decades for the development of Spain as a modern nation—Harkema presents an important and necessary critical rereading of the literary history of Spanish modernist and avant-garde movements. At the core of Harkema’s book lies a sophisticated critical examination of Unamuno’s work and influence that successfully overcomes old clichés and previously established commonplaces about the influential Basque polymath (poet, novelist, academic, politician, philologist, and philosopher, in no particular order), while at the same time newly presenting Unamuno’s philosophical and literary conceptualizations of youth in relation to a complex constellation of key networks of literary and cultural production in modern Spain.

Chicago Renaissance: Literature and Art in the Midwest Metropolis by Liesl Olson

June 13, 2019 By: Kinohi Nishikawa

© 2019 Johns Hopkins University Press The endpapers of Liesl Olson’s new book are disorienting. We see a map of a city bisected by lines and organized into grids. Heavier lines punctuated by circles indicate public transportation routes and their stops. A jagged shoreline appears at the bottom, cutting off the geometric exactness of the lines. But the lines grow less dense toward the top of the papers, indicating where the suburbs begin (or end) on the map. In the lower nook of the binding...

Still Modernism: Photography, Literature, Film by Louise Hornby

February 15, 2019 By: Alix Beeston

At the Oxford University Press stall at last year’s Modern Language Association Convention in New York City, Louise Hornby’s Still Modernism: Photography, Literature, Film was propped up next to Moving Modernisms: Motion, Technology, and Modernity, a collection of essays edited by David Bradshaw, Laura Marcus, and Rebecca Roach. Accidental, perhaps; mischievous, I hope: an editorial assistant with a twinkle in her eye.

Facing the Rising Sun: African Americans, Japan, and the Rise of Afro-Asian Solidarity by Gerald Horne

December 4, 2018 By: Etsuko Taketani

During World War II, Malcolm Little, who would eventually become the charismatic minister and spokesman for the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X, dissembled his true feelings toward war so successfully that he was banned from service. He found clever ways to avoid the draft. Malcolm Little played a “pro-Tokyo Negro” and acted crazy. He spread the word that he “was frantic to join . . . the Japanese Army,” and hoped that his words would reach army intelligence soldiers in Harlem (1). He whispered into the ear of the army psychiatrist in the induction center, “I want to get sent down South. Organize them nigger soldiers, you dig? Steal us some guns, and kill up crackers!” (1). His dissembling performance got Malcolm Little exactly what he wanted: a military classification of 4-F, not acceptable for military service, on his registration card.

The Flood Year 1927: A Cultural History by Susan Scott Parrish

September 18, 2018 By: Robert Jackson

This book investigates a flood that sprawled across forty percent of the United States (and some of Canada), killing hundreds (and perhaps thousands, since African American deaths were not included in any “official” count), displacing nearly one million people—including 300,000 African Americans who were placed in makeshift camps, which the Red Cross called “concentration camps” and which reproduced a particularly American racial logic—and stimulating an enormous range of intellectual and aesthetic production from the Mississippi Delta blues of Bessie Smith to the Berlin radio broadcasts of Walter Benjamin. The 1927 Mississippi flood, Parrish argues at length, and quite compellingly, should be understood as one of the central events in the history of modernism.

Poet-Critics and the Administration of Culture by Evan Kindley

April 18, 2018 By: Greg Barnhisel

Even taking into consideration penicillin and the atomic bomb, bureaucracy may be the most consequential and pervasive of twentieth-century humanity’s gifts to ourselves. (Global warming we gave to all species.) Yes, administrative gears ground in ancient Rome and classical China, but in the 1900s bureaucratic organizations and institutions of every type spread like kudzu. Sociologists such as William Whyte and Max Weber documented how, over the first half of the century, bureaucracies proliferated beyond the church, the military, and the government, coming to colonize every aspect of modern life.

Flat Protagonists: A Theory of Novel Character by Marta Figlerowicz

January 31, 2018 By: Nan Z. Da

Here is a get-over-yourself model of literary character. Flat protagonists are those that do not become more filled out or more compelling to others over the course of the novel even though they occupy the most space. Marta Figlerowicz takes a wonderful risk in giving her book this name because the flatness of the protagonists she tracks is not a dimensional reduction (as in: keeping them flat to study them from a distance, paring down their attributes until only the most essential—usually, historical materialist—ones remain, or turning them into the new objects of an anti-depth hermeneutics).

The Subversive Art of Zelda Fitzgerald by Deborah Pike

January 19, 2018 By: Emily Christina Murphy

Zelda Fitzgerald and her husband F. Scott Fitzgerald appeared on the cover of Hearst’s International magazine in 1922, held up as icons of the Jazz Age, of youth, talent, and burgeoning literary celebrity. This image remains one of the most recognizable of the couple. However, alongside this iconicity, Zelda Fitzgerald’s various diagnoses of mental illness have prompted critics both sympathetic and unsympathetic to remember her primarily in terms of the tragedy of her life—whether as the mad wife who brought about the downfall of her brilliant husband, or as the victim of patriarchal control and pathologization.

Spectacular Modernity: Dictatorship, Space, and Visuality in Venezuela, 1948-1958 by Lisa Blackmore

November 17, 2017 By: Vicente Lecuna

This book explores the relationships between modernism, modernization, and dictatorship, and in the process repoliticizes the discussion of a crucial period in Venezuelan modernity. Blackmore approaches these relationships through Raymond Williams’s notion of a dominant cultural formation, that “sense of reality shaped by the complex interlocking of political, social, and cultural forces that permeates a whole body of practices, expectations, and aspects of life” (19). Relying on detailed historical research and archival work, Blackmore conducts a complex and nuanced examination that does not avoid the subject’s many sensitive nerves.

Impossible Modernism: T. S. Eliot, Walter Benjamin, and the Critique of Historical Reason by Robert S. Lehman

August 25, 2017 By: Jesse Matz

How modernism transformed the conditions of history is the subject of Robert S. Lehman’s excellent Impossible Modernism, a book that should change the way we do history in modernist studies. Lehman surveys recent and current historicist work in the field and rightly argues that “[i]n their eagerness to read modernism historically, critics have rarely paused to consider how history is read by modernism” (xv).

Sounding Irish Radio at Midcentury

April 29, 2017 By: Ian Whittington

Reading through these two excellent new volumes situated at the intersection of radio studies and modern Irish literature, one feels presented with two very different instantiations of the radio listener. On the one hand, we have the dial-twirling shortwave enthusiast, stationed in (perhaps) Cork, and tuning in to transmissions Irish in affiliation but emanating from Dublin, Addis Ababa, New York City, Belfast, Geneva, London, and Berlin—transmissions that dazzle by their variety and that impart an awareness of their connectedness in dispersal.

Edge of Irony: Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire by Marjorie Perloff

March 2, 2017 By: Scott W. Klein

Our understandings of aesthetic periods along national and generic lines are often highly contingent. Anglophones may know a good deal about seventeenth-century Dutch painting, but almost nothing about eighteenth-century Dutch poetry. Italian opera looms large in the received history of nineteenth-century

Queer Bloomsbury, edited by Brenda S. Helt and Madelyn Detloff

February 1, 2017 By: Ria Banerjee

Queer Bloomsbury is a book in two parts, and as such, evokes two different responses. “Part One: Ground-Breaking Essays” consists of lightly-edited reprints of essays by Carolyn Heilbrun, Christopher Reed, George Piggford, Bill Maurer, and Brenda Helt ordered chronologically from Heilbrun’s 1968 “The Bloomsbury Group” to Helt’s 2010 “Passionate Debates on ‘Odious Subjects.’”

Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation by Nicholas Sammond

November 15, 2016 By: Marvin McAllister

In Birth of an Industry, Nicholas Sammond traces “the connections between the animated blackface minstrel, the industrialization of the art of animation, and fantasies of resistant labor” (xii). His core argument is that early animators developed unruly, cartoon minstrels in response to their increasingly depersonalized workplace. On a broader scale, the project works to situate animation within “a larger and longer history of racial iconography and taxonomy in the United States” (4). To make his case Sammond navigates a historically grounded racial matrix of minstrel shows, vaudeville acts, as well as other complex and contradictory representational forums.

Other Things by Bill Brown

September 16, 2016 By: Mark Goble

Bill Brown has had things on his mind for quite some time. In The Material Unconscious: American Amusement, Stephen Crane and the Economics of Play (1997) , he used Crane’s fiction to explore the disquietingly everyday objects which populate their imagined worlds, not just as descriptive details of the modern, but as strange historical presences telling stories about technology, race, and the lived experience of capitalism that few had found there before.

The Extinct Scene: Late Modernism and Everyday Life by Thomas S. Davis

May 24, 2016 By: Allan Hepburn

A brilliant and timely book, The Extinct Scene joins the growing list of scholarly works that deal with Anglo-British modernism in the middle of the twentieth century, such as Tyrus Miller’s Late Modernism (1999), Marina MacKay’s Modernism and World War II (2007), Leo Mellor’s Reading the Ruins (2011), Peter Kalliney’s Commonwealth of Letters (2013), and Gill Plain’s Literature of the 1940s (2013). These works establish continuities from the interwar years through the Second World War and into the era of British decolonization.

Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network by Caroline Levine

March 2, 2016 By: Paul Saint-Amour

The final chapter of Caroline Levine’s Forms begins by asking what the formalist cultural studies of the future might look like. Levine’s answer: “it could look something like David Simon’s superb television series, The Wire.” Notice, not like an analysis of The Wire but like The Wire itself, which Levine goes on to treat as an exemplary “theorization of the social” (133). Rather than analyze the show’s most sympathetic characters, she says, the formalist critic might do better to emulate their “canny formalism” (150).

From the Print Journal

Metrics of Modernity: Art and Development in Postwar Turkey by Sarah-Neel Smith

December 17, 2025 By: Edward Mitchell

Volume 10 Cycle 3

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review

Book cover with painting — *Metrics of Modernity: Art and Development in Postwar Turkey*. Sarah-Neel Smith. Oakland: University of California Press, 2022. Pp. 216.

The most prominently situated of the sculptures, Beautiful Istanbul by Gürdal Duyar, survived little more than a week. Placed in Karaköy Square, the commercial hub of Istanbul’s port district, Beautiful Istanbul presented the figure of a nude woman reclining on a rock, her arms chained behind her. The plinth on which the sculpture rested was decorated with motifs of Nature’s bounty—pomegranates, figs, bees. Roughly modeled in concrete, almost five meters tall and weighing seven tons, Beautiful Istanbul suggests nothing so much as a voluptuous, windswept Prometheus, fettered to the demands of the city.

Within days the statue was attacked, an arm broken off, the motifs on the plinth effaced: an insult to Turkish motherhood. On the night of the ninth day, after being denounced by the Deputy Prime Minister of the coalition government, Beautiful Istanbul was toppled and its carcass carted off to a gravel heap by the shore of the Marmara. When artists and the secular press cried foul, the carcass was retrieved—eventually to be rehabilitated, but not restored—in a remote corner of Yıldız Park, quietly taking its place in the lore of the city.

Today, when denunciations of Western degeneracy are commonplace, the mauling of Beautiful Istanbul would hardly be surprising. Even in the 1970s, in view of city’s changing demography and rapid provincialization, one might have predicted the statue’s fate. Arguably, the Municipality, the Academy, and the artist should have seen it coming.

But what is surprising about this episode, perhaps more so in retrospect, is the free rein given to the artists. Artists entering the competition could follow their inclinations as they chose. None of the winning sculptures bore visual associations with the established iconography of the Republic or celebrations of state. Unconstrained by the conventional baggage of commemorative monuments, the Istanbul Municipality’s celebration of the Republic was a celebration of individual artistic vision (with a dose of art-awareness as Civics), producing public art that was, to quote the jackhammering district mayor, meaningless—or worse.

Sarah-Neel Smith’s Metrics of Modernity goes a long way to showing how contemporary art in Turkey, even when celebrating the Republic’s anniversary, had so completely shaken off the once dominant iconography of nationhood. Focused on the pivotal 1950s, Metrics of Modernity examines Turkish modern art within a social/political discourse of economic development and becoming modern, a discourse increasingly tied to the strategic US development programs of the Cold War. Arguing that Turkish artists of the mid-century were aware of their role as artists in the discourse of national development and aware of the place of Turkey within emerging schemes of global development, Smith demonstrates that trends in Turkish art not only responded to economic changes but were shaped, even instituted, by them. She brings to light the close relationship between modern art and development economics, working the two in tandem to show how modern art in Turkey came to be identified with individual artistic vision, largely in the spirit of abstract expressionism, displacing the national role accorded to art by the early Turkish Republic. But if this description gives a fair indication of Smith’s project, it does not do justice to what she achieves in Metrics of Modernity as she takes us into the art world and the modernity-consciousness of the Turkish 1950s.

To appreciate what Smith achieves, we must go back to a time when there was more venture than capital, a time when the rational use of resources had political currency, a time when the figure of the nation-state was still imbued with mytho-historical elegance—a world view that would be deformed and transformed by US policies of the Cold War, policies that demanded market-dependency as the price of admission to a work-in-progress “West.” As Smith tells us, the Republic of Turkey in the mid-twentieth century encompassed seemingly contradictory attributes that complicate received narratives: “neither fully European, nor post-colonial, nor nonaligned” and possessed of a development-mindedness that had been in the making for well over a century (33). Aware of the cross-currents, Smith builds her text across multiple lines of inquiry into art, audience, and the institution of modernity.

The core of Metrics comprises four topical chapters, flanked by an extensive introduction and a conclusion that fast forwards from the age of emergent modernity to the present age of modernity surpassed. Although each of the chapters is a whole unto itself, the introduction is substantial and has much to offer. It sketches the ideological flux of the pre- and postwar periods, elaborating on Washington’s paradigm of strategic development and the pressures that led to Turkey’s alignment with the US. It situates Smith’s project within contemporary art-historical approaches and discusses the research challenges, both theoretical and practical, that she faced. Importantly, the introduction provides a masterful look into Turkish modern art prior to the 1950s, revealing the creative energy unleashed by the Kemalist revolution of the 1920s while grounding her readers in the visual and thematic characteristics of art during the early republican era—characteristics formed during a period of intense nation-building but challenged in mid-century as Turkey moved into the American orbit and flirted with privatizing the economy.

Each of the chapters of Metrics targets specific markers of change in the postwar Turkish art world. Chapters one and two examine Turkey’s first private galleries for modern art, the Gallery Maya in Istanbul and the Helikon Association Gallery in Ankara, opened in 1950 and 1953 respectively. Both were founded by notable figures committed to promoting the arts; both aimed at changing the relationship of art to public; both were regarded as venues of modernity unfolding; neither lasted more than a few years. But it is the differences between the galleries that Smith documents to reveal the competing postwar approaches to how and why modern art should be promoted.

The Gallery Maya in Istanbul was the private venture of Adalet Cimcoz, a prominent social figure, well known as a voice-over film actress, society columnist, and translator. That Turkey’s first private gallery did not appear until almost thirty years after the founding of the Turkish Republic is itself an indication of how un-commodified art was at the time. Cimcoz sought to promote modern art by bringing it into the homes of Istanbul’s aspiring middle class, effectively privatizing modern art as objects to be owned by art-conscious consumers. Revolving around Cimcoz’s dynamic personality, the gallery was more successful as a salon for the art-minded than as a commercial venture—it could hardly succeed commercially in a city with a population of scarcely over a million with little free cash for buying art. But Gallery Maya provided a celebrated alternative to the state exhibitions. The press reviews and debates that surrounded the gallery reveal how “modernness” dominated the popular culture of the day, and, in Smith’s hands, they make for a lively entry into the art discourse of the time.

Where Gallery Maya promoted modern art and art-consciousness as domestic fashion, the Helikon Association Gallery in Ankara championed modern art as a vehicle of democratic change. The gallery’s co-founder was none other than Bülent Ecevit. (A noted journalist at the time and ardent supporter of Atatürk’s modernizing goals, Ecevit would later revitalize the Republican People’s Party and be elected Prime Minister four times during the bitterly conflicted decades of the 1970s–1990s.) Starting from the premise that individual expression was the opposite of authoritarianism, Ecevit argued that state control of development produced “underdeveloped” citizens (40). Creative arts were the antidote, especially abstract art, which breaks with established figural identities. But first, art and individual must encounter one another more directly, more spontaneously, freed from the heavy hand of state sponsorship.

Ecevit’s identification of art and democracy still strikes a familiar chord. There was a remarkable congruence of values between the future Prime Minister and the liberal American mindset, a congruence Smith brings to light with eye-opening selections from Ecevit’s copious writings on art. Indeed, when Turkey was admitted to NATO, Ecevit urged the nation to catch-up with “the civilizational and cultural foundations” that other NATO nations held in common (88). Educated in the American liberal arts tradition at Istanbul’s Robert College, with its underlying Protestant values of self-improvement and self-reliance, Ecevit looked to America and molded Helikon in the spirit of individual growth through the arts. On the American side of the fence, one finds this philosophy of art and individual reduced to instrumental policy: state support for artists working in individualistic modes was one of the metrics upon which US aid was contingent (89).

Where the first two chapters explore the galleries as markers of change, chapters three and four take up a watershed event and two artists whose success marked a new era. The event was a much anticipated painting competition in 1954 on the theme “Developing Turkey,” a competition judged by a jury of prominent European critics. The outcome was startling. In preference to the canvases of the Academy-schooled painters, who depicted the usual autochthonous suspects (Agriculture and Industry, allegorically hand-in-hand), the European jury chose an expressionist canvas by a woman and outsider, Aliye Berger. Berger, from a well established Istanbul family, had trained abroad as a printmaker—not even a proper painter, according to her Academy critics. While Berger’s entry dutifully depicted figures laboring towards the future, the figures are indistinct, all but consumed by the fiery torrent of sunlight that flows across the canvas. The European judges had chosen Berger’s individual expressiveness over the conformity of the established painters, suggesting that the latter, if not the national project of “developing Turkey” itself, were passé.

The career of Füreya Koral (chapter four) brings the confluence of American metrics and Turkish modern art to a peak. Principally a ceramicist who had trained in France, Füreya developed a unique style of glazed tiles in the manner of expressionist painting, revitalizing the moribund tradition of decorative wall tiles. In a fascinating exploration of US cultural diplomacy, Smith documents how Füreya bridged the all-important craftsman/artist divide (hence checking two boxes for the US support programs). A mutual courtship between Füreya and the Rockefeller Foundation culminated in Füreya’s becoming the first non-Western artist to receive Foundation support. Her cross-over success encouraged further patronage of Turkish artists by the Rockefeller Foundation, for whom the modernist resurrection of ancient crafts had a special resonance in the paradigm of “transition.” But if the humanist bent of the Rockefeller Foundation found redemption in Füreya’s dual identity as artisan/artist, it was not Füreya’s craftsmanship but her artistry, her painterly mastery of the surface, that carried the day in America. American critics lauded her 1957 exhibition in Washington D.C. as true art.

In her conclusion to Metrics, Smith brings us into to the present century with a provocative look at the founding of Istanbul Modern, the vastly successful institution that has taken on the apparent mantle of a national museum—but with telling differences. Smith terms the museum a “hybrid enterprise, driven by a coalition of public, private, and corporate interests characteristic of the late-capitalist museum” (156). Istanbul Modern was born in a rare moment when the EU aspirations of Turkish industrialists (themselves the beneficiaries of a liberalized economy) coalesced with the aims of the newly elected Islamist-populist government, which had promised it could deliver prosperity for all. Cheering from the sidelines was a swath of cosmopolitan intellectuals, sure of their place in the vanguard. All concerned were confident that the path forward lay in abandoning the crusty biases of the latter-day Kemalist state in favor of market-blessed multiculturalism—the very stuff of the EU.

Opened in 2004 in a waterfront customs warehouse only a few hundred meters from where Beautiful Istanbul once stood, Istanbul Modern was an instant hit. With its spacious exhibition halls and breath-taking Bosphorus views, the new museum provided a defining moment: We’ve arrived. To make the point that the old Turkey, the rigidly ethno-secular Turkey, was a thing of the past, Istanbul Modern showcased its ability to showcase. Worldly and post-national, the new museum abandoned chronologic presentation and received genres in favor of thematic oppositions pumped up with fresh labels like “Enchanted Landscape / Counter-City.” Smith tells us that the curators intended to demonstrate “synchronicity with the most recent museological trends in the Western metropole” and display “European partnership rather than national identity”—thus sidestepping the formative relationship between Turkish art and national development (165). Viewed from this perspective, Istanbul Modern (now housed in a bespoke building by Renzo Piano) constitutes a fitting moment in the unfolding of the twenty-first century when even corporate carbon-credit programs are “curated” and when nation-states are touted as “brands”—seemingly profitable solutions to sticky problems of art and identity.

To my eyes the great achievement of Metrics is Smith’s reconstruction of the Turkish art world. It is here where Smith shows an extraordinary talent. Her purposeful “reimagining of the archive”—reimagined from diverse sources that are typically isolated categorically—is accomplished with such coherence and so smoothly rendered as to bring her reader into the picture with disarming ease. To reconstruct the Turkish art world of 1950s not only convincingly but with an uncanny feel for the era is a remarkable accomplishment. In Smith’s hands, the Turkish 1950s take on an almost sensible ambiance. Her account, even at its most distant, exhibits a familiarity with the subject, a familiarity, sometimes wry and ironic, that comes only from immersive research and long reflection. In achieving this quality she may have been helped by the immediacy of conversations with those close to the participants. Perhaps she has been aided as well by the passage of time, freeing her from the interpretive investments to which an earlier generation might have been inclined. However that may be, Smith’s ability to engage and to present the era has produced in Metrics an exemplary and compelling work.