Now that phonography is established as the cardinal regime of audio recording, storage, and playback in studies of sonic modernity, a coeval sound-reproduction technology merits attention—the pianola, or player piano. The instrument is a pneumatic reading machine: it scans binary machine code from perforated paper rolls and translates it into acoustic events while prompting song with its scrolling lyrics. Revisiting Derrida's “Ulysses Gramophone” (1984) thirty years on, this essay finds there a proleptic critique of the gramophonocentrism Derrida's piece has helped underwrite in sound studies. The essay then turns to an extended reading of Joyce's novel, one of several modernist works that feature the pianola in their self-conceptualization. Ulysses's pianola at once incarnates the novel's virtuosic recall of its own language and insists on the ineliminable role of exchange and of the gendered and laboring body in any performance of stored data.

The aim of the ill-fated 1922 Congress of Paris, an international conference organized by André Breton, was to diagnose the sources of the “modern spirit.” Although the congress had ambitious international goals, it was brought down by a remark with xenophobic connotations. Largely remembered today as the death knell of Paris Dada—the public fight between Tristan Tzara and Breton meant not only that the congress never took place but also that Paris Dada was dissolved—the congress's failure stemmed from the tensions involved in selfconsciously deining modernism. Arguing that ambivalence over the concept shaped the main participants' understanding of the congress, I read the congress as a concrete manifestation of the impulse to federate the arts in post-World War I France.

“The earth, for us, is flat and bare. / … Poetry // Exceeding music must take the place / Of empty heaven and its hymns… Such claims saturate Wallace Stevens's work: poetry, Stevens affirms and reaffirms, is a potential source of value in a secular world. This essay tracks his attempts to realize this potential—to write a poem that would satisfy his metaphysical need. His work is relentlessly self-critical and experimental, and over his career he develops extravagant (and ultimately hermetic) responses to a stubborn philosophical problem. My aim is to reframe critical approaches to a central topic in Stevens's poetry and to re-evaluate his relation to philosophy. In the process, I hope to suggest answers to more general questions: What is experimental poetry? How do poets think in verse? Why do poets write difficult poems? What makes a poem difficult in the first place?

Though her publications were slight after she permanently moved to Greenwich Village, in New York City, in 1940, Djuna Barnes labored over scores of literary and nonliterary typescript drafts from the 1940s to the 1980s. This unpublished artwork constitutes a geriatric avant-garde that deepened her earlier investments in modernist aesthetics. Archived documents record the elderly writer performing the principles of high modernism—innovation, experimentalism, and novelty—across an unprecedented array of genres, such as the poem, the pharmacy order, the grocery list, the medicine regimen, the memo, and personal correspondence. This article reassesses gerontophobic depictions of Barnes as an aged recluse who lived a creatively fruitless late life. The underex-plored works of her senior years are a unique version of what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls “a senile sublime.”

In the past two decades, scholars of world literature and transnational literary studies have called for an overhaul of the national literature model, in favor of a model based on literature's movement beyond national boundaries. Yet across the spectrum of approaches, scholarship on world literature has focused on the languages of the metropolitan center while largely overlooking the literary cultures of the so-called peripheries. We examine Jewish literature as a transnational and multilingual body of writing whose networks of linguistic and cultural exchange provide a clear counterpoint to the center-periphery model of global literary circulation. Moreover, the essay offers one of the first comparative studies of Eastern European Jewish literature and Middle Eastern Jewish literature, furnishing new methodological tools for a comparative approach to Jewish literary culture.

In 1940 Djuna Barnes, author of the notorious but weak-selling Nightwood (1936), received a commission from Harry A. Bull, editor of the New York-based society magazine Town & Country, to write a short reminiscence of Paris in the 1920s. The Nazi occupation of the erstwhile world capital of the avant-garde gave Town & Country's well-heeled readership reason to be nostalgic for Paris's glamorous recent past. As for Barnes, despite her dwindling book sales, she still had some celebrity—especially among those American readers who remembered her risqué onetime best seller Ryder (1928)—as an artist, journalist, and character of the Paris scene. Struggling with alcoholism and illness, and fiercely private, but desperate for money, she accepted the commission (Herring 242-50). Drawing on material in a notebook she had carried while working as a journalist in the 1920s (Caselli 116), as well as an unpublished 1939 essay, “Farewell Paris,” Barnes took her miniature memoir through several drafts over the course of 1940 and 1941.

In 1926 the new zealand artist, writer, and budding filmmaker len lye arrived in london by way of sydney, australia.

Only twenty-five years old, Lye was still a few years away from his first breakthrough in film: Tusalava (1929), a nine-minute animated film composed of over 4,400 drawings that took nearly two years to complete (Horrocks, Len Lye 91). The artist would spend the next two decades in London, years in which his association with the General Post Office Film Unit would provide him with the resources he needed to create some of his most famous films, such as A Colour Box (1935), Rainbow Dance (1936), and N or NW (1938).

In December 1925, a young American poet by the name of Laura Gottschalk—soon to change her name to Laura Riding—followed Robert Graves's advice and moved to London. While she had yet to publish a book of poems, her poetry had appeared in a number of literary journals, most notably the Fugitive (Jacobs xvii). Her first collection, The Close Chaplet, was published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press in October 1926.

Mikhail Leonovich Gasparov (1935-2005) was one of the greatest and most prolific russian literary scholars of the twentieth century.

Though associated with the Moscow-Tartu school of semiotics, Gasparov's writings were so diverse and multifaceted—and his scholarly personality so distinct—as to elude categorization.

Gasparov's accomplishments are all the more remarkable when measured against the rigid Marxist-Leninist paradigms that ruled humanities education and scholarship in the Soviet Union. A philologist with a special interest in verse form, he managed to sidestep the procrustean bed of Soviet ideology, building instead on the barely tolerated work of the Russian formalists and structuralists. He embraced and developed their goal of turning literary study into an exact science by applying statistical analysis and probability theory to poetics. Gasparov's scholarship was based on unprecedented amounts of data, which he painstakingly compiled in the precomputer era. However, he was never satisfied with the data as such; he used them to reach profound and unexpected conclusions.

How quickly and how often those who heard about the sudden death of helen tartar asked, did i let her know how much her support meant to me? Did I express adequately my gratitude for all the work she did for me and for others in literature, philosophy, critical theory, visual culture, poetry, and religion, to name but a few of her fields? I do not think it was a reflex of self-punishment as much as the upsurge of another kind of remorse, the wishing to have said more. At the American Comparative Literature Association's memorial for Helen Tartar, person after person testified to the extraordinary support she offered—soliciting a manuscript; reading it actively and critically; sometimes productively quarreling with its ideas or formulations; finding the right readers; collaborating on the material form, including cover and font; and sending the work forth into the world of readers, “worlding” it, if you will. Some at that event spoke about the race against tenure and the acute anxiety it produces, and how crucial Helen was in expediting a review and presenting the work before the board for approval. Others talked about her frank and sensitive evaluations, which let us know what had to change before the manuscript became a book—always delivered with an affirmation of the project. But because Helen was a committed intellectual with her own philosophical, literary, and religious archive, she also contested conclusions and queried moves. I remember how, when she copyedited The Psychic Life of Power (in the days when she handled every aspect of production at Stanford), she quarreled with my reading of Freud and sent me to new sources to correct my view. To Haun Saussy, with whom she worked on several projects, she wrote, “When I read this argument, I felt I needed to take hold of it like a twisted sock and pull it inside-out.” She was our first reader, and we were incredibly lucky because she paid attention.

I'm struggling now, trying to write, to say anything, to follow the command “write it!” what i really need is an e-mail from Helen, telling me to sit down, to say what it is that I want to say and then to go about saying it. She would probably give me an ideogram, direct me to a page of Ernest Fennollosa's The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, then add how much she was looking forward to seeing the essay in print, on real paper, out there in the world. She would also, perhaps by way of closing, remind me that writing was a practice of making oneself vulnerable, and that wisdom wasn't going to come uninvited if you didn't let go of the need for some security.

What are we mourning when we mourn helen tartar's loss? we are responding, first and foremost, to the loss of a friend, a collaborator, a companion in crime. Like so many, I owe my career to Helen. She plucked me out of a professional abyss at a crucial pre-promotion moment, got a stalled manuscript accepted, into production, and out into the world in an unheard-of nine months. Along the way she sent me countless messages of support testifying (I can now see) to her savvy and ingenuity but phrased in a way that made me think it was merely my due. Heady stuff for an oppressed-feeling assistant professor at an Ivy League school coming up for promotion to associate professor, and inspiring enough in all the right ways to catalyze not just that promotion but a continuing sense that someone—somewhere—would respond to my work and push me in the right directions. More than an editor, Helen was the reader I—we all—yearn for: responsive, generous, exacting.

The battle is not yet joined, and the poet has listed for us the array of warriors, of ships, of forces. “tell me now,” the poet of The Iliad has sung, in Richmond Lattimore's translation, “you Muses who have your homes on Olympos. / For you, who are goddesses, are there, and you know all things, / and we have heard only the rumor of it and know nothing. / Who then of those were the chief men and the lords of the Danaäns?” (2.484-88). Then the catalog: the list. In the Homeric tradition, a catalog unrolls under the guarding eye of the Muses, the witnesses, under the keeping and inspiring eye of divine and distant figures who have seen the scene, whose witnessing we imagine, from whom we borrow the faint authority we wear when we begin our own songs. These Homeric lists seem to us scattershot today—this ship here, that one there, a warrior next to another warrior simply on the grounds that, yes, there he stands. And yet to the extent that they turn on the authority of the fact, of a divine witness who reports this disorder and from whom we take the rumors of the fact, Homer's lists are at core structured, signed, legitimated. The Iliad is not only the story of the encounter between Trojans and Achaeans; it is also the story of the encounter between two phenomenologies—one envisioning orders of events, names on a list, as they present themselves to us, rumored, accidentally, contingently; another envisioning the order of what presents itself according to the signature of the presiding Muse, according to an immanent principle of structure derivable, if at all, from the totality of the list. These two encounters and these two phenomenologies don't line up; they're fought on different fields and at different levels; they have different scopes. One phenomenology is in principle endless—there's always another matter at hand; we cannot foreclose the possibility that another ship will appear; and the chaos of the battle always means that another figure, foe or friend, may step before us when we least expect it. The other is always bounded, limited on both sides by the immanent unfolding of its principle: that this or that friend or foe should have appeared makes manifest, sub specie aeternitatis, the reason for his, or her, appearing.