Despite its brief history, Berlin Dada (1918–20) produced a glut of chronicles and memoirs, as if to immortalize its ephemeral insurgency. Its self-appointed chronicler, Richard Huelsenbeck, tried to harness this compulsion to memorialize in the service of Dadaist agitation he hoped would unleash a revolutionary time and redeem the failure of the communist uprisings at the end of World War I. his seditious temporality was based on two incompatible concepts of revolution: a properly political notion aimed at overthrowing an unjust regime and a vitalist discourse aimed at tapping into the circular low of life. he clash of the two modes of revolutionary time is enacted in Hannah Höch's photomontage “Cut with the Kitchen Knife” (1919). he spectral temporality that sustains both is conjured by the Dada Almanac (1920), a literary compendium that doubles as a quirky inquiry into political normativity and an inluential paradigm of Dada's self-legitimation.

At Margaret Thatcher's funeral, in 2013, attendees received a program with William Wordsworth's Immortality Ode printed on the back. This was unsurprising. The ode has always been popular with figures who champion liberal capitalist democracy as the most efective form of governance, one that delivers reform through incremental change and pragmatic policies rather than revolutionary idealism. Framed by the current unrest in Western civic life, this essay paints a darker picture of this reigning political order. Considering readings of the ode by John Stuart Mill, Cleanth Brooks, and Lionel Trilling, I suggest that the poem allowed liberal intellectuals to romanticize reformist politics. For these readers, Wordsworth reveals a core of sublime possibility within systems built on routinized order. However, idealizing a gradualist approach to reform allows progress to be pushed into the future indeinitely. Tracing the commitment to practical sublimity may reveal an emergent theory of liberal technocracy, in which citizens are compelled to operate under a vast, incomprehensible array of protocols that never quite deliver meaningful social change.

By examining the episodically shiting gender of the character Farina in Hal Roach's Our Gang series, this article argues that the integrationist fantasy Roach offered depended on a strategy for representing black children that shows the speciically temporal limits to popular entertainment's ability to imagine black adolescence in the early twentieth century. he two prevailing views of the series—Our Gang as integrationist and Our Gang as mired in racist stereotypes—are not exclusive but mutually constitutive, and the tie that binds the two is the strange pleasure audiences found in the black child whose gender changed. By attending to the fact that the integration in the series happened in relation to black boys in particular, we can see Our Gang's episodic treatment of Farina as a formal response to national anxieties about black masculinity and racialized sexuality.

The African American author Elizabeth Keckly has garnered signiicant attention in recent decades as a result of renewed interest in her memoir and exposé of the family of Abraham Lincoln, Behind the Scenes; or, hirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House (1868). Meanwhile, the anonymous author who, writing as “Betsey Kickley,” viciously parodied her book in Behind the Seams; by a Nigger Woman Who Took in Work from Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Davis (1868) has remained an enigma. his essay identiies the mysterious author of Behind the Seams as Daniel Ottolengui, a Jewish newspaper correspondent and writer from Charleston, South Carolina. he parody was reprinted in 1945 by another pseudonymous author, identiied here as the Manhattan-based book dealer Charles P. Everitt. he contents and contexts of both editions of Behind the Seams illustrate the enduring inluence of Keckly's challenge to hegemonic narratives of American history.

Pas un jour, the 2002 novel by the French writer Anne Garréta, is a polemic against autoiction, the popular contemporary genre that experiments with the boundaries between autobiography and iction. Garréta lures the reader with the promise of access to some part of her real self and her lived experience by mimicking the conventions and tone of autoiction, only to reveal that the auto in autoiction is an empty concept and to insist that there is no real subject to be found in the iction. Pas un jour's iniltration of autoiction puts this subject into crisis and challenges readers to consider that who we think we are is as ictive as the novels that we read.

Although the nature poems of the Jamaican writer Una Marson are usually set against her transnational projects, they are inextricable from the cosmopolitan vision described in her radio broadcasts and journalism. Studies of transnational modernism have brought to the fore Marson's participation in pan- Africanist political and literary networks, her poems' mediation of the black West Indian woman's experience, and her work promoting West Indian literature in the metropolitan institution of the BBC. Analyses of Marson as a transnational igure, however, have obscured aspects of her literary production—speciically, her nature poetry. Placing Marson's West Indian nature poetry that was broadcast by the BBC in the context of the original programs reveals the efects of moving from print publication to radio broadcast. And, along with her editorials for the Jamaican literary magazine The Cosmopolitan (1928–31), Marson's BBC broadcasts (1939–45) make the case for the ongoing relevance of the pastoral tradition to public life.

East german literary history is a case study of how political and cultural institutions interact. the state's cultural regime mo-nopolized the right to publish within its borders and demanded that the nation's new art describe contemporary life or its precedents. Even authors seen in the West as dissidents understood themselves, more often than not, as pursuing that goal and the broader aims of socialism with their work. During the lifespan of the German Democratic Republic, this political albatross weighed on all literary scholarship. Even now, whatever their feelings toward the socialist state, scholars, critics, and readers are bound to approach a text from East Germany as an artifact of its political culture—and rightly, because the political sphere encroached heavily on the artistic. But since German unification, the rise and fall in the stock of so many East German authors has directly resulted from political revelations, raising a number of troubling questions. Though historical distance seemed to have sprung up as abruptly as the Berlin Wall had come down, to what extent does scholarship from the German Democratic Republic represent only a heightened case of what is always true of literary history— namely, that political motivation colors critical evaluation? Is it possible to consider a work of literature with no recourse to the social and political circumstances under which it was written? And would it even be desirable to do so?

From the late seventies until her death, british-born writer and artist anna mendelssohn (1948–2009) authored fifteen poetry collections and at least two dozen short fictions and dramas, often publishing under the name Grace Lake. A consummate autodidact, Mendelssohn's passion was international vanguardism, a truth exemplified by the writers she translated: in Turkey in 1969, the poetry of political exile Nâzim Hikmet; from the late nineties, the work of Gisèle Prassinos, the surrealist child prodigy celebrated by André Breton. Mendelssohn's devotion to a modernist legacy situates her within the British Poetry Revival, a label applied to a wave of avant-garde poets that surfaced in the sixties and seventies. Given that she spent her last three decades in Cambridge, Mendelssohn can be further located on the margins of “that most underground of poetic brotherhoods, the Cambridge Poets” (Leslie 28). Mendelssohn's poems appeared in journals receptive to experimentalism, among them Parataxis, Jacket, Critical Quarterly, and Comparative Criticism. In the 1990s, Mendelssohn was anthologized in collections released by Virago, Macmillan, and Reality Street. Iain Sinclair included her in his influential Conductors of Chaos (Picador, 1996); in 2004, she featured in Rod Mengham and John Kinsella's Vanishing Points (Salt Publishing, 2004) alongside John Ashbery and Susan Howe. Her most readily available text remains Implacable Art (Salt Publishing, 2000). Increasingly recognized in her later years, Mendelssohn gave poetry readings at the University of Cambridge, London's Southbank Centre, and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, among many other venues.

I wrote my dissertation in the late 1990s. it compared harriet beecher stowe and other antebellum sentimental women writers with professional male orators and rhetoricians. I argued that these women authors hadn't been writing in a rhetorical room of their own. Instead, they were solving problems that the professionals could not. While writing the dissertation, I asked a friend who was in my program to read my chapter on the most popular book in the nineteenth-century United States, Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin.

I noticed the dynamic relation between age and narrative the second time i read edith wharton's the house of mirth. on my first experience of reading the novel, as an undergraduate of eighteen, I was engaged by its thwarted love story and saddened by Lily Bart's tragic but honorable end. When I reread the novel in graduate school, however, I was about to turn twenty-nine, the age at which Lily's marriage prospects and high expectations for the future begin to fade. Although Lily is widely admired for her remarkable beauty, readers are alerted in the novel's opening pages to the incipient erosion of that beauty. Even as Lawrence Selden finds his eyes “refreshed” when he catches a glimpse of Lily at Grand Central Station, remarking that “he had never seen her more radiant” (37), he credits this impression to the way her dark hat and veil have temporarily restored “the girlish smoothness, the purity of tint, that she was beginning to lose after eleven years of late hours and indefatigable dancing” (38). While Selden silently muses about her age (“here was nothing new about Lily Bart. … [H]ad she indeed reached the nine-and-twentieth birthday with which her rivals credited her?” [37–38]), Lily declares that she's “as old as the hills” (38); she perceives that “people are getting tired” of her and saying she “ought to marry” (42). Lily is ambivalent about marriage as her “vocation” (as Selden puts it [43]) but undertakes this quest. By the end of the novel, having lost her social and economic standing and failed to secure a husband—and thereby a future—she puts her affairs in order and overdoses on chloral (43). Her age is certainly not the only factor contributing to her decline: Selden's continuing fascination with Lily affirms that she has remained dis-tractingly attractive (even if, perhaps, “ever so slightly brightened by art” [39]), and the novel attributes her social descent more directly to her financial circumstances than to her age. Nevertheless, the opening scene of The House of Mirth emphatically establishes twenty-nine as a precipice over which Lily Bart falls to her doom.

With the exception of occasional quiet moments on the raft, the circus scene in the adventures of huckleberry finn is arguably the only episode of the novel where Huck is absorbed by an experience that gives him pleasure:

In 2015 i received a letter from the mla informing me that since i had now been a member for forty years, i no longer had to pay dues. hat should have been welcome news, but I was horrified. Could I be that old? Had I actually given papers and chaired sessions at some thirty-five annual meetings since 1975, as my hastily consulted curriculum vitae proclaimed? hough rhetorical, the questions prompted a nostalgic encounter with a few nearly forgotten conference talks and a deeper contemplation of the person who delivered them. (How) had my reading and writing altered across the decades in which I moved from graduate student through the tenure ranks to professor emerita? What had it meant to age as a reader? Or, for the purposes of this short meditation, what had it meant to age as a reader of Jane Austen, whose presence threads through my teaching and writing from beginning to not-yet end?

Discussions of reading as we age are usually tangled up in discussions of rereading, for good reason. recognizing change requires some point of orientation. Yes, there are things we can learn about the impact of aging when we read a new text (we may recognize, for example, that we don't read with the same speed and concentration that we once did). But, for the most part, the effects of the aging process emerge with greater clarity and with more nuance when we have an old reading (or a memory of an old reading) to hold up against our present perceptions. So imagine that you've read a work, on and off, over forty years (an act of imagination that will be easier for some readers than for others). What sorts of differences in your reactions are liable to emerge? here are lots of them, which run along several axes and often conflict.

Everywhere I turn, there seems to be a new bandwagon waiting with bold claims on how it will save the humanities. I'm curious. I'm excited. I'm also weary.

The MOOC (massive open online course) explosion happened, and I participated with glee. It let no revolution in its wake. I love the deeply interdisciplinary and interactive shape of life for students at Design Tech High School in Silicon Valley but fear there's a dark side to Oracle's bankrolling it with upward of $43 million. And, in the bloating of middle management and infusion of cash into e.learning units on campuses across the country, we might be seeing “management theorists” lurking in sheep's clothes out to create a workforceready. only population. I worry for the twenty-two million students served in college—and especially all the rest not being served.