This article identifies a body of work—films, literary texts, and theories of the aesthetic—that can help us reopen the question of what it means for an artwork to project a vision of classlessness. The article begins by focusing on early-twentieth-century proletarian modernism, in particular in the cinematic work of Sergey Eisenstein and in British literary works that repurposed Woolfian and Joycean styles during the later interwar years. Proletarian modernism, I argue, highlights an alternative route taken by modernist literature and art: unlike the late modernists feted in much recent scholarship, proletarian modernists aimed to retool modernism, opening up new and global political futures for it rather than anticipating its end. The article concludes by showing that the cultural genealogy of proletarian modernism mapped out here doubles as a prehistory of contemporary aesthetic theory: it enables us to recognize the significant political and theoretical erasures that structure recent accounts of art's democratic potential.

This essay identifies a tension between speed and slowness that emerged circa 1800, when a self-conscious awareness of seemingly rapid social change intersected with the enhanced understanding of slowness developing in geological theory. Focusing on Charles Lyell, William Wordsworth, John Keats, and Charlotte Smith, the essay shows how Romantic poetry and geology think together about slow time and incongruous temporality. Slow time raises formal problems about how to represent temporal processes that operate below the level of the visual and the tangible. he slow time of geology ultimately offered Romantic poetry a new sense of how an apparent lack of eventfulness can be understood as eventful when placed on a longer timeline. Romantic poetry, in turn, drew in fine detail on geology's expanded scales of temporality to offer an imaginative understanding of the infinitesimal rates of change and the gradual processes central to slow time.

Drawing first on an annotated copy of the poetry of Felicia Hemans that my students discovered in the stacks of the University of Virginia's library, this essay goes on to examine the marks made by female readers in three nineteenth-century copies of Hemans's poetry to reveal the dynamics of sentiment in author-reader networks of Romantic and Victorian poetry. Seeing Hemans through the eyes of individual female readers surfaces a lost world in which poetry was valued as a collaborative, intimate language of the heart. Specific historical copies allow us best to apprehend this world, but, in the wake of wide-scale digitization, nineteenth-century books are simultaneously newly visible and newly at risk. This essay makes the case for retaining them and for integrating them into our accounts of nineteenth-century literary history.

This essay examines Kenneth Lonergan's stunning and underviewed New York City film Margaret (2011), placing it in a larger corpus of post-9/11 artistic production while also drawing out its Victorian intertexts—most notably, the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem that gives the film its title. Margaret derives its organizing thematics and formal experiments with sound from the Victorian cultural trope of hyperesthesia: the drive to look beyond the self (the protagonist, the nation) and the answering anxiety that doing so would mean being overwhelmed by the frequency of human suffering. Margaret demonstrates the continued pull of Victorian aesthetics and politics of representation on contemporary literature and film and, I argue, the cost of this persistence. At once emphasizing and occluding the far-reaching and long-lasting violence of formal and informal empire, Margaret carefully attunes us to particular forms of suffering—but only by disattuning us to global catastrophe.

In his play Catiline His Conspiracy, Ben Jonson allegorizes Cicero's fight to save the Roman Republic as a battle against the kind of spectacular drama that, Jonson claimed, his audiences so enjoyed. This metatheatrical polemic hinges on the rhetorical technique of enargeia: the power of language to conjure an image. For the early moderns, enargeia resolved the “paradox of representation”—the contradiction between “making present” and “standing for”—by subordinating visual presence to verbal illusionism. Jonson, aligning neoclassical poetics with humanist historiography, dramatizes this hierarchy of representation. In Catiline, Cicero's rhetoric puts visions of violence before his audience's eyes only to prevent their realization onstage. The play thus seeks to exorcise the specter of political violence that haunted early modern England and the Roman Republic alike. Yet the rhetoric of Jonson's Cicero proves just as coercive as the spectacular violence that it has replaced. From Jonson's time to ours, separating rhetoric from violence has remained the challenge of republicanism.

Entering Howard University's Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, one still passes through the “catalog room,” an antechamber filled with rows of card drawers. Inaugurated in 1930 by the librarian Dorothy Porter, this catalog of the “Negro Collection” served for much of the twentieth century as one of the only portals to African American print culture. This article reconstructs the creation of that catalog in order to chart the relation between infrastructure and racial imaginaries of reading. Porter contravened the routine misfiling of blackness in prevailing information systems by rewriting Dewey decimals, creating new taxonomies for black print, and fielding research inquiries from across the African diaspora. She built public access to books “by and about the Negro” at a moment when most black readers were barred from libraries. In so doing, she fueled a broader sense of what a black archive—or what Porter called a “literary museum”—might afford.

This essay investigates the personal check as it appears in two novels, W. E. B. Du Bois's The Quest of the Silver Fleece and James Weldon Johnson's he Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man. In these novels, checks move money between a wealthy white individual and an African American; a close analysis of the check's form and function shows how Du Bois and Johnson revise mid-nineteenth-century connections among feeling, money, and social change by exploiting, rather than challenging, the abstraction of this financial form. The checks in Du Bois and Johnson present the logic of reparations. In doing so, the checks make a material difference in the lives of black beneficiaries, tying them to the flow of money made possible by finance capitalism, a flow from which most African Americans were excluded. At the same time, the check's figuration of the drawer's emotional motivations salvages the potential for progressive individual actions in those whose self-interest limits their willingness to act decisively for the benefit of others.

Christina Rossetti's “Goblin Market” has long been recognized as an interpretive enigma. Simultaneously conducting its own surface reading and inviting us to interrogate its buried meanings, the poem adapts the Tractarian doctrine of reserve to set up a hermeneutic paradox rooted in Victorian exegetical thought. Variously a standard for reticent poetic style, an apologia for divine mystery, and a prescription for limiting complex theological knowledge, reserve also served Victorian thinkers as a hermeneutic strategy. Rossetti plays reserve against itself by dramatizing its dueling imperatives—inciting and containing curiosity. Laura's epilogue forecloses interpretation for “illiterate” spiritual children—those who might misconstrue mysterious meanings; simultaneously, the epilogue mobilizes a competing dimension of reserve, juxtaposing its interpretive gatekeeping against its hermeneutic potential. Anticipating recent reading debates, Rossetti's reserve generates a temporally recursive hermeneutic, within which competing interpretations and interpretive modes can be imagined to coexist.

Charles Nodier (1780–1844) holds the dismal distinction of being the most important French Romantic you have never heard of. A child prodigy, Nodier was reading Montaigne and Plutarch, and writing fluently in French and Latin, by the age of ten. By twenty-five he had vandalized a guillotine, founded the ironically Freemasonesque antiJacobin society called the Philadelphes, published one of the irst French works of scholarship on Shakespeare, and served a month in prison for criticizing Napoleon in the poem “La Napoléone.” It was only then that he got serious, and in 1806 Les tristes was published, a collection of short stories, poems, dialogues, and essays that marked him as a disciple of the Romanticism of Goethe and Schiller and hinted at his future affinity for the visionary, fantastic mode of E.T.A. Hoffmann.

Otakar Zich (1879–1934) is a striking figure in modern czech aesthetics and art theory. A gifted librettist and opera composer and a professor at Charles University in Prague, his place in the history of aesthetics is still controversial. His Aesthetics of Dramatic Art (Estetika dramatického umění [1931]) came out at a time of paradigmatic change in the humanities (the emergence in the 1930s of functional structuralism through the Prague linguistic circle). Also, it was only in the 1930s that the Czech theatrical avant-garde got into full swing. Zich's work apparently “fell short” both of the new scientific paradigm, imposed by the tandem of Roman Jakobson (1896–1982) and Jan Mukařovský (1891–1975), and of the expectations of the students of theater coming from Mukařovský's seminars, some of them already distinguished avant-garde directors (Veltruský 67). Zich's untimely death precluded the development of his project, as well as fruitful debate about it. Mukařovský, as Zich'fs protégé, felt obliged to address the work of his mentor, but his early semiotic reading was avowedly partial and tentative and barely concealed his puzzlement. This marginal inclusion in the new paradigm without real assimilation left Zich's complex and comprehensive undertaking out in the cold.

The idea of writing for the future often seems like a selfish act: a claim for personal immortality. Yet writing with future readers in mind also requires imagining the needs of a world radically different from our own. This paper examines Future Library, an artwork in which authors contribute writing that will not be read until 2114, and the fiction of David Mitchell, one of the contributing authors. In these works, writing for the future is political, not because it represents the future but because it simultaneously demands intervention in the present and opens itself to the new and to unexpected future uses.

In 1958 Marcel Duchamp and a friend gained access to the modernist poet Mina Loy's apartment on stanton street near the Bowery in New York, so that they could display the art she was storing there in a one-woman show of her assemblage artwork (Burke, Becoming 433–34). The show, which Loy herself couldn't attend since she was unwell and living with family in Aspen, Colorado, was known as the Bodley Gallery Exhibition and generated considerable interest, even drawing the increasingly reclusive Djuna Barnes to its lively opening (434). The show was described by Stuart Preston in a New York Times review as a boxing match between the popular art of the time and “Mina Loy's shocking and macabre big collages, composed most graphically of refuse, and inspired by scenes near the Bowery” (qtd. in Burke, Becoming 434). Loy's dadaist assemblages, Preston's review made clear, were a formidable opponent not only of mainstream art but also of the larger politics of art at the time: the “alliance” they reflected “between Dada and social comment,” he wrote, was “downright sinister,” and they contained a slightly apocalyptic undercurrent of social critique. Loy's artwork incorporated discarded objects, such as bottles and pieces of cardboard, from New York City's liminal spaces—especially the Bowery's alleys and abandoned buildings, places where the homeless and unemployed gathered in desperate conditions. Transporting the gutter to the gallery, this body of work depended on her close relationship to the city's so-called refuse, the homeless people she befriended who helped her collect the objects she recycled as art. It has been almost impossible to know what Loy's body of assemblage artwork—carefully dusted off and hung up by Duchamp—looked like at the Bodley Gallery show. But one fellow Bowery artist, the American photographer Berenice Abbott, had photographed Loy's assemblages. Abbott and Loy had been friends since the 1920s, when they frequented the same art scene in Paris, where Abbott was Man Ray's assistant. Abbott photographed Loy's children, and the two artists are pictured together, along with Tristan Tzara, Jane Heap, and Margaret Anderson, in a famous photograph taken at a party in Constantin Brancusi's studio in 1920.1 In this image, Loy and Abbott fill the center of the frame; Abbott's eyes confront the camera, as if to say, “I know what you're up to,” her confident head emerging over Loy's right shoulder—Loy looking as ethereal as she does glamorous. Their friendship picked up again in New York in the 1940s and 1950s, where it was defined by Abbott's interest in Loy's success and well-being.

In July 1947, the Cuban Author Alejo Carpentier traveled from his home in caracas to the sparsely inhabited interior of venezuela, visiting the country's tropical forests and its great plains. At the time, Carpentier was known principally as a music critic and newspaper columnist for El Nacional in Venezuela and Carteles in Cuba; he had yet to publish El reino de este mundo (The Kingdom of This World; 1949), which would launch his career as a novelist and earn him international renown. Carpentier later wrote a novel about a trip much like the one he took in 1947. In the now-canonical Los pasos perdidos (The Lost Steps; 1953), a failed composer finds inspiration by traveling from a cosmopolitan city to the tropical forests of South America. Carpentier's creativity was similarly sparked by his trip to the Venezuelan wilderness, as his travel diary Notas del viaje a la Gran Sabana (Notes on the Trip to the Great Savannah) makes clear. Notas is the only contemporary account of the journey written by Carpentier, who later made contradictory statements about the details and even the number of trips he took. Beyond its documentary value, the travel diary reveals that Carpentier's experience was deeply enmeshed with his readings, a characteristic that also marks the narrator-protagonist of Los pasos perdidos. Moreover, Notas is of broad ecocritical and historical significance because it makes clear the extent to which the forests and plains of South America were changing during Venezuela's boom in oil drilling and gold mining in the 1940s. Inspired by what he witnessed in Venezuela, Carpentier created the central drama of Los pasos perdidos out of his protagonist's desire to inhabit what the author called the “mundo del Genesis” (“world of Genesis”) at a time when extractive industries were rapidly transforming the economies, ecologies, and societies of the region (“La Gran Sabana” 32).

In November 1916, with the first world war in full swing, the Soldiers of the 82nd Territorial Infantry Regiment of the French Forces opened the latest issue of their monthly regimental magazine, Brise d'entonnoirs (“Breeze from Bombcraters”), to find a piece by the avant-garde poet Guillaume Apollinaire. Entitled “Curiosités du front” (“Curiosities from the Front”), it reinvents the everyday objects that cluttered the front lines: a shovel held up above the trench, for instance, becomes a dancing musical instrument as German bullets strike the shovel plate. This sense of humor was characteristic of the trench press, which existed to distract readers from the grim realities of warfare. Probably because it was thought to be so amusing or pertinent, Apollinaire's piece attracted some notice in its day. Several of its sections—“The Shovel,” “Trellis,” “The Bulletproof Shield”—found their way into other publications, at the front as well as in Paris, and some even made it onto the popular quotation pages of the official magazine of the French army, Bulletin des Armées de la République, of which an unsuspecting Apollinaire had written a year earlier, “Les pages consacrées aux citations sont merveilleuses” (“The pages dedicated to quotations are marvelous” [Letter to André Level]).

“You only have to know one thing: You can learn anything. For free. For everyone. Forever” (Khan Academy). Utopias of learning abound in our contemporary media landscape. Take, for instance, the above motto of Khan Academy (#YouCanLearnAnything), one of the earliest providers of open online education. With lessons in over twenty-four languages on topics from algebra to art history, Khan Academy aspires to reach an unprecedented global audience—not only children from the United States who are stuck in “a corrupt or broken [school] system” but also the “young girl in an African village” and the “fisherman's son in New Guinea” (Khan 4). In this sense, Khan Academy enjoys a paradoxical kinship to the diverse geographies studied in this cluster of essays. By promising the global provision of education, it seeks to conquer geography itself.

E. M. Forster's immersion in the thriving community of european writers and artists in alexandria increased his confidence as a writer; it also mitigated the social alienation he had experienced on his arrival in Egypt in 1915 to volunteer with the Red Cross. His theatrical sketch “Pericles in Paradise” (1918), published here for the irst time, is populated by characters modeled on the Alexandrian elite that fostered his sense of belonging. In addition, it bears the mark of a privileged position Forster himself was uneasy about: that of an En glishman navigating a city under British rule and removed from the realities faced by the native Egyptian population.