American modernism

The Seagram Building in Manhattan (1954-58), by Ludwig Mies van der
Rohe and Philip Johnson, is one of those rare pieces of architecture
which has come to define an era. For Mies van der Rohe the achievement of the Seagram Building was the resolution of years of theoretical and exacting architectural investigation.
The influence of the Seagram Building stretches beyond that of a single work of a modernist master, however. Its significance is also felt in the way it changed planning legislation and became associated with the fragmentation of the urban realm, through the spread of the generic modernist combination of tower, plaza and artwork.

A good story is worth revisiting. Such beauty requires multiple attempts at comprehension. One must keep coming back, keep expecting more, keep hoping for one more prolonged moment of imagination. And “The Great Gatsby” certainly deserves a re-read.

The advance of modernity, urbanization and financial prosperity in New York during the Roaring Twenties is immortalized in Fitzgerald’s classic novel The Great Gatsby. Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 film adaptation of the novel maps the 1920s New York with a contemporary and postmodern take, taking advantage of cinematic techniques. This presentation investigates the symbolism of the urban setting and how New York is visualized in the film.

One of the waiters considered “despair” to be the reason behind the old man’s attempted suicide. On being questioned “what about”, the other waiter replied “nothing.” The young waiter revealed that there was absolutely no reason for the old man to commit suicide as “he has plenty of money.” For the younger waiter, with a wife to support, money would solve all problems. For him to see an old, rich man to commit suicide in spite of having money is incomprehensible. The reason for the old man to commit suicide could have been because of the futility of existence. But what the younger waiter does not understand is the despair of confronting nothingness which the older waiter does. The younger waiter who had “youth, confidence and a job” along with a wife to keep him company would not have understood the desolation which led the old man to sit till late into the night in the cafe.

Studying the idea of “initiation” through three modernist short stories (Flight by J. Steinbeck, The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber by E. Hemingway and The Bear by W. Faulkner), this paper aims, on the one hand, to present how American modernist writers use this topos to establish new social and ethical values and, on the other hand, to underline the originality of their writings, developing a new canon for short stories.

Idea Houses I and II, two houses built by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 1941 and 1947, were the first functional modern homes built by an American museum. The houses were conceived and built during an extreme housing shortage brought on by the Great Depression and exacerbated by the Second World War. Unlike commercial model homes of this period, these houses were designed by architects retained by the Walker, with furnishings and home products selected by the curatorial staff. Rather than product placement, the purpose of the exhibitions was to promote awareness and appreciation of modern home design by presenting the houses as source material for visitors' own potential building projects: literal houses of ideas. Through these exhibitions, the Walker also sought to re-imagine the museum experience as an active, participatory event, free of the elitist associations of the conventional museum, and in these cases focused on housing, the most pressing issue of the day. This paper examines the interrelated museological and architectural aspirations of these exhibitions in the context of the housing crisis of the 1940s. These twin goals of providing quality home design advice and reinventing the museum experience are what made the project popular in its day and interesting now. This paper examines the houses both as museum exhibitions and as houses, and investigates the complex interplay of commerce and the museum that is perhaps essential to discussion of the Idea Houses, considering that the overwhelming commercial influence on home design and furnishings was what inspired the project in the first place.

Este ensayo busca identificar las ideas fundamentales en la síntesis de la obra de José Luis Sert-uno de los más importantes arquitectos del siglo XX-a través de un recorrido por las teorías e ideas arquitectónicas y urbanas que han dado forma al conjunto de vivienda Peabody Terrace. La utilización de la unidad mínima de vivienda, la organización de éstas en bloques compactos y austeros, el despliegue de amplios espacios públicos para reunión y beneficio colectivo, y su propuesta urbana en busca de la integración con la ciudad nos llevan a pensar que esta propuesta urbano-arquitectónica no sólo se proyectó resolviendo su fin específico, sino que, además, se hizo pensando en el ideal de un conjunto de vivienda colectiva que sirviera de prototipo para el desarrollo urbano. Por ello, el objetivo de este ensayo es analizar el conjunto de viviendas Peabody Terrace en sus dimensiones arquitec-tónica, urbana y paisajista, desde su concepción hasta su materialización, indagando por las tareas e ideales de la arquitectura de acuerdo con su principal autor: José Luis Sert.

Palabras claves: José Luis Sert, vivienda colectiva, espacios públicos, diseño urbano.

This study focuses on the distinguishing characteristics of poems replicating modernism in English Literature. The aim of this paper is to recognize the specific qualities of modem verse and their recognizing features in comparison to the romantic poetry. The paper concentrates on the poetry of Ezra Pound T. S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams in entirety. A reader-response-Analysis approach is used in analysing the poems, and will attempt to examine the changes that emerged as a result of modernism, highlighting the riles of these poets in this regard.

Margaret Alexander Walker's poem "For My People" (1937) is a much anthologized piece that is still highly regarded as a literary work espousing Afro-Marxist ideology. This paper discusses elements of the text that reveal it as being an occult (esoteric) writing that carries the teachings of G.I. Gurdjieff and A.R. Orage in a subtext. The literary group that Walker belonged to in Chicago in the 1930s was an esoteric group disguised as Marxists. The essay is a close reading of Walker's poem that deciphers Walker's text.

A lesson plan for teaching this story to high school or college/university students.  Developed by a Swarthmore College student, Samantha Martin, with feedback from Prof. Peter Schmidt, as a final assignment in English 71D, "The Short Story in the U.S.," fall 2018.

Herlihy-Mera situates his argument within an apposite research framework from psychological studies on migration, anthropological examinations of cultural ceremony, and literary theory on the poetics of displacement. The analysis offers groundbreaking insights on the distribution of previously overlooked structural patterns (themes, motifs, and symbols) that are present throughout Hemingway’s novelistic corpus, and provides a compelling perspective on the aesthetics of the expatriate/immigrant writing process.

http://www.amazon.com/Paris-Paname-Hemingways-Expatriate-Nationalism/dp/9042034092"

in several of ernest hemingway’s novels, the main character’s expatriation is a principal rhetorical device and a theme which critics often neglect. In The Old Man and the Sea (1952), Hemingway employs the perspective of a Spaniard in Cuba to broaden the scope of the narrative. As the author explains in a letter to Lillian Ross,“The Old Man was born a catholic in the island of Lanza Rota [sic] in the Canary Islands” (SL 807). This origin, with its attendant national and cultural differences, makes Santiago an outsider in the Cuban fishing village of Cojímar and is a principal motivation in his actions. Santiago’s “eyes the same color as the sea” (10) mark his otherness in a conspicuous and unchangeable way, setting him apart from the impoverished mulatto fishing community, and linking him to European exploitation of the island nation. Probing the political, social, and cultural contexts that would affect a Spaniard living in a former colony, this study examines Santiago’s foreignness in the novella to establish how the protagonist’s ethnic and national otherness affects his actions and sense of self in Cuba.

William Carlos Williams's long poem Paterson is shown to be informed by an esoteric content derived from alchemy and the Gurdjieff Work. Williams is shown to have associated with many of A. R. Orage's followers. Paterson  is not obscure when it is related to the esoteric ideas and materials that it allludes to without establishing any context for its presentations. (Previously this paper was posted as a Word file that was not stable. It is now a pdf and has a good appearance.)

The present article questions the common label assigned to Nightwood’s character Dr. Matthew O’Connor, widely analysed as a homosexual transvestite in spite of the various narrative implications that would reconfigure the ambiguities inherent to their gender identity. As a character in a novel considered to be as discriminatory as it is emancipatory, O’Connor is a main character treated as secondary and punished for their exclusion from standards of normativity. I employ the arguments brought forth by Magnus Hirschfeld in 1910 in order to consolidate the understanding of O’Connor as a transgender woman, as well as the views of Esther Newton on drag and camp discourses, in order to retrace the reasons for O’Connor’s critical interpretation as a mere male cross-dresser, a theatrical vision whose femaleness is assigned a performative rather than an identitarian value. Apart from the importance of demarcating transvestism from transsexuality, O’Connor’s wretched treatment and the impossibility of their transitioning is equally relevant. Their transition is envisioned as a matter of embodiment, and their expressed wishes of patriarchal female ideals point to an essentialist transgender narrative that consolidates matters of ‘passing’ that follow mimetic gender ideologies. The path to recognition requires the displacement of hegemonic standards of normativity, in favour of the recreation of the masculine/feminine dichotomy and the fragmentation of expectations for a sexed transitioned product. O’Connor’s pessimistic narrative arc could be seen within the context of an indirect and subverted call for political change coming from the author, whereby transphobia is both reinforced and negotiated.

The present article analyses the chapter titled "The Doubloon" in Herman Melville's novel Moby-Dick by means of the highly ambiguous and – at times – paradoxical meanings of the symbol-coin, methodologically aligned with Jacques Derrida’s theory of de-centering the center. The doubloon is a subjective cipher, whose center is held together by the traditional dialogism of subjective interpretations co-existing congruently inside of it (as per each speaking character’s personality), as well as an all-encompassing system of representation, ultimately prone to be controlled by an outer immanent force – existing independently of the characters’ will –, gleaned by Pip at the end in his prophetical chant. The post-structuralist paradigm will help uncover the various disunities that harmoniously rule the signification of the golden coin, as well as – inside the theme of the novel – reveal man’s despair at his inability to reach it.

Published in the exhibition catalogue "Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens," published in 2009. This chapter examines practices by photographers from the Stieglitz circle to the Harlem Renaissance that demonstrate the range of interest in African objects and the diversity of approaches taken in translating them into Modernist photographic expressions. These photographs illustrate what Roland Barthes calls the rhetoric of the image, the embedded messages and significations that inflect the way we read and understand photographs. Also demonstrated in these examples is the manner in which issues about race, gender, identity, and difference were inextricably interwoven into the many faces of American Modernism, ultimately contributing to perceptions of and shifting attitudes toward African art.

The twentieth century has witnessed political and social unrest and change. The features of the age are that society, to a high extent, was unreceptive to spiritual life. The spiritual morals appeared to be abandoned or replaced for the materialistic ones based on concrete facts rather than spiritual and unseen, which created a chaotic society which had to face increasing confusion that was significantly noticed in the burst of the First World War. The war resulted in the deterioration of the modern society with the abandonment of religious, moral and spiritual values. Eliot was aware of the problems of modern civilisation that enclosed humans with a number of tenets and beliefs wrought randomly to confront the social and political ideologies of the twentieth century. Eliot believes that modern ideologies are inadequate and useless replacements for religious belief and sees that community should be built not upon power and its exploitation, but upon an advanced spiritual and moral system of values. This study attempts to examine how Eliot's Four Quartets emphasises the likelihood of spiritual revival and gives a helpful prediction of hope. The key idea of this poem is that if modern humans are seeking for peace of mind, they will be able to achieve it, when they admit the conviction that peoples’ peace only lies in God's will. Keywords: Belief, Modern Period, Crisis, Moral Values, Religious Values, Deity & Spiritual Morals.

Jean Baudrillard, a French philosopher who is widely known for his post-Marxism, post-structuralism, post-modernism, and contributions to pataphysics, began acknowledging that people would treat some objects with different levels of meaning that stretch far beyond the physical properties of the object. With further research, he found that the problem occurred at a much deeper level, where objects that were meant as mediums, such as pictures, were soon being valued for just as much, if not more, than the objects that they were meant to represent. He noted that the referential objects were known as signs and continued his research through careful observation. As his theories expanded, he realized that one country, like no other, was the center of the sign and false realities: America. Baudrillard set off on a journey, similar to that of Alexis De Tocqueville, and noted his observations of the sign within America. When put in combination with his earlier theories and work on Marx’s “kritik of kaptial”, it can be clearly seen that America’s current situation is the result of the capitalist structural change that occurred in the 1920s and have since been leading America as the epicenter of Baudrillard’s “hyperreality”.

(from the cover) Scenario di quotidiana relazione fra le persone, luogo prediletto di autodeterminazione e sopraffazione nel quale si riflettono le tensioni e le gerarchie sociali, l'ufficio costituisce fin dalla nascita del mondo industriale un fattore decisivo del processo sociale ed economico: le sue articolazioni coinvolgono, su scala planetaria, l'esistenza di milioni di esseri umani che operano nel segno del progresso e delle sue contraddizioni. Indagare significati e complessità di una variabile fenomenologia di interni, arredi e oggetti è pertanto compito che attinge alle risorse della sociologia e del pensiero architettonico, della letteratura e del cinema, della storia economica e del design. L'evoluzione di una vicenda, che lega ambienti e strumenti del lavoro immateriale ai concreti destini di singoli e collettività, è ricostruita dall'autrice a partire dai suoi lontani antecedenti con agilità di disegno, qualità di informazione e di sintesi.
** The office has always reflected the principal changes in society, almost immediately. With the book Uffici. Interni, Arredi, Oggetti, Imma Forino looks into the workplace not just as a mere outer shell, but through the phenomenology of its spaces and decor, presenting an overall vision that is rich in talking points and stimuli for reflection.
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Indice

Introduzione

I. Lo spazio di un uomo
1.  Il topos di Diogene
2.  Artefatti e “paraphernalia”
3.  Lo studio laico
4.  “Concettosisssimi ricetti”
5.  Il libro al centro
6.  Interiorità borghesi
7.  Esposizioni sperimentali
8.  “Cellule de travail”

II. Le stanze degli impiegati
1.  Pratiche contabili e amministrative
2.  “Bureaucratie”
3.  L’apparato burocratico
4.  Tipologie antropologiche
5.  La linea del corridoio
6.  L’enclave finanziaria
7.  Lo stile commerciale
8.  “Elevator building”
9.  Verticalismi
10. Corporation newyorkesi
11. Arredi brevettati
12. Impiegate
13. La  stanza
14. La dissoluzione della stanza
15. Fortezze “versus” cattedrali
16. Uniformità replicabile
17. “Corporate America”

III. I panottici industriali
1.  La divisione del lavoro
2.  “Mass production”
3.  Dalla fabbrica all’ufficio
4.  “Time clock”
5.  Arredi standard
6.  Modelli specializzati
7.  Uffici moderni
8.  Scenografie
9.  Restyling
10. Rigore italiano
11. “Meuble” metallici
12. Linee italiane
13. Risposte pratiche
14. Progetti integrali
15. Isole vitali
16. L’office designer

IV. La scienza dell’ufficio
1.  La piramide sociale
2.  Organizzare il fattore umano
3.  Scritture elettrificate
4.  Intelligenze seducenti
5.  “Landmark” di cristallo
6.  Lo stile aziendale
7.  Spazi adattabili
8.  Ambienti pubblici e privati
9.  Il linguaggio universale 
10. La specializzazione professionale
11. Protagonisti
12. Office design
13. Pianificare l’eleganza
14. Il sistema arredativo
15. Lavorare nella natura

V. Il progetto umano
1.  “Torracchioni” nazionali 
2.  Ottimistici slogan
3.  Espressioni antimonumentali
4.  Episodi puntiformi
5.  Accoglienze nordiche
6.  “Human workplace”
7.  Arcipelaghi aziendali
8.  L’arredo-azione
9.  L’anelito al lusso
10.  “Articulation” ed “esplanade”
11. Dicotomie sensibili
12. Decadenza burocratica
13. Disinvolte ironie
14. Combinazioni organizzate
15. Personal computer
16. “Panel-system generation”

VI. “Always on!” 
1.  Autoregolazioni
2.  Burocrazie interiorizzate
3.  Uffici cibernetici
4.  La trasformazione del lavoro
5.  La Rete di conoscenze
6.  High tech/hi-touch
7.  Interazione e autonomia
8.  Mi piego per non spezzarmi
9.  Senza fili
10. Capsule
11. Senza colletto
12. Informalità creative
13. L’ufficio relazionale
14. Sottigliezze
15. Temporanee condivisioni

Un mondo che ci governa?

Riferimenti bibliografici
Indice dei nomi

This paper considers the relationship between the emerging profession of lighting design and the experience and promotion of modern architecture in the United States during the post-war era. Forming the core of this study is the collaborative design process developed between Philip Johnson, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Richard Kelly, a prominent mid-century lighting designer. The case studies examined in this paper include the Glass House, 860-880 Lake Shore Drive Apartments, and the Seagram Building. Challenging architect-centric histories, this paper considers the role of lighting design in the realization of several modernist ideals, including transparency of the glass curtain wall, articulation of structure, and luminous architecture. The influence of illuminated advertising and modern stagecraft on the theory and practice of architectural lighting design also are addressed. This paper argues for an expanded history of modern architecture, one that includes the significant contributions of lighting design.

Il seminario affronterà alcuni snodi cruciali dell'attività del noto critico americano: dalla prima traduzione dei suoi scritti in italiano ai riferimenti teorici della sua analisi, dagli interessi per il surrealismo a quelli per gli antichi maestri, dal peso specifico della sua 'autorità' sul mercato dell'arte newyorkese e la definizione di un primato dell'arte americana alle riflessioni sulla scultura moderna e sulla pittura informale in Europa.

Literary expatriation had an important role in the development of twentieth-century modernist writing, particularly for Americans in Paris during the interwar years. The critics who study this group tend to focus on similar themes—rejection of conservative mores in America, sexual liberation and alcohol consumption, creative cross-fertilization, and so on—such that the cultural migration to France itself is generally treated as a positive experience. Upon close review of the journalism, letters, and fiction Ernest Hemingway wrote during his residence in France, however, we find an expatriate scene that is disparate from these glowing general critical views: “[I’ve] been in hell now since Christmas” (Selected Letters 217), he wrote to F. Scott Fitzgerald in September 1926 before enduring several months of despondency, during which he contemplated suicide and drafted a last will. The critical locus of this essay interprets the outcomes of long-term cultural immersion, the consequences of cultural shocks and readjustments, and the implications of social distance—to analyze an important but often neglected dimension of Hemingway’s life in Paris.

Through a close reading of Clement Greenberg’s longest essay by far, ‘The Plight of Our Culture’ of 1953, and its drastic revision for Art and Culture of 1961, this article questions, and counters, certain myths surrounding the critic’s politics during the early Cold War years. Beginning with an overview of Greenberg’s politics leading up to that period, and taking into account some of the more specious commentary by various scholars, I demonstrate that Greenberg maintained a committed Marxist ethic even during the McCarthyist era in the USA.

This paper investigates "A Night-Club Map of Harlem," illustrated by E. Simms Campbell in 1932. Only recently purchased and made available by the Beinecke Library at Yale University, Campbell's map has been largely ignored by art historians of The Harlem Renaissance and American modernism. As a visual document of the interracial nightlife that characterized Harlem in the early twentieth-century, however, the map offers us new information regarding the way the physical space of Harlem became abstracted into a signification for both white and black New Yorkers. In the following pages I attempt to draw out the ways that Campbell illustrates Harlem as a space that has the ability to both cement white voyeurs' membership in a modern intelligentsia and foment black ontologies of resistance. In doing so, the social history of racialized space in Manhattan, slumming, and cartography will also be considered. I aim to describe how Campbell's map represents Harlem as a neighborhood that is comprised of white and black identity formation where both both races were able to construct subjectivities simultaneously and often in opposition to one another.