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The world broke in two for the artists of the early twentieth century. A burst of creative activity in music, art, and literature prompted Ezra Pound to declare 1922 Year One of a new era. The sentiment was echoed by those who found the innovative and iconoclastic attitudes of the modernists the way to confront the problems of a time of upheaval in science, politics, and religion. Many of the writers of the 1920s chose to follow Pound's commandment to 'make it new.' Other voices, however, rejected the cult of the new and clung to tradition., Willa Cather chose tradition. She also wrote that the world broke in two in 1922 'or thereabouts.' (1) The rage for newness, she said in 1921, was one of the [...]

I Well into the three-month-long Gertrude Stein exhibit in 2012 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 'The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde,' legal scholar Alan Dershowitz published [...]

Performative writing can be distinguished by its presentation of textual moments that invoke performance, its ability to actively take on the force and affective power of the event, and its [...]

If we used a different vocabulary or if we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world. --Misattributed to Ludwig Wittgenstein (Crafts, Schneirla, and Robinson 396) Few [...]

This paper analyzes The Calling of Katie Makanya (1995) by Margaret McCord as a collaborative autobiography. Katie's motive for wanting her story to be told is not a desire to find her own voice and identity through narration, but seemingly rather to add to and complete the picture presented in the narrative My Patients Were Zulus (1946), written by Katie's employer and Margaret McCord's father, Dr. James B. McCord. Moreover, Margaret McCord is portrayed in The Calling of Katie Makanya as finding it problematic as a white woman to write a black woman's story. Using the theories of Judith Butler, the analyses show that the context of the narrative's emergence creates a complex framing of The Calling of Katie Makanya. This paper aims to highlight and examine instances where the effects of this complex framing rise to the surface of the text and create tensions in the narrative., Durban 1954 Katie sits enthroned on a straight-backed chair in my rented apartment. Her rounded cheeks gleam like polished ebony. Her head is crowned with a velvet cloche, frayed at [...]