Tsung-Han Tsai

‘Might the violin satisfy’: Decadent Music in E. M. Forster’s ‘Dr Woolacott’

This paper considers how Forster looks to music as a means of positioning his writing amidst as well as against contemporary literary production. It focuses on the representation of the sounds of the violin in the posthumously published short story ‘Dr Woolacott’, exploring how Forster reworks the interdependence of music and Decadence to craft something he perceives as ‘new’. First written in 1927, ‘Dr Woolacott’ has often been read as a work meant for private circulation and studied primarily for its representation of male homosexual desires. While there is certainly a sense of self-titillating eroticism in Forster’s writing of the story – he told T. E. Lawrence that ‘[i]t gives bodily ecstasy outside time and place’ – his words that this is ‘the best thing I’ve done and also unlike anyone else’s work’ indicates a contextualization of the story within literary and cultural history.[1] This paper thus proposes that it is through discussing Forster’s representation of music that we can better understand what might underlie his characterization of the story as something that ‘hasn’t been done before’.[2] That is, music in ‘Dr Woolacott’, the paper suggests, reveals – and, to some extent, fulfils – Forster’s modernist impulse. Yet, as the paper will also discuss, much of the allusive and ideological force of Forster’s use of music owes to late nineteenth-century commentaries on musical affectivity. Specifically, Decadent conventions about the potentially pathological elements of music’s effects enable Forster to make intervention into post-WWI debates about trauma surrounding the figure of the returning soldier, and into masculinity and biopolitics more generally. By analysing how the story appropriates music’s association with Decadence to respond to the obsession with the male body across political and medical discourses in the 1920s, this paper reflects on Forster’s affiliation with and dissent from his modern present.

Tsung-Han Tsai is Assistant Professor at National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan. His work focuses on music and twentieth-century literature. He has published E. M. Forster and Music (Cambridge, 2021) and co-edited, with Emma Sutton, Twenty-first-century Readings of E. M. Forster’s Maurice (Liverpool, 2020).

Theodore Leane

‘Born at the opening of the eye’: Nightwood and the Problem of the Modernist Image

Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood is a novel obsessed with eyes, seeing, and the interpretation of images. The central figure, Robin Vote, appears to the reader through many other characters, all observing and attempting to describe her in extended ekphrastic passages. However, these attempts fall short. Brian Glavey has demonstrated how Barnes sows doubt about these observers’ ability to interpret what they are seeing;[3] I push his uncertainty a step further, arguing that, through her close attention to the many optical and psychological processes that interfere with perception, she is questioning their ability to see accurately at all. She pioneers a metafictional approach to narration that tells the story of the material processes occurring within the eyeballs in the text instead of what they are looking at. Barnes’ alternative, queer Modernism radically undermines the role of the narrator and deconstructs prevailing Modernist conceptions of the “image” (central to approaches such as Imagism), instead turning to animals to model alternative modes of vision. While the human system of language orders the perceptual world, dragging visual experience into the realm of the empirically knowable (and distorting it in the process), the animals of Nightwood live in a world of pure image free from the intervention of language, allowing room back in for queerness, subjectivity, and indeterminacy.

Theodore Leane is a second-year PhD student in English at Cornell University. He’s interested in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century British literature, particularly the Gothic, Decadence, Modernism, queer studies, and digital humanities, and is currently teaching a class on fin de siècle horror. He has a data paper with Grant Wythoff, “Time Horizons of Future Fiction,” recently out with the Post45 Data Collective, and an article, “Pater’s Gothic Objects: Unearthing History in Two ‘Imaginary Portraits’” upcoming in Studies in Walter Pater and Aestheticism.

Lilean Buhl

Marginalizing Frances Simpson Stevens. Gender, Migration, Celebrity, and the Submersion of America’s Only Futurist

My paper will investigate the multi-levelled marginalizations of America’s only Futurist artist, Frances Simpson Stevens (1894-1976). Stevens occupies a singular place within the historical avant-garde: She was one of a few women and the only American who contributed significantly to Italian Futurism. As a teenager, Stevens worked under the tutelage of Futurist painters and shared a room with Mina Loy in Florence, where she also exhibited multiple of her works in 1913/14. After her return to New York City in 1914, she tested the ideas of the European avantgarde on the city’s sensibilities for modernist expression, but quit avant-garde painting shortly after her 1919 marriage to a Siberian prince. Through this marriage, she rescinded her American citizenship and was forced to embark on aimless global migrations, accompanied by nationally syndicated society reports which contributed to her erstwhile celebrity, but obscured her achievements as an artist.

Despite her prominence in the contemporary moment, Stevens’s contributions to modernism have largely been lost and her extraordinary life forgotten. In my paper, I aim to resurrect Stevens by examining the angles from which she was marginalized: The misogynist posturing of Italian Futurism, the sensationalizing impulses of the New York mass press, and the in-group mentalities of New York’s avant-garde coteries, which Stevens could never quite enter. Particular attention will be paid to Stevens’s relationship with Mina Loy, who experienced similar discriminatory treatment in Italy and New York and obfuscated Stevens’s status within her own autobiographical writings.

My other source material – scraps from little magazines and mass-oriented dailies, anecdotes, and scattered remaining works – will give occasion to reflect on modernism’s politics of remembering that have determined Stevens’s ephemerality in cultural history. I position the discrepancy between her past achievements and current profile at the center of this larger problematic of the modernist canon.

Lilean Buhl is a postdoctoral researcher at the American Studies department at Leibniz University Hannover, Germany. He completed his PhD thesis, titled “Little Magazine Dialogism. Constellations, Circulations, and Submersions of Modernism,” in 2024. The project traced the dialogical workings of the modernist little magazine, showing how these smaller periodicals were used to establish modernist forms and ways of thinking in the public sphere and how modernist media performed crucial, subcultural interventions in wider, emancipatory discourses. Currently, he is preparing his second book. His research interests include periodical culture, avant-garde aesthetics, and modernist poetry as well as the philosophy of modernity, semiotics, and the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein.