This chapter centers on early American Pragmatist philosophers, such as Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, and the abundance of essays they produced, outlining the fundamental tenets of pragmatism. From the beginning, the Pragmatists showed a special affinity for the essay. This genre of writing proved to be the perfect vehicle not simply to fashion and explore provisional truths but to drive home the case that truth is inherently provisional. James and other pragmatists saw thinking as a mode of action in the world, quite different from the standard dualism that separates “mind” from “matter.” Just as the noun essay calls to mind the verb form – to essay, attempt, or try – so pragmatism was for James less a philosophical position or ideology than a method or practice. For James and Dewey in particular, pragmatism helped explain how we use ideas and beliefs to achieve our aims and how we modify and adapt those ideas and beliefs as we test them in the contexts of our daily living and engagement with others. The chapter dwells on the most important pragmatist essays and shows the many ways these influenced later pragmatist-oriented philosophers, even up to today.

Chapter 4 mobilizes second-order cybernetics theories that were first adopted in 1960s social sciences as a comparative framework for reading Gertrude Stein’s quasi-ethnographic writing about American culture. Love pairs Stein’s work with writing by second-order cybernetic anthropologists Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, and – most extensively – Mary Catherine Bateson. Love illustrates how Stein and M. C. Bateson both employ (a) the term “composition” as a framework for understanding the everyday habits of behavior that constitute American cultural identity, and (b) a combination of seemingly repetitive representational strategies and juxtapositional contexts as platforms for cultivating self-reflexive cultural awareness. They see this perspective as increasingly necessary within the twentieth century’s technologically complex networks that require us to respond in creative and flexible ways to our ever-changing circumstances. The chapter positions Stein’s work in dialogue with emergent social scientific strategies for cultural observation and analysis, and therefore as an important precursor to the anthropology-based theories at the forefront of cybernetics’ second-order turn.

The work and lives of modernist writers were extensively chronicled by the mass media, enabling Americans to develop an active interest in even the most radical literary developments in the first half of the twentieth century. This chapter examines the careers of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Hemingway and the cultural developments that enabled their success in specific decades. All were American celebrities. The lives of each were profiled in periodicals, their style was parodied, their faces graced the covers of popular magazines, and all had relationships with Hollywood and filmmaking. Other modernists were subject to this public interest as well, including Faulkner, Eliot, Woolf, and Joyce. None were immune to the broad changes in the marketing and promotion of books and authors that facilitated a lively, robust mainstream knowledge of writers as popular as Hemingway or as difficult as Gertrude Stein, blurring distinctions between low-, middle-, and highbrow writers.

The American New Woman is an archetype for the generations of women who, in the early twentieth century, were engaged in defining new forms of femininity and forging new public identities, through work, leisure, art, education, and politics. The New Woman also signaled a complex, and sometimes contradictory, modernizing of embodied femininity. Beginning with the New Woman as a sociopolitical individual, mobilized in feminist discourse and suffrage politics, this chapter goes on to explore Greenwich Village women, Black women’s responses to the New Woman, fashions for bobbed hair, and the bodies and performances of different kinds of women dancer (Isadora Duncan, Josephine Baker, Irene Castle). The chapter concludes with Djuna Barnes’ ambivalent encounters with the fashionable New Woman in her work, and Gertrude Stein’s engagement with the legacy of Susan B. Anthony, a crucial pioneer for the women’s suffrage movement and modern feminism, in her final opera The Mother of Us All (1947).

Tracing the many differences made to literary and artistic production more generally by photography, photomechanical reproduction, and cinema, this chapter considers some exemplary cases in the history of the visual arts in America. Considering Alvin Langdon Coburn’s work with Henry James and Ezra Pound, it ponders how canny this photographer was in promoting the photographic arts in relation to the existing pantheon of the arts. Turning to look at the photomechanical mediation of the news, it wonders what difference it made to see mass-reproduced photographic illustrations on a daily basis, and consider it newsworthy – what this change augured for the way writers and artists understood reality itself. Josep Renau’s photomontage work is examined as one example; the work of John Dos Passos another; the photo-essay form yet another. The chapter concludes with a survey of cinematic means of representation and their disintegrative effect on older aesthetic notions of unity, organicism, and consistency.

This chapter moves through three clear stages. First, the initial sections highlight some of the ways that Wittgenstein has been misread by thinkers working in the tradition of continental philosophy and critical theory (including Badiou, Deleuze, and Marcuse); and, exposing some of these misreadings, it makes the case for grasping Wittgenstein not simply a modernist philosopher, but, more specifically, as an exponent of (what the chapter terms) philosophical modernism. Second, the chapter tarries with a number of Wittgenstein’s controversial remarks on the atomic bomb and (what he calls) the “apocalyptic view of the world,” and it brings these remarks into dialogue with the work of a number of other literary and philosophical figures, including Gertrude Stein, Günther Anders, and Theodor Adorno. Third, and finally, although Wittgenstein’s remarks on apocalypse appear in his private, postwar notebooks, they nevertheless provide us with a crucial link to his later philosophy, specifically Philosophical Investigations and this is what I turn to in the last sections of the chapter. In the Investigations, it is not simply the language of the book that we might describe as apocalyptic, but also, and more importantly, the fundamental conception of philosophy that we find therein. This returns us to the view of philosophical modernism previously outlined.

Federation was promoted as an ideal before and between the two world wars, in both colonial independence movements and internationalist thought. It also became a term for promoting reforms to imperial governance, referring sometimes to greater political and economic integration and at other times to devolution or self-rule. Writers around the world responded to these developments directly, in specific political and constitutional discussions, and through indirect engagement with federalism’s rhetorical, conceptual, historical, and affective structures. Modernists such as Gertrude Stein, W. H. Auden, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner exemplify the range of white metropolitan writers’ playful, earnest, and creative engagements with federal themes during the interwar period. Paradigmatic of a so-called ‘federal moment’ amidst global decolonisation movements during the post-war period, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children illustrates federalism’s contested status as both a legacy of colonial rule and a potential mechanism for imagining postcolonial futures.

In the years following Richard Wright’s death in 1960, fellow author Margaret Walker created a somewhat vengeful portrait of the author, one that characterized his literary aspirations as tied to his aspersion for African American women authors. This essay shows how Wright worked alongside African American women writers and could be quite helpful to them – even though he never acknowledged a debt to black women writers or white women writers (like Stowe), with the exception of the modernist Stein. The “antagonistic cooperation” found in his relationships with Hurston, Walker, Brooks, and other women authors ultimately demonstrates African American literature’s gradual enrichment through variety if not fellowship.

Queer art and literature demonstrate an awareness of how a permanent war culture constitutes the nation’s social fabric, thus defining the unavoidable contingencies informing LGBTQ+ persons’ desires and subjectivities as citizen-subjects. Along with race, gender, class, sexuality, and citizenship status, war culture operates intersectionally. This essay introduces four new approaches to LGBTQ+ art and literatures’ representation of queer subjectivities’ relationship to war culture: the desire for national inclusion and queer fetishizations of the war-state (Gertrude Stein, Gore Vidal); activist-poets’ resistances to war culture as heteronormative and white supremacist (William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg); the perceived “terrorism” of queer activist arts’ militancy (Rabih Alameddine, Kathy Acker); and addresses of globalized queer vulnerability after 9/11 and vis-à-vis the climate crisis (Gloria Anzaldúa, Kazim Ali, Ocean Vuong).

During the First World War some of the most prominent Americans who aided France through their writing and charity work were expatriate women, many finding creative freedom and economic opportunities there that they lacked in the United States. Mildred Aldrich, Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Atherton, and Dorothy Canfield Fisher advocated on behalf of France, believing that fuller American support for France might help relieve the human suffering they saw before them and, more idealistically, preserve the civilization they found represented in France. These women wrote journalism, propaganda, academic studies, and sentimental prose, none of which are easily disentangled from each other as all are meant to convince, educate, or persuade readers to a particular point of view. They take as their subjects the wide variety of human issues that circulated around war, its impact on civilian life, the effects of invasion and occupation, injury and loss of life, and larger questions about inherited values and human responsibility in the face of suffering.

In “Correspondence and the Everyday Hemingway,” Verna Kale and Sandra Spanier examine what letters as opposed to literary biography reveal about a writer. As two guiding forces behind the Letters Project – the collaborative effort producing a multivolume scholarly edition of Hemingway’s correspondence, which published its first volume in 2011 and is not scheduled to conclude until 2043 – Kale and Spanier are in a unique position to assess how the correspondence’s availability has expanded our notions of quotidian Hemingway. As they note, there has always been an interest in Hemingway’s letters: as early as 1930, correspondents attempted to sell their letters from him to collectors to cash in on his fame. But his private correspondence wasn’t officially available until 1981 with Carlos Baker’s Selected Letters, a book that immediately impacted Hemingway scholarship. That volume, however, collects less than 10 percent of the 6,000 letters catalogued by the Hemingway Project and gives disproportional attention to 1922–1926 and 1952, somewhat distorting impressions of his life and career; nearly 85 percent of the material the Project will gather has never been published before.

Stein used film as a model to explain the avant-garde poetics of her literary portraits to her perplexed readers. The chapter examines two early portraits, “Picasso” and “Orta,” in the context of chronophotography and early film. It also considers Stein’s theoretical reflections on her insistent style, particularly “Portraits and Repetition” and “How Writing Is Written.” Stein’s early portraits are in orientation temporal and performative (like film) rather than visual and static (like photography). They advance through sequences of similar, serially varied sentences that create the impression of an ongoing present. Stein’s cinematic form of serial variation locates meaning in the movement of its sentence permutations rather than in its mimetic capacities. Her serial sentences keep readers focused on the workings of language and the text’s temporal unfolding and thus manage to turn an awareness of representational processes into a tool to center our attention on the always elusive present moment. Stein’s use of self-reflexivity to create a sense of temporal and perceptual immediacy radicalizes the cinematic strategy of embedding immediacy effects in overtly self-referential texts.