Politics, Eugenics, and Yeats\u27s Radio Broadcasts

Much has been written about the right-wing politics and eugenicist sympathies of Yeats’s late-1930s poetry in general and about On the Boiler in particular. Yeats’s focus on Ireland’s degeneration and his calls for its regeneration through cultural (and even biological methods) coincided with his dalliance with the Irish Blueshirts and his frustrations with the transformations of the Irish Free State under Éamon de Valera. However, these years also proved to be Yeats’s most active in terms of radio broadcasting, with six of his nine broadcasts made between 1937 and 1938. In this essay, I read Yeats’s broadcasts, in particular “In the Poet’s Pub,” “In the Poet’s Parlour,” and “My Own Poetry” alongside On the Boiler to show how themes of degeneration and regeneration link these works. As a medium, radio could advance the cultural degeneration and pandering to the masses to which Yeats was opposed. However, it was also within radio’s capabilities to control modes of broadcasting, influencing the public and regenerating Irish culture through the dissemination of poetry

Telemediations

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Koleksi Terpilih Usman Awang: edisi khas sastrawan negara

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Dreaming Too Big?: How Cross- and Intra-Institutional Collaboration Saved “Reading New York”

“Reading New York” is a collaborative digital research and teaching tool that has already failed twice and sparked a blog about DH failings. Now in its third iteration and on its second title, “Reading New York” has begun to gain momentum all thanks to collaboration within and across institutions. Put simply, “Reading New York” is an augmented text that, when complete, will enable students (college and high school) and the general public to read (with more comprehension) early twentieth-century literature through the help of mapping, images, sound, and film. Moreover, through the collected metadata, this project will serve as a research tool for scholars who are interested in literature, history, visual studies, sound, film, and material culture. During this “work-in-progress” session, we will discuss the early failures of this DH project; show the status of the pilot, which takes F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “May Day” as its sample text; and explain the process by which support was garnered from faculty, students, the library, and colleagues from other institutions. As part of the “work-in-progress” format, we look forward to discussing problems facing this project as it moves ahead into the grant-writing phase. Central concerns include platform flexibility, copyright laws, crowd-sourcing viability, and growing beyond New York. We will also discuss how our inter-institutional collaboration processes currently function, and what we hope this will look like a year from now

Connection Failure: War, Spiritualism and Communications Media in Violet Hunt\u27s Love\u27s Last Leave.

An overlooked figure of modernist circles, Violent Hunt was a suffragette, novelist, and author of ghost stories. In her second collection of haunted narratives, More Tales of The Uneasy (1925), Hunt explores the ghostliness of the Great War, both for those on the front and at home. In this essay, we focus on the third story in this volume, “Love’s Last Leave,” and argue that Hunt includes both ghost story tropes and communications media to articulate the real deadliness of the Great War. Communications technology and spiritualism share a similar historical evolution, and in “Love’s Last Leave” both types of mediums fail to connect those at home with those “who are gone.” By re-narrating the shared history of spiritualism and communications media, Hunt implies the devastation and deadliness of war even when the plot fails to do so. In this essay, we use media theory and narratology to show how the gaps, absences, and uncertainties in the story’s narrative structure are replicated by the communications technology in the story. The failure of narrative, technological, and spiritual mediums to transmit clear messages throughout “Love’s Last Leave” emphasizes how deadly the disconnect between sender and receiver can be