Interplay of Things

In Interplay of Things Anthony B. Pinn theorizes religion as a technology for interrogating human experiences and the boundaries between people and other things. Rather than considering religion in terms of institutions, doctrines, and creeds, Pinn shows how religion exposes the openness and porousness of all things and how they are always involved in processes of exchange and interplay. Pinn examines work by Nella Larsen and Richard Wright that illustrates an openness between things, and he traces how pop art and readymades point to the multidirectional nature of influence. He also shows how Ron Athey's and Clifford Owens's performance art draws out inherent interconnectedness to various cultural codes in ways that reveal the symbiotic relationship between art and religion as a technology. Theorizing that antiblack racism and gender- and class-based hostility constitute efforts to close off the porous nature of certain bodies, Pinn shows how many artists have rebelled against these attempts to counter openness. His analyses offer a means by which to understand the porous, unbounded, and open nature of humans and things.

Abdication, Aggression, Anschluss

This tense period held the pair together almost solely through letters. Bryher was in full-tilt rescue work, passing from New York to London, Paris, and Switzerland annually. In New York, Bryher met Nella Larsen and visited Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier introduced Bryher to Walter Benjamin, who exchanged his Berlin around 1900 for her Paris 1900. Bryher sent funds and encouragement while he was interned as an enemy alien. H.D. underwent her personal terror, facing the courts when Aldington resurfaced for a divorce. Bryher coached her in preparation. After the Anschluss, Bryher carried rat poison when traveling (as she had in World War I) and leaked her fears to the Austrian psychoanalyst Walter Schmideberg and to the couple’s new scholar friend at Yale, Norman Pearson, who would soon join the Office of Strategic Services, precursor to the CIA. He shared Bryher’s anxieties and a desire to foster H.D.’s hypersensitive creative intelligence.

Larsen, Nella (1891–1964)

Nella Larsen was an American novelist active in the 1920s and one of the central figures of ‘Manhattan modernism.’ She is best known for two short novels, Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929). While she is now considered a key American modernist writer, both Larsen and her work were unheard of for much of the mid-twentieth-century, only returning to prominence from the 1980s. The ‘rediscovered’ Larsen was initially claimed predominantly by black and feminist schools of criticism; however, Larsen’s passage into the canon has since involved the work of literary critics from almost every field.