ABSTRACT
The abstractions time and space enjoy wide currency in discussions and histories of American modernism, and with good reason; in the early twentieth-century, many writers were profoundly interested in the relationships of time and space to the shifting experiences of the modern condition. In the ensuing decades since the rise of modernism, and through the processes of canonization and institution building, however, this interest in time and space has been too often reified rather than interrogated. As a starting point for my discussion of little magazines and the Russian Revolution, I want to meditate on two essays by inveterate little magazine figures — T. S. Eliot's 1919 “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” and Mike Gold's 1921 “Towards Proletarian Art” — in order to tease out some of the ideas about not only time and space, but of place, nation, and body that arise in these essays.
