Dada Magazines: The Making of a Movement by Emily Hage (review)

Abstract

452 decision to “give” Rezia his elbow, “a piece of bone,” as they cross the streets of London.2) In particular, Colesworthy carefully looks at Peter Walsh looking at Clarissa. For someone who claims to disdain Clarissa’s social gifts, Peter spends an awful lot of time thinking about them. As Colesworthy writes, “In thinking about Clarissa and her gift, Peter helps to prove her understanding of how individuals feel and think period—her sense that one’s personal experience is never entirely one’s own but a gift we take from and give to other people” (80). Consciousness can’t be separated from sociality; modernism can’t be separated from the gift and vice versa. “To think in Mrs. Dalloway,” Colesworthy writes, “is to feel and imagine oneself to be caught up in a web of gift exchange” (76). To read Returning the Gift is to recognize how important this web was to modernism more generally—and to be reminded how frequently the best modernist scholarship is itself web-like. Colesworthy makes the case that this is so because modernism was itself web-like, the social connecting to the aesthetic, the political to the poetic. Perhaps the best way to think with modernism is to think like modernism, and Colesworthy, in this interdisciplinary study, does just that.