Dark Night of the Universal: transition (1927–1938) as Region of the Modern

In taking up the international modernist journal transition (1927–1938), edited by Eugene Jolas, I begin with the editorial project of constructing a space between and among the literatures of three world languages: English, French, and German (coinciding, in fact, with the editor’s trilingual background as an emigrant from Alsace-Lorraine to the United States), on the way to a global universal. The disparity between the basic presuppositions of these literatures—for instance, between American objectivism and French surrealism—demands a higher level of interpretation, which I compare to a geographical “region” of the modern. As Jolas’s project continues through the decade of the 1930s and into the War, I see an attempt to construct aesthetic/ethical universals from the juxtaposition of global literatures that anticipates the postwar demand for ethical/political universals, in which Jolas himself participated as a journalistic reformer in Germany and as a reporter for the Nuremberg Trials.