I think that
No need for "I think that." It's clear that you are writing in your own voice, with intelligent, impassioned concern for the subject.
I think that
No need for "I think that." It's clear that you are writing in your own voice, with intelligent, impassioned concern for the subject.
When these products do not give buyers their ideal results, it causes an additional mental health decline.
This claim may be true, but especially when you're discussing the dangers of false, unsubstantiated claims, it's important that you substantiate all your claims.
With the use of digital technology,
Misplaced modifier. This phrase applies to the person trying to lose weight.
oing back to Berger’s claim that women internalize the perspective of an outside observer, leading them to monitor their bodies.
Incomplete sentence.
Also can you provide specific evidence to support these claims and/or be more specific about psychological consequences?
he commercial omits side effects and neglects to mention that the product is not FDA-approved.
and fails to admit that it's part of the same conglomerate trying to make money off people's desperate desires to lose weight.
re” image is constructed to make viewers see themselves in it, causing dissatisfaction, implying that the product is the key to achieving happiness.
Stunning (and disturbing) image pairing and excellent use of Berger.
"There have been dramatic changes in what is considered a beautiful body. The ideal of female beauty has shifted from a symbol of fertility to one of mathematically calculated proportions."
excellent use of quotation to prepare for an engaging timeline of images.
His
Hims & Hers is the name of the company.
The ad is so (unintentionally) ironic, citing all the for profit parts of the system designed to make us sick, as if it's not part of the same system! Ugh!
, her artistic practice that pays close attention to
Incomplete sentence. Was this a technical error or did you lose steam?
What does it mean to manipulate the brown woman's body...
Beautiful, engaging, and thought provoking title and landing page.
< Berger, ekphrasis, and silent/silenced women >
Is this a placeholder for a "still to come" section summarizing Berger's argument?
Alternative Queer Identities
In some ways this title seems to run at cross purposes to your argument that we should discuss Mars and Squire as disciplined, experimental artists and not just remember them as colorful lesbians. Shouldn't your title then put the spotlight on the art and not on queer identities? Maybe "Alternative Queer Artistries"?
Mars, Ethel. “‘
There is no entry here for Ethel Mars, Artsy, so I am unable to locate in the Works Cited the various paintings by Mars you included in the story.
vibrant artwork.
Their paintings are gorgeous, but why do two different paintings have the same caption: Ethel Mars, Artsy? Having never seen these sketches before, I crave more immediately accessible information about titles, dates, locations, etc...
“Sherwood concluded that ‘in her gayety’ the American Girl ‘did not think…what silhouette she [was] casting on the map of Europe’” (Caudill 32).
I have a hard time making sense of this quotation without better framing/ sandwiching. Who is Sherwood? and what American Girl is Sherwood talking about?
Bio and literary context
Here again, this road sign doesn't adequately signal the blend of biography, close reading, and artistry that will unfold beyond the button. Embed those videos so we can't miss them!
Ethel Mars, "Woman with a Monkey"
ohmigosh, this is the most ingenious, engaging reimagining of humanities scholarship I have ever encountered! I love it so much! I wish you would embed the youtube video into your storymap rather than hiding it behind a button that reader's might skip (the button also doesn't explain what we're about to see -- I thought it was simply a link to the painting).
Most notably her self-portrait and possible namesake Stein's word portrait
Changes in font size can be distracting unless used consistently to create clear visual hierachies and meaningful distinctions.
No one has considered “Miss Furr and Miss Skeene” as a reflection of Mars’ and Squire’s artistic evolution rather than their personal lives.
Brilliant intervention!
n,
delete this comma
At the time, "Gay" formally and exclusively meant
See George Chauncey's social history, "Gay New York" for discussion of the history of the term. He suggests that the queer meaning was circulating in the early 20th century,, at least in queer subcultures. The Oxford English Dictionary (available online via our library) includes examples of the first recorded usage of any meaning. They actually cite Stein's portrait as the first text to use "gay" to mean homosexual! Stein changed the language! https://www.oed.com/dictionary/gay_adj?tab=meaning_and_use#3287607.
linguistic impact
Bold and dramatic insight! I'm intrigued! What you mean by linguistic impact? And who or what did these portraits have an impact on?
Modernist giants such as Picasso, Matisse, and Cézanne all possess their personalized word portraits
Your exposition is bold and engaging. Here, I think it would be more accurate to say: Stein created portraits of modernist giants such as...
I don't think these artists "possess" their abstract word portraits, since, as George Bornstein reminds us, literary texts don't exist in any one place or materialization.
a truth
I wonder if Hutcheon's discursive definition of art always existing in a sea of past references renders the notion of "a truth" in flux. Maybe it would make more sense to say that comparing two or more works puts them in conversation, and that the scholar who compares them joins the conversation. But what happens when scholars contribute their own artistry to the conversation?
I'm just not convinced that there is "a truth" or "the truth" embedded in any text, and I don't think that's a loss, but a gain for the way we exist in conversation with texts from the past.
Image 178 of World War history: daily records and comments as appeared in American and foreign newspapers, 1914-1926 (New York), December 7, 1915, (1915 December 7-10).Image 20 of New-York tribune (New York [N.Y.]). July 25, 1915 (talks about Mina Loy being mentioned in Kreymborg’s Others).Image 2 of The Sunday telegram (Clarksburg, W. Va.)., July 18, 1915.Image 10 o
These citations seem ggenerated by zotero and don't seem to follow MLA style
GROSS, JENNIFER R. “TRUANT OF HEAVEN: THE ARTIST MINA LOY.” Mina Loy: Strangeness Is Inevitable, edited by JENNIFER R. GROSS,
why all caps?
that has otherwise gone unacknowledged.
This claim is somewhat belied by all the quotations from other scholars, who are acknowledging that Loy's portrait poems say something about her own art and life.
This paragraph feels like you're struggling a bit to differentiate your argument from the critics. You've got a latent argument here that you could make, in the idea that the boundaries between self and other are permeable, particularly in the Paris community of expatriate artists. By returning to the setting of Paris, you could argue that Loy found herself by portraying others in Paris, a place where artists lived and worked in close proximity, inspiring one another with their bold experiments in both art and life.
Loy's portrait poems move outwards through their representations of other people and simultaneously inwards as they reflect back onto Loy as a artist and creator.
Fascinating insight. Does this suggest that the boundaries of selfhood are permeable? Or that all innovative artists share certain qualities and characteristics that distinguish them from the average joes? Or perhaps, that Loy uses portraiture as a mode of introspection, looking outward in order to better understand herself.
o mind a well-known portrait of hers
Good idea to put the portraits side by side, though I think it calls to mind some of her later photos by Man Ray more!
Dr. Suzanne Churchill put it in her analysis of the poem
Did I say that?! Where? (include parenthetical)
In this manifesto,
Good connection to Feminist Manifesto, but the text is too tiny to read. Better to quote only a passage.
Though she begins her analysis with "Brancusi’s Golden Bird,"
Again, we may not need this detail, nor the "ultimately"
n the third chapter of her book, Lewis narrows her focus to the scope of Loy’s poetry
Do we need these details, or can you just say:
Lewis argues that Loy's abstraction wasn't abstract...
novel
a work of fictino?
he poem is a portrait of James Joyce, but also a self portrait of Loy. More specifically, this poem is a portrait about Joyce's writi
Good point, but this close reading lacks the specificity of the previous one, so it seems like another example of the same thing, rather than an example that generates a new, different insight or illuminates another dimension of her portraiture.
Words as Readymade: Mina Loy's Verbal Portraiture of 'Gertrude Stein' and 'Joyce's Ulyss
Personally, I like your writing style better than his. Maybe you could make the font smaller? It's like he's yelling over you!
same genius tactics to write the poem that praises Joyce for his
Cool idea -- what tactics? And how does she make use of readymades in this poem, a tactic typically associated with Marcel Duchamp rather than Joyce?
Though his paper goes into further depth on the topic of readymades,
unnecessary verbiage that doesn't really tell us any more about his argument or the poem -- just cut it.
In Bowen Wang’s paper on Loy’s portraiture, Wang
Just say: Bowen Wang argues that...
ss and Loy's own creation of Cunard's portrait.
excellent concise, compelling close reading
framed in the facing profiles / of Princess Murat and George Moore."
Wow! How did you animate the poem image with the boldface? Amazing!
Of these ten poems, five are portraits of other people. Just as with all her 'Paris poems,' research has been done on individual poems from Loy's 'Paris years,' but the majority of of that research addresses her earlier poetry. For whatever reason, there seems to be a gap in both the portraiture and the scholarship on Loy's poems, a gap that spans her 'Paris years.' No one has written about Loy's 'Paris poems' as a whole, and no one has studied her portrait poems to see what they reveal about Loy's work.
This is really good. I think the easiest way to clear up confusion is to say something like: Most of the photographic and literary portraits of Mina Loy made by other people were created during her Paris years. Loy also created many portraits during her Paris years: of the ten poems she published, 5 are portrait poems. It is these 5 portrait poems that I will examine here.
most of the portraiture of Loy's work is of her earlier poetry,
So you're talking about portraits of Loy made by other people?
various portraits,
What do the portraits have to do with the Paris poems. I want to hear about both, but this seems like a jarring shift, after you just announced a purpose to look at the Paris poems. Perhaps you could smooth the transition by emphasizing in the previous paragraph and this one that Loy's Paris years were distinguished by a market interest in portraiture. Though Loy made portraits throughout her career, she did so with a particular intensity in both poetry and prose in the Paris years. (if this is true, that is!)
Also, it would be helpful to know whether you're talking about portraits of her or by her or both.
New York
The Bowery years were important artistically and poetically, so should probably have their own frame in this timeline.
It was there that John died on account of a rare cancerous
This is really tragic, because Loy had refused to see him or answer his letters, apparently out of anger at his father.
Caravan
Cravan
In his article on Loy's "Three Moments in Paris," Andrew Michael Roberts connects Loy's "One O'Clock at Night" poem to these affairs, drawing connections between the speaker's struggle with being a 'mere woman' and an 'animal woman' and Marinetti's public statements comparing women to animals (Roberts 137).
Maybe this level of detail would be better in a narrative than a timeline?
that she engaged with
cut clutter
John,
John actually went by "Giles," which how he's usually referred to.
citation
Did you forget to supply this one?!
n her poem about her first childbirth, "Parturition
Avoid equating the poem with autobiography. You might say Haweis was having an affair, a detail Loy alludes to in her poem about childbirth, "Parturition."
Loy changed her name from 'Lowry' to 'Loy
Interesting at a moment when most women would take their husband's last name, she chose to reinvent herself as an artist.
BACKGROUND
Good, clear opening and enticing, informative timeline.
patriarchal pressures and expectations
I think you might be able to make this argument more effectively if you emphasized her resistance to the sexualizing male gaze rather than to patriarchal pressures more broadly. Your wonderful analyses of the paintings show HOW they resist the male gaze. It's much harder to show how she's resisting something as abstract and general as patriarchal pressures.
By revealing this, Fitzgerald combats patriarchal assumptions of the dancer’s experience.
What does "this" refer to? What are the patriarchal assumptions she's resisting?
When we compare Fitzgerald’s paintings to other famous paintings of dancers, like those by Degas, we can see that they differ stylistically.
Ahh, this is exactly the kind of comparison that might work better above in the place of a generalization about male painters, but tell us about the stylistic differences. Is Degas an example of patriarchal attitudes? or of the modernist erotic destruction of the female body?
The dancers become one with their costumes.
A similar trope appears in Djuna Barnes's novel Nightwood, where a circus performer's leotards become one with their body.
ne” (Pike 187). Similarly, this is the way in which Fitzgerald describes the dressing room that Alabama enters when she arrives at the ballet studio. In the room hangs “long legs and rigid feet of flesh and black tights mounded in sweat to the visual image of the decisive
excellent choice and use of evidence.
Many male painters used depictions of the female body to display their sexual desires and misogynistic views of the role of women in their lives.
I have a hard time with such unsubstantiated generalizations. It might help to provide a representative example or two, otherwise you're relying solely on what's called a warrant of authority: Because Pike says it, it is so.
Romantic, patriarchal stereotypes of ballet.
where in the novel do you see evidence of resistance to patriarchy?
*It is important to note here that the term “Negroid” is very offensive and inappropriate.
Aha! You had a similar thought. I agree that it's offensive but think we can also see how she is using the stereotype of the Negro as stronger, more physical, and more primitive as a way of revitalizing her own white, female body--that's how Primitivist tropes work. White people create exotic fantasies about the dark Other and then feed on them to revitalize themselves.
her Negroid hips
Do you think it would be wise to acknowledge this primitivist trope as one of the ways she imagines greater physical power in her own body?
Through this lens, Michelle Payne, one of the first scholars to study body in Save Me the Waltz, argues that the novel is a literary representation of Fitzgerald’s assumed anorexia through ways in which Alabama treats her own body. She first basically diagnoses Fitzgerald with anorexia and then argues that in the novel “ballet becomes a trope for anorexia–torturous, ascetic, bodily rituals concealed by and yet enabling the graceful, seemingly delicate performance of the ballet/body” (Payne 49). She continues by interpreting the novel as a reflection of Zelda’s life, further supporting her post-mortem diagnosis. However, not only is it problematic to diagnose a person with a serious mental health condition after their death, it is even more problematic to use their fiction writing as evidence or a confirmation. When Payne does this, she actually undermines the impact of Save Me the Waltz and Fitzgerald’s writing. Since Payne is one of the first scholars to discuss the representation of body in the novel, more recent scholars must combat the notion that the novel is a mirror for Fitzgerald’s own life. Instead, we should read the novel on its own and appreciate its unmistakable, individual significance.Fitzgerald's art, in her writing and her painting, has profound meaning beyond an anorexic diagnosis.
I think you could provide all this useful information in one condensed, concise paragraph, and deliver a more precise thesis. What "profound meaning" will your analysis reveal?
As I read on, it seems like your thesis is that dance in the novel does not serve as evidence of anorexia, but is an art form that confers strength and autonomy onto the main character, allowing her to locate herself physically and creatively outside of her roles as daughter, wife, and mother.
Alabama claims ownership over her body and breaks free from the pressures of marriage and motherhood. By pushing her body through dance, she finds her own purpose.
can you provide textual evidence to support these perceptive claims?
she, “‘[is] go
no comma necessary here.
This seems like an important quotation for reclaiming and redirecting the power of blue veins toward her own fame as an artist, rather than toward sex appeal to a man.
comparison. She is self-conscious about the awkwardness of her body.Later in the night, Alabama and the rest of the party attend the ballet.In the 1930's, the ballet was very important to French nightlife. This is an example of what French ballet looked like in this era:
Why does the text of the paragraphs keep changing in font size?
This
What does "this" refer to?
She continues by interpreting the
She interprets the novel... (maybe unnessary rep?)
first basically
Payne effectively diagnoses Fitzgerald...
Fitzgerald’s assumed anorexia
unclear who is doing the assuming
There is much debate among scholars about how readers should approach the use and description of the body in Fitzgerald’s Save Me the Waltz.
Possibly give a short plot summary of the novel to get readers interested and grounded in it before you do your lit review.
, an art form that she had admired since childhood
This phrase seems repetitive, since you told us she not only admired but actually studied it as a child. Maybe just say: she became captivated by the idea of taking up ballet professionally.
These are Zelda Fitzgerald’s ballerinas.
This is a marvelous introduction to your project. You've made StoryMap operate like a ScrollyTeller with a zoom function!
Britannica Editors. "Jezebel". Encyclopedia Britannica, 25 Mar. 2026, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jezebel-queen-of-Israel. Accessed 11 May 2026.
This entry should follow the same format as the dictionary entry for Dilettante
Natalie Clifford Barney's own annotated copy of the book
Where did you get access to this annotated copy? This would be a great resource to link to and should be included in your Bibliography.
something that makes the Almanack so important today.
Good argument, but this last clause dangles. Consider cutting it.
be vague riddles or religious allusions.
She may be creating allegorical figures here, using everyday objects and symbols to represent both real people and abstract ideas.
She writes phrases like "Hussy with the Honey Head," "Jockey with the Pelvis plump," and "high-hipped Wrestler with the Rump" (60).
Not only satirical but very bawdy, scatalogical, and explicit. Lots of references to body parts, especially ones with sexual/erotic functions!
Each sign connects to a body part of the woman,
This zodiac sign also evokes two other symbolic traditions:
r dynamic, so it is very possible that these two characters were referencing Stein and Toklas
intriguing!
making it clear that even lesbian women can have differing opinions on gender roles
good insight into Barnes' feminist strategy
The reader is also introduced to Low-Heel and High-Head, t
This sentence seems to repeat the idea from the first sentence of the previous paragraph.
s "that women were weak and silly Creatures, but all too dear," and High-Head says "that they were strong, gallant, twice as hardy as any Man, and several times his equal in Brain, but none so precious"
echoing (and parodying) a cultural tendency to either denigrate or idealize women, with nothing in between.
Gertrude Stein.
good connection
a lamentation by t
Interesting medley of lamentation, bawdy doggerel, and storytelling suggests a wide range of affective moods and lesbian experiences.
n The Bible is elevated to an idol herself is significant because it presents the dichotomy of what is deemed good and evil in this narrative. By
Excellent point! As with her evocations of Christianity, she is subverting -- or even inverting -- traditional moral values. And remember "sexual inversion" was consider a valid theory of homosexuality at the time.
lyrics do not have a clear meaning,
Can you transcribe them?
ll of the angels and zodiac signs came together to produce an egg.
Seems important that this conception occurred without a man or male angel!
caricaturized
caricatured or characterized
are two columns of text
Might be helpful to have an image of the 2-column format?
or- f
use an m-dash (command/shift/hyphen) rather than a hyphen.
a fictional equivalent to the relationship between Natalie Barney and the women who she hosted at her salon. The
This phrase dangles and the next sentence is cut off.
he token straight woman
quote and cite the Afterword for this phrasing.
by women being paired "like to like,"
a more generous quotation might help untangle the syntax here. Sounds like she's being paired like to like, which doesn't make sense if she's straight.
is intentional
What is the intention? Isn't she just following the conventions of the calendar year and the almanack form?
The month of January is described
Barnes describes January as... (avoid passive voice)
reverence
irreverence? Is she mocking the women for their reverence? for their irreverence? It's not quite clear what she's mocking, but my sense is that she evokes Christian imagery to create an ironic contrast, since their behaviors are what would be deemed sinful in a traditional Christian theology.
to be enjoyed.
to be enjoyed and read as a communal experience?
While it is important for scholars to be skeptical of the underlying meanings of a work, Barnes's purpose in writing Ladies Almanack was not simply to spark scholarly arguments.
This sentence is vague. Why not just take it out?
honour the creature slowly, that you may afford it
seems almost like a warning as much as an invitation.
The foreword is fascinating. She starts by minimizing the project as a small, flawed, and obscure affair. To set it before "the compound public eye," she then shrouds it in Latinate rhetoric that obscures as much as it reveals, casting the Almanack as a dangerous mythological creature.
It feels as if, almost 50 years later, she's still trying to preserve the secrecy and self-mythologizing that strengthened and sustained the Lesbian community of the 1920s. They were considered monstrous and unnatural by society, and in some ways, Barnes embraces and recuperates the sense of being an outcast, grotesque monstrosity, much in the way subsequent activists recuperated the term "queer" and staged elaborate gay parades.
impossible
difficult? particularly for readers who are not "in the know"!
is comprised of t
"is composed of" or "comprises"
Barnes earned the label of dilletante, someone who cultivates an area of interest without real commitment or knowledge, because of her commitment to the playful tone of the novel (Merriam-Webster).
I've never come across this view of Barnes as a dilettante, so unless you found it in a more scholarly source than Mirriam-Webster, I would leave it out. She was a serious writer, as well as a witty, ironic, and sometimes outright hilarious one.
esthetic use of the decadent and avant-garde movements,
I'm not sure she used these movements as much as participated in them. You could simplify to: She combined avant garde aesthetics with decadent, bohemian, "art for art's sake" sensibility.
The Birthplace of Ladies Almanack
I think these two sections might be combined in one concise bio of Barnes that leads to the Paris and the Almanac.
f 𝐿𝑎𝑑𝑖𝑒𝑠 𝐴𝑙𝑚𝑎𝑛𝑎𝑐𝑘A Reader's Key
Simple, elegant title page tells us exactly what we need to know and entices us to enter, without minimizing your project.
arnes was given the request for a roman à clef by her close-knit group of friend
I'd love to know more detail here. Who requested it? Also this information seems to require a citation for its source.
The setting in which Loy's art would have been consumed is as much a part of her work's context as the magazine itself.
Brilliant connection and excellent point about the setting, but do you mean that the setting is as much a part of her work as the language of the poem itself? Also, might this be a place where you can gesture to the Paris connection. Loy's poem, if it's Three Moments in Paris, connects this NY scene to its Paris "sister city" in modernist decadence.
Dr. Suzanne Churchill.
I'm not the author of this work. See the about page to create a correct citation.
Burke, Carol.
Carolyn
While a relatively uncharted field,
Actually periodical studies is a very established field with a methodology that these students adopt! They didn't invent it.
Though initially published in magazines, today Loy's work primarily circulates in academic circles through published collections such as Roger Conover's Lost Lunar Baedeker compilation of Loy's works. Though these publications are excellent resources for expanding the reach of historically under-represented authors, the loss of these works' original context strips away a layer of nuance tangible in the original publications. Examining "Three Moments in Paris" alongside the context of Rogue magazine reveals a new angle for
As a design rule, use left alignment for any text longer than a single line. It's much harder to read centered text.
(Burke)
page #?
drawings
I don't think she published a drawing in Rogue, did she? Clara Tice published drawings that seemed to illustrate her work.
Rogue was one such short-lived, little magazine that ran from March 1915 to November 1916. It was born as a satirical spin on the iconic magazine Vogue by Louise and Allen Norton. Known for being cheeky and wry, it was a beacon of fashionable reading material among the intellectual elites of New York's Greenwich Village.
Do you need a citation for this information? It may be considered common knowledge, but if you had to look it up, cite your source.
(largely comprised of Stein's salon network)
Stein may be looming a bit too large in this project. Her salon was an important gathering place, but not the only one. Natalie Barney's salon, Sylvia Beach's bookstore, and the many cafes and clubs provided other nodes in the network.
the American facing literature produced
awkward syntax. Was she the American facing literature?
About the Author
Maybe clear to say "About Mina Loy," so it doesn't seem like this is about you, the author of this essay!
Through re-imposing the little magazine context, Three Moments in Paris takes on new meaning.
Good, clear, engaging opening.
This sentence has a misplaced modifier. The initial clause "through-reimposing..." attaches to the nearest subject noun, so that Three Moments in Paris is re-imposing itself.
You can make a better sentence and stronger anchor by saying something like: By examining Three Moments in its little magazine context, we can see...[and then insert a specific thesis/insight]
Photographs courtesy of Archives & Special Collections, Vassar College Libraries
This does not seem like a full citation.
e, Millay occupied both worlds at once.
What about the Paris context? Can you find any connection to her occupying the worlds of Paris and New York?
argue that early twentieth-century magazines encouraged writers to become multifaceted public figures
citation needed -- add a parenthetical to indicate which Keyser title and a page reference, even when you are paraphrasing.
presenting Boyd as breezy and unserious
can you give an example of how they presented her? Without firsthand evidence, your claim relies solely on what's called a warrant of authority, i.e. because Keyser said, it is so.
Keyser, 21)
no need for comma after author's name in MLA style
ecause the supernatural enters the story so naturally, it starts to feel emotionally believable
Where and how? provide evidence from the poem to support your claims.
Beneath the easy language sits a more complicated narrative on poverty, shame, and survival.
Can you provide evidence to show where and how poverty, shame, and survival manifest in the poem?
The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver
put poem titles in quotation marks, book titles in Italics
performance.
missing citation for Howard, too.
records their conversations almost like scripted dialogue from a play.
I'm curious to read an example of this conversation.
“They mix, but they do not communicate…There results from this union a dull grey fluid…It is puddle-grey,–the grey of despair.”
citation?
“After all, it is a French river. It speaks no English. With the best of my French, I cannot catch what it is saying.”
Excellent quotation & analysis. Where is the citation for this quotation?
Swipe to move from Greenwich Village to Paris, just like Millay!
fun, interactive prompt
. Instead, it was a deliberate form of self-portraiture that helped her navigate different audiences, genres, and expectations
Excellent, clear, concise exposition and thesis.
The length and physical impossibility of the poem's mapped itinerary reveal that Paris: A Poem is not a literal walk through the 1920s city, but a ghostlike traversal across time. A traversal where past, present, and future coalesce into a single day, and Paris lives on through the generations of artists, revolutionaries, and ordinary inhabitants who haunt its streets.
It's tiring on eyes to read an entire paragraph of boldface type. Can you switch this to regular text and make a transition to invite readers outside the map? Talk to us the way you did at the beginning, e.g.: If you feel a bit dizzy after that tour of Paris, you have begun to realize the length and physical impossibility... You might also productively include some of the calculations you mentioned in class, like how many miles were traversed in navigating the city in this way, and how long it might take to do so.
Paris: A Poem
Since you can't use italics, put the work's title in quotation marks.
Beautiful use of paintings to set the scene. Where can I find the artists, titles, etc. for these paintings?
u Carrousel."
I love how you've found so many archival photos and postcards. The images pull me back in time, while the map locates me in specific locations.
Is this your typo or how "carrousel" is spelled in the poem?
holophrase NORD-SUDZIG-ZAG LION NOIR CACAO BLOOKER…RUE DU BAC (DUBONNET)"
Is the image above this quotation one of the slogans she cites? I can't tell!
Paris, May 1919, during the Paris Peace Conference and amidst the wake of World War 1.
Good way to evoke historical and geographic coordinates simultaneously.
It lives on now recovered and revitalized.
Are you referring to your own work? Or to the digital version of the poem that precedes it? This might be a good place to introduce the digital version and link to it, inviting readers to read the poem in full before returning to take the geographic journey with you.
I love the painting in the background, btw, which makes me feel like I'm about to zoom in and become one of those figures in the Paris park!
Scholarship has mostly
Can you include a parenthetical with the names of some of these scholars?
Like Evans, Thompson locates Mills.
locates her where?
There doesn't seem to be a clear rule for what lines of text are larger. Is it quotations--from primary or secondary sources? Emphasis?
Her sudden death
When and how did she die?
Blackbirds
explain who the Blackbirds were.
critical work has focused mostly on historical contextualization rather than reading posthumous textual portraits of Mills.
I'm not sure what is the difference between historical contextualization and reading posthumous portraits.
Shuffle Along
put title in Italics. Also have you introduced Shuffle Along and explained her role in it already? Like Du Bois, this important reference needs more contextualizing to explain its significance as the first Broadway musical with an all Black cast (rather than white performers in blackface) and Florence Mills' role in the production. Was it her breakout performance?
DuBoisian project
might need a bit more context for readers unfamiliar with WEB Du Bois
Scholars probe the edges of this absence, weaving threads across the gaping void to try to understand.
Why is this text larger?
The story map is rich with archival details, but I'm having a bit of trouble distinguishing your narrative from the primary and quoted sources. Might be more effective to have a consistent rule of your narrative being in regular paragraph form, and quotations from primary sources appearing in those flying boxes?
The fact that no archival footage remains of her voice has only deepened her enigma. Audiences tried to describe it,
I agree about the red curtain and think this text and the screen shots from newspapers would probably be more effective if just delivered, with the sentence above, in regular text/image format
Even in her lifetime, Mills was mythologized.
Very effective animated collage that rebuilds the mythology even as it immerses me in it.
s--
Use comman-shift-hyphen to create a real m-dash
Afro-American
put periodical titles in italics
ConclusionThrough the blending of both the flâneuse's internal thoughts as well as her perceptions of the external world, Mirrlees constructs a multi-sensory experience that invites readers into her interiority, allowing them to engage with the poem, as she does with Paris: in a meaningful and embodied way.
Though clear and coherent, this conclusion feels like a bit of a let down after such subtle, perceptive, and engaging analysis. I think you might say how, after (or as an extension of ) collapsing the distinction between flaneuse and writer, the poem animates the reader in their combined role, inviting us to experience an autonomous, subjective, mutlisensory interiority, in which the self is not objectified nor objectifies others, but experiences its own power and permeability. In this way, the poem reminds me a bit of Walt Whitman's Song of Myself, which concludes by hailing the reader, saying: if you want me, look under your boot soles. We become Whitman, walking the streets of the newly formed American nation in his shoes.
(lines 342-345)
makes me wish you'd found audio to play these notes, though I shouldn't be greedy ;-)
e visualization of the letters are being drawn by Mirrlees as the writer, rather than the wandering flâneuse, as they implicate the page
very intriguing and perceptive distinction.
While digital media cannot materially reproduce scent, Mirrlees’s language enables readers to use their imagination, as the flâneuse does throughout the poem, in order to vicariously experience the sensation, thereby “becoming-with” the poem itself.
Nicely done!
portrait of Paris.
Paris at a particular point in the 1920s, when there were still roosters! You'd be unlikely to hear that today!
may also be envisioning paintings,
aha -- of course you already thought of that idea!
flâneuse is observing both the space and the people in the space, noting their behavior.
and perhaps also reflecting on how painters have depicted the space. Or maybe she's seeing the space via the paintings she's seen of it.
affects
effects
This line mimics the sound of a train car in motion
The audio effect is brilliant! I can hear the berkekekek!!
The one line mention devoted to each of these posters suggests that the flâneuse, through whom the poem is focalized, is noting these posters as she passes them. She does not stop to analyze them, rather they become an observation, briefly entering her consciousness, thus indicating movement.
wonderfully clear presentation and analysis of the opening lines.
lacking a self-consciousness one might assume of a woman in the 1910s
Your insights are excellent, but here again check this tendency to attach dependent clauses that don't have a clear referent. This one attaches to "male gaze."
an interpretation shared by many scholars including, Kayleigh C. Quarterman, Tory Young, and Ruth Alison Clemens.
This clause dangles in this location, attaching itself to the "female flaneuse". Better to begin with the scholars, writing something like:
Scholars have noted that the poem posits the existence of a female... as an alternative to the male....
passively
freely? nonchalantly? Also, what makes him hegemonic? Could the male flaneur ever be a queer or subversive figure?
It employs Brigg's scholarly notes, as well as many of the same images included in the digital edition, however, coupled with this new technology, the hope is to create an affective landscape that emulates the sensorial experience Mirrlees captures within the poem.
This seems like a better, more diplomatic framing of your relationship to the digital edition than the one you provide above. Consider condensing to avoid the repetition.
'a sort of futurist trick,' designed 'to give an ensemble of the sensations offered to a pilgrim through Paris'" (1056
great quotation and recuperating of a criticism into a strength!
While the digital edition includes an option to view the contextualizing notes, as well as photos, it lacks a visual cohesive flow, thereby diminishing from the sensory experience so vividly rendered in the poem itself.
Here I think you can praise the digital edition a bit more, given our debt to it, and soften your criticism while still differentiating yourself, e.g.
The digital edition makes the poem accessible to the public, providing detailed annotations of the poem's many now obscure references, and even linking them to a set of related archival images. As rich as this context is, delving into it may distance readers from their immersion in the sensory experience of the poem. Building on the foundation their digital edition provides, this multimedia essay aims to recreate that sensory experience online.
xt. Since then, the poem has seen an increase in scholarly attention. Briggs’s notes on the poem have since becom
combine in one paragraph and provide a bit more information about the digital edition.
Despite the poem’s genius, the poem remained largely unread and unanalyzed for the better part of a century (1057).
here's where you might intro the digital edition, saying: neglected until recently, when....
Introduction Portrait photo of Hope Mirrlees and Jane Ellen Harrison, 1924 Helen Hope Mirrlees was a poet and writer born in England in 1887 ("Hope Mirrlees"). Though she publis
Clear, direct opening gets the necessary facts across.
Portrait photo of Hope Mirrlees and Jane Ellen Harrison, 1924
A link to a source doesn't substitute for a citation, and here you risk losing your readers to the digital edition. Why not introduce that edition explicitly, link to, acknowledge your debt to, and distinguish your project from it right up front?
Gallery
I love your interactive exhibits, and wonder what would happen if you intermixed them with your more formal essay writing? Also, Leah Duncan can show you a way to make the music play automatically with scroll, if that's something you would want.
While the angel in Love Pampered by the Beautiful Ladies also has a mysterious identity rooted in classical mythology, the autonomy a viewer has in their interpretation is far more extreme in Drift of Chaos II (Hermes).
Your analysis of Drift of Chaos II is so richly detailed that I quite long for the scrollyteller format so I can see the image side by side with your analysis!
In the end, both the poem and the painting suggest the variety of experiences had in city life.
Marvelous job linking the poems to the paintings. The inside/outside motif is rampant in her early poetry and tied to gender motifs in "Three Moments in Paris" and in "The Effectual Marriage," too.
It's a bit confusing when you cite "Three Moments" but then quote the poem "Parturition," which I don't think is part of the triptych, is it? Considering moving the passage from Parturition up to just after the paragraph where you discuss it. Or use Three Moments, instead of Parturtition to illustrate both the inside/outside motif and the multiple speakers approach.
The identity of Love as a mythical figure is clear based on the painting’s titles and Love’s wings–so then, does the ambiguity instead refer to the androgyny of Love?
Excellent question: I want to read your answer!
In all, the intersection of these styles in Loy’s painting reveals the nature of her education and engagement with broader art movements since early on, though a closer analysis of the painted subject matter best illuminates Loy’s individualized touch.
Here, you articulate a key point that seems essential to your original contribution to Loy studies. In some ways you're returning us to Conover's original insight about how she defies categorization by showing how she applies this individual touch to her paintings.
While these scholars make meaningful contributions to the discussion of Loy as a visual artist amongst broader movements, they risk the categorization of Loy's art that Conover argued she resisted.
For some reason, Hypothesis isn't allowing me to making line item comments.
Here are a few small suggestions for your lucid, perceptive, beautifully written essay.
Since you cite our website so often, it feels like it falsely gives me credit for work that is collaborative or by other authors. It might be better to use the parenthetical (mina-loy.com) and/or cite the author of the particular page or item you're citing on that project. For example, you might use (Rosenbaum) for her chapters on Surrealism, and treat the citation as a chapter in an edited collection, where the author of the chapter is cited, and the edition info is secondary.
"Regardless, more work needs to be done" seems like a sentence that could be applied to almost any artist, and certainly any woman artist. Can you point to some more specific issue that needs attention? Such a move would foreground your contribution and whet our appetites prior to the lit review that follows.
Excellent, concise, confident, and illuminating lit review. It may be a bit unfair to charge Rosenbaum with categorizing Loy's work as Surrealist, since she's specifically looking at work Loy created when actively participating as artist, writer, and agent in Surrealist artistic activities AND she argues that Loy was critiquing Surrealism as much as participating, adopting en dehors garde strategies of engagement and resistance.
Instead, I analyze the artwork produced during Loy’s Paris years with an art historical lens. This is a crucial scope, as Loy studied art in Paris early on in her practice, and then later returned for an extended period comparable to that of New York. In turn, one can understand her better as an independent modernist artist through the identification of consistent interests and a formal evolution in her practice, opening up the possibility of a more nuanced understanding of Loy’s relationship to art movements and her later assemblages.
Fine job summarizing how your method differs from those before you, but I think you can sharpenn the articulation of what insight(s) your method will provide: what key nuances will your method reveal?
Regardless, more work needs to be done.
seems like a sentence that could be applied to almost any artist, and certainly any woman artist. Can you point to some more specific issue that needs attention? Such a move would foreground your contribution and whet our appetites prior to the lit review that follows.
(Churchill 335).
In these annotations, I offer a few small suggestions for your lucid, perceptive, beautifully written essay.
Since you cite our website here and elsewhere so often, it feels like it falsely gives me credit for individual work that is collaborative or by other authors. It might be better to use the parenthetical (mina-loy.com) and/or cite the author of the particular page or item you're citing on that project. For example, you might use (Rosenbaum) for her chapters on Surrealism, and treat the citation as a chapter in an edited collection, where the author of the chapter is cited, and the edition info is secondary.
How can the art object help us to better understand time? How does time help us understand our own selves?
These questions seem more general than your focus, which seems to be: How can Bennett's short story help us understand how Black time shapes conceptions of Black selfhood.
Bennett refuses resolution because the temporal condition she is rendering does not resolve; it accumulates and persists. The reader is left with precarity, itself a condition of Black subjecthood. Jenks may have found closure,
How does Bennett refuse resolution, yet Jenks finds closure. Again, including textual evidence would help make this distinction.
“But the Seine goes on, and Seraigne continues to be happy, and the pain in one's chest grows no easier.”
Good use of quotation. Please insert a page reference.
that arrival
what arrival?
emory in the story functions not as nostalgia but as a mode of self-assembly —that same mode of self-production mentioned earlier— a process by which Jenks gathers the dispersed elements of his experience into something coherent enough to transmit.
This is a fascinating insight that requires textual evidence to be persuasive.
enks never leaves his room, yet he traverses considerable interior terrain, moving through the lives of those he has loved and the landscapes he has carried within him.
Perhaps a quotation showing how he traverses interior terrain could help illustrate this claim.
Jenks’ trajectory enacts precisely this negotiation: a reckoning with what it has meant to have been thrown into the world as this particular person, in this particular body, approaching this particular death. His becoming is inseparable from the historical c
This is very impressive reasoning and sophisticated language. It would be more persuasive if you found evidence from the text to show that Jenks is Black and that racial awareness is evident in the narrative.
That accumulation is, moreover, the very condition of Jenks’ becoming.
Accumulation of what?
Jenks’ temporal disorientation, his resistance to the consolations of either life or death as stable endpoints, marks him as a figure whose experience exceeds the categories available to represent it.
A bit hard to follow. By the time I get to "it," I've lost track of the referent. Can you simplify this sentence?
1920s Paris map overlayed on a satellite image of the city from May 7, 2026.
This is a cool effect, but how does it relate to the argument you're making? Frame your media the way you would quotations, explaining where they come from and how they support your argument.
“becoming,” o
use single quotation marks for a quote within a quote
olence while the
insert comma
Time here is not sequential but stratigraphic
Interesting geographic metaphor. You might want to define the term "stratographic" for those (like me) who aren't familiar with it.
Crucially, these temporalities coexist, accumulate, and resist the forward momentum that linear, progress-oriented conceptions of time demand.
This is so fascinating, and again, I find the photos from Bennett's childhood a bit distracting because not immediately relevant to the argument your making about this story.
“Tokens” insists that the Black subject’s experience of time as fragmented, layered, and resistant to resolution constitutes a distinct mode of being, one that linear, progress-oriented temporality actively forecloses.
excellent! Your prose is often clearer than your expert sources!
integrating it directly into discourses of Black aesthetic time and its conceptions of being.
This phrase dangles, so I'm not sure who's doing the integrating here.
that the hiatus of unrecognizability can spur new thought and new imaginings[...]” (1).
I have trouble understanding the the "hiatus of unrecognizability" (also missing quotation mark here?). Is it when something stops being unrecognizable? Sometimes it's better to put a key idea in your own words than to quote jargon out of context!
A ScrollyTeller of Gwendolyn Bennett's "Tokens" (published 1927).
Illuminating close reading wonderfully prepares me for analysis that follows. You do a great job pointing how prominent the theme of time is, especially at the end, when you offer this quotation: "When I die I want you to give it to her, if it's a thousand years from now…just a token of a time we were in love." And then follow it with the token of the radium clock. So clear, yet I never noticed until you pointed it out!
"Tokens" is scrupulously engaged with time: its immutability, its openness, and the possibility of self-forgiveness and closure within it. I argue that reading "Tokens" alongside theories of Black spatial temporality and aesthetic time allows readers to more fully engage with the nature of Black being at the center of the story. Through what Daphne Lamothe describes as aesthetic time’s capacity to hold an accumulation of Black temporalities—“from the experience and knowledge gleaned from history to the political urgencies of the present and the immediacy of subjective feelings and perceptions” (2)—Bennett situates Barnett outside the linear logic of normative time, and in doing so, generates a more complete and more honest picture of the Black subject.
very sophisticated, perceptive, and theoretically informed thesis.