BLAST (1914-15) sought to distinguish London as a new center of radical innovation in the literary and visual arts. Edited by Wyndham Lewis—the controversial painter, novelist, and polemicist—the magazine introduced Vorticism as a movement that sought to galvanize a cultural revolution. (“Curse with expletive of whirlwind the Britannic aesthete cream of the snobbish earth.”) This course will concentrate on the two issues of the magazine itself, attending to its literary and graphic experiments in the context of other modernist magazines. We will also engage related work by the artists and writers who contributed to the journal (Ezra Pound, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Jacob Epstein, Jessica Dismoor, Helen Saunders, El Lissitsky, Rebecca West, Ford Madox Ford, Dorothy Shakespeare); and we will situate Vorticism in relation to the modernist contexts against which it emerged (including Cubism, Imagism, Futurism, and the Bloomsbury Group). Moreover, we will examine the brief history of Blast against the backdrop of the Great War. In London we will take particular advantage of the collections at the Tate. (B, G)