ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am indebted to many people for their advice, help, and support from the inception of this book to its present form, and I am delighted to be able to express my gratitude to them here.

In the course of my project, I have been the beneficiary of several grants, which offered both funding and intellectual community for my work: a Stanford Humanities Center grant, a Fulbright Scholarship in Austria, a Whiting Fellowship, a Stanford Post-Doctoral Scholarship in English, and Griswold Fund support from Yale University. These have been essential for the timely completion of this book.

I was able to read work on Wyndham Lewis for a Stanford University English Department symposium and a faculty works-in-progress group at Yale University; my thanks to all who offered their criticisms and comments in these forums. For my research on Djuna Barnes, I would like to thank Elizabeth Alvarez and the helpful staff at the University of Maryland Library; they made my visit to the Djuna Barnes papers not only fruitful and efficient but pleasant as well. I would also like to thank Ron Rebholz, who as chair of the Stanford English Department subsidized my travel to this collection. My work on Mina Loy was helped by the critical comments of the participants of the conference on 1930s poetry at the University of Maine, especially Keith Tuma and Susan Dunn, and more recently, by several stimulating conversations about Loy with Rachel Potter. I have also benefited from consulting the Loy manuscript collections at Yale University's Beinecke Library.

I have enjoyed the advice and support of several people who contributed in tangible and intangible ways to the completion of this book: Elaine Chang, George Dekker, Johanna Drucker, Ann Gaylin, Ursula Heise, Ursula König, Hans and Irmi Löschner, Kathy Ogren, Linda Peterson, Brian Rourke, George Stade, Richard Terdiman, Lilliane Weissberg, and Daniela Weitensfelder. Karla Oeler deserves thanks for her translations from obscure Russian sources, which have helped me uncover the mysteries of Beckett's "Bim and Born"; Katerina Clark also pointed out additional sources on this question. Edward Lintz provided crucial help in the obtaining of permissions and in the preparation of the manuscript.

Peter Brooks, David Halliburton, Robert Harrison, Michael Holquist, Wayne Koestenbaum, David Quint, Gilbert Sorrentino, Elide Valarini, Alexander Welsh, and Hayden White read and offered advice on chapters or on the manuscript as a whole; their help has been invaluable. Lawrence Rainey deserves special thanks for a very careful and critical reading of the manuscript in its entirety, shortly before its submission; he helped me to iron out several rough spots and to heighten a number of key arguments. I would also like to thank my readers for the University of California Press, Peter Nicholls and Thomas Harrison, and my editors, William Murphy, Linda Norton, and Julie Brand.

I have saved for last those for whom the formalities of an acknowledgment fall so far short of my debt to them that the normal phrases seem to betray rather than express my feelings. To my parents, who have watched my peregrinations with a minimum of skepticism and a maximum of love and support, I can finally say, Here it is. To Marjorie Perloff, my mentor, inspiration, and most stringent critic, go my pro-foundest thanks: Your generosity, enthusiasm, support, and friendship have been priceless to me for close to a decade now; I couldn't have done it without you. Finally, and above all, to my wife, Deanna Shemek—my thanks leave me speechless. I hope that our life together may hint to you the depth of my gratitude for all you have done and will do for me in years to come: "his thoughts, the stream / and we, we two, isolated in the stream / we also: three alike—."