Konstantin Aksyonov

Olga Aksyonova

Anna Antonova
email: antonovaannas@gmail.com

Elena Aksyonova

Polina Ziomkovskaya

Development of Cloud-Based Microservices to Decision Support System

Keywords: Simulation Modeling, Intellectual Systems, Artificial Intelligence. 1 Table 1. Comparative analysis of SIM. № Parameter ARIS

des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.

Introduction

Creation of simulation systems (SIM) [START_REF] Devyatkov | Cloud Technology in Simulation Studies, GPSS Cloud Project[END_REF] is one of the promising directions for the development of decision-making systems for business processes (BP), supply chains and logistics [START_REF] Solovyeva | Analysis of position optimization method applicability in supply chain management problem[END_REF][START_REF] Sokolov | Theoretical and technological foundations of complex objects proactive monitoring management and control[END_REF], technological processes (for example metallurgy [START_REF] Borodin | On design of domain-specific query language for the metallurgical industry[END_REF]). Currently, the presence in SIM of communities of interaction agents that are identified with decision makers (DM) is significant [START_REF] Aksyonov | The architecture of the multi-agent resource conversion processes[END_REF][START_REF] Aksyonov | Analysis of the Electric Arc Furnace Workshop Logistic Processes Using Multiagent Simulation[END_REF][START_REF] Cao | Agents and Data Mining Interaction[END_REF][START_REF] Wooldridge | Intelligent agent: theory and practice[END_REF].

Currently, commercial simulation solutions based on the market (such as AnyLogic, ARIS, G2) are desktop applications. ARIS system allows you to create html-pages with the results of experiments and upload them to the Internet. AnyLogic system is able to compile java applets with developed models and place them on the network. To start working with the model, it is necessary to fully download it to the user's electronic device, playing the simulation experiment of the model applet takes place on the user's device and requires significant computing resources.

The analysis showed that the greatest functionality of SIM of business processes is provided by AnyLogic and BPsim products. In the direction of service-oriented architecture, only G2 is developing. Thus, the urgent task is to choose a dynamic model of a business process and build on its basis a web-service of simulation. Comparative analysis of SIM is presented in Table 1.

Model of Multi-Agent Resource Conversion Processes

The dynamic model of multi-agent resource conversion processes (MARCP) [START_REF] Aksyonov | The architecture of the multi-agent resource conversion processes[END_REF][START_REF] Aksyonov | Analysis of the Electric Arc Furnace Workshop Logistic Processes Using Multiagent Simulation[END_REF] is designed to model organizational and technical, BP and support of management decisions. The MARCP model was developed on the basis of the following mathematical schemes: Petri nets, queuing systems and system dynamics models. The key concept of the MARCP model is a resource converter having the following structure: input, start, conversion, control, and output. "Start-up" determines the moment the converter is started on the basis of: the state of the conversion process, input and output resources, control commands, means. At the time of launch, the conversion execution time is determined based on the parameters of the control command and available resource limitations. The MARCP model has a hierarchical structure. Agents manage the objects of the process based on the content of the knowledge base (KB).

Analysis of the SIE Model A.U. Filippovich

Integrated situational, simulation, expert model A.U. Filippovich (SIE-model) is presented in [START_REF] Fillipovich | Integration of situational, simulation and expert modeling systems[END_REF]. Due to the fact that this model is focused on the problematic area of prepress processes (printing), some of its fragments will be described in terms of the MARCP model. SIE-model is presented in the form of several different levels, corresponding to the imitation, expert and situational presentation of information [START_REF] Fillipovich | Integration of situational, simulation and expert modeling systems[END_REF]. The first level of the model is intended to describe the structure of the system. For this, a block is associated with each object (subject). Blocks are interconnected by interaction channels. Each block processes a transaction for a certain time and delays it for a time determined by the intensity. We formulate the following conclusions:

1. The SIE-model can serve as the basis for creating a multi-agent BP model.

2. The SIE-model has the following advantages: apparatus / mechanism for diagnosing situations; a combination of simulation, expert and situational approaches.

3. The SIE model does not satisfy the requirements of the BP model: the presence of a DM (agent) model; problem orientation to business processes.

Model I.M. Moskalev, B.I. Klebanov

In the work of I.M. Moskalev, B.I. Klebanov [START_REF] Moskaliov | System for analysis and optimization of resource conversion processes[END_REF][START_REF] Klebanov | The principles of multi-agent models of development based on the needs of the agents[END_REF][START_REF] Klebanov | Bases of imitation model of artificial society construction accounting of the agents' needs recursion[END_REF] presents a mathematical model of resource conversion process, the specificity of which is the allocation of active and passive converters (APC). In this model, the vertices of graph X are formed by passive transducers, active transformers, stock of instruments and resource storages, and many arcs are represented by resource and information flows, flows to funds. The model of active and passive converters is focused on solving production-planning problems and based on scheduling theory. This model has not worked the possibility of implementing intelligent agents (models of DM) with a production knowledge base, as well as the implementation of a language for describing mechanisms and situations for diagnosing situations and finding solutions.

The results of the analysis of the considered approaches and models of dynamic modeling of situations are given in Table 2. As follows from the table, all the requirements of the multi-agent business process model are met by the MARCP model. As the theoretical basis of the implemented method you can use the SIE-model, the advantage of which is the study of integration issues of simulation, expert and situational modeling.

Details of the Implementation of the MARCP Modification

To implement the simulation modeling service, it was decided to use the MARCP concept.

The simulation modeling service is based on ASP.NET Core technology in the C # programming language.

ASP.NET Core is a cross-platform, high-performance, open-source environment for building modern, cloud-based, Internet-connected applications.

ASP.NET Core provides the following benefits: x applications targeting .NET Core require only one NuGet package. Due to the small size of the application's contact area, benefits such as higher security, minimal maintenance and improved performance are available.

 A single
Fig. 1 shows the architecture of the simulation service. The service manages 3 entities: models, simulation processes, and execution reports. It receives commands from the integration interface (API) and, depending on the command, receives or stores data in the database, performs internal transformations and calculations, and starts modeling.

WebAPI

The simulation modeling service has an interaction and integration interface in the form of cross-platform HTTP WebAPI. The HTTP protocol allows you to not only provide web pages. The simulation service describes a REST-style interface (Repre-sentationalStateTransfer). REST is an architectural style of software that defines the interaction of components of a distributed application on a network or the integration of multiple applications.

One of the requirements of REST is a unified programming interface for all entities with which the web service works. The CRUD (CreateReadUpdateDelete) interface of operations is described using the HTTP request verb (GET, POST, PUT, etc.), the names of entities and, if necessary, the identifiers of these entities.

Consider some possible queries on the models that the simulation service handles: Here, all commands to the service have a single prefix "model". If there is an appeal to many models at once -to get all models, add a new one to many models -only the prefix is used. If you need an action associated with a specific model -get, change, delete -you must continue the request URL with the model identifier. An HTTP verb is used to determine the action to be performed on the request object.

 GET model -
In the REST style, a special approach is laid down for requests that work with some service entities at once. This is how the imitation task is created:

 POST model/{id}/task.
The URL describes the relationship of one particular model with its tasks. A service should take one from the model domain with a specific identifier and refer to its many tasks for simulation. The HTTP verb indicates that a new task should be added to this set.

The receipt of all tasks for simulating a model is described in a similar way:  GET model/{id}/task;  GET task/{id}/report. However, work with many tasks for imitation can be carried out not in the context of any particular model, but immediately with the whole set. The following methods are used for this:

 GET task -get all simulation tasks;  GET task / {id} -get information on a simulation task;  DELETE task / {id} -stop simulation. For each task, many reports are generated. The task report is strongly related to the essence of the task itself. Therefore, deleting a task deletes all reports for this task. The reports do not have unique identifiers and can be received by the whole set.

Data Storage

MongoDB was chosen as the data storage system of the SIM service. MongoDB -DBMS that uses a document-oriented data model. This allows Mon-goDB to carry out CRUD operations very quickly, to be more prepared for changes in stored data and to be more understandable for the user. It is an open-source project that is written in C ++. All libraries and drivers for programming languages and platforms are also available in the public domain.

The storage method in MongoDB is similar to JSON (JavaScriptObjectNotation), although formally JSON is not used. MongoDB uses a format called BSON (bina-ryJSON) for storage. The BSON format has a certain structure and stores some additional information about a specific key and value pair (for example, data type and hash). Therefore, usually an object in BSON takes up a bit more space than JSON. However, BSON allows you to work with data faster: faster search and processing.

In MongoDB, each model is stored as a document. This document stores the entire structure of the model. Fig. 2 shows the simulation model saved by the service in MongoDB.

All models are saved in the Models collection. The structure of the model object itself, in addition to a unique identifier, consists of the following fields:

 Name -model name.

 Resources -an object in the form of a key-value, where key is the name of the resource, and value is the default value of the resource.  Orders -the key-value object, where the key is the name of the request, and the value is an array of the names of the fields of the request.  Nodes -a key-value object, where key is the name of the node, and value is a complex object that describes either the agent or the operation. The "Agent" node has an array of global rules (GlobalRules) and a lot of knowledge (Knowledges). An array of rules stores the same rule entities as operations. Knowledge is a complex key-value object, where key is the name of knowledge, and value is an array of rules that describe this knowledge.

As mentioned earlier, simulation tasks also end up in the database. They are saved to the Tasks collection. The task consists of the following fields.

 ModelId -identifier of the model with which the task is associated.

 ModelRevision -version of the model by which the task was created. If the model has changed between the creation of the task and its immediate imitation, unforeseen incidents may occur.  State -task state.  SubjectArea -the subject area with which the simulation will occur.  Configuration -the configuration with which the simulation will be launched. It stores information about when to stop the simulation, as well as some other information.  Reports -an array of reports that were created for this task. The task may be in one of the states. This is determined by the life cycle of the task. The states are as follows:

 0 -Open -the task is created and ready to simulate;  1 -Scheduled -the task has already been planned, but has not yet been simulated (the engine is being prepared, objects are being created, etc.);  2 -Pending -the task is in simulation;  3 -Failed -the task failed;  4 -Successful -task completed successfully;  5 -Aborted -the task was interrupted;  6 -Deleted -the task was deleted before it was taken into imitation.

Simulation Process

The task created as a result of the HTTP request does not begin to be simulated immediately. It is saved to the database and enters the task queue. Service within a given period of time will check the queue for tasks. If there are no tasks for imitation, the cycle will be repeated after some time. If there is a task in the queue, imitation begins on it. The simulator can simulate several tasks in parallel. The degree of parallelism is not strictly defined and can be configured by the service settings. If the simulator does not have free resources to simulate, he does not look at the queue until they appear.

As soon as some task completes the simulation, the simulator looks through the queue for new tasks.

When the task falls into the simulation, it saves to the database with the status 0 (Open). As soon as the simulator takes the task from the queue, it is set to status 1 (Scheduled). This is necessary so that a parallel process or another instance of the service does not begin to simulate the same task. When the simulator finishes preparations, he will begin the simulation, setting the task status 2 (Pending). Upon successful completion of the task, it will receive the status 4 (Successful), and if an error occurs -3 (Failed). The task can be canceled by a special team. In this case, she will have the status 5 (Aborted) or 6 (Delete).

Fig. 3 shows the pattern of product movement between the hot rolling mill LPC-10 and the cold rolling mill LPC-5.

The task is to recreate the production process of sheet steel coils and conduct a series of studies in which it is necessary to evaluate a set of key parameters within three 24-hours working days. The parameters are as follows:

1. The minimum number of slabs in the warehouse of cast slabs at the beginning of the simulation, providing a continuous supply of slabs every three minutes.

2. The current, minimum, maximum and average number of objects in each warehouse of the system during the simulation time.

3. The load of all units in percent during the simulation time and the current load.

To create such a simulation model, you need to use the POST / api / v1 / model service interface and put a JSON object describing model in the HTTP request body.

Fig. 4 shows a small part of this object. You can see the first nodes of the model on it: two operations "Slab store" and "Batch generator" and the beginning of the description of the "In bake" agent. Nine experiments were conducted with the model. In each experiment, the minimum value of the slabs in the warehouse was changed. Table 3 presents a partial result of the experiments, including the minimum value of slabs in the warehouse, the final output of the model and the waiting time -the total idle time of the furnaces.

According to the results of the experiments, it was decided that the 6th experiment was the best. Starting from it, a continuous flow of slabs in workshops was obtained with the minimum quantity in the warehouse, the best effect was obtained.

Conclusion

The data obtained in the course of this work made it possible to analyze the current development of business process simulation systems (such as AnyLogic, ARIS, BPsim, G2) and highlight the requirements for a new system oriented to work on the Internet. A comparative analysis of the existing dynamic BP models was carried out and the model of the multi-agent resource conversion process was taken as a basis. A prototype web-service for BP simulation BPsim.Web was developed. The web service has been tested in solving the problem of analyzing the processes of two workshops.

Fig. 1 .

 1 Fig. 1. Architecture of the simulation service.

Fig. 2 .

 2 Fig. 2. Simulation model in MongoDB.

Fig. 3 .

 3 Fig. 3. Product flow chart between LPC-10 and LPC-5.

Fig. 4 .

 4 Fig. 4. Part of the model description.

Table 2 .

 2 Analysis of approaches and dynamic models of situations.

	Characteristics	MARCP	SIE-	Model of
			model	APC
	1. Different types of resources	+	+	+
	2. Time attendance	+	+	+
	3. Conflicts on shared resources and tools	+	+	+
	4. Discrete operation	+	+	+
	5. Complex resource (application), application queue	+	+	+
	6. Language for describing situations, diagnosing situations and finding solutions.	+	+	no
	7. Decision Maker Model	+	no	no

  Parallel version control of the application focused on .NET Core.  Tools that simplify the process of modern web development.  Ability to build and run on Windows, macOS and Linux.  Open source and community oriented. ASP.NET Core comes fully in NuGet packages. Using NuGet packages allows you to optimize applications to include only the necessary dependencies. ASP.NET Core 2.

solution for creating a web user interface and web API.  Integration of modern client platforms and development workflows.  Cloud-based configuration system based on the environment.  Built-in dependency injection.  Simplified, high-performance, modular HTTP request pipeline.  Ability to host in IIS, Nginx, Apache, Docker or in your own process. 

Table 3 .

 3 The results of experiments.

	№	The min. number of slabs	Model output	Waiting time
	1	310	776	234
	2	350	628	133
	3	390	538	69
	4	410	543	65
	5	430	529	48
	6	477	503	11
	7	490	517	13

Acknowledgment

The reported study was funded by RFBR according to the research project № 18-37-00183.

9


Eugene Jolas's Wife Maria

Elliot Paul

Robert Sage

Harry Crosby

Stuart Gilbert

Matthew Josephson

James Johnson Sweeney

transition, 1927-1938, Between Modernisms 1 transition was edited with the help of

Keywords: American Modernism, Surrealism, Expressionism, Dadaism, but also early 19 th -century

transition was

Introduction

Directed by American poet and journalist Eugene Jolas (1894-1952), and published between 1927 and 1938, mainly in Paris and in English, the literary and artistic magazine transition is the last important exile magazine of the interwar period and one of the most important magazines of its generation. 1 In eleven yearsan unusually long run for a 'little magazine' -, transition produced 25 issues (among them two double issues) averaging 200 pages each.

With five hundred contributors coming from all over the world, transition offered contributions ranging from literature to music, drawing, painting, sculpture, architecture, philosophy, ethnology, linguistics, cinema and photography. 2 Many literary and artistic avantgardes found their way into its pages, the most represented beingin this order -Anglo-Metamorphosis), Saint-John Perse, Hugo Ball, Henri Michaux, Raymond Queneau, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, Paul Éluard, Robert Desnos, Philippe Soupault, René Crevel, Rafael Alberti, Alfred Döblin, C. G. Jung, Kurt Schwitters, Gottfried Benn, and others. Among the contributors to the magazine the reader can find prestigious names such as Hans Arp, Antonin Artaud, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Max Ernst, Vassily Kandinsky, Alfred H. Barr, Alexander Calder, Man Ray, and Louis Zukofsky.

However, transition's achievement goes beyond its ability to present the reader with a vast array of cultural movements and fascinating texts. While transition actively contributed to the transnational dialogue of the time, it also marked a chronological transition by helping redefine the particular kind of Anglo-American Modernism prevailing in the 1910s and 1920s, and usually known as 'early Modernism', 'first-stage Modernism', 'the avant-garde phase of Modernism', or 'historical Modernism'. 5 transition sheds light on the crisis of this 'historical Modernism' at the end of the 1920s and helps shape a new, minor form of 'late Modernism'. This crisis took different forms, all indicating an institutionalization of the avant-garde movement. As the word 'Modernism' itself was increasingly publicized, an important anthological and critical enterprise emerged, suggesting that the time had come to cast a look backwards and assess the achievement of the contemporary literary generation. Various important anthologies were published, such as the retrospective Imagist Anthology (1930), 5 The first three phrases are used by Marjorie Perloff in 21 st Williams certainly alluded to the fact that transition published many writers and artists of unequal quality. But 'looseness' and 'unconfinement' also described the magazine's internal structure, relying, more often than not, on the mere juxtaposition of texts and documents within broadly encompassing sections such as 'Fiction', 'Reproductions', 'Poetry', 'Essays' (up to no: 12) or 'America' and 'Other Countries' (no: 14). Number 13, for example, presents successively an extract from Work in Progress, a scenario by William Closson Emory, a poem by Archibald MacLeish, a short story by Peter Neagoë, a text by Gertrude Stein, and so on. Similarly, the various art and literature sections do not so much engage in a dialogue as contribute to the eclectism and visual beauty of the magazine. As if to add to the reader's confusion, few critical articles shed light on the literary pieces presented in the magazine (Work in Progress being a notable exception). Far from taking on the collage tradition, which involves precise compositional designs, transition seems to develop according to an organic pattern of successive additions. 13 12 Letter to James Laughlin, 23 January 1938, William Carlos Williams and James Laughlin: Selected Letters, ed. Hugh Witemeyer (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), p. 26. 13 The idea that transition exemplified the collage tradition is developed by Dickran Tashjian This 'looseness', however, is offset by numerous editorials (about 50 over 27 issues) explicitly shaping the ideological and aesthetic orientation of the magazine. Almost all of them were signed by director and editor in chief Eugene Jolas; transition's editorial policy therefore strongly reflected Jolas's own ideas. While transition continued the publishing tradition of earlier Modernist magazines by defining itself as a laboratory open to experimental writers from all over the world, the magazine also set a new agenda by becoming the first Anglo-American magazine to engage actively in the exploration of the unconscious, in the wake of Joyce and the French Surrealists, as well as the German Romantics, Jung and the primitivist and occultist traditions. From the first editorial, Jolas and Elliot Paul defined art as a 'tangible link between the centuries (...) join[ing] distant continents into a mysterious unit.' 14 Over time, the editors asserted that 'only the dream is essential' 15 , and, in the wake of Schelling, defined art as 'a reconciliation of the conscious and the unconscious'. 16 At about the same time, transition enthusiastically adopted Jung's notion of

The Revolution of the Word

The 'Revolution of the Word' manifesto, published in June 1929, expresses most succinctly the main goals of transition. 21 The manifesto was probably written by Jolas, and was signed by sixteen regular contributors of transitionthe most famous being Hart Crane. 22 Although a manifesto of avant-garde pretensions, 'The Revolution of the Word' paradoxically reveals a propensity to continuity visible in its sober, classical form (Fig 1) as well as in its inscription within literary traditions from the past. The first statement is a case in point: 'The revolution in the English language is an accomplished fact.' The authors inscribe themselves within a tradition at the very moment when they proclaim a 'revolution'. The manifesto's continuity with Romanticism and Bergsonism is especially striking, as statements 3, 10 and 11 (and Blake's aphorisms) suggest: 'Pure poetry is a lyrical absolute that seeks an a priori reality within ourselves alone.' 'Time is a tyranny to be abolished.' 'The writer expresses. He does not communicate.' This paradox highlights transition's original relationship to avant-gardism: the magazine uses avant-gardist forms (such as the manifesto) but rejects its fundamental idea, that of a break with the past. In fact, two separate logics collide in the pages of the magazine: that of the avant-garde moment of Modernism, and that of its institutionalization. This leads, at times, to an almost schizophrenic discourse. In the same paragraph, Jolas can call himself an 'iconoclast' and 'defend the right to think in eternal terms'; he can claim 'it is high time to make tabula rasa' while pursuing a synthesis between the centuries and the continents [START_REF]The Revolution of the Word' also promotes playful linguistic innovations, with Michaux's 'Le Grand Combat' (no: 16-17), Vitrac's little known essay 'Le Language à part' (no: 18), Desnos's extracts from Langage cuit, or Prévert's[END_REF] . The story of transition's lowercase 't' illustrates this collision. In January 1924, Ford Madox Ford chose to use lowercase letters for the title of his magazine and was astonished at the publicity it received as a consequence. 24 When Jolas borrowed Ford's idea three years later, his intention was clear: 'As an old newspaperman, I knew that the critics would give it a howling reception, and anyway it was the fashion among many continental 'little magazines' of the day.' 25 The use of a lowercase 't' in transition becomes an advertising strategy, and points to a new historical stage of Modernism. In any case, the ambivalence of the 'Revolution of the Word' is not only generic; it also derives from the imprecision and at times the awkwardness of some statements: when the editors claim that 'Narrative is not mere anecdote but the projection of a metamorphosis of reality', it is not clear whether they distinguish between reality and realism; when they state that they are tired of the 'hegemony of the banal word [and] monotonous syntax', we might wonder if such hegemony is not fought by literature as a whole. At the same time, however, this manifesto imposes itself as a coherent text: the rejection of realism and the defense of imagination and subjectivity echo the editorial line of the magazine. What is more, the 'Revolution of the Word' points towards a new direction: that of a revolution of language, of a 'liberation of typically bearing on Jolas's supposed claim for the materiality of the word. 27 A few texts (such as Tzara's and Brown's), and the title of the manifesto itself seem to foreshadow the Language Poets' experiments; but this is not enough to balance against the 'Revolution of the Word''s powerful neo-Romanticism. As editor Stuart Gilbert wrote: 'The Revolution of the Word is a movement to explore this secondary, non-utilitarian function of language, to treat the aura, the 'light vapour which floats above the expression of the thought'.' 28 Halfway between Jolas's personal concerns and a collective movement, the 'Revolution of the Word' is less the expression of a group than an international gathering of energies and texts, providing the readers with a general direction, that of the dream against reality, that of the word against the image, at a time when the creation of a literary group as such proves particularly difficult. As Josephine Herbst wrote, 'you might snatch at a new transition as a member of an underground might pore over a secret leaflet for a possible direction to Unlike Stein, then, both transition and Joyce pursued a 'language of night' 31 able to express 'a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry 30 Gertrude Stein, Everybody's Autobiography (London and Toronto: William Heinemann Ltd, 1938), p. 260. grammar and goahead plot.' 32 Their goals, however, were not the same. Whereas Jolas insisted on the necessity for the poet to express the chaos of his inner self, Joyce aimed at producing an effect on his readers; in other words, Joyce defined himself as a fiction maker while Jolas tried to sustain the myth of a language that would faithfully convey the poet's inner truth. Even though their projects differed, Joyce found in transition a staunch ally at a time when his new work was widely rejected. The magazine did not only provide a stable

Although Stein and Joyce are usually perceived as transition's leading personalities, Hart

Crane is probably the contributor whose aesthetic is most in line with transition's. Apart from signing the 'Revolution of the Word' manifesto, Crane contributed seven pieces to the magazine, among them 3 unpublished extracts from The Bridge ('Cutty Sark' and 'The Harbor Dawn' (no: 3), as well as 'Van Winkle' (no: 7)). The general project of The Bridge is very close to transition's, whose planned title was, for a time, 'Bridge'. 33 Like Jolas, Crane feels that the time is one of transition; this is what he writes Allen Tate in July 1930: 'You will admit our age (at least our predicament) to be one of transition.' 34 In the same way that 32 James Joyce, Letters III, ed. Richard Ellmann (London: Faber and Faber, 1966), p. 146. 33 See Jolas, Man from Babel, p. 88. transition aims at creating a link between people, centuries and continents 35 , The Bridge is conceived as a link between America's mythic past and chaotic present, between the finite and the infinite, the universal and the particular, the archaic and the modern, the religious and the profane, and, like transition, between historical Modernism and a later form of Modernism. Both Jolas and Crane are looking for an enthusiastic expression of the cosmic, spiritual and even religious links that unite human beings in spite of the chaos characterizing their time of transition. At the heart of their aesthetic projects lies a deep aspiration for unity, for a 'synthesis' originally at work in German and English Romanticisms. The Bridge, to Crane, is 'a mystical synthesis of America'. 36 transition thus welcomed two masterpieces widely rejected at the time, The Bridge, condemned for its neo-Romanticism by influential critics such as Yvor Winters, Allen Tate, Although Modernist magazines at large and exile magazines in particular tend to pay much attention to foreign literatures and cultures, transition deserves a special mention for presenting itself not only as a great cosmopolitan magazine open to international writers and avant-gardes, but also as an internationalist publication advocating a transnational union of humanity across state boundaries. Its 'invitation' to both 'American writers' and 'writers of all other countries' 'to appear, side by side'37 , in the pages of the magazine, resulted in its publication of 250 foreign contributors (i. e. half the total number of transition's contributors) representing a vast array of countries and avant-gardes (mainly Surrealism, Expressionism and Dadaism).

Many now famous writers were first published in English in transition. Such seems to be the

Conclusion

For more than ten years, transition actively contributed to Anglo-American cultural life. However, at the end of the 1930s, the magazine's apolitical and neo-Romantic editorial line became harder and harder to defend. In the face of growing political tensions both in Europe and the United States, transition eventually died at the hands of a new political avant-garde whose main publications were New Masses (1926-1948) and Partisan Review (1934-2003).

While transition sheds light on the rich cultural bonds uniting Europe and the Americas, and more specifically France and the United States, the magazine also helps better understand the transition between earlier and later modernisms starting at the end of the 1920s and corresponding to the institutionalization of 'historical', or 'early' Modernism. Some characteristics of this new 'vortex' are mainly negative, such as the dilution of the avant-garde impulse (apparent in transition's notion of 'synthesis' for example), difficulties in forming

  in A Boatload of Madmen: Surrealism and the American Avant-Garde (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995, p. 26) and above all by David Bennett in an article strangely entitled 'Collage, Individualism and Fascism: The Poetics and Politics of a Modernist Magazine' (Cahiers Charles V, no: 34 (September 2003), p. 13.)

  the 'collective unconscious' that Jolas discovered when translating 'Psychology and Poetry', first published in English in transition no: 19-20 (June 1930). The discovery of the 'collective unconscious' was essential to Jolas inasmuch as it allowed him to theorize the 'universality of [people's] impulses'.17 The magazine also started developing an important work on the relationship between language and the unconscious, culminating in June 1929 with the publication of the 'Revolution of the Word' manifesto. As a result, the 'literature of the unconscious', in the broad sense of the term, covers the majority of the contributions published in transition, from Work in Progress to poems by Hölderlin and Novalis, about 50 14 transition no: 1, April 1927, p. 135. 15 transition no: 3, June 1927, p. 179. 16 transition no: 19-20, June 1930, p. 144. Surrealist contributions, experimental texts associated with the 'Revolution of the Word', and dream stories. transition's exploration of the unconscious relied heavily on Romanticism and in particular on Novalis's conception of the unconscious as a source of wisdom waiting to be set free. transition's neo-Romanticism thus constitutes the second main element of the magazine's editorial line. In his autobiography, Jolas wrote: 'I wanted to encourage the creation of a modern Romanticism, a pan-Romantic movement in literature and the arts.' 18 Most of the literary texts published in transition delineate 'a pan-Romantic movement', whose definition, however vague, as the prefix 'pan' suggests, implies a will to express the 'I' and set the imagination free. The magazine pays homage to Hölderlin, Novalis, Goethe, and Blake, and publicizes many avant-gardes related to Romanticism, such as Expressionism, Dadaism and Surrealism. transition's 'pan-Romanticism' also helps define the quest for the absolute that characterizes the second series of the magazine as of March 1932 (with contributions by Harry Crosby, Camille Schuwer and Georges Pelorson, Joe Bousquet and Léon Bloy). Even more strikingly, transition's neo-Romanticism pervades the editorials of the magazine, and finds its most successful expression in the recurring notion of 'synthesis', defined as the 'natural passion' of the 'true poet' 19 aiming at universal harmony through the reconciliation of all contraries (including capitalism and communism). transition's neo-Romantic investigations of the unconscious represented a fruitful alternative to Eliot's and above all 18 Eugene Jolas, Man from Babel, ed. Andreas Kramer and Rainer Rumold (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 93. Pound's historical Modernism, away from 'the 'clean', 'hard', inorganic values of Imagism and Vorticism.' 20

20

  Peter Nicholls, Modernisms: A Literary Guide (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), p. 197. While transition's neo-Romantic editorial line sometimes recalls Eliot's aesthetics, its investigation of the unconscious sets it apart from him. 21 transition no: 16-17, June 1929, p. 13. 22 See McMillan, Transition 1927-38, p. 48.

action.' 29

 29 Three major contributors: Stein, Joyce, Crane Between 1927 and 1932, transition published a dozen texts by Stein, among them 'An Elucidation', written in 1923 but first published in transition four years later, 'Four Saints in 27 See Dylan Thomas's letter to Glyn Jones, c. 14 March 1934, in Dylan Thomas, The Collected Letters, ed. Paul Ferris (London: J. M. Dent, 2000 [1985]), p. 122; and Patricia Waugh, Revolutions of the Word, Intellectual Contexts for the Study of Modern Literature (London: Arnold, 1997), p. 1. 28 transition no: 18, November 1929, p. 204. 29 Josephine Herbst, The Starched Blue Sky of Spain and Other Memoirs (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1991), p. 82. Three Acts', written in 1927, and first published in transition in 1929, and, in 1928, 'Tender Buttons', long out of print since its first publication fourteen years earlier. The magazine also provided helpful critical background, including two essays (one by Laura Riding, the other by Ralph Church) and a precious bibliography of Stein's writings between 1904 and 1929, later used as a basis for the Haas-Gallup catalogue (1940) and more recently reprinted by Kostelanetz in his Gertrude Stein Reader (2002). Stein's publication gave transition greater visibility because of her potential for controversy, even as this visibility benefited Stein, who only started to be better known after the publication of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in 1933. However, the collaboration soon deteriorated when editor Elliot Paul, with whom she maintained good relationships, resigned in 1928. It was brought to an end when Stein criticized the Jolas in The Autobiography and Maria Jolas reacted by publishing a 'Testimony against Gertrude Stein' in transition no: 23 (July 1935). Part of the misunderstanding was due to personal feelings: Stein was growing jealous of Joyce's presence in the magazine, while Jolas resented her whims. Even more importantly, a wide aesthetic gap set the writer and the magazine apart: whereas Jolas was trying to express a new reality, by relying on the structure of language and respecting a traditional narrative framework, Stein was working on the structure itself, calling into question the very notion of narrativity. Hence Stein's comment about Joyce and Braque: 'they are the incomprehensibles whom anybody can understand. Les incompréhensibles que tout le monde peut comprendre.' 30

  outlet for the publication of Work in Progress (from 1927 to 1938, 371 pages of Joyce's work were published over 17 issues of transition); the editors also wrote and published about 20 essays aiming at explaining the new work (most of them reprinted in book form in 1929 under Joyce's title Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress).

34

  Hart Crane's letter to Allen Tate, 13 July 1930, in Hart Crane, The Complete Poems & Selected Letters & Prose, ed. Brom Weber (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 1966), p. 257.

  R. P. Blackmur, or William Carlos Williams, and Work in Progress, considered as a dead end by Harriet Shaw Weaver, Léon-Paul Fargue, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, H. G. Wells and Wyndham Lewis among others. Both works come close to transition's main aesthetic projects: the exploration of the unconscious on the one hand, and neo-Romantic investigations on the other. Both works, each in its own way, also ensured a transition between an earlier and a later kind of Modernism. Both reflect historical Modernism in embracing and reorchestrating a set of myths and texts, yet both are characterized by elements of a later Modernism-metadiscourse and ironic laughter in Joyce, and neo-Romanticism in Crane. transition's cosmopolitanism and internationalism 35 See transition no: 1, April 1927, p. 135. 36 Letter to Gorham B. Munson, 18 February 1923, in The Letters of Hart Crane, 1916-1932, ed. Brom Weber, (New York: Hermitage House, 1952), p. 124.

  case of Robert Desnos, Philippe Soupault, Paul Éluard, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, André Breton, Hans Arp, Ivan Goll, Benjamin Péret, Pierre Unik, Jacques Baron, Roger Vitrac, René Crevel, Tristan Tzara, Antonin Artaud, Joe Bousquet, Henry Poulaille, Drieu la Rochelle, Hugo Ball, Saint-John Perse, André Gide, Alfred Döblin, Franz Kafka, Léon-Paul Fargue (not translated into English again before 1943), Alejo Carpentier (not translated into English again before 1947), or Gottfried Benn (not translated into English again before 1950). Among transition's most important translations, or partial translations, one can cite extracts from Saint-John Perse's Éloges, Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz, and Carl Einstein's Bebuquin (not yet translated into English), Breton's first chapter of Nadja (published the same month in French in La Révolution surréaliste and in English in transition), Desnos's first chapters of La Liberté ou l'amour ! (only fully translated into English in 1993), and Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis and 'Letter to the Father'. Interestingly, among the texts translated into English by transition, three were apparently subsequently lost in their original language: Soupault's essay 'Whither French Literature?' (no: 16-17) and scenario 'The Mill' (no: 19-20), as well as Arp's 'Notes from a Diary' (no: 21). Without transition's translations, those texts would probably have been lost for good. 38 transition's exceptional cosmopolitanism and internationalism owe much to Eugene Jolas's private life. An American born in 1894 to a modest Franco-German couple, Jolas lived the first years of his life both in the United States and in multilingual Lorraine. The 'man from Babel', to quote the title of his autobiography, was shaped by this distinctive linguistic, cultural and political situation: I grew up, an American in exile, in the hybrid world of the Franco-German frontier, in a transitional region where people swayed to and fro in cultural and political oscillation, in the twilight zone of the German and French languages. (...) the bilingual conflict was a daily one (...) languages and dialects [were] ready to spring at each other's throats (...) emigration only brought further disorder, a sort of glotto-pathology for which there has seemed to be no permanent remedy. 39 38 These translations are translated into French in Céline Mansanti, 'Présence du surréalisme français dans la revue américaine transition (Paris, 1927-1938) : Eugène Jolas entre André Breton et Ivan Goll', Mélusine, no: 26, 'Métamorphoses', Paris: L'Âge d'Homme (February 2006), pp. 277-304. From then on, Jolas dreamed of a frontierless world and 'a new language, a super-tongue for intercontinental expression'. 40 transition, in many ways, is the result of this dream. After many trips between Forbach in Lorraine and the U. S., from 1911 to 1926, and many experiences including odd jobs as a grocery store delivery man, a newspaperman and an editor for the New Orleans-based Double-Dealer (see chapter 00), Jolas decided to settle in France with Maria Jolas, his newly-wed wife from a rich Kansas family. Thanks to Maria's financial support, transition's first issue came out in April 1927. transition's success was based on several factors. One is that its appearance was particularly well-timed. With the death of This Quarter's editor Ernest Walsh in October 1926, a niche opened for a new exile magazine in Paris. Concomitantly, Joyce and Sylvia Beach were looking for a stable outlet to publish Work in Progress. Since March 1924, when the first instalment came out in the transatlantic review, Work in Progress had appeared in three more magazines (the Criterion, Le Navire d'argent and This Quarter) and both Joyce and Beach had lost a considerable amount of energy contacting the editors and dealing with practical details. Another reason for transition's success was the number and quality of Jolas's international literary connections. In 1921 in Strasbourg, Jolas participated in Solveen's internationalist and trilingual (Alsatian, French, German) Nouveaux Cahiers alsaciens and later became acquainted with the internationalist, avant-gardist and neo-Romantic Arc group gathering the magazine's editors and collaborators (Henri Solveen, René Schickelé and Kasimir Edschmid) as well as other personalities such as Hans Arp, Claire and Ivan Goll, and Marcel Noll. Through Marcel Noll, Jolas met Éluard in 1924 in Paris, and subsequently other Surrealists such as Péret and Desnos. From November 1924 and for about a year, Jolas was in charge of the column 'Rambles through Literary Paris' for the Paris edition of the Chicago

  literary groups (experienced by personalities such as Pound, Zukofsky or Williams, and reflected by the looseness of the 'Revolution of the Word' movement), or the interferences of avant-garde and 'post-avant-garde' discourses (mostly at work in transition's editorials). But transition's emerging late Modernism is also characterized by the resurgence of a Romantic tradition (particularly in Crane's Bridge), the exploration of the unconscious (as well as related themes such as the night, or the 'soft', the organic, etc) and the radicalization of formal experimentation (in Joyce's Work in Progress or transition's 'Revolution of the Word'). Among transition's most interesting late Modernist achievements was the creation and publication of a coherent, yet wide-ranging American literary Surrealist avant-garde. Between the historical Modernism of its predecessors and the political avant-gardism of some of its successors, transition thus contributes to defining a lesser-known yet seminal Modernist current. 69 [Along with the "Revolution of the Word" manifesto (to be inserted within this article), I send more illustrations to pick from if necessary] 69 For more information on transition, see Céline Mansanti, La revue transition (1927-1938), le modernisme historique en devenir, forthcoming February 2009, the Presses Universitaires de Rennes.

11 transition's editorial line

  -Century Modernism, Oxford: Blackwell, 2002, p. 3. 'Historical modernism' is used by Jean-Michel Rabaté in 'La Tradition du neuf : introduction au modernisme anglo-saxon', in Les Cahiers du Musée National d'Art Moderne (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou), no: 19-20 (June 1987), p. 106. Riding's and Graves's A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927) and Jolas's Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie américaine (1927). In 1930, Pound sketched a history of the 'little magazine', from Poetry (1912) to transition; two years later, Contact engaged in a similar exercise, covering the period stretching from Camera Work (1902) to transition, and presenting in two consecutive issues a detailed bibliography of the American 'little magazine'. 6 Other symptoms revealed the extent of the crisis, such as the difficulty of creating literary groups 7 , or the dearth of new poetic forms, experienced by writers such as Kay Boyle, William Carlos Williams or Allen Tate. 8 Unsurprisingly, the 'little magazines' of the time were heavily affected by this crisis. Pound's experience with the Exile in 1927 was mainly one of bitterness and frustration. Aside from editorial difficulties of all kinds and the competition of the much more widely circulated transition, the Exile evidenced Pound's frustration in forming a group. 9 Around 1928, the Criterion started its slow decline towards royalism, anglo-William Carlos Williams's 1932 letter to Kay Boyle, The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams, ed. John C. Thirwall (New York: McDowell, 1957), p. 129. Allen Tate, 'John Peale See for example his letter to Zukofsky, 31 August 1928, Ezra Pound Miscellany, YCAL MSS 182, Beinecke, Yale, Box 3, File 72: 'Unless there is life enough in US or NY to create such a group as mentioned in mine of Feb 25. I wouldn't care much about continuing Xile.' catholicism and neo-classicism, and progressively shifted away from literature as Eliot lost interest in his own periodical. 1929 marked the disappearance of two landmarks: the provocative Little Review, one of the cornerstones of early American Modernism, and the Dial, which had established itself as one of the most important Modernist magazines by publishing pieces such as The Waste Land or selections from The Cantos. With the almost simultaneous disappearance of both magazines, a page was turned, as Poetry's editor Morton Dauwen Zabel foreshadowed in a common tribute: 'In going, they open the way to our next literary period, and so leave with us some of the sensations of suspense we experienced when they first flashed upon the view.' 10 Maybe more than any other 'little magazine' of the time, William Carlos Williams regretted that 'there was [in New Directions] too much Transition like random shooting -perhaps that's the way that it should be, loose, unconfined.' 12

	Writing in 1938 to James Laughlin who had just launched his magazine New Directions,
	transition stood out from this grim landscape and 'open[ed] the way to the next literary
	period'. Far from lapsing into disillusion and bitterness, the magazine responded positively to
	the disintegration of historical Modernism, choosing neither a clearly reactionary path (unlike
	Eliot's Criterion or Salemson's Tambour) nor playing on with rules that no longer seemed to
	apply (unlike Pound who desperately tried to create a group of young writers, when,
	according to Williams, 'no group w[ould] form'). On Pound's editorial hardships, see Craig Monk, 'The Price of Publishing Modernism: Ezra
	Pound and the Exile in America', Canadian Review of American Studies, no: 31 (2001), pp.
	Bishop' (1935), in Essays of Four Decades (London: Oxford University Press, 1970 [1968]), 429-46.
	p. 349. 10 Morton Dauwen Zabel, 'The Way of Periodicals', Poetry, vol. XXXIV, no: 6 (September
	1929), p. 334.
	11 'No group will form', letter to T. C. Wilson, 12 July 1933, The Selected Letters of William
	Carlos Williams, ed. John C. Thirwall, (New York: McDowell, 1957), pp. 141-2.

6 See Ezra Pound, 'Small Magazines', The English Journal, vol. XIX, no: 9, November 1930, pp. 689-704; and William Carlos Williams, 'The Advance Guard Magazine', Contact, vol. I, no: 1, February 1932, Kraus Reprint, 1967, pp. 86-90. 7 See Pound's and Zukofsky's correspondence between Feb 1928 and Oct 1930 in Ezra Pound Papers and Ezra Pound Miscellany, Beinecke, Yale, and in Pound-Zukofsky: Selected Letters of Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky, ed. Barry Ahearn (New York: New Directions, 1987).

8 9

transition no: 1, April 1927, p. 135.

transition no: 16-17, June 1929, p. 29.

transition no: 1, April 1927, p. 137.

Tribune, where he interviewed Claire and Ivan Goll, Joseph Delteil, Philippe Soupault, Valery Larbaud and André Breton. During these years, Jolas was acquainted with many French writers and editors such as Jean Giraudoux, François Mauriac, Tristan Tzara, Jacques Rivière, André Gide, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, Pierre Mac Orlan, Michel Leiris, Roger Vitrac and Antonin Artaud. Through Sylvia Beach, Jolas met Joyce (in 1924), Hemingway, and probably Archibald MacLeish. 'Shakespeare and Co''s owner also acted as transition's main agent until June 1930 and she was probably the one who sent their copies to the Gotham Book Mart in New York. Across the street, Adrienne Monnier, the owner of 'La Maison des livres' and administrator of Commerce, was probably instrumental in transition's publication of Commerce's editors or contributors Léon-Paul Fargue, Valery Larbaud, Marcel Jouhandeau, Henri Michaux, André Gide, Saint-John Perse, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, Alfonso Reyes, and André Breton. On the American front, many contributors of transition were already published in the Double-Dealer (such as Allen Tate, Hart Crane and H. D., as well as Richard Aldington, John Gould Fletcher, Hamilton Basso, Robert Graves, Malcolm Cowley, Pierre Loving, Kenneth Fearing, Bravig Imbs, and Samuel Putnam), or in This Quarter (such as Man Ray, Gertrude Stein, H. D., Ernest Hemingway, William Carlos Willams, Bryher, Blanche Matthias, Kenneth Fearing, James Joyce, Robert McAlmon, Djuna Barnes, Morley Callaghan, John Herrmann and Yvor Winters). As for Elliot Paul, Robert Sage, Bravig Imbs, Virgil Geddes, and Henry Miller, all were associated with the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune. Not only did 'Transocean' 41 gather in its pages many different writers and work as a bridge between continents and cultures, to the greatest happiness of its contributors; the magazine 41 This is how Joyce refers to transition in Work in Progress (transition no: 4, July 1927, p. 63).

also offered a tribune to the dissident Surrealists. 42 Almost all the authors of A Corpse, a pamphlet written in reaction to Breton's massive wave of excommunications in the Second Manifesto of Surrealism in 1929, were contributors to transition. 43 Queneau and Michaux, influenced by Surrealism but put off by its clan-like organisation, also found an outlet in transition, where they particularly enjoyed the 'Revolution of the Word' movement and Joyce's experiments. Conversely, Breton and Aragon were seldom published, and Éluard, whom Jolas particularly liked, did not appear in transition between March 1928 and 1937. As for Breton and Jolas, their relationships were marked by distance and indifference, until a quarrel in 1941 resulted in Breton calling Jolas a heretic and Jolas reproached Breton with never paying attention to his magazine. 44 Although Surrealism was the avant-garde that most influenced transition, the magazine quickly tried to differentiate itself from Breton's movement. First, it declared itself apolitical (in spite of communist sympathies, as of 1927).

Second, whereas 'Surrealists never aimed at stepping outside the laws of language' 45 , the 'Revolution of the Word' offered to express the new reality, that of the unconscious, with a 42 Many testimonies, by contributors such as John Glassco, Josephine Herbst, Henry Miller, Harry Crosby, Kay Boyle and others, show that transition's cosmopolitanism and internationalism were considered as a vital source of inspiration. 43 They include Jacques Prévert, Robert Desnos, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, Michel Leiris, Roger Vitrac, Jacques Baron, Gérard Limbour, Raymond Queneau, Jacques-André Boiffard, Max Morise and Alejo Carpentier. 44 See two unpublished letters by Jolas at the Bibliothèque Jacques Doucet in Paris. The second one, dated September 21, 1941, quotes several extracts from Breton's letter, apparently lost. 45 Michel Remy, Surrealism in Britain (Aldershot and Brookfield Vermont: Ashgate, 1999), p. 30. new language involving a reform of syntax and vocabulary. Third, transition's powerful aspiration for 'synthesis' set it apart from Breton's historical materialism and brought it close to Le Grand Jeu, a dissident Surrealist magazine founded in 1928 by Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, René Daumal and Roger Vailland which pursued a metaphysical and mystical quest. 46 But the most striking difference between Breton's Surrealism and transition's editorial line is transition's staunch advocacy of internationalism, in the wake of the internationalist brand of Surrealism that Ivan Goll tried unsuccessfully to oppose to Breton's more narrow conception of the movement in 1924. In his 'Manifesto of Surrealism' published in the one and only issue of his magazine Surréalisme in October 1924, Goll wrote: 'Surrealism does not content itself with being the means of expression of a group or a country: it will also be international, it will absorb all the isms dividing Europe, and will gather the vital elements of each.' 47 Although transition was not a repetition of Goll's manifesto and developed its own agenda, the magazine shared with the poet a conception of Surrealism, as well as a passion for pacifism and internationalism, that set them apart from Breton, who never paid attention to the American, British and Irish exiles in Paris. Only in 1953 did Breton acknowledge the talent of Anglophone writers such as Joyce and Cummings, and the existence of a broader movement interested in a reform of language, but he still could not hide his contempt for experiments other than his own: to him, the 'unleashing of a 'revolution of the word' (James Joyce, EE Cummings, Henri Michaux) [...] could do nothing but result in 'lettrism'. realist. Some of these texts also included Joycean experiments on language: Burnett stages a 'squidge', while George Whitsett's nursery rhyme 'Dancing Rope' starts: 'Lice night/ And the nice before./ Lambs and cuttlefish came to my door,/ The lambs wore plumes,/ The cuttlefish said,/ And a spray of almond over their head.' 53 The use of the fantastic in all these texts reveals an original interpretation of Surrealism, apparently mediated through 'The Revolution of the Word', and in any case separate from the aesthetics of French Surrealist texts. To Breton, the fantastic is mere fiction, unlike the marvellous, which springs from a poetic confrontation (an example of this could be Éluard's 'The Earth is blue like an orange.') 54 Moreover, the personification and animation of animals and objects noticeable in most of 51 transition no: 13, Summer 1928, p. 37. 52 Ibid., p. 199.

53 transition no: 24, June 1936, p. 38. 54 See André Breton, Preface to Pierre Mabille, Le Miroir du merveilleux (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1977 [1962]). these texts did not originate in either French Surrealism or Joyce; they do recall, however, Lewis Carroll's universe, where animals are humanized and flowers brought to life.

Another American literary interpretation of Surrealism is the 'Superrealist' path cut by Nathanael West, William Carlos Williams and Murray Godwin, the last of whom was a steady contributor to transition who did not publish much outside the magazine. 55 'Superrealism' was not a movement distinct from Surrealism; the word merely constituted an early translation of the French. However, this happenstance wording is also significant: as Jonathan Veitch has remarked, 'It is, as its name implies, an 'excessive realism'.' 56 The phrase 'American Superrealism' is first used by West in a 1931 letter to Williams mentioning Godwin as a future contributor to the second series of Contact, edited by Williams and West as of February 1932. 57 West's The Dream Life of Balso Snell (not published in transition) as well as three of Godwin's contributions to transition (two extracts from Work on Sidetrack published in transition no: 4 and 15 and a piece entitled 'In His Footsteps' in transition no: 9) better define this 'American Superrealism'. Interestingly, both Godwin and West rely on fantastic aesthetics: Godwin humanizes cars while West's narrator wanders through the entrails of the Trojan horse. But 'American Superrealism' is also a subversive reaction to the 55 Murray Godwin's life remains mysterious. A few biographical indications can be found in transition (transition no: 4, July 1927, p. 180). 56 Jonathan Veitch, American Superrealism, Nathanael West and the Politics of 'Frenchified symbolist stuff' 58 at work, for example, in Wayne Andrews's and Paul Bowles's Surrealist contributions to transition. 59 Against what West sees as an egocentric and morbid hypersensitivity 60 , both West and Godwin use a dynamic, American language (involving much American slang) relying on experience rather than abstractions ('Life is like thatforever turning up a case uncovered by experience.') 61 , and even, with the gratuitous murder of the idiot in The Dream Life of Balso Snell, incorporating scenes of violence, closely associated by West with the United States. 62 Both writers advocate a concrete, 'low' type of writing, using the physiological, and even scatological body as a theme, and relying aesthetically on the grotesque (Godwin, West) and the pastiche (West). Unlike West's and Godwin's, Williams's main Surrealist contribution to transition, a long extract from A Novelette published in transition no: 19-20 (June 1930), does not tend towards social criticism or the grotesque, and does not create a fantastic aesthetic. But A Novelette contributes to defining 'American Superrealism' by theorizing an American counter-proposal to French Surrealism. Whereas his 1924 improvisations (some of which are 58 Ibid., p. 771. 59 Both Andrews and Bowles (with 'Entity' in no: 13 and 'Spire Song' in no: 12) are fascinated with Europe and France which they associate to refinement, culture and decadence. 60 In The Dream Life of Balso Snell, Balso Snell violently addresses Saint Puce: 'Don't be morbid. Take your eyes off your navel. Take your head from under your armpit. Stop sniffing mortality. Play games. Don't read so many books. Take cold showers. Eat more meat.' (in