Clusters
Until recently, modernist food studies has been like dinner at Clarissa Dalloway’s party: apparently on offer, but mostly offstage. While scholars have counted chestnuts peeled and cocktails quaffed by Ernest Hemingway, and contemplated the savor of urine in the kidneys gobbled by Leopold Bloom, it is not until quite recently that the methodologies of food studies—rather than merely its...
May 5, 2019
Reading “The Waste Land” with the #MeToo Generation
Fig. 1. Women’s March, New York City, 2018. Photograph by Alec Perkins. Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
I did it again.
In Tuesday’s class, my undergraduate literature students were wrapping up a great discussion of Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961). We’d had a rigorous look at Brexit and Scotland, on the changing status of girls’ education...
Mar 4, 2019
Blogs
Joyce & the Dems: Ulysses, Politics, and Cultural Capital
“We are still learning to be Joyce's contemporaries,” intones Richard Ellmann, the first words of his James Joyce , published in 1959. [1] Sixty years later, Joyce’s most famous book (and second-hardest to read) has become a talking point and prop of two Democrat candidates in the race for the US presidential nomination. Ulysses , over a century since avant-garde magazines started publishing...
Apr 29, 2019
A Case for “Site-Activated” Modernism: Elmina Asafo Aesthetics
Those of us who work in traditions considered “global” within US and, to varying degrees, European academies are often pulled in two professional directions. On the one hand, many of us feel rightly accountable to a kind of work most welcome in area studies: granular, situated, concerned with historical depth over what can feel like untenable generalization. On the other, we feel the sting of...
Apr 22, 2019
Discussions
A venue for brief articles that intervene in debates in modernist studies.
Nov 22, 2017
What Are You Reading?
A forum for reviewing handbooks, companions, pedagogical volumes, introductions, etc.
Aug 14, 2018