Clusters
Literary modernism has a close relationship with pain, though not an untroubled one. To make a very general comparison, pain is to literary criticism today what illness was to literature for Virginia Woolf, and likewise betrays an under-interrogated dualism. “Literature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind,” Woolf writes, and so “this monster, the body, this miracle,...
Feb 23, 2023
Modernist Centenaries, Anniversaries, and Commemorations
On January 24, 1922, in a series of correspondence about the edits to The Waste Land , just over a week before James Joyce’s Ulysses would be published, Ezra Pound wrote from Paris to T. S. Eliot that “It is after all a grrrreat littttterary period.” [1] 2022 has been a year of commemoration in modernist studies, looking back at the key works of high modernism’s annus...
Dec 15, 2022
Blogs
Leonor Fini’s Surrealist Object and Other Marvelous Precipitates of Desire
"Objet trouvé par Leonor Fini. Couverture d ’ un livre ayant séjourné dans la mer.” (“Object found by Leonor Fini. Cover of a book that has spent time in the sea.”)
Like all object labels, this label tells a story. The first sentence is true. The second, a seductive fiction.
The artist Leonor Fini did find this object, but not on a beach. Though seemingly...
Mar 16, 2023
Creative Scholarship, or Doubling Down
I’m sometimes told by people who work outside of universities that being a teacher-writer-editor in an English Department sounds great, and occasionally it is. Yet lately everything “great” about academia sounds ominous: the Great Resignation, The Great Faculty Disengagement , The Great Pause after the Great Pivot. Resignation and disengagement are paradoxical side effects of the profession’s...
Feb 16, 2023
Responses
Responses to the Responses to the Special Issue on Weak Theory
It’s been nearly a year now since the publication of M/m’s special issue on Weak Theory, a year of conversations both here on Print Plus—and, as Aarthi Vadde and Melanie Micir point out, across a range of other professional and para-professional spaces of engagement. Many thanks to all who have taken part! As we bring this Year of Weak Theory to a close with responses from the original...
Aug 15, 2019
Responses to the Special Issue on Weak Theory, Part V
This late entry in our responses to the Weak Theory issue began as the keynote address for this summer’s conference of The Space Between Society, “Staging the Space Between,” at South Dakota State University.
Aug 5, 2019
What Are You Reading?
A Forum for capsule review of recent books of interest to our readers.
If you would like to write a capsule review (250-300 words) of one of the books featured in the Books of Interest section of our more recent print issues, we would welcome your submission at mmlittlereviews@gmail.com . Please include the issue number in which the book is listed in your correspondence.
Oct 19, 2021
A forum for reviews of recent publications and important books we may have missed the first time around. It also includes "Race in the Modernism/modernity Archives: The Harlem Renaissance and Beyond."
Feb 17, 2021