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Literary Neo-Avant-Gardes – Politics of Form Revisited

Aug 14, 2023

This cluster of essays approaches the controversial question of the political intentions, implications, and effects of the literary neo-avant-gardes by scrutinizing the topos of a “politics of form,” which is so often foregrounded in and associated with neo-avant-garde practices. Following the assumption that the reconceptualization of this familiar explanatory figure calls for a greater consideration of contexts, the essays adopt a comparative perspective on neo-avant-garde...

The Whiteness Problem

Jun 12, 2023

White South African Pauline Smith’s The Little Karoo , Pākehā Katherine Mansfield’s Urewera notebooks from Aotearoa New Zealand, and Anglo-Canadian Flora Denison’s The Tree of Poverty all emerged in early- to mid-twentieth century anglophone modernism. In the same period, US American and British use of “s****” and “n*****” also appeared in the letters of Wallace Stevens, and in the titles of Joseph Conrad’s and Carl Van Vechten’s writings. Critical analyses of these and...

The Body Politic in Pain

Feb 23, 2023

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, its pain , will soon make us taper into mysticism, or rise, with rapid beats of the wings,...

Modernist Centenaries, Anniversaries, and Commemorations

Dec 15, 2022

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 mirabilis from their centenaries....

All Clusters

Literary Neo-Avant-Gardes – Politics of Form Revisited

Aug 14, 2023

This cluster of essays approaches the controversial question of the political intentions, implications, and effects of the literary neo-avant-garde

The Whiteness Problem

Jun 12, 2023

White South African Pauline Smith’s The Little Karoo, Pākehā Katherine Mansfield’s Urewera notebooks from Aotearoa New Zealand, and Anglo-

The Body Politic in Pain

Feb 23, 2023

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, its pain, will soon make us taper into mysticism, or rise, with rapid beats of the wings, into the raptures of transcendentalism.”

Modernist Centenaries, Anniversaries, and Commemorations

Dec 15, 2022

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

Reading Modernism in the Sixth Extinction

Oct 7, 2022

1914—a year that looms large in modernist studies for many reasons, including the beginning of the First World War, the “Men of 1914” variant of literary modernism, and the publication of landmark works such as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (in serial form), Tender Buttons, and Des Imagistes—also marks the extinction of the passenger pigeon. Martha, the species endling, died of old age at the Cincinnati Zoo on September 1.

Modernism and Science Fiction

May 19, 2022

This cluster takes as its theme the entwinement of modernisms and science fiction, alternative and counterstories, against a planetary backdrop. One is a mode of cultural production that in its early years frequently positioned itself as a consciously elitist pursuit, which only those with the most advanced knowledge and understanding would appreciate, and the other is modernism. Virginia Woolf's response to SF author Olaf Stapledon's book suggests that they share significant concerns and ideas.

Collaborations, Networks, Failures, Weak Ties

Aug 10, 2021

“What are some collaborations if not the marriage of minds,” is one introductory provocation with which Jill Ehnenn confronts the reader of her

Modernism and Diagnosis

Jun 23, 2021

Questions of scientific testing, symptomatology, medical solutions, and epidemiological modeling have been front-page news this past year. But our diagnostic moment began long before the COVID-19 pandemic: from 23andme’s mail-in genetic analysis to WebMD’s online medical symptom checkers; from wearable fitness trackers that get smaller and sleeker with each new model to books and web series that promise inner joy through a simplified material existence; from a resurgence in theories of genetic determinism born of “scoring” individual genomes to the advent of a professional field dedicated to “diagnosing organizational culture.”