Clusters | Modernism / Modernity Print+

Translation and/as Disconnection

Sep 11, 2018

Only Disconnect?: The Flickering Circuits of Modernist Translation

As E. M. Forster implied, connection often creates more problems than it solves. Indeed, one of the many lessons of the 2016 election cycle and the current political climate in the United States is that few things drive people farther apart than being connected to one another. The utopian dreams of the 1990s in which the World Wide Web would foster a harmonious global village have splintered into immeasurably vast...

Scale and Form; or, What was Global Modernism?

Jan 2, 2018

Transnational , geopolitical , cosmopolitan , planetary : the language of the global turn in modernist studies is now instantly recognizable to the field’s professional and aspiring practitioners. This new lexicon percolates across journals, conferences, monographs, and other sites of consecrated disciplinary activity, and represents what Aarthi Vadde, in her contribution to this cluster, refers to as global modernism’s “definitional proliferation.” Like...

Modernist Setting

Mar 5, 2018

What does it mean to for a work to be “set” in this place or at that time? This cluster—the first investigation of its kind—explores setting as a primary shaping force of modernist form.

From Practice to Theory: A Forum on the Future of Modernist Digital Humanities

Jul 30, 2018

The future of the digital humanities is field-specific. Past models of the digital humanities (DH) have emphasized interdisciplinarity—not, perhaps, so much the idealized version of interdisciplinarity that implies a fertilizing combination of disciplines and their existing, unique methods as the strategic development and deployment of new, shareable methods that could (at least theoretically) apply to any number of humanist disciplines or literary subfields. Reaching across disciplinary...

What is Sexual Modernity?

Oct 25, 2016

While Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality (1976) is known primarily for its pathbreaking description of the emergence of sexuality, it offers an equally important account of modernity. In his history of modernity, Foucault describes a shift from the sovereign’s “right to take life or let live” to the state’s biopolitical concern with “the right to make live and to let die.”

Teaching Modern Poetry

Mar 1, 2016

Introducing a collection of pedagogy essays in 2008, Helen Sword noted an ironic discrepancy. As teachers of modernism, we spend much of our professional lives engaged in a common and challenging pursuit: guiding students through notoriously difficult texts. Nevertheless, teaching is often what we don’t talk about when we come together to talk about modernism. Listen for mention of the classroom in conference talks or read for it in the pages of literary journals, and you might conclude, with Sword, that the subject is nearly “taboo."

Mind the Gap! Modernism and Feminist Praxis

Aug 7, 2017

“Mind the Gap! Modernism and Feminist Praxis” marks Modernism/ modernity’s first forum dedicated to feminism and women modernists. Our forum situates its arguments at the nerve center of twentieth-century feminism, engaging diverse aspects of modern women’s lives through equally diverse methodologies. Feminism serves as a mode of critical discourse as well as an object of study, a rich doubling that shapes our dialogues about two constitutive aspects of modernism