Clusters
What Is the Scale of the Literary Object?
Feb 1, 2019
We’re not arguing for a turn to scale in modernist studies. It’s too late for that. The turn to scale began geographically at least 15 years ago, with the new theories of world literature and with the call, within modernist studies, to recognize larger ambits for the sourcing, making, developing, and adapting of modernist art. What has been called “the transnational turn” and, later, “global modernism” is surely part of a first re-scaling in modernist studies....
Wartime
Jul 22, 2020
In Tense Future (2015), Paul Saint-Amour advances the concept of “weak theory”—not only for thinking about the expanding field of modernism, but for finding a response to “[t]hat exemplary strong theory”: total war. [1] The idea of “weak theory” has since taken on critical momentum of its own, with a Modernism/modernity special issue in 2018 putting a name to an array of approaches against symptomatic reading...
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...
Reading “The Waste Land” with the #MeToo Generation
Mar 4, 2019
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 in the 1930s, on Free Indirect Discourse, and on what might be meant by a treatise of Moral Philosophy entitled, “...
Reading the Modern Magazine in an Interdisciplinary Humanities Lab
Jul 3, 2019
This essay cluster begins with an ending. Specifically, it began with the ending of Patrick Collier’s “What Is Modern Periodical Studies?,” which concludes with a provocation to find a new way to read and study modern periodicals. In order to develop coherent methodological approaches to modern periodicals, Collier argues, we need to resist the urge to “decid[e] in advance where [a] periodical’s value lies.” Instead, he urges us to “start with only one assumption: that the periodical is...
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.
Modernist Institutions
Nov 9, 2020
Twenty years after the publication of Lawrence Rainey’s Institutions of Modernism , our field once again finds itself wrestling with its troubled relationship with institutionalism. But where once Rainey argued, incisively, that literary modernism was self-aware of its own marketability and commodification, cocreating modernism as a discrete institution in its own right, we now find ourselves productively applying this rubric to the field’s institutionalization within academia...
Modernist Food Studies
May 5, 2019
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 objects of study—have vitally shaped modernist inquiry and vice versa....
Modernism’s Contemporary Affects
Dec 11, 2018
A moment in cultural “time,” as Jonathan Lethem has suggested, “is marked not so much by ideas that are argued about as by ideas that are taken for granted,” because the “character of an era hangs upon what needs no defense.” [1] In part, Lethem’s statement helps us to explain why we find “the contemporary” at once so critically slippery and yet practically self-evident. Pushing somewhat more explicitly against Lethem’s own grain,...
Modernism on the World Stage
Oct 15, 2019
In 1954, Maya Angelou performed in a production of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess that toured through Italy. This United States-sponsored initiative brought African American performance to European stages in an effort to combat Soviet propaganda about American racism. As Melanie Masterton Sherazi shows in her contribution to this cluster, Angelou’s own memoirs of the trip recall not only the staged productions on the tour, but also the everyday performances outside of opera houses...
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...
#MeToo and Modernism
Sep 28, 2020
In 1994, when I was an undergraduate English major in California, I had the opportunity to interview Adrienne Rich, whose poetry was the subject of my senior thesis. I was nervous. I wanted to know about the influence of T. S. Eliot upon her poetry. Ever courteous, looking me in the eye, Rich was definite. Eliot’s anti-Semitism, his New Critical impersonality, and his declared self-definition as “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion,” had made him...