Clusters
Latest Clusters
Realism and/or Modernism
Jan 25, 2021
Long considered epistemologically naive, realism has, in the last ten years or so, undergone something of a rehabilitation, as scholars such as Anna Kornbluh, Caroline Levine, and Matthew Beaumont have shown realism to be, in Kornbluh’s words, “a mode of production rather than a mode of reflection.” [1] If this work has often focused on nineteenth-century texts, another set of scholars has described what Devin Fore’s 2012 book...
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...
#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...
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...