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Latest Clusters

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...

Indigenous Modernities

Mar 23, 2021

This cluster explores how we think about Indigenous lives, literatures, and cultural productions in North America from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and considers some of the possibilities and challenges that Indigenous studies and modernist studies present to one another. It originated from a panel entitled “Indigenous Modernisms” at the Modernist Studies Association’s 2018 conference in Columbus, Ohio. Chaired by Stephen Ross, the panel was composed of Indigenous and...

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...

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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.ⁱ Early accounts of what modernism was and did pivoted on the role of the commodity. For critics from Walter Benjamin to Fredric Jameson, the formal complexity of modernism attempted to re-enchant a world reduced to mere marketplace. From this vantage point, the individual’s sensuous encounter with food—such as the Proustian reverie on the madeleine—could restore the consumer’s evacuated subjectivity, even as aero-planes advertised toffee in sky-writing.

Reading “The Waste Land” with the #MeToo Generation

Mar 4, 2019

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.[1] Around the same time, the turn to scale also began archivally, with the creation, substantial expansion, and significant use of digital collections, which offered new ways of accessing, parsing, and arranging early twentieth-century manuscripts, books, and journals, as well as artworks in several media, including verbal, visual, and audio.[2

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, we might also say that he reveals how easy it is to take the very character of contemporaneity for granted, since it will always be impossible to pin down—always remain in a state of perpetual “drift,” to borrow Theodor Martin’s keyword from his ambitious attempt to historicize the present.[2] It can be just as reassuring to take for granted the idea of modernism flourishing beyond mid-century, in ways that facilitate conversations about its continuity and about its potential to describe the “character” of eras in which modernist production has hitherto not been located. Few would deem this inclination for expansion a bad thing, of course. And if modernism’s cartographic and diachronic enlargement arrogates intellectual capital to those objects or conditions it (newly) designates, then this process of adding value is analytically enriching and enabling. That modernism today seems more geohistorically widespread and generically mobile is a testament to how scholars are challenging us to apprehend why and where modernist innovations still happen: what they politically and formally mean in different hemispheric contexts; how they depart from Eurochronological frames of artistic influence and advancement; how the very “language and structure of modernism,” in Simon Gikandi’s words, allowed “a postcolonial experience” to become “articulated and imagined in literary form”; and how specific practices of modernism in the present might continue to effect radical change through oppositional modes of cultural production.[3

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 fields of divergent realities, unknowable terrains of digital echo chambers and of silos filled with conspiracy theories; here, self-sufficient “facts” are constructed and rarely questioned. From yellow journalism to “fake news,” only the names and technologies that simultaneously inspire phantasms of social cohesion and create indelible fractures are new. As Virginia Woolf put it in 1927 when assessing the global empires of her moment, “the streets of any large town . . . [are] cut up into boxes, each of which is inhabited by a different human being who has put locks on his doors and bolts on his windows to ensure some privacy, yet is linked to his fellows by wires which pass overhead, by waves of sound which pour through the roof and speak aloud to him of battles and murders and strikes and revolutions all over the world.”[1] To understand connection itself as a mediated potentiality and a problem—as a double-edged condition—is to recover some of the lived dangers, silences, and fissures of this era and of our own

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 boundaries was necessary, on a practical level, in order to assemble a sufficient number of peers performing the everyday activities of scholarship (collaboration, mentorship, peer review, critique) for a robust new field to emerge.

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.

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 any other expansion of specialized terms, the language game of global modernism takes the form of scholarly disagreement: it generates affiliation and disaffiliation at the levels of panel and plenary, article and book. Yet arguments among partisans of this term or that one paper over an implicit consensus about the coherence and importance of its central concept, modernism, an agreement that (in Adorno’s words cited above) “illuminates the ether in which the jargon flourishes.”