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Latest 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-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....

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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 non-Indigenous scholars of modernist studies and Indigenous studies in the United States and Canada in response to what I had recently characterized as modernist studies’ “Indian problem.”

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 Ann

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 itself.

#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 dangerous, dated, or, at best, irrelevant to Rich at this moment in her life.^{^[2]} While she had been “raised in the school of Eliot,” now, as a radical lesbian poet, she found that “Eliot was useless to me.”

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 under the umbrella category of “weak,” not to mention the spate of responses that have since appeared on the Print Plus platform.[2] The present cluster brings weak theory back to war. It does so not because it wants to winnow down the manifold critical possibilities already opened up, but, on the contrary, because the pluralized temporality of weakness continues to hold new possibilities for how we read and write about war. “Where strong theory attempts to ride its sovereign axioms to ‘a future never for a moment in doubt,’” Saint-Amour writes, “weak theory tries to see just a little way ahead, behind, and to the sides, conceiving even of its field in partial and provisional terms that will neither impede, nor yet shatter upon, the arrival of the unforeseen” (Tense, 40).[3] Weak theory suggests a temporality of the unformed, the voluminous, and the indeterminate. It is that temporal mode which emerges across the essays in this special cluster, in which we explore the many ways wartime affects, and is affected by, varieties of temporal critique and temporal understanding.

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 and concert halls. When the cast of Porgy and Bess arrived in Venice, for example, they stepped out into a public square where they were confronted by what seemed a menacing Italian crowd. As Sherazi describes this scene, these African American performers recalled and rehearsed a familiar Jim Crow–era “script” in the piazza. As it turned out, the crowd was there to welcome them and an impromptu scene of opera singing ensued. This spontaneous Venetian performance reveals how changing contexts can prompt performers and audiences to invent something new. In modernist performances on the world stage, roles spontaneously shift and everyday performances are spliced with more conventional theatrical productions. This cluster follows the peregrinations of both well-known and forgotten performers, tracking the chance encounters and improvised performances of a modernist theater always on the move.

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 valuable simply because it exists—because it once performed some desirable functions for some number of people—and set as our first conceptual task reaching some hypotheses on what those functions were.”[1] The seeming simplicity of this provocation—read without having deciding the value of what you’re reading in advance—belies its theoretical and methodological complexity. If modern periodicals are best known for the sheer size and heterogeneity of their archives, then an approach that provides no framing in advance, no specific path for navigating that archival scope, is daunting to say the least.

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.