Precarity, Caregiving, and Covid

In the years after the Spanish Flu, no one wanted to talk about it. Elizabeth Outka describes this phenomenon of cultural erasure in her timely book Viral Modernism (2019).[1] A global pandemic that killed more people than World War I was rarely represented directly in modernist literature. Illness was harder to memorialize than war; it challenged narrative structures; it was a miasma rather than a blast. In examining these gaps and silences, Outka draws out experiences that are hiding in plain sight. The modernists, not often daunted by a narrative challenge, either turned away from the Spanish Flu or handled it obliquely. 

Should we expect a similar response to COVID-19? Will twenty-first-century modernist scholars, like the writers we study, struggle to give voice to the pandemic that has set the conditions for our work over the last three years? In one possible harbinger of things to come, three French booksellers reported poor sales for pandemic-related titles, citing readers’ reluctance to read accounts of the pandemic years.[2] As in 1918, people feel they have had enough and want desperately to put it all behind them. If this is true in our literature, how much more so in our professional and personal lives? This cluster of essays is an attempt to stem this process of erasure by giving our colleagues, those who have been impacted by the pandemic as scholars and caretakers, a chance to tell their stories. 

In the wake of the pandemic, we have observed a new surge of interest in writing that blurs the lines between personal narrative and academic impersonality. Works such as Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (2020) or Anahid Nersessian’s Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse (2021) allow the lived experience of the academic writer to dance alongside literary and cultural criticism. It is no accident that enthusiasm for this work coincides with a moment when academic lives and personal lives became impossible to separate. Zoom university brought students into the teacher’s home and vice versa, giving us square-shaped glimpses into each other’s worlds and making it impossible to separate an impersonal scholarly persona from the mess and disorder of a personal life. The writers in this collection explore this blurring, examining what it means to perform academic labor and care work at the same time and in the same space.

There are precedents for writing that combines academic and personal voices, especially by postwar American writers like Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich. But what about the previous generation of modernist writers? T. S. Eliot, after all, famously argues for the impersonality of the artist. For Eliot, the great poem “is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.”[3] Might modernist scholarship be particularly resistant to the incursion of the personal voice? And what about the theme of caretaking? Is it not inimical to the modernist impulse towards autonomy? Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own urges a woman writer to perform the kind of spatial separation that is impossible for many women writers and scholars today. The laptop brings students and colleagues into our private rooms and the combination of precarious employment and parenthood might involve breastfeeding beneath the laptop camera’s open eye or a toddler doodling over one’s pages. Moreover, it was in the modernist period that literary scholarship and close reading became a cornerstone of the modern university; a position that has rapidly eroded in recent years with the culling of humanistic disciplines, the casualization of teaching faculty, and the rise of AI-generated writing and instruction.

This collection makes a claim, perhaps counter-intuitive, that it is because of modernism’s critique of personality, privileging of artistic autonomy, and entrenchment of literary studies into the modern university (not in spite of these factors) that modernist scholars are well-placed to address the challenges of the present moment. We see in modernist scholarship a riposte to the orthodoxies of the present, an opportunity to engage critically with our pandemic moment, and a warning to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. The pieces in this collection tell a story about what is happening to our colleagues in modernist studies, which, at least in literary studies, can no longer claim to be a hiring field. Several of our contributors identify as modernists or write about modernist texts in their pieces. Modernism, in some ways, abounds in the writing. But we also have been thinking very carefully about whose voices have dominated the conversations in the academy and decided to draw those voices out as a way of working against the historical erasure of the pandemic.

Contributors to this collection engage with modernism in various ways. Libbie Rifkin discusses abandoning teaching Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons during the pandemic only to rediscover Stein’s relevance for pandemic-era students; situating Stein within Disability Studies, Rikin argues that Stein offers a necessary critique of academic ableism in a time when disabled students are disproportionately left behind. In her essay, Beryl Pong looks to Blitz-era British World War II writing as offering a precedent for the chronological disorders of pandemic time. Not all contributors address modernism directly, but several focus on their experience as scholars and teachers. Dania Dwyer discusses why calls by administrators to offer care to students during the pandemic placed a disproportionate burden on Black faculty who were left reeling from the murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor. Also addressing the topic of faculty burnout, Lynn Deboeck outlines a series of proposals for improving the lives of precarious faculty. And finally, Eleanor Russell describes finding solace in the “cool” aesthetics of Ottessa Moshfegh in a time of caretaking and unemployment.

Now that the COVID-19 pandemic has been declared “over,” and many in the academy are resigned to a back-to-business-as-usual approach, this cluster serves as a collection of testimonies that speak against the erasure of the pandemic experience and the silences surrounding precariously-employed academics and caregivers in a time of virtual schooling and austerity measures. These pieces show what the pandemic has been like for your colleagues. They are a window into the chaos, the research, the writing, the zooming, and the caregiving that has defined the pandemic for a large subset of faculty. Each of the contributors discusses what it means to do care work and academic work at the same time and, often, in the same space. For some of the contributors, care work was performed in the classroom as students during the pandemic looked to faculty for support and compassion, often disproportionately turning to women faculty and faculty of color to perform this emotional labor. For other contributors, the demands of care work conflicted with the work of writing, reading, teaching, and service. And for still others, academic labor was a welcome respite from the demands of care work—allowing a release into language and a chance to absorb oneself in other lives and a world of ideas.

In this collection, which emerged from an MLA roundtable of the same title, we are proud to introduce a wide range of perspectives: community college professor to renewable contingent faculty at a four-year private university to independent scholar to tenure-track faculty and variations in between.[4] These scholars are from the US, Jamaica, and the UK. They identify as white, Black, and Asian. All are caregivers. All are women—not because we intentionally excluded men or non-binary colleagues, but because, statistically in the Venn diagram of precarity, caregiving, and faculty, women are the overlapping majority. “Pandemic Productivity in Academia,” by Roxanna Nasseri Pebdani, et. al, found that parents, especially mothers, were less likely to have uninterrupted work time and that mothers were three times more likely than fathers to multitask and nearly five times more likely than fathers to multitask while caring for children.[5]  

What was unexpected about our MLA roundtable was the cathartic coming-together of both presenters and attendees who commented that sharing these stories was “precious” in the face of unhelpful institutional responses and mandates, closed day-cares, homeschooling, teaching demands, elder care, and the plight of international scholars during the pandemic. As session organizers, we knew that these pieces deserved a wider audience. Rose Casey, an original member of the roundtable, published a revised version of her MLA piece in the Chronicle titled, “The Pandemic’s Sexist Consequences: Academe’s Stark Gender Disparities are Exacerbated by Covid-19,” where she argues that the post-pandemic policies of academic institutions must not be gender neutral if they’re intending to be gender equitable. Casey concludes the essay acknowledging that the only solution to change institutional cultures of overwork and gender inequity is faculty organizing—a conclusion echoed during the roundtable itself by presenters and attendees alike. If anything, the pandemic has revealed that even tenured and tenure-track faculty are precarious in the face of the dismantling of institutions of higher education.

As we found a home for the cluster and put out a call for more participants, the pandemic shifted yet again. More variants emerged and instructors were ordered back to in-person teaching, regardless of living with vulnerable family members or being at-risk themselves. The consequences of the pandemic for our precarious contributors were now being felt: an original presenter, Mina Ino Nikolopoulou, whose MLA piece focused on her status as an international contingent scholar amidst President Trump’s Covid-related travel bans, left her position as a visiting assistant professor and the academy altogether for a new profession that promises more visa stability and less precarity. So did original contributor Ravenel Richardson, who examined how her experience as a precariously employed faculty member and a parent shifted her approach to teaching and trauma. As academic work became unsustainable, Richardson has turned her insights and talents towards research development and public policy. Modernist studies is losing important voices like Nikolopoulou and Richardson in real time: international scholars, disabled scholars, single parents, and those responsible for caregiving of all kinds were getting pushed out of the conversation about how to build a more equitable university.

Contributors to this cluster discuss being unemployed and non-tenure track in a time of online teaching and austerity cuts. They describe the duration of “crisis time” for early career scholars for whom tenure clock stoppages and longer probation periods extend years of precarity and widen the pay gap. They describe burning out and building back up. They explore how the pandemic changed their relationship to modernist literature. They describe their experiences as parents, teachers, advisors, scholars, and readers. Their approaches are informed by Disability Studies, the Black Lives Matter Movement, and Critical University Studies and all, to various degrees, by Gender Studies. Their experiences shape their recommendations for developing sustainable pedagogies of care and mitigating adjunct faculty burnout. 

The erasure of the pandemic is not unlike the erasure of care work, in general. COVID-19 made the decision to care or not to care a stark existential choice. Many people stepped up to care for each other. We cared for our elders, our children, our students, and our communities. The question now remains whether all this care will be swept back under the rug and, with it, those who bore a disproportionate burden of the care-taking. As Shannon Mattern writes in her essay “Maintenance and Care,” “What we really need to study is how the world gets put back together. I’m not talking about the election of new officials or the release of new technologies, but rather, the everyday work of maintenance, caretaking, and repair.”[6] As modernist scholars, this may mean shifting our focus from the Poundian credo of “make it new” towards the easily overlooked attentiveness of caring for one another in times of crisis and ensuring our specialty survives the next ten years. 

So who, then, might be our modernist models for caretaking in precarious times? Many modernists were hostile to care-taking as a social obligation, and yet, we might still find a number of modernist role models for what it means to care for our work and each other in times of crisis. There are modernist care-takers like Sylvia Beach that we might consider. Often called the “midwife of modernism” (at times with dismissiveness), Andrew Field writes of Beach, “By almost universal consent, her particular genius was generosity of spirit, which is a gift not in oversupply in the business of literature.”[7] The 2022 centennial celebration exhibition curated by Clare Hutton at the Harry Ransom Center, Women and the Making of James Joyce’s Ulysses, shows the care and investment that Beach brought to her position as a crucial modernist connector. Or, perhaps we might look at editorial work, more broadly, as a form of caretaking. As Brigitte Fielder and Jonathan Senchyne argue in the concluding essay of Editing the Harlem Renaissance, “infrastructural care” by publishers, editors, librarians and, later, digital humanists was necessary to create and preserve the body of work defined as the Harlem Renaissance. Fielder and Senchyne urge us to “look at Harlem Renaissance literature with an eye towards not only the individual authors of this literary movement, but also the attendant efforts that have made this movement legible as a body” and that carry it forward into the future.[8] Focusing on modernist caretaking, whether by booksellers and publishers like Beach or the librarians of the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library, we see models for managing our current moment of precarity. Rather than making it new, let us instead consider modernist forms of maintenance and care. With care for one another and each other’s work, make it endure.