Recent Scholarship | Modernism / Modernity Print+

Feb 9, 2016 By: The Editor

A What Are You Reading? forum on recent publications in the field.

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Contributors

Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network by Caroline Levine

Paul Saint-Amour, University of Pennsylvania

The final chapter of Caroline Levine’s Forms begins by asking what the formalist cultural studies of the future might look like. Levine’s answer: “it could look something like David Simon’s superb television series, The Wire...

The Extinct Scene: Late Modernism and Everyday Life by Thomas S. Davis

Allan Hepburn, McGill University

A brilliant and timely book, The Extinct Scene joins the growing list of scholarly works that deal with Anglo-British modernism in the middle of the twentieth century, such as Tyrus Miller’s Late Modernism (1999), Marina...

Other Things by Bill Brown

Mark Goble, University of California, Berkeley

Bill Brown has had things on his mind for quite some time. In The Material Unconscious: American Amusement, Stephen Crane and the Economics of Play (1997) , he used Crane’s fiction to explore the disquietingly everyday objects...

Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation by Nicholas Sammond

Marvin McAllister, University of South Carolina

In Birth of an Industry , Nicholas Sammond traces “the connections between the animated blackface minstrel, the industrialization of the art of animation, and fantasies of resistant labor” (xii). His core argument is that early animators...

Queer Bloomsbury, edited by Brenda S. Helt and Madelyn Detloff

Ria Banerjee, CUNY-Guttman Community College

Queer Bloomsbury is a book in two parts, and as such, evokes two different responses. “Part One: Ground-Breaking Essays” consists of lightly-edited reprints of essays by Carolyn Heilbrun, Christopher Reed, George Piggford, Bill Maurer...

Edge of Irony: Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire by Marjorie Perloff

Scott W. Klein, Wake Forest University

Our understandings of aesthetic periods along national and generic lines are often highly contingent. Anglophones may know a good deal about seventeenth-century Dutch painting, but almost nothing about eighteenth-century Dutch poetry. Italian...

Sounding Irish Radio at Midcentury

Ian Whittington, University of Mississippi

Reading through these two excellent new volumes situated at the intersection of radio studies and modern Irish literature, one feels presented with two very different instantiations of the radio listener. On the one hand, we have the dial-...

Impossible Modernism: T. S. Eliot, Walter Benjamin, and the Critique of Historical Reason by Robert S. Lehman

Jesse Matz, Kenyon College

How modernism transformed the conditions of history is the subject of Robert S. Lehman’s excellent Impossible Modernism , a book that should change the way we do history in modernist studies. Lehman surveys recent and current historicist...