Recent Scholarship | Modernism / Modernity Print+

Feb 9, 2016 By: The Editors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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...

Spectacular Modernity: Dictatorship, Space, and Visuality in Venezuela, 1948-1958 by Lisa Blackmore

Vicente Lecuna

This book explores the relationships between modernism, modernization, and dictatorship, and in the process repoliticizes the discussion of a crucial period in Venezuelan modernity. Blackmore approaches these relationships through Raymond...

The Subversive Art of Zelda Fitzgerald by Deborah Pike

Emily Christina Murphy

Zelda Fitzgerald and her husband F. Scott Fitzgerald appeared on the cover of Hearst’s International magazine in 1922, held up as icons of the Jazz Age, of youth, talent, and burgeoning literary celebrity. This image remains one of the most...

Flat Protagonists: A Theory of Novel Character by Marta Figlerowicz

Nan Z. Da

Here is a get-over-yourself model of literary character. Flat protagonists are those that do not become more filled out or more compelling to others over the course of the novel even though they occupy the most space. Marta Figlerowicz takes a...

Poet-Critics and the Administration of Culture by Evan Kindley

Greg Barnhisel

Even taking into consideration penicillin and the atomic bomb, bureaucracy may be the most consequential and pervasive of twentieth-century humanity’s gifts to ourselves. (Global warming we gave to all species.) Yes, administrative gears ground...