How might we situate Paul Scheerbart within German modernism? The work of excavating his oeuvre, its conceptual and generic contours, and its entanglements with other figures and constellations of German modernism has begun in earnest, yet he is still known primarily as a theorist of glass architecture, on the one hand, and as a decades-long, subterranean influence on Walter Benjamin, on the other—Benjamin received a copy of Scheerbart’s 1913 novel Lesabéndio from Gershom Scholem as a wedding present, and continually returned to the utopian aspects of Scheerbart’s writing. In his 1914 treatise, Glasarchitektur (“Glass Architecture”), Scheerbart calls for nothing less than the total spiritual renewal of humankind by means of building with colored glass, an avant-garde architectural utopianism that would influence Bruno Taut, as well as artists associated with Bauhaus and Dada. “Glass Architecture” was published in Herwarth Walden’s Expressionist journal Der Sturm, and Scheerbart associated with the artists in the orbit of Der Sturm, a prominent modernist constellation in Berlin that included figures such as Walden, Else Lasker-Schüler, Alfred Döblin, and others. Yet despite these associations, and despite the multimedial sweep of Scheerbart’s work—which includes dozens of novels, as well as the treatise on glass and a 1910 account of his attempt to build a perpetual motion machine—Scheerbart’s contributions to German modernism still await a fuller reckoning. In part this is surely because the books themselves, idiosyncratic, whimsical, and always of uncertain genre, at times seem written to defy the attempt to take them seriously: Scheerbart’s narrative worlds are outlandish and weightless, while his style exhibits none of the density, difficulty, or self-awareness typically associated with literary modernism. As Benjamin wrote in praise, Scheerbart’s prose is transparent, fresh as “a nursling’s cheeks.” Yet this transparency associated with both Scheerbart’s prose and his architectural fantasies about glass exhibits multiple ambiguities—ambiguities that prove quite generative for thinking about some of the discursive, disciplinary, and medial contours of German modernism, especially its engagement with questions of perception and embodiment, its relationship to monism, its retheorization of the subject, and its interrogation of the relationship between art and society. This essay reads Scheerbart’s 1913 “Asteroïdenroman” (“asteroid-novel”) Lesabéndio, to flesh out the relationship between this ambiguous transparency, on the one hand, and the novel’s utopian vision of boundlessly mobile, embodied perception, on the other. By unfolding a tension between fantasies of transparency and embodied vision, the novel engages with a key problematic of the avant-garde, yet closer examination suggests the presence of another context, namely the popular intellectual currents that circulated under the names of monism and panpsychism. Indeed, the strange, alien bodies in this novel might be seen as a missing link between modernism and monism. The ambiguous transparency of both glass and monism pivoted on the paradoxical relationships between materiality, embodiment, and perception, as a new, specific inflection of the relationship between mind ( Geist) and body. In the ways in which glass in architectural discourse around 1913 flickered in and out of different modes of signification—is it transparent or is it a surface? Does it allow us to see clearly or is it what is meant to be seen? Is it material, medium, metaphor, or all three?—these questions reflect monism’s revision of the relationship between matter and spirit. Far from representing a reactionary flight into mysticism, the monist fancy that characterizes Lesabéndio ought to be seen as a playful literalization of contemporary ambiguities surrounding transparency, embodiment, perception, and materiality.

In envisioning alternative futures—utopian, dystopian, cataclysmic—we historicize the present. Marxist critics like Fredric Jameson read science fiction as the new Lukácsian historical novel. [1] Others, turning to a further distant future, elaborate on the new perceptions of time and space offered in SF as visions that push toward cosmic and nonhuman scales. [2] As such, SF shares with the modernism of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce a similar interest in defamiliarization, in the limits or...

Lyotard’s question is mostly rhetorical and yet shines a light on an issue that haunts the fraught space between theory and fiction. The issue is particularly salient when it comes to science fiction, a genre that is characterized by figuration, fabulation, and the production of concepts. The copula “science fiction” itself is oxymoronic: if theory offers us cognitive tools to process philosophical conundrums about the state, personhood, etc., then surely the fictional, at best, plays a minimal role in this process, perhaps as a kind of space of simulation, narrativity, and poesis.

The ghost of philosophical nihilism lingered over the modernist landscape like a dank fog that refused to lift. [1] Literary figures of the time observed this nihilistic atmosphere, with Elliot Paul declaring in his essay “The New Nihilism” (1927) that after the Great War, “old values had become meaningless” and in his introduction to “A War Diary” (1915–1918), Herbert Read recalling that “nihilism—nothingness, despair” was literary modernism’s “universal state of mind.” [2] This disintegration...

In this article, I explore the intersection of science fiction and modernist anthropology in a period of crucial development for both fields—the 1920s through the 1940s—by examining the ways in which Ray Bradbury’s “—And the Moon Be Still as Bright,” a central chapter in The Martian Chronicles (1950), engages in debates over culture and form that circulated among modernist anthropologists, artists, and critics. In recent years, scholars have argued that science fiction has a particularly close...

Rokeya Shakhawat Hossain’s short story Sultana’s Dream is a brief text, but its complexities and nuances make it a critical part of the utopian canon. [1] The narrative follows the titular Sultana as she explores an advanced feminist society called Ladyland, with the ambiguous ending leaving questions to whether it was an alternate reality or a dream (as the title suggests). Both possibilities lead to the same hopeful call for active change in her own world. Ladyland has seen the prevalent...

Living and writing in Reaganite America, Kathy Acker’s fiction is a sustained interrogation of the feasibility of classical revolutions in neoliberal late capitalism. This reading of Empire of the Senseless (1988) traces some of the overlooked affinities between Acker’s “punk feminism” and the feminist strand of futurism that challenges the Italian futurists’ anarchic and imperialist vision of technotopias. [1] Instead of passively accepting subjugation by a programmatic utopia that promises...

In 2009, science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson argued, drawing on the correspondence between Virginia Woolf and Olaf Stapledon, that Between the Acts (1941) “ends with Stapledonian imagery, describing our species steeped in the eons. Woolf’s last pages were a kind of science fiction.” [1] At the time, this assertion seemed transgressive because of the way it linked perhaps the most revered modernist writer in the Anglophone literary sphere with a genre that formerly was considered to be...

In January I was teaching speculative and science fiction from the modernist period to show my students how fascism emerges, and how to recognise the ways that literary strategies can instil alienation, fear of the Other, and anti-Semitism and racism. My students were German, and our seminars were held in the north-west German university town of Paderborn, a little east of the Ruhr, where a British Army base