Stephen J. Ross is an assistant professor of English at Concordia University in Montreal. He is the author of Invisible Terrain: John Ashbery and the Aesthetics of Nature (Oxford University Press, 2017) and co-editor with Alys Moody of Global Modernists on Modernism (Bloomsbury, 2019).
Stephen J. Ross
Contributions
Editor’s Note April 2024 (31.2)
Leading off this issue, Kristin Rivero revisits the role of mediation in Zora Neale Hurston’s fiction and anthropological research. On the related topic of mediation, Elvin Meng considers media affinities between interwar psychical research and Vladimir Nabokov’s idiosyncratic conception of narrative fiction as a spatial (rather than temporal) medium. Allan Antliff explores Ananda Coomaraswamy’s anarchist championing of Walt Whitman’s sexual libertarianism before and during World War I and the subsequent eclipse of this Whitman by the figure of the parochial nationalist poet of US
Five Years of Visualities
Five years ago, in August 2019, the Visualities forum was established as a site for thinking through the visual relations and ocular regimes of modernity. It posed three broad provocations: “In what new ways might we discuss the visual as a special category—aesthetic, epistemological, political—in modernism? How do different modes and practices of vision interact within the contested terrain of modernity?
On Global Modernism and Academic Precarity: A Reply to Claire Barber-Stetson
In the Modernism/modernity Print Plus cluster on “Modernism’s Contemporary Affects,” Claire Barber-Stetson writes probingly of the relationship between the precarious existence of graduate students and early career academics in English and the rise of global modernism. She sees the expansion of modernist studies, of which global modernism is perhaps the signal instance, as “driven—at least in part—by more pervasive precarity in literary studies as a profession,” and worries about the various challenges it poses to modernism as practiced in English departments. “It threatens,” she writes, “to dilute the term modernism beyond critical purchase, to leave graduate students without sufficient institutional support, and to divert resources from other fields, periods, and movements, including contemporary literary studies.”