Alex Goody is Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture at Oxford Brookes University, UK, and is the author of Modernist Articulations: a cultural study of Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy and Gertrude Stein (2007), Technology, Literature and Culture (2011), and Gender, Leisure Technology and Modernist Poetry: Machine Amusements (2019), and co-editor of American Modernism: Cultural Transactions (2009), and Reading Westworld (2019). She is the co-editor of the upcoming volumes the Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology and Beastly Modernisms: The Figure of the Animal in Modernist Literature and Culture.
Alex Goody
Contributions
Ruth Lechlitner’s Extinction Poetics
Other papers in this cluster illuminate how modernism and extinction are closely historically related, but my contribution here is specifically concerned with the utility of reading a poet—Ruth Lechlitner—who allows us to think about modernism and extinction along parallel tracks. Lechlitner’s work is attentive to extinction in diverse ways; her poetry confronts the extinction of human solidarity, the extinction of organic life by the machines of extractive capitalism, the extinction of our embeddedness, as human animals, in a multispecies ecology, and the global extinction threat of nuclear war.