Timothy Wientzen is an Assistant Professor of English at Skidmore College. His book, Automatic: Literary Modernism and the Politics of Reflex, is forthcoming from Johns Hopkins University Press.
Timothy Wientzen
Contributions
Reading Modernism on Election Day
It’s election day in the United States. So, of course, I’m thinking about modernism.
Responses to the Special Issue on Weak Theory, Part II
Several of this latest batch of responses to the Special Issue on Weak Theory engage not only the original issue, but also the first set of responses that we ran last month—and we plan on keeping this conversation going. Would you like to be part of it?
Not a Globe but a Planet: Modernism and the Epoch of Modernity
As the critical scale of modernism has shifted away from nation and toward the world system, critical possibilities have been both opened and foreclosed. The essays in this cluster—including Aarthi Vadde’s argument about the definitional scalability of modernism, Nicole Rizzuto’s examination of maritime fiction’s relationship to surface reading, and Bashir Abu-Manneh’s emphasis on global realism—all point to the ongoing critical possibilities that emerge from the successes and failures of the “global” as a paradigm. For me, these debates represent a crucial point of inquiry for scholars at a moment in world history in which global capital flows determine so much of our lives. But there is another aspect to the relationship between modernism and the systems of capitalist modernity that turns on “planetary” rather than “global” concerns.