Clusters

The essays gathered in this cluster discover new ways to address intractable, interconnected problems at the heart of elegy studies. We approach this field of study now with several hopes, across different horizons: with the hope of better understanding how this writing about death mobilized agency during past waves of political violence, and how it might continue to do so in the present; with the...

The aim of this cluster is to provide an alternative to the disciplinary reliance on Anglo-European imperiality as a structuring force for what is considered global within global modernisms. Collectively the cluster aims to expand understanding of the relationship between modernism, imperialism, and the global by reconceptualizing how modernism engaged with entangled colonial networks in which...

In her editor’s note introducing the first 2022 print issue of Modernism/modernity, Anne Fernald reflects on anniversaries and new beginnings in light of this weightiest of modernist centenaries: “1922 was a special year and its advent is special to us, in part because it is an anniversary not of violence, but of artistic achievement. If we value art as a mode of resistance to violence and a way to make meaning out of loss, then anniversaries that are determined by art are important.” An anniversary determined not by violence, but by art: what better way to open a cluster marking the centenary of a modernist long poem dedicated to the “Peace Carnival” of Paris in 1919? Hope Mirrlees’s Paris: A Poem, what Julia Briggs has irresistibly dubbed “modernism’s lost masterpiece,”

Modernism, as the last two decades of criticism have taught us, resides in many places. From Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring to the jazz of Louis Armstrong, the Dadaist oddity of Ballet M écanique to the silent comedies of Buster Keaton, the expansiveness of James Joyce’s Ulysses to the lithe sophistication of Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, the ubiquity of modernist experimentation in...

To think about “another revolution” in our contemporary moment means to also think about another crisis of revolution. Not unlike the middle of the last century—with its prevailing sense among Western intellectuals that historical revolutions had failed and that, consequently, revolution had largely been discredited as a political concept and project—there is a palpable disillusionment with radically transformative endeavors among progressives around the globe today

In the years after the Spanish Flu, no one wanted to talk about it. Elizabeth Outka describes this phenomenon of cultural erasure in her timely book Viral Modernism (2019). [1] A global pandemic that killed more people than World War I was rarely represented directly in modernist literature. Illness was harder to memorialize than war; it challenged narrative structures; it was a miasma rather than...

What’s left to learn about Shakespeare and Company, Sylvia Beach’s bookshop and lending library in interwar Paris? The story of Shakespeare and Company has been told and retold—by Beach herself in Shakespeare and Company (1959) and The Letters of Sylvia Beach (2010), by Noël Riley Fitch in Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation (1984), and by Laure Murat in Passage de l’Odéon (2003). Ernest Hemingway mythologized the bookshop and lending library in A Moveable Feast (1964), and Woody Allen satirized that mythology in Midnight in Paris (2011). Countless writers have described Beach’s publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922): Richard Ellmann in James Joyce (1959), Kevin Birmingham in The Most Dangerous Book (2014), Keri Maher in The Paris Bookseller (2022)—to name just three. In the aftermath of the Ulysses centennial, we might assume we know all there is to know about Beach’s “famous bookshop and lending library on the Le

Though the term cinephilia simply means “love of cinema,” historically it has been used to mark a love of cinema with a difference. Whether it is understood broadly or in its most limited, conventional sense—as an impassioned, discriminating fervor for film that takes its cues from the film societies and cinémathèques of interwar and postwar France—cinephilia typically sets itself apart from...

In his 1916 essay “Trans-national America,” Randolph Bourne rejects an anglophone, “Anglo-Saxon” vision of US society and culture. Like many of his contemporary writer-editors in multilingual New York, Bourne’s vision of a modern US literature was polyglot and polyvocal. And yet, with the essay rooted as it is in Bourne’s response to World War I, he continually restates the implications of borders...

This cluster of essays approaches the controversial question of the political intentions, implications, and effects of the literary neo-avant-gardes by scrutinizing the topos of a “politics of form,” which is so often foregrounded in and associated with neo-avant-garde practices. Following the assumption that the reconceptualization of this familiar explanatory figure calls for a greater...

White South African Pauline Smith’s The Little Karoo, Pākehā Katherine Mansfield’s Urewera notebooks from Aotearoa New Zealand, and Anglo-Canadian Flora Denison’s The Tree of Poverty all emerged in early- to mid-twentieth century anglophone modernism. In the same period, US American and British use of “s****” and “n*****” also appeared in the letters of Wallace Stevens, and in the titles of Joseph...

Literary modernism has a close relationship with pain, though not an untroubled one. To make a very general comparison, pain is to literary criticism today what illness was to literature for Virginia Woolf, and likewise betrays an under-interrogated dualism. “Literature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind,” Woolf writes, and so “this monster, the body, this miracle, its pain, will soon make us taper into mysticism, or rise, with rapid beats of the wings, into the raptures of transcendentalism.”

On January 24, 1922, in a series of correspondence about the edits to The Waste Land, just over a week before James Joyce’s Ulysses would be published, Ezra Pound wrote from Paris to T. S. Eliot that “It is after all a grrrreat littttterary period.” [1] 2022 has been a year of commemoration in modernist studies, looking back at the key works of high modernism’s annus mirabilis from their...

1914—a year that looms large in modernist studies for many reasons, including the beginning of the First World War, the “Men of 1914” variant of literary modernism, and the publication of landmark works such as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (in serial form), Tender Buttons, and Des Imagistes—also marks the extinction of the passenger pigeon. Martha, the species endling, died of old age at the Cincinnati Zoo on September 1.

This cluster takes as its theme the entwinement of modernisms and science fiction, alternative and counterstories, against a planetary backdrop. One is a mode of cultural production that in its early years frequently positioned itself as a consciously elitist pursuit, which only those with the most advanced knowledge and understanding would appreciate, and the other is modernism. Virginia Woolf's response to SF author Olaf Stapledon's book suggests that they share significant concerns and ideas.

“What are some collaborations if not the marriage of minds,” is one introductory provocation with which Jill Ehnenn confronts the reader of her Women’s Literary Collaboration, Queerness, and Late-Victorian Culture. [1] In 2008, when Ehnenn’s book was published, collaboration had already been the topic of a small host of books, articles, and collections; and scholarship has since found ever-newer...

Questions of scientific testing, symptomatology, medical solutions, and epidemiological modeling have been front-page news this past year. But our diagnostic moment began long before the COVID-19 pandemic: from 23andme’s mail-in genetic analysis to WebMD’s online medical symptom checkers; from wearable fitness trackers that get smaller and sleeker with each new model to books and web series that promise inner joy through a simplified material existence; from a resurgence in theories of genetic determinism born of “scoring” individual genomes to the advent of a professional field dedicated to “diagnosing organizational culture.”

This cluster explores how we think about Indigenous lives, literatures, and cultural productions in North America from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and considers some of the possibilities and challenges that Indigenous studies and modernist studies present to one another. It originated from a panel entitled “Indigenous Modernisms” at the Modernist Studies Association’s 2018 conference in Columbus, Ohio. Chaired by Stephen Ross, the panel was composed of Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars of modernist studies and Indigenous studies in the United States and Canada in response to what I had recently characterized as modernist studies’ “Indian problem.”

Long considered epistemologically naive, realism has, in the last ten years or so, undergone something of a rehabilitation, as scholars such as Anna Kornbluh, Caroline Levine, and Matthew Beaumont have shown realism to be, in Kornbluh’s words, “a mode of production rather than a mode of reflection.” [1] If this work has often focused on nineteenth-century texts, another set of scholars has...

Twenty years after the publication of Lawrence Rainey’s Institutions of Modernism, our field once again finds itself wrestling with its troubled relationship with institutionalism. But where once Rainey argued, incisively, that literary modernism was self-aware of its own marketability and commodification, cocreating modernism as a discrete institution in its own right, we now find ourselves productively applying this rubric to the field’s institutionalization within academia itself.