Paul Saint-Amour

Bio

Paul K. Saint-Amour is Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor in the Humanities and chair of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of The Copywrights: Intellectual Property and the Literary Imagination and Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form. Saint-Amour edited the collection Modernism and Copyright and co-edits, with Jessica Berman, the Modernist Latitudes series at Columbia University Press. His teaching and writing are now exploring questions of ethics, affect, and scale in the environmental humanities.

Contributions

Afterword: Deep War Time

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A first centenary, like 2018’s of the Armistice, is a kind of hinge in time. It marks the point at which a commemorative scale of years and decades begins to swing outward toward a longer scale of centuries and even millennia. Such a moment is like the edge of a continental shelf where, with our feet still in the shallows of calendrical time, we peer over that rim into the undersea canyon of deep time. This is to begin thinking about the deep future of the First World War—to imagine the...

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war commemoration WWI

The Medial Humanities: Toward a Manifesto for Meso-Analysis

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One of the touchstone quotations in Franco Moretti’s work on distant reading is a line from the composer Arnold Schoenberg, which Moretti seems to have encountered in Theodor Adorno’s The Philosophy of Modern Music. It’s a repudiation of middles, and it goes like this: “The middle road . . . is the only one which does not lead to Rome.” [1] In Moretti’s “Modern European Literature: A Geographical Sketch” (1991), Schoenberg’s claim helps set up a series of polarizations within modernism—James...

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discipline reading scale

Weak Theory, Weak Modernism

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From the Print Journal
© 2018 Johns Hopkins University Press Weakness: not a word that would seem, at first blush, to have anything to say to modernism. Modernism doesn’t blush; it blasts. Its reputation is for strength in extremis—for steep critiques of modernity, energetic convention busting, the breaking of vessels. In the words of its early theorists, modernism is “rebellion against authority,” a “revolution of the word,” “kicking over old walls” and “breaking of ‘Do Nots.’” [1] Nothing small-bore about revolt...

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theory

Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network by Caroline Levine

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The final chapter of Caroline Levine’s Forms begins by asking what the formalist cultural studies of the future might look like. Levine’s answer: “it could look something like David Simon’s superb television series, The Wire.” Notice, not like an analysis of The Wire but like The Wire itself, which Levine goes on to treat as an exemplary “theorization of the social” (133). Rather than analyze the show’s most sympathetic characters, she says, the formalist critic might do better to emulate their “canny formalism” (150).

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cultural studies