Ian Afflerbach

Bio

Ian Afflerbach is Associate Professor of American Literature at the University of North Georgia, where he researches and teaches in modern American fiction, African American studies, intellectual history, and American periodical culture. His first book, Making Liberalism New: American Intellectuals, Modern Literature, and the Rewriting of a Political Tradition, was published by Johns Hopkins UP in 2021. His essays have appeared in PMLA, ELH, African American Review, Modernism/modernity, and Modern Fiction Studies. His current book project examines the widespread anxieties about “selling out” that have shaped modern American culture. He was a Fellow at the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies in 2019.

Contributions

Time: The Present. Selected Stories by Tess Slesinger

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In 1932, Tess Slesinger published her most famous story, “Missis Flinders,” a bracingly candid look into the mind of a woman in New York City returning home from her abortion. Slesinger’s story—inspired by her own decision to terminate her pregnancy that year—does not fit neatly into the rhetoric that surrounds our ongoing political and legal debate over women’s reproductive rights. During the Great Depression, economic scarcity meant that abortion, if still illegal, was not policed or stigmatized as bitterly as it would be in earlier or later decades. Neither simply “pro” nor “anti,” Slesinger’s tale instead explores the psychological afterlives of this experience for one woman, trying to reconcile her decision with the feelings that linger after, with her identity as an intellectual, and with her husband’s own intellectual insecurities.

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review feminism

Surveying American Late Modernism: Partisan Review and the Cultural Politics of the Questionnaire

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From 1920 to 1932, the Literary Digest—a weekly American magazine—accurately predicted the winner of each presidential election in the United States by conducting massive straw polls. In 1936, however, the magazine fell into irreparable ignominy when, after distributing over ten million questionnaires, the editors predicted a landslide victory for Republican candidate Alf Landon, only to have Franklin Roosevelt win handily, securing sixty-one percent of the popular vote. George Gallup’s American...

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late modernism american literature