My subtitle deliberately echoes Houston Baker’s pivotal monograph, Turning South Again: Re-thinking Modernism, Re-reading Booker T, which—when it was first published in 2001—fundamentally altered the course of Southern studies. Beginning with a primal reorientation around the experiences of Black slavery and incarceration, the New Southern Studies went on to perform a sweeping reevaluation of its terms, tropes, subjects, and geographies. Arguably one of the more exciting developments (for me, at...

Literature is a protean phenomenon. Nobody seems quite sure how to classify it. Is it an object, immutable and self-contained? Or is it an event that happens when a self makes contact with a line of letters on a page? Nowadays, critics regard the text primarily as a resource. “There’s a lot of useful knowledge here,” we say, and our job is to show how this knowledge can help us in real life. Recently, I have come upon a fourth option. What if the text were an organ of perception, an extension of the body that structures our muddled, all-too-narrow picture of reality?

What resources can literature from the past offer when confronting the urgent present-moment reality of climate crisis? What function should the humanities classroom serve when the future of human life seems increasingly precarious? Anne Raine’s post, “Modernism, Eco-anxiety, and the Climate Crisis,” helped catalyze these questions for me by challenging us “to find ways to make climate change our job.” I’ve been trying to figure out how to meet this challenge in a course I’m teaching on literature and climate justice.

I had not heard of ProctorU software until October 1, 2020 when I noticed that several folks on Twitter, whom I follow for their thoughts on pedagogy, had retweeted and responded to the same upsetting TikTok video I had come across earlier that same day. The video shows a young woman, crying, explaining that she had just failed an online exam not because she had been unprepared but because her professor’s surveillance software flagged her as “talking” out loud while taking the exam.

In 1994, Renaldo Hudson was on death row in Illinois. As we became friends, I knew where I stood in relation to the place where the plan was to kill him. I was not interested in starting a book club there or teaching a class. I was not interested in writing an essay on the literature of resistance.

In 1926, Gertrude Stein delivered the lecture “ Composition as Explanation” to the Cambridge Literary Club at Oxford University (fig. 1). The talk couches a description of her own evolution as an experimental author within a broader discussion of history, culture, and art as a series of distinct “composition[s].”As Kristin Bergen helpfully explains, the “multivocal term” composition at once designates “the dominant mode of daily life for a given period and also the production of those who...

How did people learn to be queer in an era before stable identities, lifestyles, or representations of sexual outsiders were readily available or, for that matter, before they even existed?

In my first stab at drafting an inaugural post as the new editor of this forum, I went the Raymond Carver route, writing “What We Talk About When We Talk About the Discipline” across the top of a blank page. When that imagined dialogue hung fire for several weeks, I ventured greater specificity, replacing “We” with “I.” Pronouncements still unforthcoming, I searched my hard drive for toeholds. What have I talked about when I’ve talked about the discipline? My Documents folders returned zero hits for the phrase “the discipline.” I tried again, deleting “the” from the search, which revealed that I have only ever used the word “discipline” as a verb or an adjective—most often to describe the reading and writing habits and practices of the subjects of my first book (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Marcel Proust, Gertrude Stein, Henry James, and Nella Larsen). This lacuna was perhaps predictable: in my early career as a graduate student and then an untenured assistant professor, I was more concerned (and more comfortable) with proffering granular descriptions of literary activity in my field than with scaling up grand claims about the literary institution my studies were constituting

In the Modernism/modernity Print Plus cluster on “ Modernism’s Contemporary Affects,” Claire Barber-Stetson writes probingly of the relationship between the precarious existence of graduate students and early career academics in English and the rise of global modernism. She sees the expansion of modernist studies, of which global modernism is perhaps the signal instance, as “driven­—at least in part—by more pervasive precarity in literary studies as a profession,” and worries about the various challenges it poses to modernism as practiced in English departments. “It threatens,” she writes, “to dilute the term modernism beyond critical purchase, to leave graduate students without sufficient institutional support, and to divert resources from other fields, periods, and movements, including contemporary literary studies.”

“If it’s secret and elite, it can’t be good,” intones Luke McNamara, played by Joshua Jackson, the guy from The Mighty Ducks and Dawson’s Creek, in the final moments of the now forgotten movie, The Skulls (2000). The line is presented as a hard-earned revelation. Though McNamara, a scholarship student at Yale, is at first seduced by the secret society Skull and Bones, taking a vertiginous journey into its hidden world of power and luxury, he eventually comes to the sobering realization, after surviving a series of near-fatal altercations with its leaders, that the society’s anti-democratic tendencies “can’t be good.” The fact that such a banal revelation is presented as a revelation at all suggests the exhaustion of this bit of common sense. We’ve become tired—as worn out as McNamara is in the scene—of the lesson that secret society stories teach, the lesson that exclusive student organizations are nefarious while the universities that house them are meritocratic and transparent.

When a convener adds Things Fall Apart (1959) to their syllabus something strange happens. If all goes well the class will read Chinua Achebe’s novel together, discussions will grow around the colonial history of Nigeria, and textual details will emerge from their conversation. Two systems will touch: context and close reading will intersect. The imperial damages and fugitive traditions of world history will come into contact with the New Critical leftovers of contemporary criticism. What’s...

The epigraph implies origin. As a literary device it often announces source material for a text, and it is a place where, presumably, the reading experience begins. The epigraphs I have placed above are modeled after the form that Samuel R. Delany uses for his 1995 novella “Atlantis: Model 1924,” which has two literary excerpts at the beginning of each chapter. [1] Four of the five chapters of “Atlantis: Model 1924” contain epigraphs from Robert Hayden’s poem about the trans-Atlantic slave trade, “ Middle Passage.”

From this day forward, every time you see the name Roberto Busa invoked as a—or the—founding scholar of either quantitative or computational method in the humanities, we want you to mentally search and replace with another name: Josephine Miles.

What can the acknowledgements page of an academic book reveal to us about the discipline of literary studies? Scholarly acknowledgment is often characterized by the special fulsomeness of its intimate enumeration of gratitude. It’s easy to experience a kind of vertigo when moving from the cozy intimacy of these expressions of thanks to the rigorous delimitations and impersonal critical surveys of the introductory material that follows. What would it mean to close the gap between these modes—to uncordon acknowledgment from prefatory convention so that it infuses more overtly within a monograph’s critical investigations? How might the work of denoting scholarly debts extend beyond a demarcated page to shape the sensibility of a book as a whole?

In the Spring of 2016, I received confirmation that I had been awarded funding to undertake doctoral study that coming October. Overwhelmed, I physically jumped for joy, promptly thumping my skull on the shelf that rested shortly above me. Usually, we bang our heads due to frustration brought about by inertia, but I think about this literal knock as a transitional moment, one which allowed me to cross the battle lines drawn by my desk, seceding from the administrative camp and joining the ranks of graduate school

An early letter from Willa Cather to Zoë Akins in 1914 consists almost entirely of blunt feedback to the aspiring writer. Some representative lines, "This story, my dear Zoe is written to be smart. . . . There’s either got to be real feeling in a story, or an intellectual interest of the highest order. . . .

In Mary McCarthy’s 1952 academic novel The Groves of Academe, the protagonist Henry Mulcahy is let go from Jocelyn College, a self-described sanctuary of academic freedom in a world haunted by the specter of Joseph McCarthy. The facts of the matter are undisputed: Mulcahy writes an article for Marxist Quarterly about dialectical materialism in James Joyce, donates money to the Henry Wallace campaign, attends a meeting given in support of dissenting political opinions, and then is informed by his employer that his contract with the college will not be renewed.

As we completed our book on the US research university amidst the political tumult of the last several months, we resisted the urge to add laments, policy recommendations, or vision statements to the growing pile. Instead, we sought to reframe familiar arguments about the university by calling attention to its media, which are so often looked past (or through) by critics of higher education.

Laura Heffernan’s introductory post describes work being done in what she calls the “new disciplinary history.” I have an interest in using quantitative methods to practice disciplinary history. In this post, I explore some of these methods using the archives of Modernism/modernity. The quantitative analysis of a journal has a long history. Sociologists of science, for example, have long used citation patterns to reveal the disciplinary structure of a field.

In the Spring of 2001, while a graduate student in Philadelphia, I inherited the instructorship for a Temple University continuing education course called, accurately if awkwardly, “Books You Wish You’d Read.” Everything about this gig screamed “easy money,” starting with the course title’s modest past perfect promise — no one, it seems, was expecting me to transform adult students into readers of the classics; all I had to do was turn a few classics into books they had read.