“Enabling Entanglements”: Rethinking Modernist Difficulty in the Sixth Extinction

October 7, 2022 By: Shalini Sengupta

There’s something incredibly unsettling about the dispassionate description captured in these lines, which the reader encounters midway through “Pinky Agarwalia,” a science fiction narrative written by the British-Indian poet Bhanu Kapil. By Kapil’s account, the story revolves around the destruction of what was once Earth by a thermonuclear war and opens in medias res with the narrative voice of its eponymous protagonist: the orphaned Punjabi child named Pinky Agarwalia.

Virginia Woolf Writes Empire and Extinction

October 7, 2022 By: Saskia McCracken

Feather fashions were the subject of heated debate between the 1860s and 1920s, with feather-wearing women held largely accountable by anti-plumage trade campaigners for the decimation of exotic bird species. The UK Plumage (Prohibition) Bill of 1920, which sought to ban the importation of feathers used in women’s fashion, was the subject of Woolf’s “earliest feminist polemic,” her narrative essay “The Plumage Bill” (1920), which challenged the “injustice to women” implicit in the language of the plumage trade debate.

The “bare germs of things to come”: H. G. Wells’s Utopias, Ecological Risk, and the Anthropocene

October 7, 2022 By: David Shackleton

Recent fiction that portrays future climate-changed worlds might be seen as the foremost cultural expression of what the sociologist Ulrich Beck calls the “speculative age.” For Beck, such an age began as “risk society” emerged with recognition of the unprecedented dangers that modernity brought about as well as its benefits; this reflexive phase of modernity is characterized by a transition of concern from the production and distribution of wealth, to the production and distribution of risks....

“Adjusting the Ash Heaps”: Extinction and the Modernist Archive

October 7, 2022 By: Sean Keck

One of the saddest features of civilisation is the disappearance of so many beautiful and curious creatures from this world of ours. From all parts of the earth the same story comes; and we now seem to be within measurable distance of a time when wrecks and remnants of once compact and indigenous assemblages of organisms will be all that remain to us, and such a thing as a complete fauna will be unknown. —Charles Dixon, Lost and Vanishing Birds, 1898 Accounts of extinction frequently combine...

Domestic Ecology and Autoimmunity: Eugenic Feminism in the Sixth Extinction

October 7, 2022 By: David Hollingshead

Initially hailed as an ur-text for feminist scholarship upon its first reprint in 1973, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper” (1892) has undergone a significant historicist reevaluation, beginning in the 1990s, which condemned the story on behalf of its author’s investments in eugenic feminism, the view that women’s reproductive roles should be weaponized as a tool of white supremacy through the enforcement of “racial hygiene.”

Ruth Lechlitner’s Extinction Poetics 

October 7, 2022 By: Alex Goody

Other papers in this cluster illuminate how modernism and extinction are closely historically related, but my contribution here is specifically concerned with the utility of reading a poet—Ruth Lechlitner—who allows us to think about modernism and extinction along parallel tracks. Lechlitner’s work is attentive to extinction in diverse ways; her poetry confronts the extinction of human solidarity, the extinction of organic life by the machines of extractive capitalism, the extinction of our embeddedness, as human animals, in a multispecies ecology, and the global extinction threat of nuclear war.

“That sunny dome! those caves of ice!”: Hunting Bison in Modernist Caves

October 7, 2022 By: Holly Corfield Carr

In the autumn of 1941, David Jones is carving “bison in the caves of ice” into a hurried single-page fragment, one of the early “experiments” which would, a decade later, yield his late modernist epic poem The Anathemata. Before the final manuscript’s publication in 1952, both the bison and their ice caves will disappear from Jones’s drafts, their meltwater pooling in the footnotes where Jones anticipates the end of the world:

Troubling Modernism at Community College during the Sixth Extinction

October 7, 2022 By: Ria Banerjee

“How are we not all talking about this?” a student unmuted to ask in an environmental change-themed writing course, their voice rising to add, “It’s so relevant to what’s going on.” We had just finished reviewing a 2009 profile of climate scientist James Hansen written by Elizabeth Kolbert via then-unfamiliar webinar technology adopted during the first wave of the pandemic. [1] With a New York Times long read about climate migration, Kolbert’s essay formed the first module of a freshman writing...

Reading Modernism in the Sixth Extinction

October 7, 2022 By: Caroline Hovanec

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.

“Enabling Entanglements”: Rethinking Modernist Difficulty in the Sixth Extinction

October 7, 2022 By: Shalini Sengupta

There’s something incredibly unsettling about the dispassionate description captured in these lines, which the reader encounters midway through “Pinky Agarwalia,” a science fiction narrative written by the British-Indian poet Bhanu Kapil. By Kapil’s account, the story revolves around the destruction of what was once Earth by a thermonuclear war and opens in medias res with the narrative voice of its eponymous protagonist: the orphaned Punjabi child named Pinky Agarwalia.

Virginia Woolf Writes Empire and Extinction

October 7, 2022 By: Saskia McCracken

Feather fashions were the subject of heated debate between the 1860s and 1920s, with feather-wearing women held largely accountable by anti-plumage trade campaigners for the decimation of exotic bird species. The UK Plumage (Prohibition) Bill of 1920, which sought to ban the importation of feathers used in women’s fashion, was the subject of Woolf’s “earliest feminist polemic,” her narrative essay “The Plumage Bill” (1920), which challenged the “injustice to women” implicit in the language of the plumage trade debate.

The “bare germs of things to come”: H. G. Wells’s Utopias, Ecological Risk, and the Anthropocene

October 7, 2022 By: David Shackleton

Recent fiction that portrays future climate-changed worlds might be seen as the foremost cultural expression of what the sociologist Ulrich Beck calls the “speculative age.” For Beck, such an age began as “risk society” emerged with recognition of the unprecedented dangers that modernity brought about as well as its benefits; this reflexive phase of modernity is characterized by a transition of concern from the production and distribution of wealth, to the production and distribution of risks....

“Adjusting the Ash Heaps”: Extinction and the Modernist Archive

October 7, 2022 By: Sean Keck

One of the saddest features of civilisation is the disappearance of so many beautiful and curious creatures from this world of ours. From all parts of the earth the same story comes; and we now seem to be within measurable distance of a time when wrecks and remnants of once compact and indigenous assemblages of organisms will be all that remain to us, and such a thing as a complete fauna will be unknown. —Charles Dixon, Lost and Vanishing Birds, 1898 Accounts of extinction frequently combine...

Domestic Ecology and Autoimmunity: Eugenic Feminism in the Sixth Extinction

October 7, 2022 By: David Hollingshead

Initially hailed as an ur-text for feminist scholarship upon its first reprint in 1973, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper” (1892) has undergone a significant historicist reevaluation, beginning in the 1990s, which condemned the story on behalf of its author’s investments in eugenic feminism, the view that women’s reproductive roles should be weaponized as a tool of white supremacy through the enforcement of “racial hygiene.”

Ruth Lechlitner’s Extinction Poetics 

October 7, 2022 By: Alex Goody

Other papers in this cluster illuminate how modernism and extinction are closely historically related, but my contribution here is specifically concerned with the utility of reading a poet—Ruth Lechlitner—who allows us to think about modernism and extinction along parallel tracks. Lechlitner’s work is attentive to extinction in diverse ways; her poetry confronts the extinction of human solidarity, the extinction of organic life by the machines of extractive capitalism, the extinction of our embeddedness, as human animals, in a multispecies ecology, and the global extinction threat of nuclear war.

“That sunny dome! those caves of ice!”: Hunting Bison in Modernist Caves

October 7, 2022 By: Holly Corfield Carr

In the autumn of 1941, David Jones is carving “bison in the caves of ice” into a hurried single-page fragment, one of the early “experiments” which would, a decade later, yield his late modernist epic poem The Anathemata. Before the final manuscript’s publication in 1952, both the bison and their ice caves will disappear from Jones’s drafts, their meltwater pooling in the footnotes where Jones anticipates the end of the world:

Troubling Modernism at Community College during the Sixth Extinction

October 7, 2022 By: Ria Banerjee

“How are we not all talking about this?” a student unmuted to ask in an environmental change-themed writing course, their voice rising to add, “It’s so relevant to what’s going on.” We had just finished reviewing a 2009 profile of climate scientist James Hansen written by Elizabeth Kolbert via then-unfamiliar webinar technology adopted during the first wave of the pandemic. [1] With a New York Times long read about climate migration, Kolbert’s essay formed the first module of a freshman writing...

Modernism, Energy, and Environment

May 11, 2022 By: Thomas S. Davis

Critical, speculative, and imaginative forays into modernism’s relationships with energy systems, ecological change, and the nonhuman world.

Black Migrants and Climate Change Vulnerability Amid the Great Smog of London in Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners

January 28, 2026 By: Saba Pakdel

What would it mean to reread Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956) as a narrative about the representation of Black migrants during the smog? The smog, the 1950s’ concerning ecological and climate issue, results from the mix of coal-burning smoke with London fog. Upon combustion, coal emits visible black smoke into the lingering fog, causing various health and respiratory hazards. The Lonely Londoners depicts the 1950s, when the Windrush generation of migrants, particularly Black Afro-Caribbeans, arrive in London during the smog and, at the same time, encounter growing racial and anti-immigrant sentiments. A close reading of the novel reveals a running analogy between black smoke and Black migrants as Selvon excavates the parallel of air pollution and racism. The analogy underwrites the assumption that the blackness of the smog is toxic, and in the popular imagination, Black immigrants presumably “pollute” England. In this essay, I will argue that The Lonely Londoners astutely places racialization and pollution as figures and

Introduction to “Letters from the Field”

September 10, 2025 By: Sookyoung Lee

I have been tasked with introducing “Letters from the Field”, a new series of blog correspondences on doing modernist studies while living through climate change and calamities. “Letters from the Field” grows out of conversations that have taken place at online and in-person events organized by the MSA’s Modernism and the Environment special interest group (SIG) over the past two years. We bring these conversations to forum on Modernism, Energy, and Environment in the hope of having the broader community participate in the exchange. To situate you in the conversation, I’ll provide an account of how this collaborative project came about before sharing my own reflections on what it might mean to think, act, and study together as things fall apart again and again.

Mei Foo Lamps: Standard Oil’s Old Technology and New Frontier

December 7, 2023 By: Yandong Li

At the top of the Rockefeller Center in Manhattan, an exhibition designated “New Frontiers” showcases digital art and design works that are “technology-forward” and “innovative.” [1] The exhibition borrows its title from the Rockefeller Center’s inaugural arts program of the same name, led by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, the co-founder of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) (Schneider, “New Frontiers”). More than half a century ago, at the same building, Socony-Vacuum, one of the legacies of John D...

Conrad’s Dynamite Time

December 9, 2022 By: Tobias Wilson-Bates

On February 15, 1894, a bomb went off in Greenwich Park near the Royal Observatory. The event set off a media frenzy that, thirteen years later, resulted in Joseph Conrad writing The Secret Agent (1907). Recent readings of the novel have begun to explore how in constructing his ironic re-mediation of the event, Conrad also began to lay bare some of the complex energy infrastructures of his historical moment. In Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination, Allen Macduffie argues...

Modernism, Energy, and Environment

May 11, 2022 By: Thomas S. Davis

In October 2019, The Getty Center in Los Angeles opened its “Manet and Modern Beauty” exhibit, a major reappraisal of Manet’s late work. The directors believed these canvases would reveal how “Manet’s growing fascination with contemporary fashion and femininity coincided with a steep decline in his health and mobility, a confrontation with his own human frailty.” [1] If the emphasis of the exhibition fell on his less familiar works, the narrative of the modern artist as a suffering genius sounds...
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