Modernism/modernity

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Modernism/modernity Modernism/modernity is a peer-reviewed academic journal and the official publication of the MSA. Winner of six awards from CELJ!

Modernism/modernity focuses on the methodological, archival, and theoretical approaches particular to modernist studies. It encourages an interdisciplinary approach linking music, architecture, the visual arts, literature, and social and intellectual history. The journal's broad scope fosters dialogue about the history of modernism and its relations to modernization. Each issue features a selectio

n of essays as well as book reviews. Modernism/modernity is the official journal of the Modernist Studies Association (MSA). Modernism/modernity’s editors are elected to a five-year term by the MSA board. The current editor is: Debra Rae Cohen, University of South Carolina (2014-2019)

"Should we expect a similar response to COVID-19? Will twenty-first-century modernist scholars, like the writers we stud...
24/07/2024

"Should we expect a similar response to COVID-19? Will twenty-first-century modernist scholars, like the writers we study, struggle to give voice to the pandemic that has set the conditions for our work over the last three years? In one possible harbinger of things to come, three French booksellers reported poor sales for pandemic-related titles, citing readers’ reluctance to read accounts of the pandemic years. As in 1918, people feel they have had enough and want desperately to put it all behind them. If this is true in our literature, how much more so in our professional and personal lives? This cluster of essays is an attempt to stem this process of erasure by giving our colleagues, those who have been impacted by the pandemic as scholars and caretakers, a chance to tell their stories."

Our latest cluster, "Precarity, Caregiving, and Covid," edited by Emily Bloom and Laura Hartmann-Villalta, considers the "blurring" of the academic and personal, "examining what it means to perform academic labor and care work at the same time and in the same space."
Read it here: https://modernismmodernity.org/forums/precarity-caregiving-and-covid

"Deciphering the 'secret' language of these signs is the primary aim of this study, in which I argue that the three Expr...
11/07/2024

"Deciphering the 'secret' language of these signs is the primary aim of this study, in which I argue that the three Expressionists were creating images that incorporated Jewish and Masonic hand gestures in order to 'speak' a language of exclusivity, and thus modernity. In so doing, meaning was thus visually communicable between themselves and their sitters, as well as to erudite viewers who were cognizant of these historic 'gang signs.' This contention suggests, moreover, that Kokoschka, Oppenheimer, and Schiele had developed a niche lexicon of signs by 1910 based on two separate, yet interconnected, concepts: the mysteries encoded in the gestures of the Freemasons; and an awareness that 'talking with one’s hands'—as discussed, for example, by the Austrian-Jewish writer Elisabeth Freundlich (1906–2001)—persisted as a cultural stereotype of Jews in fin-de-siècle Vienna."

Now live on Print Plus: Nathan Timpano's fantastic article, "A Language of Esoteric Signs," argues that "each of these artists [...] worked in tandem to create an expressive language that iconographically referenced two very specific hand gestures."

https://modernismmodernity.org/articles/timpano-language-esoteric-signs-deciphering-jewish-and-masonic-gestures-viennese-expressionism

Our latest cluster, edited by Joshua Kotin andRebecca Sutton Koeser and co-published with the Journal of Cultural Analyt...
29/05/2024

Our latest cluster, edited by Joshua Kotin and
Rebecca Sutton Koeser and co-published with the Journal of Cultural Analytics, takes an incisive look at Sylvia Beach's archives to tell new stories about Shakespeare and Company, ones that resituate and deepen our understanding of its centrality and impact.

"['The World of Shakespeare and Company'] focuses on Beach’s archives at Princeton University through the lens of the Shakespeare and Company Project, a digital humanities initiative that details the lending library’s operations, including what its members read and where they lived. By analyzing documents and data provided by the Project, the cluster does not simply deepen standard accounts of Shakespeare and Company and its world; it presents new stories and asks new questions that alter our understanding of the institution and its impact, and establish its relevance to present-day debates in literary history and theory. [...] The cluster, in this way, shows how digital humanities projects can ground and motivate an astonishing range of research. The Shakespeare and Company Project is a work of scholarship and an instrument of scholarship. By interpreting, structuring, and supplementing an extensive and at times chaotic collection of documents, the Project transforms archival sources into data."

Read more here: https://modernismmodernity.org/forums/world-of-shakespeare-and-company

We are elated to share that Amy E. Elkins is taking the reins from Janine Utell on our forum on feminist and q***r moder...
16/05/2024

We are elated to share that Amy E. Elkins is taking the reins from Janine Utell on our forum on feminist and q***r modernisms, “Orientations.” Elkin's first entry, an introduction to her editorship, takes up the sparks and provocations from Utell's introduction in 2021:

"What does such a person with a commitment to radical openness and feminist practice want with and from a space like 'Orientations'? What does a space that privileges feminist and q***r modernisms make possible on a platform such as this that has not been previously possible?"

Amidst meditations on methods, messes and manifestos, Elkin writes:

"Part of my aim as editor is to expand our sense of method in feminist scholarship, to q***r questions around what counts as academic inquiry and argument, and to foreground collaboration as a radical praxis. This approach asks us to sometimes work counterintuitively, to deliberately tinker with scholarly teleology in ways that make our arguments and interventions more lively, inclusive, open, and enduring."

Read “Q***r ‘Orientations’ as Counterblast Manifesto” here: https://modernismmodernity.org/forums/posts/elkins-q***r-orientations-counterblast-manifesto

"The deterioration of the information environment in our age of inflationary media has precipitated a crisis of reality:...
08/05/2024

"The deterioration of the information environment in our age of inflationary media has precipitated a crisis of reality: any sort of baseline for what we take to be “facts” no longer exists. Evidence-based information is routinely drowned in a media market that rewards the loudest and most strident voices at the expense of truth and the common good. [...] In this context, reality itself has become a consumer good, a product to be bought and sold in the marketplace. The result has been a deadly devolution of the language of democracy."

The latest entry in Debra Rae Cohen's "In These Times" is David R. Castillo's piece on the role of the humanities in combatting the spread of mis- and disinformation: https://modernismmodernity.org/forums/posts/castillo-humanities-rescue-militant-editorial-project

"There is no gentle way into the later twentieth-century work of the painter Prunella Clough. It is [...] a difficult ki...
17/04/2024

"There is no gentle way into the later twentieth-century work of the painter Prunella Clough. It is [...] a difficult kind of realism" writes Jennifer Johnson in her article "Realism, Alienation, and Affective Distance in the Work of Prunella Clough." Read it online now: modernismmodernity.org/articles/johnson-realism-alienation-affective-distance-work-prunella-clough

"As these case studies show, forms of the love of cinema cultivated in the Global South, while long marginalized by domi...
28/03/2024

"As these case studies show, forms of the love of cinema cultivated in the Global South, while long marginalized by dominant notions of cinephilia, cannot be understood simply as oppositional, alternative, or resistant to their hegemony. Some institutions of film culture were unabashedly elitist and cosmopolitan, and others progressive and nationalist. Cinephiles might disregard so-called centers of film production altogether in favor of more local reference points, or imagine themselves as linked to their counterparts elsewhere in the Global South through a shared investment in radical politics. If the new cinephilia holds out the promise of a global, networked, and socially committed love of film, the case studies presented in this cluster make clear that the old cinephilia was far more complex and far-ranging than we ever imagined."

Our new cluster, "Global South Cinephilias," edited by Rielle Navitski, questions what "come[s] into view if we expand cinephilia’s purview beyond the Euro-American contexts where it is traditionally understood to have flourished?": https://modernismmodernity.org/forums/global-south-cinephilias

"The first section of “Judging by its Cover” consists of pieces that are interested in the cover as a form of compensati...
22/03/2024

"The first section of “Judging by its Cover” consists of pieces that are interested in the cover as a form of compensation, a covering over, as a piece of gorgeous textile can mask or stand in for what one doesn’t want to confront, or what can’t be confronted for whatever nefarious, oblivious, or self-deceptive reason. The pieces are interested, too, in how covers spur questions about what others are thinking and what one’s own book is doing—and what it is about the cover image that links these two epistemic problems to each other. The pieces shore up, finally, the irreverence of asking an image to do for us what we want it to do, to represent for us. Because, as we know, it would be difficult to imagine any image that doesn’t exert its own power regardless of what we ask of it.

This last problem is approached more pointedly in Part 2, in which our authors consider the disjunctions as much as the continuities between the images on their books’ covers and the arguments of those books—and hence, in some cases, understanding the recontextualization of the image as a kind of brutality. The series concludes with a postscript by Rebecca Colesworthy—not only an editor at SUNY Press but also an author of an important book in modernist studies with its own arresting cover—who offers a personal and industrial perspective on the making and meanings of scholarly book covers."

Read the second part of "Judging by its Cover," curated by Visualities editors Alix Beeston and Pardis Dabashi, featuring short essays by scholars reflecting on their book covers, here: https://modernismmodernity.org/forums/posts/judging-its-cover-part-2

"The book cover performs compensatory work—again, for the work and us. The covers bear a preponderance of objects that t...
14/03/2024

"The book cover performs compensatory work—again, for the work and us. The covers bear a preponderance of objects that thematize absence. [...] Hiding the work it simultaneously publicizes, the book cover is also a kind of dress without a body—to the extent that it circulates separately from the book itself, its downloadable token and talisman on Google and on press websites."

Read the first part of "Judging by its Cover," curated by Visualities editors Alix Beeston and Pardis Dabashi, featuring short essays by scholars reflecting on their book covers, here: https://modernismmodernity.org/forums/posts/judging-its-cover-part-1

"America is defined, both locally and globally, through its fascination with the spectacle of race, which Joyce thematiz...
01/03/2024

"America is defined, both locally and globally, through its fascination with the spectacle of race, which Joyce thematizes by explicitly linking the culture of lynching to the theatrics of the minstrel stage. Even though the two cultural forms have trackable precedents in Europe and in Africa, Joyce uses lynching and blackface minstrelsy to broadly configure both American and non-American representations of racial politics and national identity."

Live now from our latest print issue: "Lynching Modernism: Ulysses, America, and the Negro Minstrel Abroad" by Amadi Ozier: https://modernismmodernity.org/articles/ozier-lynching-modernism-ulysses-america-negro-minstrel-abroad

21/02/2024

"The place of realism in Joyce’s modernism is that of a constitutive absence, sympathy for a nation that does not yet exist, the autonomy not of what is, but what isn’t."

Fresh off the presses is Thomas A. Laughlin's review of Paul Stasi's "The Persistence of Realism in Modernist Fiction":

"To the extent that these readings wish to explain away the effects of these late paintings, they ignore what is perhaps...
25/01/2024

"To the extent that these readings wish to explain away the effects of these late paintings, they ignore what is perhaps the most compelling lesson of Monet’s art: that the lines between things are often blurry."

The latest in our Visualities series, edited by Pardis Dabashi and Alix Beeston, is now live on Print Plus! Read Robert Volpicelli's "Monet’s Cataracts, Re-examined" here: https://modernismmodernity.org/forums/posts/volpicelli-monets-cataracts-re-examined

'The papers in “Modernist Periodicals Networks and the Transnational Turn” propose a fluid view of modernism: instead of...
21/12/2023

'The papers in “Modernist Periodicals Networks and the Transnational Turn” propose a fluid view of modernism: instead of studying modernist periodicals from a static, Euro- or US-centric perspective, the scholars in this cluster follow authors, texts, and magazines across continents. This cluster aims to be a starting point for new collaborative projects in modernist periodicals studies, with traveling, intercontinental magazines at their center. As transnational scholars, we are convinced of the benefits of bringing a truly multilingual, multicultural, and expansive perspective to contemporary scholarly approaches to modernist magazines. With this cluster, we hope to open new collaborative routes within the study of transnational modernism, enabled by the material and geographical singularities of periodical networks.'

Our final cluster of the year is now available on Print+. Read "Modernist Periodical Studies and the Transnational Turn," edited by Nicoletta Asciuto, , and Camilla Sutherland over the holidays: https://modernismmodernity.org/forums/modernist-periodical-studies

A new cycle and a new print issue have been inaugurated over on Print Plus! Read Stephen Ross's editorial note here: htt...
18/12/2023

A new cycle and a new print issue have been inaugurated over on Print Plus! Read Stephen Ross's editorial note here:
https://modernismmodernity.org/editors/april-issue

Our teaser review, written by Alessandro Giammei, of "A Violent Peace: Media, Truth, and Power at the League of Nations" by Carolyn N. Biltoft can be read here: https://modernismmodernity.org/forums/posts/giammei-violent-peace-biltoft

Finally, Stephanie Lebas Huber's article "Dutch Neorealism and Cinema Magic: The Case for a Filmic Modernism," is also available for free on Print Plus: https://modernismmodernity.org/articles/lebas-huber-dutch-neorealism-cinema-magic-case-filmic-modernism

"Therefore, it is not lost on me that while I work to unravel q***r orientations, the academic article is one of the man...
01/11/2023

"Therefore, it is not lost on me that while I work to unravel q***r orientations, the academic article is one of the many “straightening devices” enforcing a kind of heteronormative rhetoric (Ahmed, Q***r Phenomenology, 107). My search for less straightforward orientations relies on what has at times seemed more marginal than q***r. Ahmed writes that “[a] Q***r object makes contact possible” (169). While it may risk my not being q***r enough, I remain very interested in dwelling in this tangential but generative contact point."

The latest in our Orientations series, edited by
Janine Utell, is now live on Print Plus! Read Lauren Rosenblum's "Q***r Enough" here: https://modernismmodernity.org/forums/posts/rosenblum-q***r-enough

"What I love about this photograph is the unruliness of its child subjects, who draw attention to the experience of bein...
26/10/2023

"What I love about this photograph is the unruliness of its child subjects, who draw attention to the experience of being looked at as a site of struggle. They maneuver­­­—or wiggle, to borrow Sara Ahmed’s term—in the tight space of this encounter by insisting on their own projects of looking, knowing, and relating, in raucous, convivial disharmony with one another. While the forward movement of the children on the right introduces a sense of spatial and temporal depth into the still of the photograph, bringing the presence of the photographer into view along with their own propulsive capacity, the child on the left opens up whole other worlds of relation with her turn to the horizontal, beyond the frame of the still."

The latest in our Visualities series, edited by Pardis Dabashi and Alix Beeston, is now live on Print Plus! Read Nadine Attewell's "Looking With Images: Chinese Diasporic Worldmaking Beyond the Frame" here: https://modernismmodernity.org/forums/posts/attewell-looking-images-chinese-diasporic-worldmaking

"Instead of the axiomatic, invisible, essentially unremarkable means through which cinema is/was accessed, moviegoing is...
12/10/2023

"Instead of the axiomatic, invisible, essentially unremarkable means through which cinema is/was accessed, moviegoing is better understood as a historically specific, expressive, and altogether strange modality through which cinema is/was performed. Moviegoing requires and produces a constitutive tension between individual and collective experience, promising both solitude and congregation, absorption within assembly."

Now live on Print Plus: Nolan Gear's fantastic article on moviegoing, intimacy, and public life in Jessie Redmon Fauset's "Plum Bun": https://modernismmodernity.org/articles/gear-moviegoing-public-life-fauset-plum-bum

05/10/2023

"Q***r theory has a vexed relationship to the personal and to persons: the former aligned with normative forms of social belonging (like heterosexual culture) and the latter tied to neoliberal, rights-based political programs that are focused on assimilation rather than resistance. Even as q***r theory sought to authorize q***r-identified people as the makers of scholarly knowledge and knowledge important to daily survival, it developed a framework for thinking about sexuality not as a quality or a possession of individual persons but as a product of modernity and a system of power relations."

The latest in our Orientations series, edited by Janine Utell, is now live on Print Plus! Read Jess Shollenberger's "'Ruthless Personalizers': Q***r Theory and the Uses of The Personal' here:

21/09/2023

The latest in our Visualities series, edited by Pardis Dabashi and Alix Beeston, is now live on Print Plus! Read Noa Saunders's "'Improbable Life': Bain, the Baroness, and Public Photography" here:

14/09/2023

Charles Andrews gathers ingredients for a "dangerous" modernist studies in his latest for Debra Rae Cohen's "In These Times" series. Read "Injurious Recipes" here

31/08/2023

In the latest for our Visualities series, Sophie Oliver and Sarah Parker discuss the interdisciplinary exhibition "Poets in Vogue"

16/08/2023

Now live on Print Plus: a brand new cluster, edited by Lars Bernaerts, Vincent Broqua, and Sabine Müller! Read "Literary Neo-Avant-Gardes – Historicizing the Politics of Form" here

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