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)

"By working so closely with these letters, I was privileged to have a glimpse at “Aunt Willie,” as Cather signed her let...
12/09/2024

"By working so closely with these letters, I was privileged to have a glimpse at “Aunt Willie,” as Cather signed her letters to her nieces, well before I started to understand Cather as the American literary giant she has come to be. Despite common (mis)conceptions of Cather as a reclusive, solitary artist, the Cather I came to know was one who was very embedded in her family, who so sweetly loved the three girls growing up in the West."

New on Robert Spoo's Future Pasts forum: a dialogue between Melissa J. Homestead and Emily J. Rau on the process of editing Willa Cather’s letters for digital publication: https://modernismmodernity.org/forums/posts/homestead-rau-editing-willa-cather-letters-digital-publication-dialogue

"I would like to claim that modernist studies as the institutionalization of avant-garde culture—a repository for exciti...
28/08/2024

"I would like to claim that modernist studies as the institutionalization of avant-garde culture—a repository for exciting futures—has a peculiar and self-conscious affinity to the mechanism of the modern weather forecast in this respect. Consider its structuring paradox: on the one hand, there is rupture, the opening-up of commonsense perceptions of time and space, most famously exemplified by Mallarmé’s words scattered across a page in Un coup de dés; on the other hand, an increased focus on everydayness, standardized life, the homme moyen sensuel and so on. A language of breakdown and the new coinciding with sciences of social normality, including statistics and probability, means that the shock of avant-garde aesthetics is eternally bound up with the anesthetic and institutional dimensions of disciplinary power. This article argues that a focus on the science of meteorology can help resituate this predicament and evaluate its consequences for the intersecting histories of ecology and literary criticism. Indeed, if there is to be a distinctive “Anthropocene” criticism today, taking seriously political determinations on a planetary scale, the ordinances of deep time, the exhaustion of natural resources and geopolitical unevenness, then, clearly, it will necessitate a full reckoning with the obdurate fantasies which continue to attach us to the modernist every day."

So provokes Barry Sheils in his contribution on weather predictions and the modernist novel in our latest issue. Read it here: https://modernismmodernity.org/articles/sheils-meteorological-device

"If orientalist scholarship constituted epistemic violence, this volume represents a trove of epistemic resistance."Read...
22/08/2024

"If orientalist scholarship constituted epistemic violence, this volume represents a trove of epistemic resistance."

Read Shaj Mathew on Zeynep Çelik's recent edited collection of journalism, polemic, and scholarship, "Europe Knows Nothing about the Orient," here: modernismmodernity.org/forums/posts/mathew-europe-knows-nothing-about-orient-%C3%A7eli

"The breadth of Menken’s creative activity would seem to justify my critical inclination to consider her work within its...
08/08/2024

"The breadth of Menken’s creative activity would seem to justify my critical inclination to consider her work within its broader cultural and trans-historical contexts. But even before learning about Menken’s wide-ranging collaborations, I felt drawn to make more far-flung comparisons—to position Visual Variations in relation to Stein’s writing rather than (or as well as) Noguchi’s art, its ostensive subject, or to the New York filmmakers it would influence. It feels just as easy to put Visual Variations into conversation with Surrealist and Dada films that came before it—Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy’s Ballet Méchanique (1924) or Viking Eggeling’s Symphonie Diagonale (1924)—as the experimental films that came after."

The latest post in Alix Beeston and Pardis Dabashi's "Visualities" series, "Woman with a Movie Camera," is live now!

Read Elizabeth Alsop on Marie Menken's "somatic" and "suggestive" filmmaking:
https://modernismmodernity.org/forums/posts/alsop-woman-movie-camera-menken-noguchi

"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 “Queer ‘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

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