MODERNIST STUDIES ASSOCIATION

SEMINAR DESCRIPTIONS

Modernist Fiction as Auto(bio)graphy
H. Porter Abbott, University of California at Santa Barbara

Despite modernist dicta of an impersonal art (extended in a different key by post-structuralist erasures of the author), there are numerous occasions, throughout modernist and late modernist writing, that would seem to invite an autobiographical (or autographical) response – obvious examples are the naming of Marcel in the Recherche and the reference to The Artist in Joyce’s title. But picking up on these invitations is, to say the least, a delicate task. The seminar will focus on this complex issue of artistic intention and literary response. No particular theoretical slant is required.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

CLOSED The Heritage of Modernism in the Work of American Poets Born after 1960
Charles Altieri, University of California at Berkeley

Now that many critics think postmodernism is dead--either as a short-lived rebellion against modernism or as the last gasps of modernism itself, it may be a good time to examine how writers now finding distinctive voices interpret this heritage. So I propose a seminar on "Interpreting Modernist Poetics for the New Century." The focus will be on how poets born after 1960 explicitly and implicitly engage and recast modernist values. These values may be articulated in modernist poetry, but the poets may also most intensely engage modernist theorists like Benjamin and Adorno or other modernist arts and their heritage.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Class Matters
Ann Ardis, University of Delaware, and Holly A. Laird, University of Tulsa

This seminar will explore class issues at the turn of the twentieth century, 1870-1922. We will be especially interested in papers that address this topic in relation to the "rise" of modernism; educational reform initiatives; and/or the development of English studies.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Modernism For Sale
Kevin J. H. Dettmar, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale

Over the past decade or so, a great deal of new modernist work has focused on the relationship of modernist artistic production to the larger market forces of post-industrial capitalism in the United States & Great Britain. This seminar will engage with topics and questions posed by some of this work, such (for example) Rainey, “The Price of Modernism”; Scandura & Thurston, eds., Modernism, Inc.; Wexler, Who Paid for Modernism?; Wicke, “Appreciation, Depreciation: Modernism’s Speculative Bubble”; FitzGerald, Making Modernism: Picasso and the Creation of the Market for Twentieth-Century Art; Dettmar & Watt, eds., Marketing Modernisms. Almost one century out, how have (scholarly, artistic, institutional) “investments” in modernism fared?

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Modernism and Ethics
Marian Eide, Texas A&M University

How might we account for the recent “turn to ethics” in literary study? This seminar may explore both recent critical contributions to ethical theory as well as the concern with ethics reflected in literary texts of the modernist period. The seminar might also consider contemporary interest in ethics in a historical context as it reflects social changes or critical concerns with academic discourse.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Modernist Versions of Pastoral
Maria Farland, Fordham University

In "Some Versions of Pastoral," William Empson describes what he calls the "essential trick" of pastoral: "to make simple people express strong feelings. . .in learned and fashionable language." In pastoral, we see common people and subjects elevated to a subject of literary importance. By the time Empson was writing, pastoral had remerged in debates surrounding Marxism, Communism, and the Great Depression. The seminar welcomes discussions of pastoral techniques and devices in modernist literature such as Frost's "Build Soil"; the films of directors such as Frank Capra and King Vidor; or the visual art of painters such as Norman Rockwell, Thomas Hart Benton, and Diego Rivera.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

CLOSED Modernism's Past
Anne E. Fernald, DePauw University

The injunction to make it new conceals the intensity of the modernist obsession with the past. Baudelaire¹s "il faut être absolument moderne" exists alongside Woolf¹s "we think back through our mothers if we are women." Recent critical work wherein questions of tradition intersect with questions of canon helps re-map this terrain in non-Bloomian terms. In this seminar, we'll explore and discuss both how modernists constructed, transformed, or rejected their past, and, equally importantly, how we, as scholars of modernism, might best theorize the desire of modernists to be new, to break from tradition, to reimagine what the past--literary and more broadly historical--signifies. Theoretical approaches to the question of modernism's past especially welcomed.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

International Poetics and Expatriate Modernism
Matthew R. Hofer, University of Chicago, and Alec Marsh, Muhlenberg College

What does an American poet owe America? This seminar will address the ways modern American poets chose to represent their homeland, its citizens, and themselves from the metropolitan centers of Europe during and between the two world wars. In addition to studies of individual poets, we will pay special attention to collaborative efforts between poets and other artists and intellectuals, such as those found in avant-garde groupings, salon affiliations, and publishing coteries. In this (collaborative) sense, interdisciplinary and multimedia approaches are especially welcome. Relevant themes include the role of poetic language in the political, poetry’s forms of praise and protest, issues of censorship and circulation, expatriates’ access to domestic audiences, and the various ways in which loyalty and treason were defined during the period.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Modern Practices of Competition/Dialogue/Collaboration
James E. Housefield, Southwest Texas State University

This seminar seeks papers about Modernist practices that engage competition, dialogue, and/or collaboration. Innovative conceptions of these terms are encouraged, as are papers that consider interdisciplinary or visual modernisms. See (http://www.swt.edu/~jh48/msaprop.html)

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

CLOSED The Limits of Global Modernist Studies
Eric Keenaghan, Temple University, and Deborah Parsons, University of Birmingham

“The Limits of Global Modernist Studies" will provide a forum to debate the place of internationalism in modernist studies. Presently, the field is at a crossroads, and recent scholarship indicates an interest in expanding the definitions of "modernism" and "modernity" beyond their traditional Western European and North American parameters. As "modernism" and "modernity" have come to be discussed as the plural "modernisms" and "modernities" in Euro-American interwar culture, exciting possibilities open for shifting our understandings of both beyond geographical and even period boundaries. Studies of cultural production in global texts and contexts, however, introduce new difficulties that scholars must address. To what extent do cultural paradigms or historical exigencies frustrate comparative readings by introducing irreconcilable modes of difference? Is a desire to read international texts and contexts through a "modernist" lens a form of intellectual imperialism? If so, how can we responsibly negotiate this desire? How do prevailing understandings of modernisms, constructed either by scholars or by Euro-American modernists themselves, pose obstacles to our reception of other world cultures through "modernist" frames? The seminar leaders welcome general theoretical discussions of the limits of global modernist studies as well as approaches to these issues through comparative or singular case studies.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Drama/Theatre/Performance at the Scene of Modernism(s)
Katherine E. Kelly, Texas A&M University

Defined broadly as a set of printed scripts, theatrical practices, and theoretical claims, modern drama (c. 1880s-1945) in both its avant-garde and realist aspects helped to form, and was in turn formed by, the energies and institutions that accompanied modern culture. This seminar will consider the relations between drama, theatre, and/or performance in the making of modernism(s). These relations can be traced in a variety of ways, e.g., through Darwin’s, Freud’s, or Marx’s theoretical engagements with concepts of theater, audience, and display; through the interart productions of individual modernists (Picasso, Stein, T. S. Eliot); or through a study of the sociability of commercial and coterie theater circles. In making fresh historical and theoretical links between modernism, modern theater, drama, and performance, we will be recovering a field of cultural work typically evacuated from studies of the modern.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Modernist Women, Anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust
Phyllis Lassner, Northwestern University

While modernism and fascism is now an established field of study, its urgent political implications, as they extend to relationships between modernism, anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust, have yet to make their mark in modernist studies. We will explore these complex relationships by focusing on modernist women writers, film makers, and artists whose work can be interpreted as questioning or complicating an aspect of these relationships. The focus on women artists can also relate to male authored modernist art typically associated with anti-Semitic representations, as well as a range of responses to the Holocaust. While the Holocaust is historically dated from Kristallnacht, Nov. 1938, through the liberation of the camps in April 1945, there are many forecasts embedded in the cultural productions of earlier modernisms and its presence resonates in works produced well after the war. We will share interpretations of how anti-Semitism and the Holocaust resonate in women's expressions of aesthetic concerns long before, during, and after their devastating realities.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Modernism and the Psychology of Religious Experience
Pericles Lewis, Yale University

A century ago, William James published The Varieties of Religious Experience. While avoiding, in pragmatist fashion, any reduction of religious experiences to straightforward material, sexual, or ideological causes, James equally avoided a judgment as to the truth or falsity of particular theological beliefs. James’s approach chimed in with new currents of thought in the social sciences, represented by Durkheim, Weber, and Freud, that tried to explain the problems of faith and consciousness that positivism had ignored. Can their investigations of the psychology and sociology of religion contribute to our understanding of modernism? Participants are invited to address links between modernist literary production and psychology, sociology, and theology. Possible themes include myth, the occult, the status of the artist, feminist versions of mystical experience, and religious orientalism.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Modernism and Anthropology
Marc Manganaro, Rutgers University

This seminar invites papers that explore the relations between anthropology and modernism. Approaches can vary widely, but can include (but are not exhausted by) the following: the impact of anthropology upon modernist art; the artistic or aesthetic aspects of modern anthropology; the relation between the institutionalization of the fields of literature/literary study and anthropology; the intellectual and artistic development of the concepts of race and culture within and across the disciplines of anthropology and literary study. Above all, perhaps, the seminar invites papers that explore how anthropological method and discourse can contribute to our understanding of what modernism can mean.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Modernism's American Audience
Alice Goldfarb Marquis, University of California at San Diego

The modernist artists' rebellion against outmoded aesthetic standards attracted a small but militant audience in the United States. Beyond artistic freedom, modernist art implied other kinds of freedom—sexual, political and social—attracting a diverse array of patrons: wealthy bohemians (e.g. Walter and Louise Arensberg, John Quinn), political radicals (e.g. Alfred Stieglitz, Harold Rosenberg, Upton Sinclair), women (e.g. Mabel Dodge, Abby Rockefeller, Peggy Guggenheim), and members of other marginalized groups (gays and lesbians, blacks, Jews). This seminar welcomes any approach to understanding this audience or any of its components, whether comparative, historical, stylistic, psychological, sociological, economic, philosophical or biographical.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

CLOSED The Modernist Poem in Mid-Century America
Timothy J. Materer, University of Missouri

In 1921, T. S. Eliot said that the modern poet, living in a civilization of "great variety and complexity," would have to "force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning." Poets after W. W. II not only faced a world of still greater complexity than Eliot's but also the challenge of absorbing the poetic innovations of the preceding generation. This seminar will examine the innovations in poetic language of mid-century American poets such as James Merrill, Robert Lowell, John Berryman and Elizabeth Bishop. The cultural complexity of mid-century America as well as the influence of modernist poetic tradition will provide the context for our discussion.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Modernist Education: Theories and Institutions
Mark McGurl, UCLA

Papers in this seminar will explore the coincidence of the modernist movement with upheavals in the theory and practice of education in Europe and the United States. Was modernism itself a “pedagogical” enterprise? How does this become manifest in the modernist text? What was the relation of modernism to the continuing spread of mass secondary education? Of what import was the hostility modernist authors frequently expressed toward the university? What links, if any, can be drawn between modernist aesthetics and the educational reform movements by which the period was marked?

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

CLOSED Modernist “Things”
Jennifer Poulos Nesbitt, Wilkes University

In a recent number of Critical Inquiry, Bill Brown encourages a turn toward the theorization of the thing. The variety, value, and significance of things in Victorian culture has been amply demonstrated by Asa Briggs in Victorian Things, but what are the continuities and disjunctions that occur as the century turns and the relationship between humans and their stuff (broadly conceived) is focused through the aesthetic, political, and cultural lenses of the modern period? What is the status of the thing in modernist culture? How does matter erupt into/disrupt/corrupt/construct an aesthetic? What are the political and aesthetic contexts of things in modernist culture? How do objects become things, and vice-versa? What can the problems posed by thing-ness tell us about the crisis of representation that informs the modern period? Work in all disciplines, from a variety of critical lineages, examining the material, phenomenological, and ideological ramifications of things is welcome.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Modernism, Modernity, and the Harlem Renaissance
Michael Nowlin, University of Victoria

This seminar invites critical discussion of the prominence given the Harlem Renaissance within recent topographies of American modernism, and especially the paradigm of a "bi-racial" modernism. Problems to explore include definitions of "modernism" that elide different aesthetic agendas and techniques; modernity's uneven development and the disjunction between white fascination with black voices and bodies and black fascination with white "literature"; "literature" in relation to the performing arts; "insider" critiques of the Renaissance and the repudiation of its achievements by prominent mid-century African-American writers (Wright, Ellison, Baldwin); the Harlem Renaissance, the return to the "provincial" in modernist studies, and contemporary multi-culturalism.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

CLOSED Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy
Bob Perelman, University of Pennsylvania, and Alan Golding, University of Louisville

This seminar poses two sets of questions about the relationship between modernist poetics and pedagogy: (1) Did modernist poetries--especially, but not solely, avant-garde poetries—themselves enact a pedagogy? A counter-pedagogy? How did they situate themselves vis-a-vis pedagogical institutions? (2) How have such pedagogical issues changed? What problems do modernist poetries continue to pose, in the classroom, in the culture at large? Is the pedagogical situation inimical to innovation as anything other than a periodizing narrative? We are less interested in anecdotes from the trenches, more interested in analyses of the theoretical issues involved and of texts that foreground those issues.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Regionalism and the Modern
Marjorie Pryse, State University of New York at Albany

Bruno Latour argues that if "premodern" is a modern construction, then "modern" itself does not exist and therefore, "we have never been modern." This seminar invites papers that consider Latour's paradox and his "nonmodern Constitution" in light of regionalist writing from about 1880 to 1950. Relevant topics might include encroachments of modernity on the region with respect to regionalist texts; anticipatory regionalism in modern texts and paradigms; "hybrid" texts or trends that combine regionalism and the modern; and/or evidence from the literary that science may not have irrevocably separated us from "premodern" cultures.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

CLOSED Modernism and Mourning CLOSED
Patricia Rae, Queen’s University

This seminar will explore all aspects of the “work of mourning” in modernist texts. Papers are especially welcome that consider literary modernism’s relationship to the public discourse mourning death in war. Does the “refusal to mourn” in modernist elegies inevitably set them apart from the public work of mourning (from commemorative speeches and ceremonies, journalism, amateur literary productions, public monuments, etc.)? Does the “Waste Land Myth” of the Great War give a skewed representation of the public spirit in Britain, America, and other nations between the world wars? What effects does the repetition of world war produce in modernist (and other) texts dealing with loss and sorrow? Our discussion might culminate in some reflection on whether modernist mourning offers viable strategies for responding to the public culture of mourning following September 11, 2001.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

CLOSED Low Modernism CLOSED
Robert Scholes, Brown University

We all are aware that "High Modernism" is the modernism of "the Men of 1914--Joyce, Eliot, Pound, and Ford--and that it took the form of works of uncompromising difficulty that aspired to be masterpieces of literature. Let us suppose that this reach for the heights created a space--and a need--for works that were more immediately engaging and accessible. First question: Is this supposition valid? Was there a "Low Modernism," or was all modernism necessarily "high." Second question: Can we see in the fiction of crime, espionage, and adventure, in the "entertainments of Graham Greene, or in the frivolity of P. G. Wodehouse, Ronald Firbank and E. F. Benson literary works that are "modernist"? That is, do these works represent or enact interesting responses to those social conditions we call "modernity"? Third question: Do the Bloomsbury writers--Woolf, Strachey, Forster, etc.--work as high or low low modernists? Participants may wish to address the cases of specific genres or individual writers in relation to the general topic.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

The Periodization of Modernism
Morag Shiach, University of London

This seminar will explore the critical, theoretical and pedagogical implications of the ways in which we periodize modernism. 'Modernism' has markedly different historical boundaries within different disciplines, for example in literary studies, in art history, or in architecture. To what extent can these designate the same critical or historical object? Within literary studies, debates about periodization often connect quite acutely with larger theoretical and political questions about gender or region. Again, we might explore the gains and the costs of different periodizations for our critical and pedagogical practice.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

CLOSED Modernism and the Extreme
Joyce Wexler, Loyola University Chicago

Breaking with the cultural and literary norms of the past, many modernist texts were considered extreme when they appeared, but the violence and sexuality that were once scandalous are now common, and the formal innovations that made modernism "difficult" have become familiar. If ideas of extremity vary, how do we interpret its literary effect now? Is the extremity of modernism recoverable? Does extremity lose its symbolic value when historical events surpass it? Is extremity related to claims that certain texts are racist, fascist, primitivist, or sexist? Is extremity related to contemporary trauma theory? Does extremity remain central to conceptions of modernism?

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

CLOSED Experiencing the Modernist City
Richard J. Williams, University of Edinburgh

We know a lot about the experience of the modern city: the modernist city remains obscure. Modern Paris and New York are familiar through the work of artists and writers who focused on the bustle and heterogeneity of the street. But the Modernist city – the British New Town, the Parisian HLM, Brasília – is so often represented only as an experience of alienation from which the author quickly escapes. But what do these places’ architects suppose that we should feel? The surrealist merveilleux? Communion with the human spirit? Romantic yearning? And what alternative artistic representations are there? This seminar investigates.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Literary Modernism and New Media
Mark Wollaeger, Vanderbilt University

While the cross-pollination of the traditional “sister arts” has long been recognized as fundamental to modernism, media studies (working territory first opened by Hugh Kenner’s The Mechanic Muse in 1987) has more recently added new communication technologies such as the gramophone, radio, and telephone to the mix; it has also helped reinvigorate study of the photography-film-modernism-modernity nexus. This seminar invites participants interested in exploring relations between modernism(s) and new media: within a rapidly changing media ecology, how does literary modernism resist, appropriate, or transform new forms of communication?

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

World Modernisms
Steven G. Yao, Ohio State University

To expand the geographic and linguistic range of the MSA, this seminar invites papers discussing “modernist” cultural production in contexts OUTSIDE of Europe and the United States. For this seminar, “modernist” will be understood primarily in aesthetic terms, though the differing meaning of “modernist” aesthetic strategies in various geographical, historical and political contexts will be the principal topic of consideration. Possible topics include, but are not limited to, Japanese modanizumu, Chinese xian dai zhu yi, Latin American modernismo, as well as other comparable cultural phenomena. Papers addressing only works of European or American origin will be excluded from consideration.