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Latest Clusters

Global Modernisms and Asia’s Other Empires

Jul 31, 2025

The aim of this cluster is to provide an alternative to the disciplinary reliance on Anglo-European imperiality as a structuring force for what is considered global within global modernisms. Collectively the cluster aims to expand understanding of the relationship between modernism, imperialism, and the global by reconceptualizing how modernism engaged with entangled colonial networks in which Europe is influential, but not the sole player. This cluster contends that some of the strongest...

Hope Mirrlees’s Paris: A Poem @ 100

Jul 2, 2025

In her editor’s note introducing the first 2022 print issue of Modernism/modernity, Anne Fernald reflects on anniversaries and new beginnings in light of this weightiest of modernist centenaries: “1922 was a special year and its advent is special to us, in part because it is an anniversary not of violence, but of artistic achievement. If we value art as a mode of resistance to violence and a way to make meaning out of loss, then anniversaries that are determined by art are important.” An...

Modernism in Comics

May 20, 2025

Modernism, as the last two decades of criticism have taught us, resides in many places. From Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring to the jazz of Louis Armstrong, the Dadaist oddity of Ballet M écanique to the silent comedies of Buster Keaton, the expansiveness of James Joyce’s Ulysses to the lithe sophistication of Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes , the ubiquity of modernist experimentation in twentieth-century art exposes the porous boundary...

Another Revolution: Building Modern Worlds at the Interface of Art, Culture, and Politics

Feb 19, 2025

To think about “another revolution” in our contemporary moment means to also think about another crisis of revolution. Not unlike the middle of the last century—with its prevailing sense among Western intellectuals that historical revolutions had failed and that, consequently, revolution had largely been discredited as a political concept and project—there is a palpable disillusionment with radically transformative endeavors among progressives around the globe today

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Literary Neo-Avant-Gardes – Politics of Form Revisited

Aug 14, 2023

This cluster of essays approaches the controversial question of the political intentions, implications, and effects of the literary neo-avant-garde

The Whiteness Problem

Jun 12, 2023

White South African Pauline Smith’s The Little Karoo, Pākehā Katherine Mansfield’s Urewera notebooks from Aotearoa New Zealand, and Anglo-

The Body Politic in Pain

Feb 23, 2023

Literary modernism has a close relationship with pain, though not an untroubled one. To make a very general comparison, pain is to literary criticism today what illness was to literature for Virginia Woolf, and likewise betrays an under-interrogated dualism. “Literature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind,” Woolf writes, and so “this monster, the body, this miracle, its pain, will soon make us taper into mysticism, or rise, with rapid beats of the wings, into the raptures of transcendentalism.”

Modernist Centenaries, Anniversaries, and Commemorations

Dec 15, 2022

On January 24, 1922, in a series of correspondence about the edits to The Waste Land, just over a week before James Joyce’s Ulysses

Reading Modernism in the Sixth Extinction

Oct 7, 2022

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.

Modernism and Science Fiction

May 19, 2022

This cluster takes as its theme the entwinement of modernisms and science fiction, alternative and counterstories, against a planetary backdrop. One is a mode of cultural production that in its early years frequently positioned itself as a consciously elitist pursuit, which only those with the most advanced knowledge and understanding would appreciate, and the other is modernism. Virginia Woolf's response to SF author Olaf Stapledon's book suggests that they share significant concerns and ideas.

Collaborations, Networks, Failures, Weak Ties

Aug 10, 2021

“What are some collaborations if not the marriage of minds,” is one introductory provocation with which Jill Ehnenn confronts the reader of her

Modernism and Diagnosis

Jun 23, 2021

Questions of scientific testing, symptomatology, medical solutions, and epidemiological modeling have been front-page news this past year. But our diagnostic moment began long before the COVID-19 pandemic: from 23andme’s mail-in genetic analysis to WebMD’s online medical symptom checkers; from wearable fitness trackers that get smaller and sleeker with each new model to books and web series that promise inner joy through a simplified material existence; from a resurgence in theories of genetic determinism born of “scoring” individual genomes to the advent of a professional field dedicated to “diagnosing organizational culture.”