Can the modernism genie truly be sequestered in its twentieth-century bottle? This seminar invites papers that explore the possible persistence of aesthetic modernism in twenty-first century literature and art.
It’s been forty years since Perry Anderson's debate in New Left Review with Marshall Berman over the vital relevance or arid abstraction of modernism as a concept (and NLR’s publication of Jameson's "Postmodernism" essay two weeks later). Since then, the possibility of aesthetic modernism's embattled persistence into the late-twentieth century and beyond has returned in various guises as a way for critics to take stock of how the cultural production of their present constitutes a break and/or or continuity with that of the early- to mid-twentieth century.
Often, such modernism-talk accompanies re-schematizations of historical stages within capitalism, discussion of how the historical development of capitalism mediates cultural production, and/or accounts of geographically specific trajectories within capitalism’s combined and uneven development. Over the past ten or so years, terms like "post-postmodernism" and "metamodernism" have gained traction within such modernism-talk. A handful of edited collections and an entire journal (Nonsite) have explored the exigency of modernist aesthetic criteria under neoliberalism.
This seminar aims to spark debate about the modes of modernism-talk that are most relevant to the present. Thus, we seek papers that consider modernism not only or primarily as a period but also—and perhaps more fundamentally—as a position distinguished by certain criteria for artistic production. Such modernist criteria might include but need not be limited to aesthetic autonomy, impersonality, medium specificity, formal innovation, difficulty, internal coherence, etc.
Papers that ground arguments about the contemporaneity of aesthetic modernism in close readings of works of literature and art are preferred to purely theoretical papers, but the latter are by no means discouraged.
Topics may include but are not limited to the criteria and/or periodization of modernism in relation to:
It’s been forty years since Perry Anderson's debate in New Left Review with Marshall Berman over the vital relevance or arid abstraction of modernism as a concept (and NLR’s publication of Jameson's "Postmodernism" essay two weeks later). Since then, the possibility of aesthetic modernism's embattled persistence into the late-twentieth century and beyond has returned in various guises as a way for critics to take stock of how the cultural production of their present constitutes a break and/or or continuity with that of the early- to mid-twentieth century.
Often, such modernism-talk accompanies re-schematizations of historical stages within capitalism, discussion of how the historical development of capitalism mediates cultural production, and/or accounts of geographically specific trajectories within capitalism’s combined and uneven development. Over the past ten or so years, terms like "post-postmodernism" and "metamodernism" have gained traction within such modernism-talk. A handful of edited collections and an entire journal (Nonsite) have explored the exigency of modernist aesthetic criteria under neoliberalism.
This seminar aims to spark debate about the modes of modernism-talk that are most relevant to the present. Thus, we seek papers that consider modernism not only or primarily as a period but also—and perhaps more fundamentally—as a position distinguished by certain criteria for artistic production. Such modernist criteria might include but need not be limited to aesthetic autonomy, impersonality, medium specificity, formal innovation, difficulty, internal coherence, etc.
Papers that ground arguments about the contemporaneity of aesthetic modernism in close readings of works of literature and art are preferred to purely theoretical papers, but the latter are by no means discouraged.
Topics may include but are not limited to the criteria and/or periodization of modernism in relation to:
- Processes of (de)commodification and (de)industrialization at present, class analysis and struggle under neoliberalism
- The information age and the platform economy, automatism and artificial intelligence, digitality and medium specificity
- Gender, sexuality, and social reproduction, queer aesthetics
- Literature and art in the capitalist periphery and postcolonial or neo-colonial contexts
- Philosophical accounts of aesthetic autonomy, through-lines and schisms between romanticism and modernism
- Sociological accounts of aesthetic autonomy, methodological philistinism from Bourdieu to the institutional turn in literary studies
- Legacies or critical disruptions of racism and primitivism, conceptualizations of aesthetic autonomy in Black studies
- Climate change, the Anthropocene, Promethianism, primitivism, indigeneity