The Modernism Research Group
Coordinator
Research description
In the words of one famous blurb, “High Modernism is now as far from us as antiquity was from the Renaissance” (Fredric Jameson’s The Ancients and the Postmoderns). If nothing else, this serves as a double historicising demand: still, of course, to understand the emergence and meaning of modernism, which retains a periodising function, but also, from the vantage point of the new distance between modernism and us, to assess its legacies and continuing interest.
Reflecting this distance, modernism—always defined by its newness—has already been subjected to one renewal of its own in the form of the New Modernist Studies (NMS), which continues to assert a transformative influence over the field. But as NMS widens, loosens, and pluralises the scope of modernism(s), it raises the question of whether, and to what extent, modernism continues to serve as a useful or coherent category of cultural and historical analysis. Moreover, as we push further into a now that is characterised as post-postmodernity, we become, at least conceptually, further removed from the modernity that has hitherto served as an enormously productive idea in its own right and as modernism’s grundnorm. What, then, is the current status of an idea like modernity? Are the legion of theoretical and critical developments since the moment of high modernity capable of being grafted onto that concept in a way that continues to enrich our understanding of modernism, or do they leave both modernity and modernism lingering on as zombie concepts? Such questions require that we engage with debates about the altermodern, metamodernism, mestizo modernism, indigenous modernisms, anachronic modernity and other heterogenising concepts and practices that arrange themselves around ideas of modernism and modernity.
Approached from a slightly different angle, what this issue raises is the contribution that modernism can make to the many new debates about, for example, environment, technology, identity, coloniality, and ethics that all reject what might now be called modernism’s “traditional” formalism. Today, answers to such questions can only arise from a careful engagement with modernisms as they arise from different national and period contexts, with different adjectives and hyphenations, and in different forms and disciplines (literature, cinema, philosophy, history, theory, visual art, and so on).
Activities
The group holds regular meetings to read and discuss significant new works in the field of modernist studies, to consider work in progress by researchers (including PhD students), to revisit older or classic works of modernist scholarship, and to promote the visibility of modernist research through special events. The group also serves as a node through which interdisciplinary work on modernism is facilitated, including the oversight of PhD projects that require supervision from more than one specialist field (literature, theory, visual art, cinema, history, and so on). Beginning with a forum on T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (first published in 1922), a series of anniversary events are being held to recognise and celebrate the centenary of various landmark modernist works that were first published in the 1920s in light of the latest scholarship and new perspectives in modernist studies.
Societal impact
Members of this research group have created and continue to teach the MA elective on Modernisms and Avant-Gardes in Europe and the BA elective Authors in Focus: “Make it new” – Modernists between the Wars. They also supervise PhD students on modernist topics (current projects include work on James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Walter Benjamin, and others).