Moving Modernisms: Motion, Technology, and Modernity ed. by David Bradshaw, Laura Marcus, and Rebecca Roach (review)

I am drafting this review while quite bed-bound: four weeks into an acute fracture of my left foot and after that still non-weight bearing for fourteen more days (doctor's orders). I chuckle at the irony of writing a book review for an edited collection that recalibrates—quite impressively—multifarious movements in New Modernist Studies in order to carve out intellectual space for the subfield "Motion Studies." I return to my own temporary immobility at end of these short comments, but let me begin by stating the obvious: the co-editors of this volume (the late David Bradshaw and Laura Marcus and Rebecca Roach) have brought together a stellar roster of luminaries to consider their topic at hand. The three have deftly organized their book into six overlapping sections that introduce topoi such as temporal crossings, wishes for faraway places, experimental performance, flexible periodization, silent motion pictures, and mobility devices such as the streetcar. Collectively, these incisive essays address modernism's debt to mechanical instruments (hence the Technology of the collection's subtitle) and unexpected affective registers. There is also an impressive range of authors and avant-garde movements that pass through these pages—Wai Chee Dimock prominently features James Joyce; Rachel Potter does the same for Virginia Woolf; and Tim Armstrong pays respectful attention to the queer Australian author Patrick White. This collection is unquestionably at the vanguard of the field.

A few standout examples demonstrate its value. In a gentle critique of the push towards ever more planetarity in New Modernist Studies, Andrew Thacker beckons his readers to zoom in on "the material specificities of such spatial categories" (20). In a slightly wry line, he observes that "tellingly, perhaps, there is no index entry for regionalism in the recent Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms" (21).¹ I fully endorse this need for deeper emphasis on regional modernisms, a call that Americanists such as myself as well as Jani Scandura, John Duvall, and, in a complementary vein, Saikat Majumdar have made.² But I do remind readers that monographs focused on transnational aesthetics often dwell in the domain of the regional, especially when we recall Thacker's citation of Jessica Berman's Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics, and Transnational Modernism and that monograph's keen focus on the midwestern experimentalist Meridel Le Sueur.³ While Thacker's claim about Mark Wollaeger and Matt Eatough's Oxford Handbook's index is undoubtedly true, there are more than eighty references to "region" in their collection, including an extended focus by Mary Lou Emery on "Caribbean Modernism: Plantation to Planetary" (48-77). Regionalism, I think, remains predominant in our scholarship, even if it is not explicitly stated as such. Thacker's is nonetheless an important reminder for us to better spotlight such movements. The same goes for Tim Armstrong, who, in a proximate piece on "Micromodernism," promotes "a localized version of modernism" that could potentially supplement our accent on modernism's globality (28).

Switching gears somewhat, Enda Duffy, in "High-Energy Modernism," builds on his previous research to consider how modernist artworks pop with adrenaline and avant-garde oomph.⁴ "[T]o be alive," he finds for modernism, "is to be full of energy" (87). Anchoring this claim by citing "adrenaline aesthetics" in Djuna Barnes, Joyce, and many others, he contends that "the extraction of energy from static matter of every form became a fundamental goal of every modernist project" (86, 87). His universalizing conclusion is strong theory at its strongest as Duffy pitches a totalizing aesthetics: "It wants your adrenaline to pump, and for you to fight, not fly, as you experience yourself experiencing the artwork" (95). I do not disagree with this broad claim, but I did wonder about major modernist texts that dial it down: quiet Christmas celebrations in My Ántonia; Nick silently fishing in in our time: stories; Janie and Pheoby catching up on the front porch; and...