How Modernism Provisions Us for the Future

Rupture—once the byword of modernist politics—is in a sorry state. Over the last decade, categories of rupture have gained widespread currency in an array of economic and political movements intent on undermining institutions—particularly international ones—at the very moment in history when we need them most. In Modernist Studies, annual meetings have become tinged by pessimism as we increasingly turn our attention to the precarious nature of academic labor. While such anxieties are undeniably justified, they are dramatically amplified by the larger, ever-more dire rupture of the natural world. At a recent meeting of the Modernist Studies Association, I found myself imagining a future in which scholars of the field continued to meet on an annual basis, and could not shake the sense that such a future would be an incredibly bleak one. For what kind of future will we have in even twenty years if we deem face-to-face meetings sufficient justification to continue burning fossil fuels? Though nobody says this aloud, the intellectual practices we take for granted cannot endure. Our academic and professional formations have been made possible by the carbon economy that is killing us. Imagining a future for these formations is as difficult as imagining a future in which the natural world has been reconciled with our modernity.

As hard as it is to imagine this future, many scholars—myself included—find it equally difficult to damn the study of modernism as a mere byproduct of the carbon economy. Modernist writers were among the first to extensively experience the realities that would become familiar to us—from new gender expressions, mass warfare, and speed, to the lived experience of mass communication. If the modernist moment meant anything, it was characterized by a sense that crisis and opportunity are harmonious co-travelers, and that literature has a broad social function in helping us navigate a future unlike our present.

The best new work in Modernist Studies is animated not by a blanket ecological imperative, per se, but rather by a sense that modernism might be useful as we navigate this ruptured future. In a special issue of Modernism/Modernity on "weak theory" published in 2018, Paul Saint-Amour described new and emerging methodologies in the field, especially those resistant to historicism and the hermeneutics of suspicion. My sense is that many of these emergent methodologies have gained traction because they offer ways of operationalizing the lessons of modernism for the political exigencies of right now, the third decade of the twenty-first century. The books under discussion here form part of this movement in recent scholarship. Much of this work shares a desire to move beyond long-dominant methodological imperatives, particularly those that would partition the past from the present (and thus from the future). These books are far less concerned with restoring lost historical contexts than they are with achieving fidelity to the political impulses that fired modernism, including its orientation toward the future.

The collection Affective Materialities: Reorienting the Body in Modernist Literature, edited by Kara Watts, Molly Volanth Hall, and Robin Hackett, is one text engaging modernist literature in these ways. This ambitious collection seeks to answer critical lacunae in both ecocriticism and affect theory while also renewing how scholars have traditionally analyzed the work of bodies in modernist literature. As the editors understand it, ecocriticism, with its emphasis on environments, has failed to adequately theorize the role of bodies and affect in its objects of analysis, while affect theory has struggled with a paradox of seeing bodies as both materially limited and boundless. Modernist texts appear in this collection as objects of analysis that might allow a theoretical intervention in both fields.

But this collection also...