Modernist Machines, Modernist Mechanisms: The Infrastructure of the City and its Literature (Proposed Panel for Boston MSA 2025)
Modernist literature emerges at the intersection of industrialization and the rapid expansion of fossil fuels—railways, power grids, and oil pipelines—that define the modern city while also exposing its vulnerabilities. This panel explores how modernist works engage with the materiality and aesthetics of infrastructure to critique the systems that sustain modern life and the forms in which modern life is communicated.