MSA 2025: The Pedagogical Stakes of an Expanding Modernism
Modernist Studies in the 21st century has rigorously adapted itself to bridge the gap between the narrowly periodized referent of “modernism” and the much broader range of literary-critical interests that the term encompasses. This trend is heralded by Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz’s 2008 call for a spatio-temporally and “vertically” expanded “New Modernist Studies,” and it reaches its logical extreme in Susan Stanford Friedman’s Planetary Modernisms (2015), which locates discrete modernisms both throughout and beyond the scope of recorded human history.