Modernisms, In Fact
The proposed panel aims to explore modernist techniques and perspectives as they might appear in any form of fact-based discourse in the early twentieth century. Much work has already been done on modernism and nonfiction literary forms such as (auto)biography and travel writing, but what about less evidently literary genres and fields—economics, chemistry, history, policy, mathematics, and so on? Among many questions this panel might investigate, a central one is this: what happens to facticity when it is presented through modernism’s disorienting multiperspectivism, unreliability, ambiguity or fuzzy logic?