Modernist Studies, Contemporary Problems (ACLA 2020)
In the past decade, modernist studies has been animated by the issue of periodization. As a concept, modernism has been projected backwards and forwards in space and time. Attempts to clarify the “when” of modernism have ultimately led modernist studies to the doorstep of contemporary. If we now have late modernism, metamodernism, and cosmodernism broaching the present, we also have arguments “against periodization” (Hayot), proposals for “literary transhistory” (Bronstein), and assertions that modernism is nothing more nor less than the “creative and expressive domain” of any modernity (Friedman). But what does it mean to propose the contemporaneity of modernism when modernism itself is being detached from time and history?