“A New World of Information”: Modernism and Data

Modernism has a problem with data. Within adjacent fields—Victorian, Post45, and Black studies—there has been a proliferation of attempts to expound upon the relationship between narrative form, literary technique, cultural production, methods of statistical aggregation, and information science (Womack 2022; Lubin 2022; Lee 2019). However, there remains relatively little engagement with the relationship between modernist form and the rise of data governance despite the fact that the historical period commonly called modernism, 1890-1940, coincides directly with a “total revolution in racial data generating technologies” (Muhammad 2010, Womack 2022). This is despite the fact that numerous Black and working-class “modernist” authors—George Schuyler, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ann Petry, Jean Toomer, Pauline Hopkins, among others—were wholly preoccupied with exploring the relationship between “statistics and storytelling” (Du Bois). 

To date, literary histories of modernism have prioritized the particular, the unrepresentable, and the ineffable, in contrast to a preoccupation with  “type” and statistical average in Victorian realism. Yet this special issue posits that the sudden emergence of new data regimes in the early 20th century gave rise to an existential crisis of representation which is quintessentially modernist in nature. In 2008 Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz identified this “problem” when they, in an effort to map new directions in the field, declared that: “[I]t is hardly a secret that the materializing of a new world of information was one of the crucial historical developments of the early twentieth century, nor has modernist criticism over the decades completely neglected this phenomenon. But it does seem that this transformation is currently attracting unusually focused scholarly attention, and we may want to ask why.” This special issue invites essays willing to take up their provocation in earnest. Possible questions for consideration include, but are not limited to:

• What is the relationship between modernist aesthetic innovation, theories of information, and histories of data governance? 
• How does the history of “information” complicate established accounts of the relationship between social science discourses and the history of the novel? 
• What does the suspicion of “data” reveal about our aesthetic and political sensibilities? 
• To what extent is new interest in “data in modernism” driven by institutional pressures? 
• How might modernist obsessions with detail and description articulate with– or refuse–new economic and political incentives to collect and quantify data? 
• Does the data positivism of the early 20th century contain lessons for, “the drama of Big Data” (Chun 2019) and “crisis of information” (Mao & Walkowitz, 2008) in the present?  

We are interested in short (around 1000-1500 words) articles and creative responses to the topic of modernism and data. We are just as excited about papers that use digital methods as those that refuse to; as long as you tell us why! Submissions are to be sent to Mia Cecily Florin-Sefton at mcf2180@columbia.edu by 20th December 2024. Please include ‘Modernism and Data TMR Special Issue’ in the email subject line. Any queries relating to the CFP should be sent to the same address. General queries about The Modernist Review should be sent to: tmr@bams.ac.uk.