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. From the blazing landscapes of John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer to the bustling streets of The Street by Ann Petry and the urban divestment of Richard Wright’s Native Son, 20th-century texts reveal how the material of modernity—bridges, factories, and tenements–are not only physical networks but also metaphors for the precarious, unsustainable nature of capitalist society. Modernist aesthetics such as formal ruptures, narrative antinomies, and linear collapse parallel disruptions in the urban environment and reveal the modern subject’s fractured social subconscious. Drawing from ecocriticism, urban studies, and infrastructural studies, the panel examines how modernist texts map the tenuous balance between industrial progress and ecological degradation, highlighting the entanglement of energy systems, urbanization, and the fraught legacies of national development and exploitation. 

Key words: ecocriticism, energy studies, American studies, infrastructure, modernism, urban studies

Please submit 250-word abstracts to Sarah Frank (sarah-landerholmfrank@uiowa.edu) and Jennie Sekanics (jennie-sekanics@uiowa.edu) by April 1st. 

This CFP is for the Modernist Studies Association conference in Boston, from October 9-12, 2025. 

https://www.moderniststudies.org/conference/MSA2025/CFP/#p3