Modernisms, Old and New

4.0 credits

“Make it New” has generally been accepted as a mantra for literary modernism. But with many of its classics now more than 100 years old, their novelty invites reinvestigation. In recent years, moreover, modernist studies, as a critical field, has itself undergone a significant remaking. With the emergence of “the new modernist studies,” critical attention has shifted to a recognition of multiple and diverse modernisms that stretch the geographic, temporal, and material limits of what once passed for an established canon and that open the field to practitioners not previously recognized as modernists. This turn has brought a profusion of new questions and methodologies and new texts and contexts to consider. This seminar will explore a number of recent challenges to the traditional mapping of the modernist field and to the critical rubrics it has promulgated; we will do so through a reading of some of the key critical interventions in the field that have been published in the last couple of decades, but also through a rereading of iconic texts of British modernism. We will also look at how postmodern and contemporary artists have recast and transformed some of these modernist icons, sometimes by literally taking them apart and re-piecing them together.