The Modernist Review #49: Precarious Modernisms

27 October 2023

Modernism has been productively destabilized in recent years, leading Paul K. Saint-Amour to claim that the masculinist model of “make it new” verges on a kind of “cartoon vitalism.” As he writes, “equating modernism with […] muscular idol smashing and warrior masculinity misses both the traditionalism of the strong and the dissidence of the weak.”^[1] If weakness has become a new operative term in our understanding of modernist aesthetics, practice, and pedagogy—as the high traction of Saint-Amour’s article suggests it continues to be—it is high time to consider the resonance of precarity as another, if not-quite synonymous qualifier. Indeed, the “dissidence of the weak” can equally refer to the efforts of precarious modernists—including those working and writing along intersecting lines of racial, class, and gender disenfranchisement—and it also calls attention to the precarity of modernism as an academic discipline. Consider the unfortunate dearth of hiring in literary modernism or adjacent specialties. This, and the related shortcomings of the neoliberal University, forces us to acknowledge that a vast majority of  modernist scholarship today comes not from the tenured or the institutionally secure, but rather from the realm of the precarious: graduate students, contingent faculty members, independent scholars, and all those whose own, tenuous belonging to the field mirrors the precarity of the figures we study. Perhaps this was always the case, but recent global developments nonetheless shine a light on its current salience. Across the U.K., higher education has seen widespread strike action, while graduate students across the U.S. have been fighting to unionize for better research and teaching conditions. Just last month, West Virginia University voted to make wide-ranging reductions to academic programs and faculty positions, including the entire world language department, a crisis that, as Rose Casey, Jessica Wilkerson, and Johanna Winant suggest, spells disaster for the future of public education. This is not just an academic problem, they caution, for “people are the heart of the public University, and the public University is the heart of American democracy.”

Performing Alternative Selves and Combating Precarity in Rose Macaulay’s Newspaperwoman Novels

27 October 2023

Hunter Plummer, Loyola University Maryland

Expressing her keen eye for politics and farce, Mystery at Geneva (1922) and Keeping Up Appearances (1928) also embody author Rose Macaulay’s preoccupation with the extremes white, English working women went to in the 1920s to achieve success in new communities. These novels do not draw directly from Macaulay’s life, but the economic and social precarity she depicts seem inspired by Macaulay’s own experiences maneuvering different spheres as a journalist, novelist, and daughter of an upper-class family in continual financial straits. Protagonists Miss Montana and Daisy Simpson adopt alternative physical and social selves because that is the only way they can access the male-dominated or upper-class spaces of work and society they crave. Pairing the exaggerated efforts they go through to change who they appear to be with each novel’s ending—in which its protagonist extracts herself from a community when her identity is exposed—underlines the precarity and potential ruin Macaulay saw for many interwar women when they tried to better their position.

Quantum Reality and Mystical Musings on Precarity in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse

27 October 2023

Xueying Zhou, College of Humanities and Law, Beijing University of Chemical Technology

The idea that nothing lasts runs throughout Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. The sea engulfs a spit of land Mr. Ramsay stands on by ‘slowly eating [it] away’. [1] The ‘order and dry land’ inside is compared with the outside ‘in which things wavered and vanished, waterily’. [2] Water, a central element in this novel, stands for mass forces of fluidity that erode the solid. Such erosion stands for the process of dissolution that imperils our desire for order and permanence.

The Precarity of Modernity in Turgut Uyar’s Poetry: A Study of Failure and Poetic Rebuilding in the Context of İkinci Yeni

27 October 2023

Lamia Kabal, Boğaziçi University

Fresh investigations into modernism, with a heightened focus on the experiential and singular production of modernity on a global scale, have prompted a reevaluation of the concept by dissociating it from Western-centric perspectives and associating it with capitalism, generating uncertainties surrounding the category and the boundaries of modernism. Through an exploration of Turkish poet Turgut Uyar’s poetics, which unravel the underlying precariousness and the looming prospect of failure, this essay seeks to contribute to the ongoing discourse on the precarity and uncertainty enveloping the category of modernity and modernism.

Precarious Dubliners: Women, Work, and ‘keeping it quiet’

27 October 2023

Casey Lawrence, Trinity College Dublin

For women in post-famine Ireland, James Joyce knew, marriage was an unlikely or at least substantially delayed prospect—and one of the only ways to secure economic stability at a time when they had few employment opportunities. Joyce was particularly attuned to the plight of women, having watched his mother suffer through seventeen pregnancies in twenty years of marriage to a progressively drunker, more violent, and less economically stable man. In 1904, he wrote to Nora Barnacle, who would soon become the mother of his children (and much later his wife):

My mother was slowly killed, I think, by my father’s ill-treatment… When I looked on her face as she lay in her coffin… I understood that I was looking on the face of a victim and I cursed the system which had made her a victim.[1]

Although Joyce sought to have a more equal relationship than his parents’ marriage, as an unmarried mother in an unfamiliar country, Nora was in an equally precarious position—if not more so—than women in traditional marriages. Joyce’s fiction offers many examples of the precarity of turn-of-the-century Irish women, but academic tradition has left these largely overlooked.

Zitkála-Šá’s The Sun Dance Opera: A Precarious Staging

27 October 2023

Ryan O’Shea, Queen Mary University of London

I’ll leave my land! I’ll join the Sioux! Forgetting my past days, seeking new friends. I’ll hie to the land of the Sioux, remembering only the songs of my people; I’ll fly to the land of the Sioux, of the Sioux, the SIOUX.^[1]

At the beginning of Zitkála-Šá and William F. Hanson’s The Sun Dance Opera (1913), a Shoshone Nation singer introduces the setting, the ‘land of the Sioux’, as an interloper from another tribe. His interference in rituals drives the plot. As the character was played by a white singer to a largely settler audience, these themes have a contextual relevance. Viewers became voyeurs, and the theatre space made them intruders in a staged Sun Dance. Yet, Zitkála-Šá, a Dakota Sioux writer and classical violinist, wished to assert and preserve indigenous rituals through her work. There was a precarity to this performance, a balancing act between Zitkála-Šá’s affirmation of her Sioux culture in a time of indigenous persecution and the dangers of subsuming a private ritual into settler entertainment.

Modernist Precarity in Today’s Television Adaptations: Zora Neale Hurston’s “Drenched in Light” and Little Fires Everywhere

27 October 2023

Jerrica Jordan, Tarrant County College

The rising success of twenty-first century television adaptations queries the preoccupation showrunners have with remaking the past. Series such as Watchmen^[1] (2019) and Little Fires Everywhere^[2] (2020) highlight racial events of the modernist era to showcase present-day society’s desire to reconcile ourselves with past trauma. While Watchmen overtly demonstrates this through its opening recreation of the 1921 Tulsa Greenwood Massacre, Little Fires Everywhere more subtly approaches elements of racial precarity; its Black protagonist, Pearl Warren, confronts issues of tokenism—a practice in which people or groups include small numbers of minorities to disguise patterns of inequity—as she navigates life in 1990s suburban Ohio. In many ways, her narrative journey repeats elements of Zora Neale Hurston’s ‘Drenched in Light,’^[3] symbolizing the pervasive effect of tokenism in American media and society.

‘Wiped of mould and mites, would the ball run true?’: The Precarious Nostos of David Jones and Basil Bunting

October 27, 2023

Lucie Kotesovska, University of Victoria

Known but not assimilated describes the scholarly consensus regarding the poetry of David Jones and Basil Bunting. If the hallmark of an astute modernist was to ‘modernize himself on his own,’ as Pound claimed, the ascendancy of Jones and Bunting should have been guaranteed. ^[1] However, their creative effort was not accompanied by a corresponding self-assertion and canonical self-inscription as practiced by, for instance, Eliot and Pound. These poets’ self-presentation rather assumed, for most of their lives, the monastic, semi-hermitic existence of the early saints native to the British Isles – a tradition central to the geo-historical strata of their respective regions – Wales and Northumbria.