Rhetorical Thinking Among Arabs-Ancient and Modern

Literary, But Not Too Literary; Joyous, But Not Jazzy: Triad Magazine, Antipodean Modernity and the Middlebrow David Carter (bio) Antipodean Modernity My title comes from an editorial in the Sydney monthly, the Triad, from July 1924. It represents one in a series of attempts by the magazine’s editors to redefine their magazine in a way that was adequate to the changed cultural circumstances in which they found themselves in the mid-1920s—surrounded on all sides by the new cultures of modernity, confronting the rapid turnover of isms that had yet to find enduring institutional form as modernism, and attempting to find a place in a cultural field that appeared newly segmented into high, low, and middlebrow strata, at exactly the moment the term “middlebrow” gained wide currency in the English-speaking world. The editors sought an editorial platform, an audience, and a set of contents that were, in one of the phrases of the era, “neither highbrow nor lowbrow.” The fact that this task proved near-impossible for the magazine in any permanent form has a good deal to tell us about the print culture of this key transitional moment and the state of what I will call “antipodean modernity.” Studies of modernism and modernity in Australia have been transformed over the last decade in ways that manifest the “spatial” and “vertical” expansion of the new modernist studies as defined by Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz.1 This transformation, however, has been driven as much by internal pressures on the cultural modeling of nation and modernity as by [End Page 245] external influence. The “transnational turn” has been especially influential in reconfiguring Australian cultures and hence in reconfiguring Australia’s relation to international modernity across a wide range of fields: popular theater and live entertainment, cinema, radio and jazz, photography, craft and fine arts, architecture and design, advertising, fashion and consumption.2 The ground has shifted from high modernism alone to the more complex and entangled spheres of technological, media, and “vernacular” modernisms, reframing modernism as “a powerful domain within a particular modernity,” here in its specific Australian time and place.3 Australian literature has also been subject to the transnational turn, but, with only a small number of exceptions, studies of print culture and especially the critical role of periodicals in relation to modernity have lagged some distance behind.4 The focus has been on a small number of publications including the weekly Bulletin—especially in its first two decades from 1880, when it managed to combine elements of the new journalism with a serious commitment to the nation, the public, and cultural life—and on the little magazines, particularly the spectacularly antimodernist Vision (1923–24) or the heroically modernist Angry Penguins (1940–46). Studies of Australian modernity have also given increased attention to Home (1920–42), a magazine dedicated to the dissemination of modern taste in fashion, design, and the decorative arts.5 But a great deal of the archive remains unexplored. The Triad itself is largely forgotten, despite having been the only long-term periodical in Australia across the first three decades of the twentieth century dedicated primarily to literature, theater, and the other arts.6 Earlier approaches to modernism in Australia took their bearings from the “Greenwich Meridian” of European and Anglo-American high modernism, or from a nationalist perspective tracing the evolution of a distinctive Australian culture that would be at once local, modern, and mature.7 Indeed, the two perspectives were often complementary, giving rise to a long history of pronouncements on the nation’s incipient modernity: the signs of modernity were gathering but had not yet, not quite, been consolidated; or alternatively, the latest successful artist or artifact was proof that the nation had finally made it. In effect, both perspectives inscribe the model of center and margin, metropolis and province, so that the history of modernism in Australia unavoidably became a story of lack and lag. The fact that Australia was a long way away, itself a very partial geography, routinely blurred into the idea that it was a long way behind. Geographical distance was translated into cultural belatedness. By contrast, the newer studies of modernity discover Australia’s contemporaneity...

Modernism: Evolution of an Idea by Sean Latham and Gayle Rogers, Modernism’s Print Cultures by Faye Hamill and Mark Hussey, Modernism, Science, and Technology by Mark S. Morrison

Modernist Voyages: Colonial Women Writers in London, 1890-1945 by Anna Snaith Cambridge University Press, 2014. 278 pages Anna Snaith's Modernist Voyages: Colonial Women Writers in London, 1890-1945, is a timely study that illuminates colonial women writers' foundational role in literary modernism and the ways in which their representations of London disrupt imperial claims to stability. Through her paradigm of the "voyage in," with its playful reversal of Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out (1915), Snaith focuses on the unprecedented mobility offered by the ship to demonstrate how colonial women writers shaped modernity: "These women were not coming to London solely to experience modernity, they were a constituent part of it" (26). Modernist Voyages is, in short, a story of reversals: a reversal of the traditional route of imperial expansion from London to the colonies, a reversal of London's assumed influence on colonial literary production, and a reversal of critical conversations and practices. Modernist Voyages participates in the "spatial turn" within the new modernist studies and yet distinguishes itself by restoring the issue of gender to current debates within the field. Feminist scholars of modernist literature, particularly Jane Garrity and Anne Fernald, have critiqued Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz for their dismissal of sexuality and gender as alternate modes of scholarship in "The New Modernist Studies" (2008). Snaith lends her voice to this debate and poignantly summarizes the problem: "It is as though that primarily recuperative project [on modernist women writers in the 1970s-1990s] is now complete, and critical momentum needs to look elsewhere" (10). Feminist recuperation and "critical momentum" are not mutually exclusive, and Snaith's refrain of "both ... and" attempts to address this impasse: these writers were both feminists and anticolonialists, a position that scholars consistently fail to appreciate. Snaith's deep historical research into the lives of these seven women--Olive Schreiner (South Africa), Sarojini Naidu (India), Sara Jeannette Duncan (Canada), Katherine Mansfield (New Zealand),Jean Rhys (Dominica), Una Marson (Jamaica), and Christina Stead (Australia)--raises provocative methodological questions as she gestures toward a more expansive understanding of literary modernism's terrains. Uniting the diverse cast of characters in Modernist Voyages are London and the sea, two settings whose importance raises them almost to the status of character in Snaith's work. In line with Henri Lefebvre's work on the social production of space, Snaith's spatial analyses of London trace different topographies that illuminate how various colonies subtend and haunt the unreal city, signaling London's inherent instability. Instead of reifying London's position as the facilitator of transnational modernism, then, Snaith's concentration on these writers' London years demonstrates how the imperial city fostered both their feminism and anti-imperialism, thus contributing to the destabilization of empire's ideology. London also epitomizes the criteria by which Snaith designates these writers as "modernist": "The combined focus on urbanism, capitalism and colonialism in their work constitutes a thoroughgoing consideration of the forms of modernity and its transnational manifestations" (8). In terms of recuperative praxis, finally, the focus on London introduces several writers into the broader category of transnational modernism. For instance, until now Sara Jeannette Duncan and Una Marson have primarily been discussed in the context of either Canadian or Jamaican literature, subordinating each writer's cosmopolitanism to her national origins. Snaith's remapping of London is compelling, but her emphasis on the sea as a facilitator of a distinctly feminist transnational modernism proves her most significant accomplishment. Employing Michel Foucault's concept of heterotopia from "Of Other Spaces" (1984), she argues that the ship represents a place moving through a hegemonic space and creating a space of resistance. …

New Modernist Autonomies Christopher Langlois Aesthetics of Negativity: Blanchot, Adorno, and Autonomy William S. Allen. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016. xvi + 322. $65.00 (cloth). The Work of Difference: Modernism, Romanticism, and the Production of Literary Form. Audrey Wasser. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016. Pp. vi + 208. $85.00 (cloth); $28.00 (paper). In his 2011 article for the minnesota review, "The New Modernist Studies: What's Left of Political Formalism?," Max Brzezinski implicates Rebecca Walkowitz, Douglas Mao, and Martin Puchner in the instigation of a methodological turn in contemporary modernist studies that has so far betrayed no signs of reversing course.1 This turn, Brzezinski worries, is notable less for having expanded what Mao and Walkowitz describe in their now-canonical 2008 co-authored PMLA article as the "vertical" and "horizontal" vectors directing the future of modernist studies, than it is for capitulating to the "political flattening" of academic research that characterizes the neoliberal ethos of the twenty-first century university: "the transformation of a critical movement into a marketable intellectual commodity" (109). Puchner's Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes (2005) is paradigmatic, in Brzezinski's view, of how contemporary modernist scholarship performs a depoliticizing function under disingenuous cover of political progressivism, for what Puchner achieved in his award-winning book, Brzezinski continues, is nothing more commendable than having reduced both political and aesthetic "revolutions of the past" into "objects of disinterested theoretical appreciation" (111). So it is that while Puchner makes much of the "manifesto form's ability to make claims on and shape the future," Brzezinski writes, "the 'future' as a critical category seems almost politically contentless," which accords with the demands of new modernist studies (intentionally or otherwise) to capitalize on the aesthetic properties of revolutionary discourse without any substantive allegiance to sociopolitical revolutionary commitments (111). Marx and Engels's The Communist Manifesto has value, in Puchner's hands, only for its invention of an avant-garde aesthetic genre and not, from the depoliticized vantage point of the new modernist studies, for its political investments in utopian reconstructions of the social order under capitalist modes of production. This is, for Brzezinski, perhaps the ultimate betrayal of the Marxist legacy and a testament to the ideological complicity of new modernist studies in the institutional consolidation of neoliberalism: "is the Neo in Neoliberalism the New in New Modernist Studies?" (120; emphasis in original). Puchner responded to Brzezinski's accusations of neoliberal complicity in the 2012 issue of the minnesota review, defending his aestheticization of The Communist Manifesto on the grounds that the best way to resist the siren song of neoliberalism is for "[w]e in literature" to reject being "lured away from our strengths in a misguided attempt to be better economists, political scientists, or historians. If we want to reverse our marginalization," Puchner contends, then we must not be afraid to embrace the fact that literary scholars know more about "how literature works, and I mean this in the broadest sense, from production to reception, how literature is written, how it is received, how it acts in the world and fails to act in the world. … Historians are better at writing a history of revolutions. We are better at writing a history of their 'poetry.'"2 Puchner's defense of the specialized study of literature, and specifically of "how literature works" in his response to Brzezinski, is useful for approaching the two books under review here—William S. Allen's Aesthetics of Negativity: Blanchot, Adorno, and Autonomy and Audrey Wasser's The Work of Difference: Modernism, Romanticism, and the Production of Literary Form—with an eye on their scholarly contribution to some of the most pressing methodological debates in modernist studies today. At first glance, neither Allen's nor Wasser's books would appear to have anything at all to do with either the "vertical" or "horizontal" expansions of the new modernist studies. With their shared emphasis on concepts like "negativity," "autonomy," and the "genuinely new," both Allen and Wasser have risked anachronistic critical interventions into ways of reading literary (and philosophical) texts, and of understanding modernist processes of literary production, through concepts that have all but lost their...

Reviewed by: The New Modernist Studies ed. by Douglas Mao Gül Bilge Han The New Modernist Studies. Edited by Douglas Mao. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Modernist studies over the past few decades have undergone a radical sea change that has altered some of the field’s long-standing assumptions about the foundations and meanings of modernism as a theoretical and historical category. Recent critical interventions into what is now commonly referred to as “the new modernist studies” have charted paths that extend the traditional axis of modernism beyond early twentieth-century Euro-American arts and literature. By showing how modernist works operate in diverse geographical locations and cultural forms, and on different timelines, these scholarly activities have transgressed modernism’s previous disciplinary boundaries in various “spatial, temporal and vertical directions,” as Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz wrote in their seminal essay “The New Modernist Studies,” published in PMLA in May 2008 (737). Such efforts have led to the reconfiguration of modernism as a polycentric rather than a singular phenomenon while rendering the term itself increasingly elusive and at times hard to grasp. The publication of this new collection of essays, The New Modernist Studies, continues and advances such critical work by rigorously documenting and responding to the field’s key areas of debate and self-inquiry, which were first developed in edited volumes such as Bad Modernisms (Duke UP, 2006), The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms (Oxford UP, 2012), and A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism (Columbia UP, 2016), and recently anthologized in The New Modernist Studies Reader (Bloomsbury, 2021), to list but a few. With its fourteen essays divided into two parts, “Histories” and “Horizons,” the current volume, edited by Mao, both historicizes the critical currents of (the new) modernist studies from its origins to the present (Part I) and identifies productive points of departure for fresh paths of inquiry oriented toward the future (Part II). The two essays in “Histories,” by Michael North and Mark Wollaeger, provide a useful and comprehensive overview of the birth and growth of modernism’s trajectory as a cultural, intellectual, and academic formation. The remaining twelve essays in “Horizons” collectively explore a wide array of topics from a largely contextualizing perspective with a simultaneous emphasis on textual specificities and formal features. The volume undertakes the task of rethinking text-context relations in ways that resist the immediate prioritization of context over textual meaning. Such prioritization of context can be said to have dominated the field of the new modernist studies from its inception. Several chapters set out to explore modernism’s spatial and global dimensions, highlighting patterns of transaction between diverse cultural and geographical contexts as well as individual texts and movements. María del Pilar Blanco’s contribution begins with a theoretical reflection on the notion of the planetary, which critically builds on previous models developed particularly by Gayatri Spivak and Susan Stanford Friedman. Taking as its case study Spanish American modernismo and French Décadence, the essay underscores the continuities and ruptures between the two movements through translation, linguistic correspondence, and individual travel. Modernismo ’s encounters [End Page 118] with the Décadence movement serve as a testing ground for comparative, planetary readings that nevertheless remain cautious of flattening out the temporal and linguistic boundaries through a homogenizing Anglo-American institutional lens. This revisionary approach to modernism as a global and transnational project emerges as a key concern in several other essays from a notably broad range of angles: Friedman’s chapter, for instance, proposes transnationally situated comparative readings that bring together figures like Rabindranath Tagore and E. M. Forster based on their mutual engagement with religious identity and empire. Aarthi Vadde probes the formal and conceptual allegiances between the technological and scientific engineering of international auxiliary languages, on the one hand, and mid-twentieth-century global modernist literature, on the other. Steven S. Lee’s contribution examines the global revolutionary projects of communism before and after the Cold War as a generative force for modernist aesthetics’ engagement with social realism. Edwin Hill is equally invested in uncovering modernism’s wider cultural and spatial flows in his exploration of noir film and its use of jazz as a...

There is a close relationship between literary theory and contemporary Chinese literature, and the integration of knowledge from different disciplines. To realize the development of contemporary Chinese literature, not only the support of literary theory research is needed, but also the research results of different disciplines and the integration of discipline knowledge are needed. It also lays a theoretical foundation for promoting the development and research of Chinese contemporary literature. This article conducts in-depth research on literary theory and Chinese modern and contemporary literature. On the basis of expounding the related concepts and connotations of literary theory and Chinese modern and contemporary literature, it deeply analyzes the relationship between literary theory and Chinese modern and contemporary literature, and puts forward some suggestions for promoting the development of literary theory, promoting the development of modern and contemporary Chinese literature, Promoting the development of the literature industry is of great significance, and it provides specific implementation strategies for promoting literary theory and the study of modern and contemporary Chinese literature.

New Russian Modernist Studies Edward Waysband Leonid Livak, In Search of Russian Modernism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018. ix + 375 pp. Irina Shevelenko, ed. Reframing Russian Modernism. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2018. xii + 259 pp. Leonid Livak’s and Irina Shevelenko’s books reflect a growing interest in, and need for, new theoretical reassessments of Russian modernism and its post-Soviet theorizations made possible by the fall of the Soviet Union. Whereas Anglo-American studies of modernism are an intellectual growth industry, a collective hothouse of innovative approaches and ideas, research on the issue is still marginalized in Russian studies in the West and in international modernist studies.1 Russian modernist topics feature but rarely in the programs of annual conferences of The Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) or of The Modernist Studies Association (MSA) conferences. Leonid Livak, in particular, reflects on circumstances that have led to the conceptual “belatedness” of studies of Russian modernism and avowedly aims to synchronize their theoretical basis with that of their more up-to-date Western counterparts. If anti-modernist Soviet ideology created a special form of cultural disruption, late- and post-Soviet efforts to reclaim the modernist “lost time,” along with their unquestionable empirical accomplishments, have often uncritically espoused the value system and fixed canon self-servingly codified by specific literary figures. Aiming to de-ideologize the field, Livak’s book includes a revision of a range of entrenched assumptions of the “old” Western studies of modernism, associated with “the New Criticism and the Marxist tradition running from Georg Lukács and the Frankfurt school to Fredric Jameson” (4). Livak draws inspiration for this two-fold revisionist task from “new modernist studies” which emerged in Anglo-American literary scholarship in the 1990s and are embodied in its flagship journal, Modernism/modernity. He accepts the major theoretical assumption on modernism as a range of ambivalent responses to the challenges of modernity and reconsiders the concept epistemologically. Drawing on Clifford Geertz’s understanding of culture as a mechanism for organizing information and Virgil Nemoianu’s studies of Romanticism, Livak proposes [End Page 357] to consider “modernism”2 not as a fixed number of canonical works but as “culture” or a “cultural process,” i. e. “an evolving system of values, ideas, practices, and conventions . . . suffusing human experience with meaning” (7). This cultural synthesizing approach results in major reconsiderations of Russian modernism’s taxonomy, chronology, and geography, as well as of their interrelationships. No less important is Livak’s engagement with Pierre Bourdieu’s work in the field of cultural production, which yields important insights in regard to the socio-economic evolvement of Russian modernism. Taking as his main working metaphor the notion of cartography, Livak exposes distortions and blind spots in previous “maps” of cultural communities of modernity and proposes more accurate delineations. The titles of the book chapters reflect this cartographical metaphorics. The first three chapters propose a careful rethinking of the entrenched methodological premises (or distorted “maps”) concerning Russian and, by extension, international modernism. The fourth and fifth chapters propose two new “maps” of Russian modernism, demonstrating the possibilities of more inclusive research, involving extra-aesthetic phenomena, primarily social and economic. In chapter 1, “The Toponymical Labyrinth of Russian Modernist Culture,” Livak deliberately downplays various aesthetic lines of demarcation among multiple segments of modernist culture, viewing them as expressing the intrinsic modernist predilection for collective/ group self-definitions rather than as signifiers of any essential significance. Livak questions the universalization of general terms and definitions that were used at the turn of the century through the end of the 1920s by actors and contemporary observers of various artistic enterprises to define the evolving cultural and literary processes and self-organization. While this “intense onomastic activity” (40) was then substantialized by scholars, Livak stresses its functional and situational character in constant literary feuds and fights for artistic self-legitimization. Undermining the essentialist character of such concepts as Symbolism, Decadence, novoe iskusstvo (new art), Acmeism, Futurism, Cubo-Futurism, LEF, RAPP, and others, Livak, however, considers “modernism” as “the least bad option for a generic umbrella term denoting, in shorthand, a Russian cultural formation that existed from the turn of...

Goblin Modernism:Modernism, Anarchism, and the Radical Fantastic James Gifford (bio) The longstanding conflict between Marxism and anarchism as scholarly methodologies shapes how we read the modernist canon in modernist studies and in particular the new modernist studies. More importantly, it has just as strongly shaped the formation of that canon itself. What we conceive as belonging under the designation of modernist and understand as a manifestation of the conditions of modernity is itself pliably configured by the critical paradigms on which we rely and the inherited legacies of their development. This means that we are also shaped by the critical scotoma or blind spot each methodology demands. But this is not a new idea in the new modernist studies, and as much as it is metacritical, it is also simply a rephrasing of Susan Stanford Friedman's sense of definitional excursions and the purposes that differing definitions serve: these purposes being perhaps of greater interest than the definitions themselves.1 In the new modernist studies, the prevalence of Marxist methodologies has made working class popular culture, film noir, science fiction, and both hardboiled pulp and detective fiction visible and vital. They are forms particularly conducive to Marxist analyses, perhaps best evidenced through Fredric Jameson's work across them all in connection with his writings on modernism.2 The symptomatic critical scotoma that accompanies this methodology, however, covers and blinds modernist studies to the deep entanglements between anarchism, modernism, and the apparent anathema to Marxism: fantasy. Even as magic and the occult have become normalized elements of modernist studies [End Page 551] that are recognized as essential components of the print cultures in which modernist little magazines flourished, the overlaps among modernism and magical fantasy have been eclipsed by Jameson and by the ur-critic of science fiction Darko Suvin's argument that fantasy is "socio-pathological" when set in comparison to its cousin in genre pulp: science fiction.3 Fantasy's "pathology" is supposedly even more visible in relief against both genres' ego ideal: modernist literature.4 Moreover, it is socio-pathological in the same way as Jameson and Suvin see anarchism through their critical lens. The problem goes beyond merely recognizing that the same moment of the late modernists also saw the emergence of hobbits and the New Apocalypse, or that the reactionary nostalgia in reviving Grail romances shapes the literary events of 1922 in a vision of resurgent Romance and Arthuriana widespread in popular Romances of the same time, both playing to imperial nostalgia and ideological certainties of a passing (or passed) historical moment. The problem is larger, more enchanting, and more unruly than that. Innovative modernist writers such as John Cowper Powys and Hope Mirrlees transitioned seamlessly to writing fantasy fiction, and there is a long thread of anarchist thought embedded in the genre, as if these were not really transitions after all but merely continuations in another form.5 What I call "goblin modernism" comes from this overlap and provides a powerful corrective through direct action to the critical habits generated by the chummy camaraderie of the new modernist studies, science fiction studies, and Marxist studies (despite how productive their contiguity has been and continues to be). My term deliberately blurs Marx's specter or hobgoblin from the opening of The Communist Manifesto with a magical spell and the notion of fantasy.6 Modernist writers were doing a great deal in genre writing, as has been long recognized, and if we have the modernist middlebrow in our critical field, we also have the lowbrow pulp, and likewise if we have a modernist historicization of the class struggle we also find the role of anarchism in modernist poetics runs deep.7 More to the point, this pulp has every potential to be radical, disruptive, and self-reflexive for its historical moment if we can only get past the tribalism of the critical body built up around it and that creates a blind spot occluding our view.8 The crux of my argument is that the development of the new modernist studies, and in particular the concept of late modernism within it, is remarkably congruent with the development of fantasy studies, and in particular the concept of...

The Weak Powers of Digital Modernist Studies Gabriel Hankins (bio) Are digital methods weak or strong? How should we understand the conjunction of digital tools and methods with modernist studies? In some accounts of the rise of weak theories in literary studies, weak theory and digital methods like distant reading are taken as correlative terms, with associative logic and epistemological modesty common to both.1 Yet a nearly opposite set of arguments is as familiar: digital literary methods are too "strong," so goes the claim, because they conceal naïvely positivist notions of evidence and proof, reductively quantify cultural production, or advance a neoliberal agenda within the academy.2 Digital methods appear both too weak and too strong for use on literary objects, particularly objects so delicately rebarbative as those of modernism. Generalized glosses such as these call out for more particular accounts of digital practice from within modernist studies itself, and indeed these have begun to appear. Work by Robert Scholes and Clifford Wulfman, Jessica Pressman, Shawna Ross, and James O'Sullivan supports the contention of Stephen Ross and Jentery Sayers that there are "special affinities" between modernism and digital approaches, and that digital methods "afford some of the most promising lines of development for the ongoing expansion of the 'new modernist studies.'"3 Shawna Ross and James O'Sullivan's edited volume Reading Modernism with Machines (2016) marks a turn from debating the advantages and deficits of digital methodology and towards embedding new methods and interpretive procedures within the specificity of modernist studies as a field.4 [End Page 569] Rather than surveying the field or advocating a particular digital technique, the present article advances an argument about how digital approaches articulate with modernist subjects. After considering the leading positions on that question, and drawing on current examples of work in the field, I contend that digital modernist studies can and should understand itself through a weak theory of the conjunction of digital method and scholarly field, following the line of thinking developed by Wai Chee Dimock, Bruno Latour, and their common sources in science and technology studies.5 This line of weak theory focuses on relational networks of association, skeins of weak bonds that paradoxically produce strength through "dissemination, heterogeneity and the careful plaiting of weak ties" (Latour, "Actor-Network," 3). The social is continuously woven by human and nonhuman actors, argues Latour, and he has in mind the micro-societies that constitute disciplines, not just the macro-social echelons of politics and economics. For Dimock, these "dispersed, episodic webs of association, not supervised and not formalizable, make it an open question what is primary, what is determinative, what counts as the center and what counts as the margins" ("Weak Theory," 737). The weak conjunction between digital method and modernist studies foregrounds exactly these questions of center and periphery, social determination, long lines of material dependencies, and critical authority. Rather than a static theoretical picture, weak theory is here employed to theorize the process of affiliation, conjunction, translation, and alliance between methods and subjects, and to redescribe the work of digital modernist studies as the careful, conscious "plaiting of weak ties" between method, object, and field. Digital modernist studies requires a Latourian attention to the intervention of material agents into critical practice, along with long chains of institutions, machines, collaborators, and other mediations between the intimate triad of the world, the text, and the critic. It necessitates the Dimockian work of filiation, comparison, and self-reflective theorization—an emphasis on constructing rather than assuming the boundaries of the field—that increasingly serves as the hallmark of an expanded modernist studies. It compels interdisciplinary conversations that extend beyond the boundaries of the humanities. Over and above the labor of the individual critic, digital modernist studies demands collaborative labor and collective verification, along with new methods of peer review now coming into view. Such methods at their best afford us few of the pleasures of deciphering, uncovering, or excavating meaning associated with the strong theoretical approaches that Paul Ricoeur describes as the hermeneutics of suspicion, despite the now privileged rhetoric of "data mining." Nor do they offer historicist critics an escape from the careful composition of texts, contexts, and...

(Yubraj Aryal interviewed Peter Nicholls on New Modernist Studies. Mr Aryal focused his questions on some most recent issues on new modernist studies.) Y. A.: You worked as the Director for the Center for Modernist Studies at University of Sussex before you recently moved to New York University. From your works, experiences and involvement in the field, could you please tell what is the most recent development in the field of [new] modernist studies today? [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] P.N: In the last ten years or so there has been what feels like an explosion of modernist studies. Scholars have become increasingly interested in what might be called the history of modernism, in an expanded view of the field of cultural production in which art works appeared. There has been a lot of attention to what Lawrence Rainey calls the institutions of and to the relation of particular texts to public culture'. Critics (Mark Morrison, for example) have concerned themselves with the mechanisms of publication and reception through which modernist works made their appearance. We've also seen exciting work on the relation of modernism to psychoanalysis (books by Lyndsey Stonebridge and David Trotter are good examples), along with explorations of its connections to anarchism (Alan Antliff), New Deal politics (Michael Szalay), and the publication of little magazines (three volumes in progress edited by Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker). Modernism is becoming a large-scale phenomenon, then, with significant new inclusions, such as the Harlem Renaissance (see Houston Baker's work). I recently revised my Modernisms: A Literary Guide for a new, expanded edition and one of the things that struck me was a growing sense among critics of European modernism as a rich and highly complex area. In my own work I've always been intrigued by modernism as a plural, transnational set of movements (Marjorie Perloff's The Futurist Moment remains for me a key text, with its dazzling grasp of the continental scene) and it's here that I think really new work will be done. The remarkable collection of materials edited by Timothy O. Benson and Eva Forgacs, Between Worlds: A Sourcebook of Central European Avant-Gardes, 1910-1930, shows just how much, from an Anglo-American critical perspective, we don't really know about. But there are signs that this is beginning to change. The newly-founded European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernist Studies held its first conference last year in Ghent and that was a very well-attended and truly international affair. This year the conference is in Poland, and that location indicates a real desire to open up discussion of the many national avant-gardes that remain to be explored. There are significant linguistic difficulties attaching to this move, of course, but I think that we shall soon begin to see our own modernisms in a rather differently refracted light. Y. A.: Your response raised two questions in my mind. I am going to ask you one at a time. I am interested in your use of the term material history of modernism. If we try to read European modernist avant-garde writings in the conditions of an accelerating rise of colonialism, imperialism abroad and fascism and capitalism at home, what picture can it give to us? What role have avant-garde artists played against fascism, colonialism and capitalism? My question is how new modernist studies attempt to read the radical experimentation of European aesthetic modernity along the line of capitalist imperialist societal modernity of Europe? P.N: This is a large and complicated question. If we look at the range of historical avant-gardes, as Peter Burger calls the proliferation of experimental tendencies at the beginning of the twentieth century, it's fairly clear that we can distinguish between movements which celebrated modernity and those that didn't. Italian futurism is the best example of an avant-gardism which tied its own formal experimentalism very closely to the dynamic of capitalist modernity, while the main current of Anglo-American modernism, as exemplified in the work of T. …

This paper offers an analysis of Modern Studies, a school subject unique to Scotland. First taught in the 1960s, Modern Studies was originally conceived as an option for students discontinuing their studies in history and geography. Since then, though, Modern Studies has carved a distinctive curricular niche and has become one of the most popular subjects in Scottish schools. Despite this popularity—or, perhaps, because of it—Modern Studies has not received the same critical analysis as other subjects in the school curriculum. The subject remains one defined by its content (political literacy, social issues, and international relations), rather than by its disciplinary or epistemic underpinnings. This paper uses Toulmin’s (1990) conception of modernity to analyse course documents and examination papers. This analysis suggests that Modern Studies was imbued from the start with three foundational assumptions. First, a positivist ontology that believes certainty about the social world is possible. Second, a belief that Weberian means-end rationality is the most appropriate approach to evaluating and making sense of social relations. Third, a telos which positions liberal capitalism as the inevitable end-state of human affairs. Modern Studies is, therefore, not just ‘modern’ but modernist. The paper explores and develops these critiques with reference to specific examination questions and concludes by proposing a programme for renewing and reinvigorating the subject in an age of epistemic uncertainty and global environmental crises.

The very premise of this volume and the ongoing debate in which it intervenes testifies to an anxiety at the core of the new modernist studies. The one topic of discussion you can count on hearing at conferences of the Modernist Studies Association (MSA) is the question of what modernism is and how it is to be determined. It is a meta-critical problem, one of the discipline, of disciplinarity itself, and its interminable hashing-out marks a fundamental concern that in remaking modernist studies we may risk losing modernism. Put another way, the ongoing concern with (re-)defining modernism/modernity/modern is testimony to a desire to preserve the validity of what we do as modernist studies, even as we recognize the necessity and desirability of expanding its contours and reconfiguring accepted understandings. There is a genuine anxiety here, one that keeps us returning to the problem of what, exactly, we are supposed to be working on. The question is pertinent, even if the ways of posing it seem impertinent at times, and demands that we really consider whether we can make what we do modernist studies simply by declaring it to be so—and why it matters so much that it should be modernist studies, after all.

Reviewed by: Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time by Susan Stanford Friedman Matthew Eatough Susan Stanford Friedman. Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time. New York: Columbia UP, 2015. xii + 451 pp. Susan Stanford Friedman’s name has become synonymous with the move to broaden modernist studies’ spatial and temporal borders, and Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time is her most sustained statement yet on the promises and pitfalls of the global turn in modernist studies. Part manifesto, part definitional excursus, and part cultural history, the volume asks readers to consider how modernism’s global turn has revolutionized the field of modernist studies. What periodizing concepts, geographic scales, and aesthetic criteria, Friedman wonders, allow us to see modernism on a truly global scale? And to what extent do such new lenses challenge our conventional understandings of what it means to be modernist? Friedman’s answer to these questions can be summed up in a simple yet bold claim: modernism is “the aesthetic dimension of any given modernity” (x) and can be found in any time and place where “transformational rupture and rapid change” occur (ix). From this deceptively straightforward premise, Friedman makes a case for radically expanding modernist studies’ field of focus. Rather than identify the term “modernism” with a particular style that first emerged in early twentieth-century Europe, Friedman insists we should instead see modernism as a general label for any and all “innovative representational forms” (11). Such a move would open up the field of modernism to not only those so-called late postcolonial modernisms that have helped to globalize the discipline in recent years but also to art and literature from well before the period of high modernism. Indeed, Friedman suggests that for modernism to be truly “planetary,” we need to be able to recognize how the more familiar modernism of early twentieth-century Europe is anticipated by a number of other modernist projects—for example, the art and literature of Tang dynasty China, the Islamic Abbasid caliphate, and the Mongol empire, among others. Friedman’s project hinges on two radical interventions. First, Friedman joins her name to a long list of historians, sociologists, and anthropologists who theorize modernity as a “multiple, polycentric” phenomenon (10). In contrast to the classical definition of modernity, which identifies this term with the contemporaneous rise of capitalism, secularism, imperialism, and the nation-state in post-1500 Europe, such thinkers point out that many non-Western cultures have exhibited characteristics similar to those found in Western modernity. This is a line of thinking Friedman explores in chapters 3 and 4 of her book, [End Page 172] which survey a number of non-Western modernities: the Islamic and Sinocentric world-systems that dominated global commerce prior to the rise of the West, the imperial state-building efforts of the Chinese Tang and Song dynasties, and the cultural mixings brought about by the spread of the Mongol empire. These examples suggest to Friedman that modernity has never been the sole possession of the West and that any identification of the West with modernity is a purely “ideological” move that attempts to transform a particular culture into a universal model (93). Friedman then uses this historical narrative to draw an even more provocative conclusion: if modernity is a plural phenomenon that erupts in multiple times and places across human history, couldn’t modernism itself be treated in a similar fashion? Just as global historians provincialize European modernity by reimagining it as one modernity among many, could we not reimagine “’high’ or ‘avant-garde’ modernism as one articulation of a particularly situated modernism—an important modernism but not the measure by which all others are judged and to which all others must be compared” (70)? It should be emphasized that Friedman’s use of the word “modernism” here is at odds with the more familiar use of the term in modernist studies, where it traditionally functions as a label for a specific cultural period or literary style. What Friedman appears to be most interested in examining in Planetary Modernisms is the cultural capital that has accrued to the term, such that modernism has often been idealized as the epitome of “modern” art and...

Despite the enormous investments made in collecting DNA samples and generating germline variation data across thousands of individuals in modern genome-wide association studies (GWAS), progress has been frustratingly slow in explaining much of the heritability in common disease. Today's paradigm of testing independent hypotheses on each single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) marker is unlikely to adequately reflect the complex biological processes in disease risk. Alternatively, modeling risk as an ensemble of SNPs that act in concert in a pathway, and/or interact non-additively on log risk for example, may be a more sensible way to approach gene mapping in modern studies. Implementing such analyzes genome-wide can quickly become intractable due to the fact that even modest size SNP panels on modern genotype arrays (500k markers) pose a combinatorial nightmare, require tens of billions of models to be tested for evidence of interaction. In this article, we provide an in-depth analysis of programs that have been developed to explicitly overcome these enormous computational barriers through the use of processors on graphics cards known as Graphics Processing Units (GPU). We include tutorials on GPU technology, which will convey why they are growing in appeal with today's numerical scientists. One obvious advantage is the impressive density of microprocessor cores that are available on only a single GPU. Whereas high end servers feature up to 24 Intel or AMD CPU cores, the latest GPU offerings from nVidia feature over 2600 cores. Each compute node may be outfitted with up to 4 GPU devices. Success on GPUs varies across problems. However, epistasis screens fare well due to the high degree of parallelism exposed in these problems. Papers that we review routinely report GPU speedups of over two orders of magnitude (>100x) over standard CPU implementations.

Since 1979, Earth scientists of the Geothermal Research Program of the U.S. Geological Survey have carried out multidisciplinary research in the Cascade Range. The goal of this research is to understand the geology, tectonics, and hydrology of the Cas­ cades in order to characterize and quantify geothermal resource potential. A major goal of the program is compilation of a comprehensive geologic map of the entire Cascade Range that incorporates modern field studies and that has a unified and internally con­ sistent explanation. This map is one of three in a series that shows Cascade Range geology by f i t t ing publ ished and unpublished mapping into a province-wide scheme of rock units distinguished by composition and age; map sheets of the Cascade Range in Washington (Smith, 1993) and California will complete the series. The complete series forms a guide to exploration and evaluation of the geothermal resources of the Cas­ cade Range and will be useful for studies of volcano hazards, volcanology, and tectonics. For geothermal reasons, the maps emphasize Quaternary volcanic rocks. Large, igneous-related geothermal systems that have high temperatures are associated with Quaternary volcanic f ie lds, and geothermal potential declines rapidly as age increases (Smith and Shaw, 1975). Most high-grade recov­ erable geothermal energy is likely to be associated with silicic volcanic systems active in the past 1 million years. Lower grade (= lower temperature) geothermal resources may be associated with somewhat older rocks; however, volcanic rocks emplaced prior to 2 million years ago are unlikely geothermal targets (Smith and Shaw, 1975). Rocks older than a few million years are included on the maps because they help to unravel geologic puzzles of the present-day Cascade Range. The deeply eroded older volcanoes found in the Western Cas­ cades physiographic subprovince1 are analogues of today’s snow-covered shield and composite volcanoes. The fossil hydrothermal systems in the roots of Eocene to Pliocene vents, now exposed, provide clues to processes active today beneath the Pleistocene and Holocene volcanic peaks along the present-day crest of the Cascade Range. Study of these older rocks aids in developing models of geothermal systems. These rocks also give insight into the origins of volcanic-hosted mineral deposits and even to potential volcanic hazards. Historically, the regional geology of the Cascade Range in Oregon has been interpreted through recon­ naissance studies of large areas (for example, Diller, 1898; Williams, 1916; Callaghan and Buddington, 1938; Williams, 1942, 1957; Peck and others, 1964). Ear ly s tudies were hampered by l imited access, generally poor exposures, and thick forest cover, which flourishes in the 100 to 250 cm of annual precipi­ tation west of the range crest. In addition, age control was scant and limited chiefly to fossil flora. Since then, access has greatly improved via a well-developed network of logging roads, and isotopic ages— mostly potassium-argon (K-Ar)—have gradually solved some major problems concerning timing of volcan­ ism and age of mapped units. Nevertheless, prior to 1980, large parts of the Cascade Range remained unmapped by modern studies. Geologic knowledge of the Cascade Range has grown rapidly in the last few years. Luedke and Smith (1981, 1982) estimated that, when their maps were made, more than 60 percent of the Cascade Range lacked adequate geologic, geochemical, or geochro­ nologic data for a reliable map at 1:1,000,000 scale. Today only about 20 percent of the Cascade Range is too poorly known to show reliably at the larger 1:500,000 scale of this map. In Oregon the poorly known areas include Oligocene and Miocene rocks in the Western Cascades physiographic subprovince and parts of the Columbia River Gorge. The present series of maps of the Cascade Range is not merely a reworking of previously published data. Geologic interpretations shown here are based largely on newly published and unpublished geologic maps and isotopic age determinations, including our own, done since 1980. To assign all map units their correct composition and age, we also reevaluated older published maps and incorporated recently determined chemical analyses and isotopic ages.