The Contemporaneity of Modernism

At a juncture in which art and culture are saturated with the forces of commodification, this book argues that problems, forms, and positions that defined modernism are relevant to the condition of contemporary art and culture. Essays revise our understanding of what modernism was in its earlier instantiations, and account for the current moment, addressing the problems raised by modernism's afterlives and reverberations in the 20th and 21st centuries. The book considers literature, sociology, philosophy, visual art, music, architecture, digital culture, television, and other media to make a case for what happens to literature, art, and culture in the wake of the exhaustion of postmodernism.

Michael D'Arcy is Associate Professor of English at St. Francis Xavier University, Canada. Mathias Nilges is Associate Professor of English at St. Francis Xavier University, Canada.

Introduction: The Contemporaneity of Modernism Michael D'Arcy and Mathias Nilges Part 1: Modernism's Temporality 1. Abstract in Concrete: Brutalism and Modernist Half-Life C.D. Blanton 2. Our Last September: Climate Change in Modernist Time Douglas Mao 3. Time, Modernism, and the Contemporaneity of Realism David Cunningham Part II: Modernism's Literary Afterlives 4. Relative Autonomy: Pierre Bourdieu and Modernism Andrew Goldstone 5. Impersonality and Institutional Critique Sarah Brouillette 6. Impressionism After Film Jesse Matz 7. Involutions of the Word: Lorrie Moore and Jonathan Lethem Joseph Brooker Part III: Modernism's Global Economies 8. The Fidget Manifesto: Fast Capital, the Gesture, and Growth in Modernist Culture Enda Duffy 9. "The Highways of Empire": Geopolitics, Modernism, and Committed Reading Thomas S. Davis 10. "La furia de la materia': On the Non-Contemporaneity of Modernism in Latin America Eugenio Di Stefano and Emilio Sauri Part IV: Modernism's Media 11. To Burn or not to Burn: Modernism's Photographic Exposures Michael D'Arcy 12. The Plain Viewer Be Damned: Or, Modernism on TV Nicholas Brown 13. Modernist Binge-Watching Michaela Bronstein 14. Modernist Poetics After Twitter, Inc. Lisa Siraganian Afterword David James