A collection of essays entitled Regional Modernisms (2013) challenged what its editors, Neal Alexander and James Moran, called ‘a powerful and well-rehearsed narrative about modernism’, namely that it was ‘essentially metropolitan and internationalist in character’. This panel seeks to extend their analysis of the regional character of modernism by focusing specifically on a selection of modernist writers who chose or actively resisted non-standard language varieties as their literary medium. Why did these writers choose or resist a ‘non-metropolitan’ medium for their poetry, and how does their work negotiate the seemingly contradictory impulses towards the modern and the international (with its hegemonic drive towards standard English as a written lingua franca) and the nostalgic and the local (with their privileging of the traditional community vernacular)? To answer this question, the panel brings together a transnational selection of writers who represent different modernist and vernacular traditions. The transnational perspective is important in its potential to identify common anxieties and motivations across members of different vernacular traditions as they address the modernist condition. The proposed presentations will speak to the topic as follows:

Catriona MacLeod, University of Pennsylvania: “Edwin and Willa Muir’s ‘Contradictiousness’: The Predicament of Vernacular Modernism”

Modernist studies have long focused on rootless cosmopolitanism. Rather than turn to an apparent figure of opposition – the poet who remains profoundly rooted on home turf – my paper will explore an uneasy and unstable middle position, with its attendant geographical and language issues. Exploring the modernist language politics of Edwin and Wilhelmina (Willa) Muir, in particular Edwin Muir’s controversial stand on Standard English, I will, however, show that despite their polemical embrace of English for the modern Scottish poet, and despite their lifelong patterns of deracination and travel, potent vernacular fragments repeatedly surface in and haunt their works.

Tyler Babbie, University of Washington--Seattle: “'I have discarded dialect'”: Fenton Johnson’s Songs of the Soil”

Fenton Johnson’s Songs of the Soil stands as a pivotal work of vernacular modernist literature in two senses: the book is important in its own right, and it stands as the midpoint between several styles employed by Johnson throughout his poetic career. The foreword of the journal announces that Johnson plans to discard the traditional English forms for those of the folk poetry of the Black American South, but he adds an interesting distinction when he explains that he will not use dialect in the case of spirituals. Torn between his desire to write local poetry and his past writing academic poetry, Johnson’s Songs of the Soil is the turning point that leads to Johnson’s later influential and experimental modernist works. The importance of Songs of the Soil was noted by Poetry magazine’s coeditor, Alice Corbin Henderson, who claimed that the dialect-free spirituals contained “the germ of future development.” Indeed, vernacular seems to have been a stopping point for Johnson, as Songs of the Soil’s self-conscious exploration of the difference between dialect and standardized, but spare spirituals carries forward into the later, more famous, experimentally stark poems that were ultimately published in Others and its associated anthology. Even in the introduction to Songs, he gestures toward the next phase of his project. His broader plans are clarified through reference to his fiction and poems published in venues such as the NAACP’s house magazine, The Crisis.

John Corbett, University of Sao Paulo, Brazil - "Sydney Goodsir Smith's Unreal Edinburgh"

The New Zealand-born Scottish vernacular poet Sydney Goodsir Smith wrote a number of late modernist poems in literary Scots, celebrating and interrogating Edinburgh in the 1940s-1960s. The most famous of these, "Kynd Kittock's Land" was composed as a commission for the BBC, with still photographs by Alan Daiches, the son of the distinguished literary critic, David Daiches. In all of his Edinburgh poems, Goodsir Smith seeks to draw upon the strategies of high modernism - the allusions to ancient and mediaeval classical cultures, the 'return to the past' as a means of moving forward, the self-conscious impenetrability of the text - and reconcile them with the sociability that characterised the popular poetry of 18th century Enlightenment Edinburgh. This paper seeks to account for the specifically inflected hybridity that results from the attempt to yoke modernist concerns with vernacular traditions.

The three proposed presentations serve as case studies that explore the tension between international modernism and regional, vernacular traditions from geographically different perspectives. While two of the presentations focus on Scottish exemplars, with Muir's championing of standard English contrasting with Goodsir Smith's advocacy of literary Scots, the third addresses similar concerns via the experience of the Black American South. The writers concerned are significant in a number of ways - Fenton Johnson is key to the 'modernisation' of a significant Black American genre; Edwin and Willa Muir wrote original poetry and fiction, and, together, were responsible for introducing the work of Kafka to the English-reading public; and Goodsir Smith was a central figure in the post-war 'Lallans' movement that took as its inspiration the earlier modernist vernacular poetry of Hugh MacDiarmid.

The session seeks to address the resonances, commonalities and dissimilarities among these disparate experiences and to account for the literary strategies adopted to articulate them. The session participants hope that the discussion will be of relevance to others in the audience who are interested in modernism and diverse regional traditions, and how they interact.

The format will be that Corbett will chair the session, and introduce the speakers, who will speak for fifteen minutes maximum. There will then be at least 15 minutes for questions and discussion from the floor. The chair will actively elicit contributions from audience members who are working on topics that are analogous to the case studies presented, in the hope that networking clusters may emerge from the event.