Historicist accounts of Modernism during the interwar period tend to frame its aesthetics, technique and subject matter as a response to well-known phenomena: the rise of Freudian psychology and psychoanalysis; the failure of Progressive-era policies culminating in WWI; the same war’s disruption of positivism and of rigid categories of class, race and nationality along with its traumatization of combatants and survivors alike; and the reverberations of first-wave feminism. However heuristically useful (and indeed relevant) this constellation of cultural events may be, it also becomes self-fulfilling and thus self-limiting. Readings of Modernist literature that configure its stylistic innovations, stream-of-consciousness technique and general post-war themes within this well-charted historical constellation by now seem both valid and obvious.

The Covid-19 pandemic, however, has challenged prevailing paradigms for approaching Modernism. By reminding contemporary readers that writers of the 1920s contended with a pandemic of their own, the 1918 Influenza or “Spanish Flu,” Covid-19 has demanded a reappraisal of what Modernism is, what it responds to, and how. Although scholars have explored the role of the 1918 Flu Pandemic in Modernism (notably Elizabeth Outka in Viral Modernism), critical and popular interest in pandemics, either within or as the impetus for literature, would seem to have faded with the rise of mass vaccinations. But in so far as pandemic has become ubiquitous in our own cultural and historical moment, we cannot help but see how the 1918 Pandemic was endemic to Modernism all along, overlooked but now acutely salient in its literature. Read Mrs Dalloway today and you are struck not just by its treatment of WWI veteran Septimus’ PTSD or its cognitive tunneling, per usual, but by references to the flu and its profound repercussions: Clarissa Dalloway’s heart is “affected...by influenza”; “after her illness...she must sleep undisturbed”; and “the sound of St Margaret’s bells...[express] languor and suffering” by reminding Peter Walsh that Clarissa “had been ill.” Our newfound attunement to these references also urges us to consider allusions that are still less obvious. Indeed, a challenge scholars must now address is how the 1918 Pandemic becomes conflated with, hidden by or subsumed in other categories, and how we as might disentangle it from these dissimulations.

This special session presupposes that 1) Modernist writing is full of explicit and ambiguous references to the 1918 Influenza Pandemic and that 2) Modernist aesthetics are a response, at least in part, precisely to pandemic trauma and grief. The session is also an important venue for the contextualizing narrative and creative responses to the Covid-19 pandemic as well as discovering analogues. Although these topics could easily become the stuff of an edited volume, for the purposes of the MLA panel, three panelists will take up the mantle.

Youngmin Kim (professor Emeritus at the Department of English at Dongguk University) begins the seminar with “The Technology of Zooming in the Scale of Aesthetic Distance in Pandemic Discourse.” Building off of Outka's Viral Modernism, Kim takes up one of the most perplexing challenges of pandemic poetics (and epistemes, for that matter), namely, that of scale. Focusing on zooming both as technique and now ubiquitous technology, his work argues that “what is at stake in the literary mind of the pandemic discourse is the art of distance, a way of situating oneself both physically and aesthetically, ‘neither too near, nor too far,’ that is, how to zoom in and zoom out properly.” From there, Tom Ribitzky, Adjunct Assistant Professor of English in Comparative Literature and 2020 PhD graduate from CUNY, modulates the theme of positionality, technique and technology toward metaphorical and literal medical instrumentation, namely “X-ray vision” and the scalpel in Thomas Mann and Virginia Woolf. His paper demonstrates how both authors “employ dissection as a narrative strategy, cutting characters off from the world in order for them to reengage with it” and “reinvent...anatomy as a space to articulate life after a pandemic.” Finally, Caroline Heafey, PhD student at U. Mass, Amherst, uses sound studies as a way of attuning us to how Mrs Dalloway “[attends] to pandemic violence, trauma and grief” in a way that then-conventional medicine or Freudian psychology cannot. After the presentations are 15 minutes of unstructured discussion.

The Covid-19 Pandemic, however perversely, has taken up Ezra Pound’s dictum and made Modernism “new again.” Even if vaccines outpace variants, contending with the aftermath of a pandemic is something Modernists have done before us, and something scholars and writers today, too, will continue to grapple with. This special session does the important work of beginning to show us how.