This panel addresses questions of accessibility in modernist literature, research and pedagogy. The contributors—who range across position, continents, and institutional affiliation—resist the characterizations of modernist literature as existing only for the initiated, for those with the time and resources to work with “difficult” texts, and they make visible the power dynamics that shape these presumptions. They ask how access, legibility, and meaning making are embedded in the transnational relationships between modernist writers across continents, and in the canonical high modernist, experimentation of long-form texts. Naming the structural challenges that now shape how we as scholars study modernism and how we teach modernism to our students, the panelists question the assumptions of race, gender, embodiment, and resource access that underlie the state of the field of modernist study.

Jeesoon Hong’s “Accessible Modernism: Translation and Visuality in Ling Shuhua’s Autobiography” asks what it means to examine modernist through considering the intersections of translation and visual accessibility. She explores the Chinese modernist, Ling Shuhua’s autobiographical fiction, Ancient Melodies, which arose as a result of her relationship with the Bloomsbury group, and particularly with Virginia Woolf. This paper extends modernists’ problematization of “representation” to the notion of “translation,” and reexamines her translation of the autobiography in terms of accessibility and visuality, particularly through the illustrations she painted for the English translation. For Ling Shuhua, writing Ancient Melodies meant translating her episodic short stories to a novel-length memoir with enhanced visuality, and from third-person to first-person narration. If the genre of autobiography generally operates under the spirit of truth and the authority of memory, the non-Western woman’s autobiography appeals to Western readers with the myth of an unmediated image of the Other, in which the question of translation is conveniently elided.

In “Making Modernisms: Access through Experiential Learning and the Book Arts,” Diana Proenza presents a pedagogical model that promotes access through experiential learning in modernist coursework that she pulls from her experiences as a graduate assistant and instructor in her department’s community press, BookLab, as well as from the principles of humanities makerspaces, design justice, critical making, and Amy Elkin’s Crafting Feminism. Students are often anxious to approach modernist literature and criticism, because of the genre’s experimental modes and its privileging of an exclusionary canon that bars access based on race, ability, class, language, coloniality, gender, and sexuality. Using diverse examples of found poetry, experimental typography, treated novels, artists’ books, little magazines, broadsides, zines, and other DIY print counterculture, this paper suggests that inviting students to replicate and remediate modernism’s multimedia and often multimodal forms as a point of entry.

The last papers consider the imbalances in power and resource access embedded in modernist scholarship. Jack Dudley’s paper, “Modernism TL;DR: Inequality, Access, and the Material Conditions of Modernist Studies ,” argues that the experimental forms, obscure referentiality, and fragmentation of modernist texts would seem to especially elicit an annotative method dependent on painstaking contextualization. Drawing from recent scholarship on the power imbalances in academic publishing, he asks how we can consider the concept of “access” in the wake of the material conditions of modernist scholarship. The generous time conditions, material access to travel and archives, library resources, research assistants, and perceived prestige offered by elite universities have created a narrowly specialized, highly contextualist model of modernist scholarship that overdetermines the meaning of modernist works and access to those very conditions that make what is regarded as “the best” modernist scholarship. Seeing access as a highly regulated material condition of the contemporary university’s prestige economies imagines new ways of valuing work in modernist studies.

In “Accessing the Unfinished,” Melanie Micir responds to the recent surge of critical interest in unfinished work within modernist studies to ask: what is the relationship between the unfinished and the inaccessible? As one possible provocation, she suggests that this trend is no coincidence in an ongoing cultural moment in which so many of our friends, peers, and colleagues are unable to secure tenure-stream employment. Is our attention to the Great Unfinished, so to speak, within and beyond modernist studies also a kind of elegy for the incredible scholarship produced by the many scholars pushed out of the profession due to forced austerity, scholars whose work is too often destined to remain unfinished, un(der)published, un(der)read, undervalued? How can our attention to the unfinished work of the twentieth century pressure us to attend to the labor conditions surrounding the unfinished work all around us today?