Scholars of both modernism and early modernism have recently reimagined periodization. In Planetary Modernisms, Susan Stanford Friedman argues that modernity is not a temporal concept, but one made recognizable because it is a “spirit of epistemological rupture” (2): “plural,” “recurr[ing],” “global,” “relational,” and “contradictory.” Valerie Traub argues for the need to think both within and across literary periods: “History is polytemporal not only because each synchronic moment is riddled with multiple, and sometimes, contradictory asynchronicities, but because time, like language, operate simultaneously on synchronic and diachronic axes” (Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns 74-75). Friedman and Traub invite us to consider the structures of power that still inform literary historiographical methods and the experience of time as both linear and untraceable that is at the heart of periodization. This panel—comprised of modernists and early modernists—consider the affordances of this diachronous study. We ask how we might view these periods as bearing “familial resemblance,” and we make visible the underpinnings of disability, racial, and gender politics that inform this work.
Opening the panel, Jennifer Cranfill argues that both periods’ claims to modernity are rooted in models of normative embodiment through an analysis of Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur and Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood. She argues that Malory’s disabled knights and kings are simultaneously insiders and exiles whose ambiguous position in society reflects the narrative ambivalence of the text. Cranfill traces this ambivalence into the precarity specific to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The rise of industrialization, the omnipresence of war and pandemic, and the human capital that capitalism demands generates increasing tensions between humanism and modernity. These existential threats mirror the anxieties of modernity in Le Morte and dictate the depictions of disability, liminal social positions, and abjection in Nightwood.
LeeAnn Derdeyn and Stephanie Pietros analyze modernists as readers of early modernists to engage with cross-period poetic analysis. Derdeyn interrogates T.S. Eliot’s career-long engagement with the early modern Metaphysical poets John Donne and George Herbert. Though Eliot first praises the metaphysical poets for their “vitality of language” early in his career, Derdeyn finds the continued influence of their work in his later works. In married bliss at the end of his life, Eliot continues to draw from Donne and Herbert, as seen in the poetry he writes to his wife: “Dedication II, ” “A Valedictory Forbidding Mourning," and his three erotic love poems, all demonstrating the metaphysics’ influence on Eliot’s late engagement with love and sexuality.
Pietros argues that modernist sonnets that “follow the rules” of the strict form do so in order to interrogate the white patriarchy baked into the form’s DNA. The sonnets of Claude McKay helped to inaugurate the Harlem Renaissance, revive the sonnet form in English, and upset the expectations of the form to center the Black American experience. Similarly, Edna St. Vincent Millay’s sonnets use the form in order to interrogate and explode societal expectations for female desire. Pietros argues that readers must read across period in order to understand the conventions and expectations of the form as solidified in the early modern period.
In a turn to visual form and to the decades immediately following the supposed “end” of modernism, Matthew Rooney uses early modern collage practices to examine the epistemological properties of Donald Barthelme’s “The Flight of the Pigeons from the Palace.” Rooney argues that Barthelme’s stories not only operate under the same principles as works of modernist visual arts, but that his visual semiotics complicate and reify the epistemological and aesthetic concerns of early modern rationalists, anatomists, and space-makers in the context of modernist art making. “The Flight of the Pigeons from the Palace” complicates the modernist claim to renewed contact with reality, individuality, objectivity, and beauty, and demonstrates the danger (as well as the necessity) of moving beyond traditional forms of art.
All the panelists illustrate how thinking across periods allows scholars to illuminate how we work within history, the materiality of the subjects we study, and the way that the markers of literary period fold, collapse, and take new shape across time and space. They argue that the methods of our reading practices must account for how literary period can inform, distort, and dismantle how we make literary knowledge.