The study of literary modernism is in the ascendant in the academy. From alternate modernisms, to neomodernisms, to metamodernism and global modernisms, modernism scholarship has evolved through a configuration of modernism into a cross-cultural and inter-generational aesthetic practice. This article critically examines the periodizing logic implicit in this new modernism scholarship, specifically as it pertains to the study of what is loosely called ‘neomodernism’, which we suggest presents a notable development in literary history for accounts of contemporary fiction and postmodern culture. We are principally interested in a recent trend we observe in modernism literary criticism concerning the futurization of the object (literary modernism), and of critical work thereupon. This work, which specifically addresses developments in contemporary Western Anglophone literature, seeks to extend the project of modernism (sometimes called its ‘promise’) into the present, understanding it as the principal agency in literary distinction and merit. We examine this criticism through a series of case studies, and discern three interconnecting strands in neomodernist criticism – three ways of futurizing modernism, and of self-futurizing modernism criticism.
What are the politics of the accident? This essay interrogates the accident trope's dual meaning in critical theory and popular narrative as both historically endemic and conditional for a political theory of radical resistance and ethical relation. I explore this in Paul Haggis' 2004 film Crash, a popular narrative that plots the accident to provide an opening for a politics of possibility and ethical engagement. However, this essay critiques efforts to situate accidents, and therefore contingency, as both historically endemic and politically resistant, arguing for the difficulty of reading a specific theory of political and ethical decision into something ontologically given. Crash stretches contingency to incorporate temporality itself, and in doing so nullifies consideration of institutional histories of race and class, which aesthetically foregrounds and troubles related assumptions made by a critical mode that too quickly reads a specific politics and ethics into contingency's deviation from necessary law. The essay re-evaluates the accident's political and ethical coordinates through reference to Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's theorisation of contingency as conditional for political meaning more generally. Accidents, it concludes, are politically and ethically mobile, if they, as Crash and theories of radical contingency contend, happen everywhere and all the time.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.