Modernist Institutions

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

11-9-2020

Abstract

Twenty years after the publication of Lawrence Rainey’s Institutions of Modernism, our field once again finds itself wrestling with its troubled relationship with institutionalism. But where once Rainey argued, incisively, that literary modernism was self-aware of its own marketability and commodification, cocreating modernism as a discrete institution in its own right, we now find ourselves productively applying this rubric to the field’s institutionalization within academia itself. Just as Rainey’s argument stood against long-held myths about modernism’s fundamental anti-institutionalism, avant-gardism, and resistance to authority, recent reprisals of the “institutional” debate have asked us to apply the same critical hermeneutic towards the academic field of modernist studies itself. At a time when cultural institutions are increasingly under attack, we find ourselves defending academic freedom and the important work of cultural institutions in the public sphere. Simultaneously, we also seek to examine institutions critically, as so many have been complicit in establishing and maintaining systems of power and privilege. Along those lines, the recent dialogue between Michael Shallcross and Luke Seaber, “The Trouble with Modernism,” fundamentally asks for us to examine how modernist studies, filtered through the infrastructure of academe, has itself become institutionalized. Seaber argues that “[a]cademia, in the institutional sense, does seem to require Modernist Studies to take in more and more material hitherto not thought of as ‘modernist.’”[1] Shallcross additionally states that we might even see modernism’s ever-expanding canon as a “quasi-imperialist process of assimilation.” In further exploration of modernism’s institutionalization, we continue to find the dialogic form a productive method of self-reflexive examination; to that end, we hope that the following cluster on “Modernist Institutions” energizes others and enables a continuing debate and discussions of the role of institutions in our time and in our field.

DOI

10.26597/mod.0155

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