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Other Modernisms/Modernism's Others

SEMINAR ABSTRACTS

MODERNIST PSYCHOLOGIES FROM JAMES AND BERGSON TO MERLEAU-PONTY AND DELEUZE
Charles Altieri (UC Berkeley)
This proposed seminar will study modernist psychologies by proposing the following question: how useful for the study of modernist writing is the tradition from James and Bergson to Merleau Ponty and Deleuze, especially on matters of intentionality, sensation, affect, and embodiment? What lines of thinking do they provide that supplement the projects of particular writers or movements? And how can their own struggles against idealism clarify the stakes of specific modernist projects? Finally, are such frameworks adequate to the writing or does one need the Hegelian tradition as well?

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO FEMINIST CRITICISM?
Meryl Altman (DePauw U)
Suppose we confront head-on, and concretely, the future (if any) of the feminist impulse within modernist studies. “Queer theory” replaces calls for lesbian visibility, “women’s studies” becomes “gender studies,” and, as Toril Moi notes, theoretical debates deprive us of the most useful words from our early vocabulary. Greater sophistication and wider inclusiveness? A new version of an old conjuring trick to make women disappear? Has our success in reconfiguring canons and curricula rendered feminists obsolete? How do contentions between “third wave” and “second wave” feminisms play out in modernist studies? Participants will be asked to present two readings of the same literary text, first according to an older paradigm of feminist interpretation, and then “as I’d do it now,” and we’ll see what we see.

ART HISTORY’S OTHER MODERNISMS
Bill Anthes (U Memphis)
In art history, modernism has been understood as an urban phenomenon, originating in Western Europe; “modern styles” are seen to follow a developing world system described in terms of rationalization, instrumentalism, global capitalism, and the fragmentation and dislocation of traditional social and aesthetic forms. Recent work by anthropologists and art historians including Rasheed Arareen, Janet Berlo, Charlotte Townsend-Gault, Ann Gibson, Olu Oguibe, Fred Meyers, Ruth Phillips, and Jackson Rushing point towards an expanded modernist canon. For this seminar, we invite papers addressing “other modernisms” in a global art history, and considering what theories of alternative modernities contribute to a history of modernist art.

THE (OTHER) NATURE OF MODERNISM
Eric Aronoff (SUNY) and Bonnie Kime Scott (San Diego State)
“Modernism” as an aesthetic movement has often been associated with the urban, the cosmopolitan, and the consumerist, with interest in “nature” or the environment relegated - by both modernism’s practitioners and its critics - to regionalist nostalgia, or romantic immaturity. In this sense “nature” might be seen as one of modernism’s “Others.” Yet conceptions of nature are at the center of several important versions of modernism, from the connection between agrarianism and poetry in the New Criticism, to the overlapping literary, sociological and anthropological interest in the environmental “region,” to the fascination among artists and social critics with the primitive, the bestial, the unconscious, and “organic” wholeness/fragmentation. This seminar invites investigation of and alternatives to the nature/culture dichotomy including, but not limited to: New Criticism and agri-culture; regionalism, nationalism and poetic form; modernist anthropology, the culture concept, and “native ground;” colonial and rural landscapes in modernist literature and visual arts; American modernism and National Parks. They may enter debates about the intersections of gender, race and class in modernist representations, as well as issues of scientific categorization, essentialism, and the feminist flight from nature.

COPYRIGHT MODERNISMS
William S. Brockman (Penn State)
Copyright law has both fostered and constrained the publication and dissemination of modernist literary, theatrical, musical, and graphic works. Copyright’s limited monopoly encourages artistic production, but allows constraint by artists and estates upon use. Though early modernism left a heritage now in the public domain, changes to copyright law have continued protection of many modernist works. The seminar is open to discussion of copyright issues during the modernist era and the effect of intellectual property law upon recent use of modernist works. Participants might consider topics related to piracy, technology, performance, publishing, and fair use of works in any medium.

MODERNISM IN/AND TRANSLATION
Margaret Bruzelius (Smith College)
This seminar seeks to explore the practice of translation not as an English language phenomenon, but as an essential modernist strategy across languages and cultures. Benjamin's suggestion that "the translator release[s] in his own language that pure language that is under the spell of another" is one famous articulation of translation as a vehicle that opens up new relations to language. How can we understand the effects of Darío's translation of Lautreamont? Or Roussel's homophonic translations from French to French? Or the Zukofskys' translations of Catullus? How does the effort to transport effects across language enable new articulations of the "host" language? What "other" modernisms are produced by the effort to transport effects from French into Catalan? Or Chinese into Spanish?

WELFARE STATE MODERNISM
Robert Caserio (Penn State) and Lisa Fluet (Trinity U)
This seminar invites considerations of the ways in which histories of literary modernism and of modern welfare states intertwine. How does “high” literary modernism reflect upon, and develop responses to, concerns like social insurance, governmental consolations, security, child care, dependence, social mobility, scholarships and outside patronage? In what ways might experimentality in literary form and in social organization be related? Are there ways to connect apparently cosmopolitan affinities in modernism to the “other” national attachments of welfare modernisms? What relationship might “low” modern literary production have to emergent welfare governments in Britain, the U.S., or elsewhere?

NATIONALIZING MODERNISMS: NATIONAL IDENTITY AND ‘OTHER’ MODERNISMS
Odile Cisneros (U Alberta) and Jennifer O’Farrill (U North Carolina, Chapel Hill)
How do non-centric modernisms endeavor to update domestic literary and artistic vocabularies in the face of rising nationalist tendencies in the 1920s and 1930s? Also, what are the intersections between Latina/o art and modernism(s) (1890s-1970s) stemming from a fusion of nationalisms and/or national identifications? What is the relationship of modern cosmopolitan aesthetics to the representation of the "national": modernist nation-building, national identity, constructions of "Americanness", the role of memory and the past, and representations of the body? This seminar will welcome papers exploring the vexed relationship of modernism and nationalism in "Other" modernisms textually and contextually. Of particular interest are Latin American movements such as Mexican muralism and vanguardia, Brazilian modernismo, Cuban and Puerto Rican negrismo, as well as Latina/o modernist art. Proposals from other national identity contexts such as Central European, African, Pacific and East Asian modernisms are also invited.

BEFORE AND AFTER HUYSSEN’S “GREAT DIVIDE”
Lois Cucullu (U Minnesota)
In keeping with the conference theme of 'Modernism's Other/Other Modernisms,' this seminar solicits papers that consider whether we need to withdraw, redraw, or leave standing Huyssen's 'great divide' that redefined aesthetic modernism for a generation of scholars. Do new areas of inquiry in World English, queer theory, third-wave feminism, post-colonial studies, and new media pull apart the divide along its stated biases of gender and postmodernism or along its unstated Eurocentric, class, and scientific ones? Are there still 'other' coordinates that need to be factored into an understanding of modernism as we begin another century? Or are there different histories of modernism that put in tension Huyssen's schema?

WHY STEIN NOW
Adam Frank (UBC) and Steven Meyer (Washington U, St. Louis)
Recent studies by Dydo and Meyer have put the context back in Gertrude Stein--textual, biographical, intellectual--and there are many additional contexts on offer (studies of race, sexuality, visual and aural media, publicity, poetics, others). What has made it possible for Stein to emerge in the last decade or two, finally and definitively, as a central figure for twentieth- and twenty-first century writing? Short papers are invited to consider this phenomenon from any one of the many angles which may help to explain it. What are the most valuable ways of thinking about and with Stein now?

MODERNITY AND (AMERICAN) RURALITIES
Janet Galligani Casey (Skidmore)
Rural culture might seem something of an embarrassment to a society in the throes of a self-conscious, “progressive” modernity; yet rurality was much discussed in the U.S. between 1900 and 1940. How did deployments of rurality sharpen assumptions about modernity? Was rurality enfolded into modernity as much as it was set up as a contrast to it? How do nationalist ideals (Jeffersonian agrarianism, the pioneer ethic) play into American negotiations of rurality and modernity/ism in representational works? How might the New Agriculture’s emphasis on breeding and technology invite intersections with eugenics, the birth control movement, notions of industrial production, or other modernist concerns?

USING BIOGRAPHY
Langdon Hammer (Yale)
The twentieth century is a period in which biography comes under aesthetic and theoretical attack, at the same time that it flourishes as a literary form. This seminar will investigate biography from several points of view by welcoming papers on modern ideas of biography and on modern biographies as well as biographies of modern figures. In addition, we will discuss samples of ongoing biographies or biographically oriented criticism by seminar participants. Discussion will center on, but not be limited to, works by or about literary artists.

VISUAL AND LITERARY MODERNISMS, MODERNITIES, AND THE COLONIZING MOMENT
Elizabeth Harney (U Toronto) and Cyraina Johnson-Roullier (U Notre Dame)
What is the significance of colonization and decolonization in literary and visual modernity, and how might a consideration of these 20th century global realities alter the parameters of modern discourse? Participants may explore this question in the works of "high" modernists or of cultural others--either in the colonies or in exile in the metropoles--who have long been silenced within the colonizing moment. By examining the significance of colonization and decolonization throughout visual and literary modernity, papers will consider the meaning of modernity and modernism in multiple and often conflicting contexts, revealing a much more nuanced and culturally inclusive understanding of the modern than heretofore possible.

SEXUAL REPRODUCTION IN/AND MODERNISM
Christina Hauck (Kansas State)
Demographers and demographic historians have long held the demographic transition of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries, characterized by a declining birthrate and a shift from a rural to an urban population, to be one of the most significant transformations of modernity. However, very little scholarly attention has been paid to literary representations of the revolutionized patterns of reproduction throughout Europe, including England, and the United States. Yet writers high and low were profoundly concerned with sexual reproduction, especially with the complications attendant on private and public efforts to control it, including sexual abstinence, contraception, abortion, and in/voluntary sterilization. This seminar invites papers that explore effects and traces of the demographic transition in modernism (and its others), focussing on the years 1880-1930. All approaches and all national literatures are welcome.

OTHER MODERNISMS AND THE LOCATION OF POETRY
Jeanne Heuving (U Washington) and Susan M. Schultz (U Hawai’i)
When questions of location emerge, they are taken up frequently through analysis of metropolitan centers and regional margins that displace questions of location into issues of modernity and anti-modernity. This seminar asks: 1) How does focusing on location alter descriptions of modernism? By making the question of geographical and socio-political orientation primary, how might we understand existing descriptions of modernism as based on implicit locales; and by focusing on alternative locations, how might our sense of modernism shift? 2) How do various locations manifest themselves in poets’ poetry and poetics? 3) What is the necessity or irrelevance of addressing the location of poetry in a century given over to such dislocating phenomena as globalization, transnationalism, mediatization, and the internet? This seminar welcomes papers that explore these questions through focusing on individual poets, locations, poetic communities and movements.

ONLY CONNECT? (POST)MODERNISM AND THE LIBERAL IMAGINATION
Dejan Kuzmanovic (U Wisconsin)
Lionel Trilling described E. M. Forster as someone who simultaneously belonged to the liberal tradition and yet was deeply at odds with the liberal mind. To what extent and in what sense can other modernist writers be described in a similar way? Is liberalism intrinsic to modernism or is it modernism’s other? Or might it be both and in what way? How has the liberalism of modernist writers and their early critics such as Trilling fared under the pressure of postmodernist ideas (theoretical, ethical, and political)? Do these ideas allow us to perceive gaps and contradictions within modernist liberalism? Can we find in some modernist works elements of a postmodern critique of liberalism? Which liberal values, goals, and beliefs still inform literary and other studies of modernism today and which need to be examined as potentially limiting and misleading in the context of such scholarly pursuits?

MODERNIST PHILSEMITISM AND ANTISEMITISM: CHALLENGING THE TERMS OF OTHERNESS
Phyllis Lassner (Northwestern)
This seminar will question and redefine meanings of Other as it relates to philosemitism and antisemitism and complicates what are commonly assumed to be their inherent tensions. We will focus on the use of the figure of the Jew and Jewishness in British, North American, and European cultural production, such as literary and non-literary writing, art, film, music, and theater. Possible topics include Jews and Jewishness as modernist literary subjects and authors, Holocaust monuments, Jewish cultural icons such as "Seinfeld," the myth of Jewish media control, the role of antisemitism and philosemitism in modernist, multicultural, colonial and postcolonial theories and practices.

GENERIC MODERNISM
Sean Latham (U Tulsa)
What difference does genre make in both the production and reception of narrative and visual texts in the early twentieth century? How, in particular, do individual genres and subgenres (such as the adventure novel, the roman a clef, the science fiction film, and the studio portrait) resist or reconfigure more sweeping theories of modernism that posit a shared emphasis in the period on radical aesthetic innovation? How are generic codes deployed either in major modernist texts such as Ulysses or in middle-brow and mass forms such as the detective novel? While some consideration will be given to examining the very broad generic distinctions between drama, poetry, the novel, film, and painting, seminar participants will be asked to focus on the particularities of more narrowly conceived genres and the ways in which these highly-structured forms became sites of innovation and experimentation that have otherwise been ignored or consigned to the mass culture of the period. We will, in effect, attempt to use genre to think beyond the conceptual and historical limitations imposed by the generic concept of modernism.

“IS NOTHING SACRED?”: RE-EXAMINING THE FATE OF THE SACRED IN MODERNISM AND MODERNITY
Garry Leonard (U Toronto)
The "sacred" in modernity. Is it gone? Was it ever real? Can something substitute for it? How do we cope with or without it? What role did it ever play in its formerly religious incarnation, what has it become in the presumably secular world? Is the conflation of “modernism” and “post-sacred” misleading? Is the concept of “the sublime” a vehicle that smuggles notions of the sacred back into modernity (I’m thinking particularly of Lyotard’s rehabilitation of the term)? For that matter, isn’t Lacan’s positing of subjectivity on “lack” and “desire” of the Other at least arguably a secular recasting of a sacred paradigm? Wallace Stevens's remark "it's the belief and not the god that matters" is one of many intriguing "modern" remarks about the need to find the sacred in the secular, or even the inevitability of finding something to "stand-in" for it, whether we like it or not--addictions, fascism, consumer goods (the "rave" scenes in the new Matrix movie were intriguing -- the desire to get out of the consumerist, pleasure-focused, deceptively ungrounded “matrix” could be seen as a desperate craving for something sacred beyond the secular; that would also explain all the prophet-like posing of Morpheus and Neo as well as all the Biblical/Apocalyptic sub-text). The role of advertising in Joyce, or the “Wasteland” in Eliot, or a sense of personal integrity in Woolf, have been viewed as evidence of a loss of the sacred, but might they not also be a re-configuration of it? In other words, not simply a net “loss”, but a new paradigm? No doubt the sacred is shattered, as Eliot so compellingly attests, but are the “fragments” gone or retrievable in flashes such as Joyce’s “epiphany” or Proust’s taste of madeline, or Benjamin’s “involuntary memory”, or Woolf’s sense of “this day, this moment”?

CINEMA, CULTURE & TEXT: FILM IN MODERNIST THEORY & PRACTICE, 1900-1939
Sophie Levy (U Toronto) and Susan McCabe (USC Los Angeles)
The seminar will engage in the emergent discourse about the intersections between Modernist literature and the diverse film practices contemporary to it. The dates roughly encompass film in its beginnings and extend through the silent film era as well as the transition to rise of "classical" and Hollywood film. The place of cinema in Modernist culture may be examined through cultural concepts such as the relationship between multiple genres (including poetry) and modernist film, specific collaborations between modernist writers and filmmakers, the often vexed dialogue between "high modernism," the international avant garde and the popular cinema. We also invite reflections on the poetics of film such as forms of montage as poetic styles, and investigations of cinema's centrality to Modernist theories of self and other, for example, in the historical overlap between the contemporary fields of psychoanalysis, anthropology/ethnography and film (as formulated in journals such as Close Up 1927-33 and Minotaure) that explore the emergence of the culturally othered "bodies" of modernism (including the newly formulated "hysteric," automaton and the sexual invert) in film texts.

MODERNIST MANNERS
David McWhirter (Texas A & M) and Rebecca L. Walkowitz (U Wisconsin-Madison)
At first blush, what could be less modernist than manners? Focused on social minutiae, construed as domestic, decorous, feminine, and narrowly genteel, and viewed as a product of the Victorian drawing-room (and nineteenth-century realism), the novel of manners has conventionally served as one of modernism's others. Recently, however, new approaches to modernism -- gendered, queer, intercultural, and anthropological -- have fueled a critical return to manners by treating affect, emotion, intimacy, snobbishness, excessiveness, naturalness, embarrassment, and perversity as central concerns. This seminar invites papers reconsidering modernism's relation(s) to manners and to manners texts. What happens to modernism, and/or to the genre of manners, when we read these two constructs together rather than in opposition?

POETICS, POETRY, AND PEDAGOGY REVISITED
Deborah M. Mix (Ball State) and Elizabeth Savage (Fairmont State)
At the 2002 MSA Conference, the seminar entitled “Poetics, Poetry, and Pedagogy” considered the ways in which modernist poets enacted particular pedagogies through their poetry and poetic theories. This seminar builds on the earlier one by considering the challenges visited upon teachers of modernist poets and poetics. In light of lenses that have revealed “modernisms” where “modernism” once seemed so firmly to appear, how does the modernist scholar communicate modernism’s imperatives to students without returning the period and its writers to the monolith contemporary studies have so usefully complicated and reinvigorated? What poets should be included in a survey course? In a seminar on modernism? How should their works be framed in order to resist major/definitive and minor/derivative categories of which we are (or should be) suspicious if not contemptuous? And once the poets are chosen, how do we convey the importance and relevance of their work? Practical approaches and classroom strategies that address specific opportunities and problems posed by these and other matters in the modernist poetry classroom invited.

QUEERING MODERNISM
Peter Naccarato (Marrymount Manhattan College)
As the MSA 6 conference theme suggests, one of the most recent trends in scholarly work regarding modernism has been to re-think what has become the common set of assumptions about this rich and complex period of literary and cultural history. As a means of contributing to this important work, this seminar invites participants to employ the contemporary theoretical tool of “queering” to assess our understanding of what modernism was and what impact it has had on the literary and cultural scene. Participants are invited to take a second look at any facet of modernism as we collectively shake up what has become accepted dogma within modernist studies.

VISUAL MODERNITY
Ira B. Nadel (U British Columbia)
What explains modernism’s appropriation of the visual? Why has film, photography, art and graphics played such a dominate role in shaping and defining modernist works? Is it a strategy – or a response – to the demands of restructuring form? And has the use of a visual grammar and syntax extended modernism’s life in the postmodern period? Has the visual grammar of modernity prepared us for the postmodernism? These and related questions will form the basis of this seminar as it explores the function of the visual in the writings of the moderns, whether it is Joyce, Beckett, Stein or Pound or through such modern movements as Imagism, Vorticism, Primitivism or Cubism. Beginning with Baudelaire’s definition of modernity as compromising “the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable,” in what ways has the dominance of the visual in modernist writing extended, redefined or revised the cultural work of the modernist text?

MODERNISM AND JUNK
John Timberman Newcomb (U Illinois Urbana-Champaign)
Some modernisms fetishized text into object, seeking to assert the text’s unique identity and permanence. But the pedestalized object-text has not worn well in modern economies whose success depends on the continual obsolescence of physical objects. Might the modernist text be approached instead through its engagement with objects perceived as alien or other: in other words, with junk? Some modernists (Stevens in "The Man on the Dump") discover value in junk, while others (Eliot in The Waste Land) deny it. Junk has always been the scenery, and is now the history, of consumerist modernity. Discarded machine parts reclaimed into sculpture, or never reclaimed into anything; advertising ephemera prized as collectibles by individuals and museums; Fitzgerald’s Flushing ash-heaps, their very meaninglessness laden with signifying power; mind-altering chemicals denigrated as junk even by those who crave them: these are some of the many forms of modern junk that papers in this seminar might address as modernist texts.

TEACHING MODERNISMS: OTHER USES FOR OUR SCHOLARSHIP
Alyssa J. O’Brien (Stanford)
Seminar participates are invited to discuss both practical and creative approaches to pedagogy that engage students in the social, political, cultural, and intellectual contexts of modernist production. Papers might discuss and theorize strategies for using scholarship in the classroom or convey best practices for mentoring students as future modernist scholars. Interactive multimedia papers and weblinks to participants’ work are welcome. One goal of this seminar will be to compile a compendium of syllabi, teaching resources, “best texts,” and pedagogical plans for teaching modernisms at the undergraduate and graduate levels.

MODERNISM AND THE WAR METROPOLIS
Paul K. Saint-Amour (Pomona College)
Modernist studies has mapped a host of modernist cities: capitals of fashion and the avant-garde, empire's metropole and architecture's concept city, the horizontal habitats of flapper and flâneur. But what about what Lewis Mumford in 1938 called the "war metropolis" - the city of klaxons and rations, the city in which emergency had become routinized? Is it really the case - as the most prominent accounts would have it - that in wartime, modernism evacuates to the front, leaving a counter-modernist home front in the city? How do urban modernisms register the reconfiguration of the city as target? In what ways does the soldier get imagined as the Other of the modernist? Or, to the extent that modernists get militarized, is the civilian modernism's other Other?

GENDERS AND RACES, EMPIRES AND NATIONS: VIEWS FROM ELSEWHERE
Sonita Sarker (Macalester College)
This seminar presents occasions to discuss the intersections between (post)colonial theorizing and whiteness studies as ways into/out of modernisms and modernist studies. It offers opportunities to re-member the works and figures of minoritized and ‘major’ cultural producers in order to address questions such as: How did South Americans, South Asians, Caribbeans, and African Americans read the promises and threats of imperial, fascist, and nascent nations in connection to their own ‘otherness’? How did these views intersect with or diverge from other European and American views that (have) gained prominence? The seminar invites you to investigate the strategic valency of obscuring or foregrounding identity parameters (race, class, gender, sexuality, nation) in analyzing cultural and political ideologies, by the writers and/or in our scholarship. For example, what meanings did ‘gender’ imbricated with ‘race’ hold for modernist writers shuttling between dominant and emerging nation-states? What is the potency in connecting the various connotations of race to fascism? Diverse media and frameworks are most welcome.

MODERNIST ANTIRATIONALISM
Davis Schneiderman (Lake Forest)
Different strains of modernism responded differently to the dominance of reason in the first half of the twentieth century. The Futurists fetishized reason as technology, while the Surrealists dismissed its power in celebrating the unconscious. This seminar will explore this second type of response through the various negative (dialectical) articulations it assumed: antirationalism, automatism, occultism, etc. How does the reification/negation of the "artist" connect these tactics in an antipathy toward reason - or at least toward the prevailing discourse of its articulation? What are the contemporary legacies of such articulations, whether aesthetic, critical, or theoretical?

RACE AND THE MODERNIST NOVEL
Urmila Seshagiri (U Tennessee)
This seminar invites papers about the aesthetic, political, and social functions of race in the modernist novel. Critical attention to race in early twentieth-century novels is too often confined to discourses about imperialism; this seminar aims to explore the wide-ranging attitudes and assumptions about racial identity that inform the modernist reinvention of narrative. How does modernist fiction register, critique, or extend the racial obsessions so prominent in the avant-garde visual arts? What do literal and figurative depictions of race purchase for the modernist project of aesthetic renewal? How does the treatment of race vary from modernism’s metropolitan centers to its various peripheries? Finally, how do multiple, shifting categories of race determine or subtend modernist theories of literature and the novel?

MODERNISMS OF THE AMERICAS
Aram Shepherd (U North Carolina, Chapel Hill)
Defining Europe as the center of modernism creates divisions between Europe, the United States and Latin America that obscure interconnections between artists within the Americas. This seminar will explore the shared concerns and the exchange of ideas among modernists from the United States, Canada, Central America, South America and the Caribbean, from Martí’s poetry and essays written in New York before the turn of the century to the visual artists of the international avant-garde before WWII. Both theoretical works focusing on formulations of modernism in the Americas and studies of specific influences across national boundaries are welcome.

MODERNISM AND THEATRICAL PERFORMANCE
Kirsten Shepherd-Barr (Birmingham)
I propose a seminar on the relationship between modernism and theatrical performance, focusing specifically on why theatre and performance have generally been marginalized in the historiography of modernism. Histories of modernism have tended to construct definitions of the movement through examples from the visual arts, fiction, poetry, dance, music and drama (texts). Yet there is much evidence to show that avant-garde theatre groups, theatrical designers, and specific productions all contributed in vital and diverse ways to the movement we call modernism. Why, then, has theatre been systematically sidelined? The seminar would provide an opportunity for a long-needed discussion about this problem from a wide range of angles, as it is hoped that modernists as well as theatre scholars and practitioners might want to participate.

PACIFIC RIM MODERNISMS
Helen Sword (Auckland) and Steven Yao (Hamilton)
Following up on the plenary roundtable on Pacific Rim Modernisms, this seminar invites submissions exploring the "Pacific Rim" as both a site and conceptual paradigm for Modernist cultural production in a variety of media. Possible topics include the rise of indigenous modernisms in countries throughout the area, including East, Southeast and South Asia as well as Australasia and the Americas; the treatment and function of specific Pacific Rim cities within colonial, semi-colonial and imperial settings; the liminal place of Pacific Rim locales within existing center/periphery models of international modernism; and affinities among and interactions between Pacific Rim countries in an era of steadily increasing cultural and economic globalization. Definitions and defenses of a new Pacific Rim paradigm are encouraged; questionings and complications are welcome.