37 | 2024
Reanimating Modernisms (I): Embracing Neophilia, Neophobia, and the Modernists’ Renaissances

This issue is the first part of a diptych, entitled Reanimating Modernisms, which proceeds from the critical energies that, not least since the New Modernist studies, continue to challenge the notion of a singular modernism in the ever-proliferating renewal of the discipline. “Reanimating Modernisms (I): Embracing Neophilia, Neophobia, and the Modernists’ Renaissances” takes stock of the reanimating energies of Modernist artists themselves by exploring the ways the claims to “Make it New” of Modernism are always bound up in a dialectical embrace of repetition and renewal, embracing also at one and the same time the antinomic moods of « neophilia » and « neophobia. »

The plurality of Modernisms that have developed in the wake of Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz’s 2008 PMLA article follow rich and varied methodologies: resurrecting works of canonical Modernism from a “dead” or moribund state in the coffins of prior disciplinary containments (new criticism/high modernism, Eurocentric avant-garde, transatlantic Modernism, romantic proto-Modernism, contemporary neo-Modernism, etc.); expanding the field of what counts as “Modernist”; and crossing disciplinary boundaries and fields of study (literature, cultural studies, visual culture, film studies, sound studies, etc.). Issues 37 and 38 engage with these precedents and mobilise their dynamic approaches in order to reanimate the diverse discourses through which Modernism as an object of study is framed, without ever being fully contained. In these two issues, despite the range of topics and texts addressed, this reanimation is informed by, perhaps paradoxically, one of Modernism’s most long standing and generative sources of tension: the ways in which modernist aesthetic practices attempt to negotiate a relation to the past while at the same time respond to a modernity conditioned by unprecedented developments in transcultural, transnational, and technological transmission. Keeping in mind Walter Benjamin’s injunction that “In every era the attempt must be made to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it,” Reanimating Modernisms harnesses these reanimating energies to foreground questions of renovation and transgression central to the ongoing dialogue about what Modernism(s) means today.