I'm here! #TroublesomeModernisms
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The first roundtable of #TroublesomeModernisms. Troublesome Monographs in St Bride, Bridewell Hall featuring @alixbeeston, @helenksaunders, @amyEelkins, Jerome Boyd and @ncecire
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Conversation
begins by thinking about precarity and its relation to the often gendered politics of the "polished" academic monograph. Citing Benjamin, she suggests that a mode that hopes to erase it's labour (it's mistakes) also erases the precarious situation of its producers.
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Jerome Boyd Maunsell now discussing his "troublesome monograph" _Portraits from Life: Novelists and Autobiography_ (OUP, 2018). E.g. Woolf's phrase "the platform of the present" acted as a useful model for rejecting a placeless and timeless critical perspective.
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Maunsell's own precarity informed and shaped his attention when considering the autobiographical modes of e.g. Lewis and Conrad. In thinking about his own practices/labour, he could better envisage the ways these writers envisaged the role and purpose of their autobio labour.
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describes a very familiar feeling: the "first book" became not a labour of love or joy or achievement but an instrumental object that might one day allow her to "pay her rent."*
*By getting her a job obvs. Nobody makes any money from their book rofl lol crying emoji
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@helenksaunders daringly describes her own mode of precarity as "full time employment." In recognizing her need to pay the bills, she had to get a job in editing that leaves her precious little time to carry out her "primary career," to which she has already sunk ks of unpaid hrs
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Saunders cites Joyce's notable superstition about publication dates, but is more pragmatic in wanting to get her book on _Joyce, Fashion, and Identity_ out by 1922 when everyone will be going Cray Cray for Jay Jay.
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Saunders effectively looks around the room and asks: "where my professors and senior scholars at?" (Deafening silence). The job of discussing precarity and the discussion of actual labour has been left to the precarious.
Replying to
discussing her resistance to the term modernism (specifically for her book _Experimental: American Literature and the Aesthetics of Knoweldge_). The process of naming things "modernist" became within New Modernist Studies a way of recovering writers of colour.
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The process of canon-construction should be dynamically and attentively observed, but the process of "recovery" (renaming) is a process of obfuscation. The title is honorific rather than descriptive. A value judgement rather than a categorisation.
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Discussions become MORE rather than less reliant on High Modernism as a yardstick and the more varied forms of _being-modern_ are lost. "Recovered" works tend to be given an associate status rather than understood in their own terms.
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Sophie Seita that Little Magazines offer a way to observe the provisionality and belatedness of artistic groupings (like Dada). The many energies and directions that are filtered out in processes it historical concretisation. This provisionality should be kept alive.
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Amy E. Elkins suggests that her own background gave her a commitment to "experiential education" that can still be felt in all her work.
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Fundamental importance of interdisciplinary collaboration in her work, but there is little opportunity in the standard monograph to reflect and acknowledge these processes beyond "thanks" in the acknowledgments.
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Giving space to archivists and other networks of contributors (who offer real material input) is awkward and revealing of the particular resistances of traditional scholarly work to communal and collaborative practices.
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