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Abstract

In this seminar I’ll talk about my book, The New Modernist Novel: Criticism and the Task of Reading. I'll do so by sketching out a little of the role modernist literature has played in the history of academic close reading. First, I'll follow some shifts in Edmund Wilson’s use of the term “reader,” which gained in complexity from the 1920s to the 1940s, and I’ll suggest that for other critics besides Wilson, too, modernist writing prompted new kinds of reading. But in the academy in the 1950s and early 1960s, ways of reading modernist writing also needed to lead to successful teaching and criticism. In this context, some authors and their work and some strategies of close reading seemed more valuable than others. I’m interested in how Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy, and others weren’t among those valued highly, and instead were pulled back to recognition in the 1970s onwards and especially in the 1990s. I’ll close the talk by reading Loy’s novel Insel against the grain of some mid-century tendencies in reading, in order to suggest that close reading can be site of change in the discipline.

Bio

Elizabeth Pender has published in Critical Quarterly a�Ի� Modernism/modernity, and with Cathryn Setz, co-edited the essay collection Shattered Objects: Djuna Barnes’s Modernism (Penn State UP, 2019). The New Modernist Novel: Criticism and the Task of Reading was published in 2024 with Edinburgh University Press.