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Moving Modernisms: Motion, Technology, and Modernity. Ed. by David Bradshaw, Laura Marcus and Rebecca Roach, Forum for Modern Language Studies, Volume 53, Issue 3, July 2017, Page 376, https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqx028
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This collection of essays arises from the conference Moving Modernisms held at the University of Oxford in 2012, and examines the question of movement in mainly Anglo-European modernism from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. Although movement is already a well-discussed issue in studies of modernism, the editors and authors of this volume attempt to rethink this relation by taking into account the recent debates about world literature, global modernisms and periodization. In terms of the book’s structure, motion and modernism are related to each other by a few main themes: modernist geographies and temporalities; energies and quantities; periodization and discourses; and new technologies – especially the moving image. The 17 essays (not counting the introduction), written by prominent scholars in the field, cover a broad range of writers, texts and artworks. For example, Tim Armstrong’s discussion of ‘micromodernism’ shows that, in contrast to the idea of mapping modernism and its all-encompassing vision, we might understand modernism defined by its localisms in a more dissident way; Steven Connor argues that mathematics and the concept of numbers are in fact catalysts for the modernist desire for ‘speed, flux […] and universal continuity’ (p. 107); Deborah Longworth examines modernists’ fascination with the bicycle and speed in visual presentation, avant-garde writings and popular culture in the early twentieth century. Overall, the volume is coherent and diverse, combining breadth with in-depth analysis that probes questions about modernist boundaries, the affective and vitalist aspects of motion in modernist works, the concept of scale in national and political space as well as aesthetic and linguistic contexts. It will be of interest to specialists in modernism and more broadly to scholars in literature, critical theory and visual culture.
