There has never been a great age of science and technology without a corresponding flourishing of the arts and humanities. In any time or place of rapid technological advance, those creatures we would now call humanists—literary commentators, historians, philosophers, logicians, theologians, linguists, scholars of the arts, and all manner of writers, musicians, and artists—have also had a field day. Perhaps that generalization is actually a tautology. Great ages of science are great ages of the humanities because an age isn't a historical period but a construct, and constructs are the work of humanists. Throughout history, there have been many momentous scientific discoveries that simply drift into the culture, are adapted without any particular new social or philosophical arrangements. It is the humanistic articulation of the significance of scientific change that announces a new episteme, a world-altering, even metaphysical, transformation. While scientists and engineers are responsible for the discoveries and inventions, humanists consolidate those experimental findings, explain them, and aggregate their impact in such a way that we suddenly have not just the new but an epoch-defining paradigm shift. (E = mc is an equation; the concept of relativity is a defining intellectual model.) The humanistic turn of mind provides the historical perspective, interpretive skill, critical analysis, and narrative form required to articulate the significance of the scientific discoveries of an era, show how they change our sense of what it means to be human, and demarcate their continuity with or difference from existing ideologies.

I was invited by the MLA committee on the status of graduate students in the profession to speak at a convention workshop entitled “Keywords for a Digital Profession.” My keyword was obsolescence, a catchall term for a multiplicity of conditions; there are material obsolescences, institutional obsolescences, and purely theoretical obsolescences, each type demanding a different response. I spent years pondering theoretical obsolescence while writing The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television. The book argues, in part, that claims about the obsolescence of cultural forms often say more about those doing the claiming than they do about the objects of the claims. Neither the novel in particular nor the book more broadly nor print in general is dead, and agonized announcements of the death of such technologies and genres often serve to re-create an elite cadre of cultural producers and consumers, ostensibly operating on the margins of contemporary culture and profiting from their claims of marginality by creating a sense that their own values, once mainstream and now decaying, must be protected. Two oft-cited reports of the National Endowment for the Arts, Reading at Risk (2004) and To Read or Not to Read (2007), come to mind; like numerous other expressions of anxiety about the supposed decline of reading, each rhetorically creates a cultural wildlife preserve in which the apparently obsolete can flourish (United States). These texts suggest that obsolescence is, in this case at least, less a material state than a political project.

[Les critiques] ont en commun avec les tyrans de plier le monde à leurs désirs.

[Critics] and tyrants have this in common: they bend the world to their desires.

—Yasmina Reza, L'aube le soir ou la nuit (9)

If there is anything that radically distinguishes the imagination of anti-imperialism, it is the primacy of the geographical element. Imperialism after all is an act of geographical violence through which virtually every space in the world is explored, charted, and finally brought under control.

—Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (225)

Denis Diderot's Encyclopédie is explicit about “Les Indes” ‘The Indies.‘ in explaining why distant landmasses were charted under the incorrect rubrics “East Indies” and “West Indies,” the Encyclopédie states in 1765 that these designations refer to countries situated on either side of the Cape of Good Hope, the southern extremity of Africa:

[L]es modernes moins excusable que les anciens ont nommé Indes, des pays si différens par leur position & par leur étendue sur notre globe, que pour ôter une partie de l'équivoque, ils ont divisé les Indes en orientales & occidentales. … De-là vint l'usage d'appeller Indes orientales, ce qui est à l'orient du cap de Bonne-Espérance, & Indes occidentales, ce qui est à l'occident de ce cap. … [P]ar un nouvel abus, qu'il n'est plus possible de corriger, on se sert dans les relations du nom d'Indiens, pour dire les Amériquains. (“Indes”)

[T]he moderns, who are less forgivable than the ancients, have called Indies countries so different by virtue of their location and their size on our globe that these had to be divided into East and West Indies in order to correct the ambiguity. … Hence the custom of calling East Indies what lies to the east of the Cape of Good Hope and West Indies what lies to the west of that cape. … [T]hrough a new misuse, which can no longer be corrected, the name Indians is used in travel relations to refer to Americans.

In our introduction to bad modernisms, we traced the emergence of the new modernist studies, which was born on or about 1999 with the invention of the Modernist Studies Association (MSA) and its annual conferences; with the provision of exciting new forums for exchange in the journals Modernism/Modernity and (later) Modernist Cultures; and with the publication of books, anthologies, and articles that took modernist scholarship in new methodological directions. When we offered that survey, one of our principal interests was to situate these events in a longer critical history of modernism in the arts. In the present report, we want to attend more closely to one or two recent developments that may be suggestive about the present and the immediate future of the study of modernist literature. Part of the empirical, though certainly far from scientific, basis of our considerations lies in our recent service on the MSA Book Prize committee (Walkowitz in 2005, Mao in 2006), through which we became acquainted with dozens of recent contributions to the field.

An onomatopoeic expression automatically entails the specification of what is being described. A pattering sound cannot come from a piece of wood. But when I was listening to [Peter Ablinger's Berlin sound] recordings, I sometimes couldn't tell whether a sound was coming from thunder or a sheet of metal. I wanted to represent the sound, not the person who was producing it, nor its metaphorical significance. It took me quite some time to come up with a solution: My solution was not to find a solution, but rather to enter into the crevice between sound and language and make countless little notes.

—Yoko Tawada, “The Art of Being Synchronous”

Nothing is more remarkable in the tradition of Althusserian Marxism than the silence that has dogged the work of Juan Carlos Rodríguez. One thinks of the relative importance attached to the work of Terry Eagleton and Fredric Jameson. Some might believe the discrepancy is a matter of merit rather than of willful or unconscious neglect. But even the most casual comparison of Rodríguez's Theory and History of Ideological Production with Eagleton's Criticism and Ideology (1975) and with Jameson's The Political Unconscious (1981) suggests that this can hardly be the case. The parallel with Jameson is particularly intriguing. Like Rodríguez, the North American scholar accepts Louis Althusser's view of the social totality as a “decentered structure” in which various levels develop in “relative autonomy” and in which different feudal and capitalist matrices coexist. Also like Rodríguez, he considers literary works to be a form of ideological discourse that represses historical truth. Why, then, the silence that surrounds Rodríguez? The answer lies in the extent to which Jameson's work recontains diverse critical positions in the larger horizon of Marxism. Such a practice, as Eagleton has argued, is congenial to a dominant American pragmatism and eclecticism, as are the presiding Marxist Hegelian categories of reification and commodification (60–62). The consequences, politically, are found in Jameson's amorphous brand of “alliance” politics. The material situation of Rodríguez was very different. Given the militancy of the working class in Spain, his presiding categories were those of exploitation and class conflict, which combine to form the basis of a revolutionary proletarian politics that is anything but acceptable to the North American academy.