As Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz note in their introduction to the 2006 collection Bad Modernisms, “[T]here were numerous ways of being outside in the early twentieth century” (7). Efforts over the past several decades to imagine modernism as an expanded field have been remarkably successful. Female modernism, African American modernism, queer modernism, sentimental modernism, low- and middlebrow modernism, and colonial, postcolonial, and anticolonial modernism have all been integrated into a renewed understanding of modernism (or modernisms, as it is often written). In addition, the rethinking of modernism as a set of aesthetic movements in relation to a larger context of global modernity and modernization has turned the inside out. Since few modernists, on closer inspection, appear to have stayed high or dry, bad modernism, outsider modernism, and marginal modernism begin to look more and more like modernism itself.

The reputation of Djuna Barnes's Nightwood as a work of “marginal” modernism is complicated by its affinities with the aesthetics of high modernism, a fact signaled by its role as the inspiration of Joseph Frank's theory of spatial form. At once emblematic and eccentric, the novel is devoted to both recognition and obscurity. Nightwood enacts this paradox through a strategy of queer ekphrasis that aestheticizes moments of loss, giving aesthetic form to experiences of stigma in order to “dazzle” them. Attending to Barnes's spatial form will forward debates about modernism and queer theory, suggesting a more useful vocabulary for both: an account of the aesthetic that is neither wholly subversive nor wholly conservative and a nuanced account of queerness that does not subscribe to either total negation or total affirmation.

Housman's bitter poems about fate, betrayal, and unhappiness were dismissed by many modernist critics and poets on account of their author's pathological self-division, both in content and form. As Housman's thwarted homosexuality became more widely known, it seemed the obvious source of his relentless oppositions between desire and a fateful law. But his newly recovered collection of pornography and sexology shows as much interest in sadomasochistic fantasy scenarios as in homosexuality, scenarios in which sufferer and torturer are covertly agreeing to play the same game. This interest means not only that the poems protesting against punishment might be covertly identifying with it but also that they might covertly ironize the aesthetic criteria of Housman's modernist opponents. Auden's, Richards's, and Leavis's organicist ideas about poetry's cultural mission, based on Schiller's model of the aesthetic state, are parodied by the unmediated, self-contained, and homeostatic relationships found in the masochistic fantasies of Housman's collection.

This article examines the prevalence of confusion and incoherence in James Baldwin's 1962 novel Another Country, arguing that the novel should be read as an extended and theoretically rich meditation on the difficulty of gaining self-knowledge in oppressive social contexts. Its central thesis is that the novel is motivated less by the tragedy of Rufus Scott's suicide early in the novel than by the ethical imperative that compels all the characters to risk their sense of self (to figuratively commit suicide) in order to better understand the circumstances they face. Through this “suicidal” sensibility, Baldwin examines how self-knowledge in oppressive contexts frequently depends on people making extreme shifts in their conception of self—of who they are in relation to their society. These shifts are often dreaded and appear self-menacing, but Baldwin ultimately implies that they hold liberatory promise.

The chapter “Spectacles in Color” in Langston Hughes's first autobiography, The Big Sea (1940), envisions modernist Harlem culture as a drag performance and offers a useful rubric for understanding Hughes's The Weary Blues (1926), a lyric history of that culture whose poems characteristically cross gender, sexual, racial, and even formal lines. The Weary Blues employs a low-down, or nature-based, and down-low, or queer, aesthetic of racial and gender crossing that I term “primitive drag,” an aesthetic that ironically coincides with the stereotypes of African Americans and queers that were propagated by early-twentieth-century sexological science and degeneration theory: namely, that blacks and queers were unnatural and degenerate because they, unlike whites and heterosexuals, exhibited a lack of racial and gender differentiation. Disidentifying with those stereotypes, the primitive drag in The Weary Blues depicts queer feeling as natural and nature as queer, thus offering a productive paradox for rethinking literary histories of modernism and theories of sexuality by the rather Darwinian notion that “the nature of the universe,” as Hughes calls it, is always subject to change, or queering.

This essay contributes to recent debates in the study of the history of sexuality that have developed out of a comparison of a story from Apuleius's Golden Ass and its transformation by Boccaccio in the Decameron. Addressing questions of book history, philology, and textual transmission, the article offers another perspective on the problems of identity, temporality, and epistemology that have been at the center of these debates and proposes reorienting considerations of Michel Foucault's still-contested role in the field by drawing on the underappreciated later volumes of his landmark History of Sexuality. Instead of mining the stories of Apuleius and Boccaccio for exemplary social types or for information about the social meanings of past sex acts, this essay uses philological and paratextual materials to focalize these tales' interpretive erotics, complicate the temporal relations between them, and model a way of studying the history of sexuality that is not tied to a history of social types, identities, or acts.

Tendentious as these definitions are, they refer to the colliding conceptions from which academic activism issues. The often reductive contrast between theory and practice, thinking and doing, has been used to regulate what is admissible as campus politics as if it were apparent in advance which actions were insufficiently imbued with reflection and which worldly commitments compromised disciplinary or institutional loyalty. Suffice it to say that drawing the boundary between activity appropriately inside and outside the academy has always been anxiously freighted. The pursuit of practically engaged knowledge has been constituted in a taut exchange with the very powers it has been called on to serve—persistently but not exclusively those of the state, of industry, and of professional associations (Newfield, Ivy; Readings; Chomsky; Starr). In the lineage of the Western university, degrees of critical separation from these authorities were hard-won and were conceived of as autonomy or academic freedom (Kant). The emergent disciplinary formations of the late nineteenth century made activist claims for equality in a self-designated professional cohort under the rubric of peer review. This compact, advanced by the American Association of University Professors, ceded institutional control to administrators in exchange for noninterference with the pursuit of specialized knowledge (even if manifest as political speech), which was apportioned to those elevated to the peerage through conferral of tenure (O'Neil; Thelin).

I cannot identify what sparked my environmental awareness. The romantic in me invokes childhood with an ardently outdoor maternal grandfather, who taught me to distinguish a beech tree from a birch, to plant potatoes, and to welcome the tree frogs' spring chorus with awe and delight. More likely, the recognition arrived not from childhood pleasures or reading Henry David Thoreau but from something as quotidian and cumulative as exhaustion from years of commuting from New Hampshire to Boston for work as an adjunct, sucking exhaust fumes on Route 128.

During my winter sabbatical of 2004, I found myself one day in Hayneville, Alabama, a small hamlet off highway 80, the lonely stretch of asphalt that connects Selma with Montgomery. This is the same road that hundreds walked in 1965, to be joined by thousands more as they neared the state's capitol building in the last hurrah of the modern civil rights movement.

In his presidential address at the 1970 MLA convention, Maynard Mack sounded a warning bell concerning activism and the future of literary studies. Faced with a seemingly endless conflict in Vietnam and a national student body growing polarized in its response to this war, higher education, including language-based pedagogy, was in crisis. Of particular concern to Mack was a growing generational disconnect over the role of activism in the literature classroom. He cited a landmark study in which nearly two-thirds of all professors over the age of thirty maintained that any foray into politics should be avoided, if not altogether prohibited, in formal course work. The younger generation disagreed: two-thirds of them, in fact, felt a moral and pedagogical obligation to use colleges and universities as loci for social change. This ideological divide, Mack predicted, would soon create “a crisis of authority in the offing beside which all current manifestations would look pale” (365).

One winter morning, the student scanning cards at the front desk of the university gym noticed the “faculty” label on mine and asked which department I was in. I replied that I teach in English. A middle-aged man who checked in behind me chased me down the hall. When he caught me, he exclaimed with frustration, “English, eh? Well, could you please get students to stop using plural pronouns when they need singular ones? Everyone—they, someone—they. It's just terrible English.”

In the last days of March 2007, the beautiful and captivating colombian city of medellín hosted an often bland yet, on this occasion, surprisingly media-appealing event: surrounded by a generous cohort of reporters, the Association of Academies of the Spanish Language was holding its regular conference, the thirteenth since its conception in 1951. The gathering began on the twenty-first and culminated three days later, at the Teatro Metropolitano, with what could arguably be described as one of the most highly publicized events in the history of the Spanish language: the official approval of the Nueva gramática de la lengua española ‘The New Grammar of the Spanish Language’ (henceforth NGLE). The Colombian president, Álvaro Uribe, and the head of the Spanish monarchy, King Juan Carlos I, presided over the ceremony, providing the occasion with the solemnity (and media pull) that it so critically required. After a series of opening remarks and speeches, the king stood, faced the academicians—one from Spain, one from the Philippines, and twenty from the Americas—and, as he called their names individually, asked, “¿Aprobáis la Nueva Gramática?” ‘Do you approve the New Grammar?‘ Each in turn, with a distinguished assembly of politicians, businessmen, and publishers as witnesses, rose and answered with a simple yet unequivocal “Sí.”

Grammar Games in the Classroom

It looked like an error of vocabulary. The class was reading a text by the east german author Thomas Brussig, Wasserfarben, and practicing the indirect discourse subjunctive. In the text, an East German school director, Schneider, summons a student to his office to reprimand him on his lack of motivation:

In the introduction to a 2002 special issue of diacritics on ethics and interdisciplinarity, mark sanders asks us to consider, “What points of contact, if any, are there between the current investment in ethics in literary theory, and the elaboration of ethics in contemporary philosophy?” (3). Yet the question behind this question—the one that motivates his selection of essays for the issue—is why literary critics and theorists have drawn their ideas about ethics from Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Alain Badiou but have felt little or no need to consult past or present moral philosophers. As Sanders goes on to note, while “in North America and the Anglophone world generally, the tendency in ethics has been to bring moral reflection to bear on questions in political theory,” there “has been relatively little attention among literary theorists to developments in disciplinary philosophy” (4).