Please join us for the Fall meeting of the NYNJ Modernism Seminar

Aarthi Vadde (Duke University)

“Language’s Hopes: Global Modernism and the Science of Debabelization” 

Friday, October 19, 12-2 pm (lunch served)
CCA Seminar Room
Academic Building West 6051
Rutgers University

Professor Aarthi Vadde works in the field of 20th-21st century Anglophone literature, with particular interests in the historical and technological forces conditioning migration and globalization.  She looks at how literary history interfaces with theories of internationalism, the history of computation, and media studies more generally. 

Her book Chimeras of Form: Modernist Internationalism beyond Europe, 1914-2016 was published by Columbia UP in 2016 and won the ACLA's 2018 Harry Levin Prize for best first book in the field of comparative literature.  It illustrates how modernist and contemporary writers from Rabindranath Tagore to Zadie Smith reimagine the nation and internationalism in a period defined by globalization. Drawing on close readings of individual texts and on literary, postcolonial, and cosmopolitical theory, Vadde explains how modernist challenges to traditional notions of aesthetic form enable newfound understandings of the cohesion and interrelation of political communities.  An interview related to the book is available here.

The NYNJ Modernism Seminar, cosponsored by the Modernism and Globalization Research Group at Rutgers and the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia, meets twice annually to discuss work-in-progress by leading scholars in the fields of 20c and 21c literary studies.  Professor Vadde's paper will be available on the NYNJMS Sakai site in early October.  Everyone is welcome!  If you would like to be added to the site, please write to Rebecca Walkowitz (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) or Sarah Cole (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.).