27 - Networks: Modernism in Circulation, 1920–2020

Summary

Within modernist scholarship, the term ‘network’ tends to lend its powerful connotation of complex connectivity to two interpretive contexts: first, in definitions of modernism as a far-flung set of constellations of people, publications and institutions across space and time, and second, in excursions into network analysis that use software to explore and visualise relationships among modernists or their texts. In the former case, the term ‘network’ crystallises what would be an amorphous cloud of movements into a discrete entity that seems definite but is flexible enough to support the new modernist studies’ transnational and transhistorical expansions of what counts as modernism. In the latter case, the term ‘network’ refers to the computational methods adapted by digital humanities scholars to craft visually compelling graphics and queryable datasets related to a particular text, genre or group of authors, often on a large scale. In both cases, the named entities comprising modernism are related but not conflated, allowing the scholar’s argument to overcome the slippery recalcitrance of its subject material while retaining its complexity.

Recent examples of arguments that deploy networks as a figure for modernism’s groups of mutual influence include Helen Southworth’s Leonard and Virginia Woolf, the Hogarth Press and the Networks of Modernism (2010) and London Art Worlds: Mobile, Contingent, and Ephemeral Networks, 1960–1980 (Applin et al. 2017). For others, studying a single point in the mesh reframes the whole modernist network; Willa Cather does so for Janis P. Stout (2015), H. D. for Georgina Taylor (2001), D. H. Lawrence for Julianne Newmark (2016) and Taxco for A. Joan Saab (2011). By contrast, triangulating many points might redraw the network on a continental scale, as in Patricia Novillo-Corvalán’s Modernism and Latin America Transnational Networks of Literary Exchange (2017) and Wesley Beal’s Networks of Modernism (2015). Tracing a network is a political act that can recover occluded radical modernisms, as Wai Chee Dimock does by exploring representations of Native Americans in ‘Weak Network: Faulkner’s Transpacific Reparations’ (2018) and James Gifford does by redrawing lines of influence away from Marxism in Personal Modernisms: Anarchist Networks and the Later Avant-Gardes (2014). Clearly, the network – as a model for conceiving of artists and texts as agents whose most salient feature is that they interact with one another in complex ways – offers considerable explanatory power.