The Coda pushes the implications of the book’s argument both backward and forward in time. Love reads Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s character Sherlock Holmes as a nineteenth-century precursor to the cybernetic impulses of data-collection and data-processing, and points to the growing body of criticism that is probing the historical parameters of cybernetic thinking even further back in time. Love proposes that the emerging sense of a literary–critical cybernetic paradigm is particularly significant to scholars of modernism in light of the field’s recent global turn. Finally, she illustrates how the cybernetic reading of modernist formal experimentation can both illuminate and offer aesthetic alternatives to contemporary technological debates surrounding issues like surveillance and privacy. This conclusion drives home the argument that modernist literature can help us understand the longer and more diverse cultural history of our present-day, information-rich world; it also gestures to new possibilities for research and analysis that might push our awareness of cybernetic thinking back even further into earlier cultural moments, movements, genres, and texts.

Saqqakhaneh represents in Iranian art historiography the first successful translation of global modernism into the Iranian context. Saqqakhaneh is considered the first movement that moved beyond the belated imitation of Western artistic styles and established a local modernism rooted in Iranian visual traditions. Chapter 3 examines artworks and various written sources associated with Saqqakhaneh. Saqqakhaneh was not a self-styled art movement nor did the artists share a common aesthetic program. The various designations of Saqqakhaneh as a school of modernism, an artistic group, or even an independent art movement reveal no uniform definition of the term. This leads to the conclusion that art historiographical processes were more influential on the evolution of Saqqakhaneh as a category than the artists’ actual collaboration. Recognizing this distinction gives an important insight into the complex and shifting politics that prepared the ground for the reception of artworks connected to Saqqakhaneh. As a celebration of the Pahlavi monarchy’s liberal sponsorship of art and culture, these works play a key role in the memorialization of prerevolutionary Iran.

Geomodernism insists that we cannot theorize modernist art within a national frame, emphasizing embeddedness and interconnection over isolation. Doing so requires reckoning with how questions of race and citizenship, migration and war, empire and revolution change our assessment of the aesthetics and politics of modernism. I begin with a call for a clearer sense of the relations among geomodernisms, global modernisms, and postcoloniality to suggest that US modernist studies could subtend geomodernist emphasis on place further by harnessing the insights of ethnic and postcolonial studies more fully. The global can neither be assumed as inert fact or impossible aspiration. Drawing on Eric Walrond’s Tropic Death (1926), I argue for a more robust focus on decolonial practice, on border as method, and on the ongoing racial violence of a settler state to highlight the unresolved presence of US empire and extraction in the hemisphere alongside submerged histories of labor migration.

What did it mean for Iranian revolutionaries to understand the revolution as global? To answer this question, this chapter investigates the idea of enghelab-e jahani (global revolution) in Morteza Avini's documentary films and theoretical writings. Avini was a faithful supporter of Ayatollah Khomeini who dedicated his art and thinking to grassroots mobilizations of Hezbollah volunteers after the revolution. Raised in intellectual and artistic environments of avant-garde art before the revolution, Avini's key intellectual struggle was to reconcile the cosmopolitan nature of his prerevolutionary training in modernist art with postrevolutionary faith in political Islam's assumption that all people are eventually and universally convertible to Islam through the revolution. Navigating between the cosmopolitanism of modern art and the universalist aspirations of political Islam, combined with his socialist commitment to a materially more just society, Avini offered a theory of the global revolution in which the global emerged at the intersection of four discursively distinct categories: global, cosmopolitan, universal, and worldly, all of which reflected the Persian concept of jahani.

Although Wallace Stevens did not travel extensively outside the United States, his poetry is deeply concerned with expanding the boundaries of the poetic imagination to reach beyond its domestic and local settings. The desire to develop a poetics that is capable of establishing new nodes of interconnection between near and far places and cultures is palpable throughout Stevens’s oeuvre. Han’s chapter outlines and explores this aspect of Stevens’s poetry in view of recent theoretical interventions in literary transnationalism and global modernism. It argues that the poet’s exploration of diverse cultural materials and settings interrogates, rather than simply asserts, the border-traversing capacities of the poetic imagination. Stevens’s vision of artistic mobility and travel both displays a transnational aesthetic sensibility and reveals its moments of implosion; it explores at once the possibilities and limits of the imagination’s worldly affiliations and global circuits. The poet’s impulse toward national and cultural border crossings is composed of complex responses to the literary-political currents of his epoch, which range from the specific context of American nativism in the 1920s to more general developments of globalization and the Cold War.

This chapter asks whether the “planetary,” a term that has gained currency in literary criticism since the 1990s, is a manageable framework through which to study modernism. Current iterations of the “planetary” signal crises in our contemporary shared human environment, while also marking a transformation in our disciplines. Addressing this bind, Blanco considers a number of different uses and versions of “planetarity,” from Gayatri Spivak’s and Enrique Dussel’s to Susan Stanford Friedman’s recent provocations within the new modernist studies. While thinking about the advantages and disadvantages of framing a center-less modernism, Blanco also asks what happens when rupture is not thought of as the principal operating principle through which to think modernism. Framing these questions around the experiences of Spanish American modernistas in fin-de-siècle Paris (especially Nicaraguan Rubén Darío and Guatemalan Enrique Gómez Carrillo), Blanco ask whether a privileging of a planetary framework effectively undoes a workable conceptualization of modernism.

The introduction begins by articulating the volume’s two main aims: to offer a rich account of the origins of the new modernist studies (part 1) and to suggest possible new paths of inquiry for the field in the near future (part 2). The introduction then surveys key features of the new modernist studies; examines ongoing debates over what the term “modernism” can encompass; and considers the position of modernist studies vis-à-vis recent critiques of contextualist scholarship. Throughout, it recurs to the strong institutional grounding by which the new modernist studies has been shaped. It also highlights how the collection’s individual chapters speak to the new modernist studies’ intersections with other areas of inquiry; to the continuing importance of examining modernist works in relation to non-, anti-, or not quite modernist ones; and to the value of working close analysis of textual intricacies together with elaboration of historical and cultural contexts.

Twenty-first century paradigms of global modernism implicitly endorse “babelization” (the inscrutable styles of literary texts, the addition of lesser taught languages to the field) as a corrective to linguistic imperialism and the reduction of language to a communicative medium. Yet this stance does not fully account for the distinction between natural and artificial languages. “Debabelization,” as linguist C. K. Ogden put it in 1931, motivated rich debates about the nature of language and whether technological intervention could make particular languages more efficient agents of cultural exchange. Designers of Esperanto, Ido, and Basic English each promised that their artificial language would bridge the gap between speakers of different national tongues. This essay shows how the competitive and techno-utopian discourse around auxiliary language movements intersects with the history and aesthetics of modernist literature. While linguists strove to regulate the vagaries of natural languages, modernist writers (for example, Aimé Césaire, G. V. Desani, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, H. G. Wells) used debabelization as a trope for exploring the limits of scientific objectivity and internationalist sentiment.

The ‘transnational turn’ has cycled from its establishment within the social sciences in the 1990s, its dissemination across the humanities in the 2000s, to its reassessment in our present decade. It is the contention of this chapter that to reread Ezra Pound’s comparatist aesthetic and political labours within this presently contested framework demonstrates anew the significance of Pound’s methods of literary and cultural appraisal – and that this exercise can illuminate, too, the critical affordances and limitations of the transnational turn itself.