Modernism and Technology

Turn on and tune in because this episode is about modernism and technology. Alex Goody and Ian Whittington discuss their recently published Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology (Edinburgh University Press, 2022).  Alex Goody is Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture at Oxford Brookes University, and Ian Whittington is Associate Professor of English at the University of Mississippi. Together, they have compiled essays from 28 contributors on topics including  machines, media, bodies, and systems that collectively present the cutting-edge of modernist technology studies. 

What is Surrealist Sabotage and what does it have in common with "quiet quitting" and today's gig economy? This episode considers these questions as we look into the political aspects of surrealism with Abigail Susik, Associate Professor of Art History at Willamette University and author of Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work (Manchester University Press, 2021). We discuss the war on work in early twentieth-century France, the "art strikes" they included, and the art work they inspired. While we cover well-known surrealists like André Breton and Louis Aragon, we also discuss perhaps lesser-known figures like Simon Breton and Óscar Domínguez.

Dig into our summer session episode on archaeology in the interwar period with Dr. Helene Maloigne, an archaeologist and historian at University College London. Our talk centers on the work of Leonard Woolley and includes discussion of T.E. Lawrence, Gertrude Bell, Agatha Christie, the excavation of the tomb of King Tutankhamun in 1922, and the discovery of Sutton Hoo in 1938 (featured in the Netflix film The Dig) as well as the work of Katherine Woolley, Sheikh Hamoudi, and the impact of interwar archaeology on popular culture and archaeological practices today. 

Take off for a discussion of “airmindedness” with contributors to Aviation in the Literature and Culture of Interwar Britain (Palgrave 2020). What did it mean to be “airminded” in interwar Britain? How did airmindedness encapsulate the possibilities and potential dangers of aviation? How was it an expression of military and industrial power as well as aerial theatre? Join Rinni Haji Amran, Brett Holman, and Luke Seaber for a discussion of aviation, Croydon aerodrome, and the work of W. H. Auden, Virginia Woolf, and T. H. White, among others. Rinni Haji Amran is a Lecturer in English Literature at the University Brunei Darussalam. Brett Holman is a Professional Associate of the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research at the University of Canberra in Australia. Luke Seaber is Senior Teaching Fellow in Modern European Culture at University College London and the co-editor with Michael McCluskey of Aviation in the Literature and Culture of Interwar Britain (Palgrave 2020).

What can refrigerators, vacuums, stoves, and other appliances tell us about class, labor, race, and gender in the 1920s and '30s and beyond? Apparently quite a bit, as Rachele Dini discusses in this episode. Rachele is Senior Lecturer in English and American Literature at Roehampton University and the author of Consumerism, Waste and Re-use in Twentieth-century Fiction: Legacies of the Avant-Garde (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and 'All-Electric' Narratives: Time-Saving Appliances and Domesticity in American Literature, 1945-2020 (Bloomsbury, 2021). Here, she discusses interwar appliances alongside contemporary advertisements and examples from Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, William Carlos Williams, and Gertrude Stein. 

This episode is about representations of Poland in interwar British literature. Juliette Bretan, a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge, discusses the Polish landscape, Polish characters, and Polishness, as well as the use of Poland to comment on politics, history, and identity in works that include D.H. Lawrence's The Rainbow (1915), T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922), Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall  (1928), Martin Hare's Polonaise (1939), and stories by Joseph Conrad.

In this episode Megan Faragher talks about her new book, Public Opinion Polling in Mid-Century British Literature: The Psychographic Turn (Oxford University Press, 2021). She shares stories about what she calls "pollmindedness" in the 1930s, its roots in Victorian occultism, and its relevance today. We discuss the writers Celia Fremlin, Naomi Mitchison, and H.G. Wells as well as the work of Mass Observation and the British Institute of Public Opinion (BIPO). Megan is Associate Professor of English at Wright State University - Lake Campus. Her research and teaching interests center on British literature between the world wars, and the intersection between technology, information, and culture. Her scholarship has been published in Textual Practice, The Space Between Journal, and Literature & History. She has also contributed essays to the collections Humans at Work in the Digital Age: Forms of Digital Textual Labor (Routledge 2019) and Twenty-First Century British Fiction and the City (Palgrave 2018). 

In this premier episode Kristin Bluemel tells the story of artist Gwen Raverat (1885-1957) and other women wood engravers whose work contributed to an engraving revival in 1930s England. Kristin Bluemel is Professor of English and the Wayne D. McMurray Endowed Chair in the Humanities at Monmouth University. She is the author of books on Dorothy Richardson and George Orwell, editor of Intermodernism: Literary Culture in Mid-Twentieth Century Britain (Edinburgh University Press, 2009), co-editor of Rural Modernity in Britain: A Critical Intervention ((Edinburgh University Press, 2018), and editor of Blitz Writing (Handheld Press, 2019). From January to June 2022 she will be Leverhulme Visiting Professor at Newcastle University.