Monday Seminar:
Susan Stanford Friedman
IRH Director
English, UW-Madison
This paper, written for a keynote address at the Modernist Studies Association (November, 2009), explores the “transnational turn” in modernist studies and the anxiety in the field over the expanded meanings of the categories modernism and modernity. It presents a manifesto in defense of these expansions, examining a range of concepts central to a planetary modernist studies, from engagements with multiple and polycentric modernities, colonialism, and the longue durée, to critical strategies for a globalized modernist studies.
Susan Stanford Friedman is the Director of the Institute and the Virginia Woolf Professor of English and Women’s Studies and the Sally Mead Hands Bascom Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She works in the fields of modernist studies, migration and diaspora studies, cultural and feminist theory, narrative theory, and psychoanalysis. She was awarded the Wayne C. Booth Lifetime Achievement in Narrative Studies (2009) and is the author of Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter (winner of the Perkins Prize for Best Book in Narrative Studies), Penelope’s Web: Gender, Modernity, and H.D.’s Fiction, Psyche Reborn: The Emergence of H.D. She edited Joyce: The Return of the Repressed and Analyzing Freud: Letters of H.D., Bryher, and Their Circle. She co-edits Contemporary Women’s Writing and is at work on a book entitled Planetary Modernism: The Modernities of Empire, Nation, and Diaspora.