My research springs from a blind spot in modernist studies. On one hand, the field’s dominant strain of sociological criticism neglects aesthetic autonomy. On the other hand, more aesthetically discerning inquiries often overlook how market exposure galvanizes artistic formal innovation. By contrast, I explore how modernist literature and art have made and continue to make the market an aspect of their medium. Thus, rather than confining modernism to a few decades in early twentieth century, my work illuminates how modernist aesthetics persist within the market-saturated contexts of the late-twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Constellating Anglophone fiction and intersecting trajectories of poetry, visual art, and film since the fin-de-siècle, I clarify the formal distinctiveness of aesthetic modernism while expanding its canon along a diversely inhabited trajectory of market-antagonistic artistic production that remains vitally relevant today.

My current book project, “The Market Architecture of Modernist Fiction,” argues that a distinct strain of Anglo-American modernism persists into the twenty-first century in a variety of works that have successfully internalized and turned to their own ends the market logic of capitalist modernity. The project first revisits how the principle of aesthetic autonomy gains traction during the fin-de-siècle period. Here, prior to the market-insulated modes of circulation that subtend the classical modernist canon, I examine how market-exposed works of fiction develop what I call “market architecture:” formal strategies that transform the external, instrumentalizing pressures of market demand into internal, aesthetic problems of self-legislating form. I then trace how these formal strategies prevail across the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Drawing on Western Marxism, post-Kantian philosophies of art, deconstruction and its neo-pragmatist critique, critical theories of race and racism, and literary sociology, I reappraise the specificity of modernism’s autonomous aesthetics with a particular focus on ontology—the what of the art object—as it is shaped by interrelated processes of marketization, practices of racism, and terrains of class struggle. I shift sociological and postmodernist critiques of aesthetic modernism out of their often abstract realm of theoretical generalization and rebut them on the concrete terrain of interpreting how works assert aesthetic autonomy through and against their commodification.

Part of the project's third chapter is published in Nonsite: “Mary Ellen Solt: Concretizing 1968."

Part of the project's first chapter is forthcoming in Modernism/modernity.