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 the first half of the twentieth century, my work illuminates how modernist aesthetics persist within the market-saturated contexts of the late-twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Constellating transnational Anglophone fiction and intersecting trajectories of poetry, visual art, and film since the fin-de-siècle, my work clarifies the formal distinctiveness and political significance of aesthetic modernism while expanding its canon along a diversely inhabited trajectory of market-antagonistic artistic production that remains vitally relevant today.

Renewed attention to four areas of inquiry—mass culture, race, political instrumentality, and the contemporary—has been integral to the “new modernist studies” and has premised the field’s sociological disinterest in aesthetic autonomy. My current book project, The Market Architecture of Modernist Fiction, contends that if we want to understand how modernist fiction engages with and illuminates each of these areas, we must take the idea of the autonomous modernist artwork seriously. The book first presents a new account of how the principle of aesthetic autonomy gains traction within market-exposed fiction during the fin-de-siècle period. Here, prior to the market-insulated modes of circulation that subtend the classical modernist canon, I examine how 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. 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. Overall, The Market Architecture of Modernist Fiction shifts sociological and postmodernist critiques of aesthetic modernism out of their predominantly 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.