Research

My research explores literary modernism as an expansive movement for which aesthetic autonomy is not merely an idea but an historically adaptable horizon of artistic practice that resists the marketization of social life under capitalism. With an eye to canon-expansion that clarifies the formal distinctiveness of modernist literature and art, I study how Anglo-American fiction and intersecting trajectories of poetry, visual art, and film from the fin-de-siècle to the present rework the principle of aesthetic autonomy to address the market-mediated constraints of their historical conjunctures. Drawing on Western Marxism, romantic and modernist aesthetic theory, deconstruction and its neo-pragmatist critique, and literary sociology, I investigate the specificity of the aesthetic under capitalism with a particular focus on ontology—the what of the art object—as it is shaped by processes of commodification, discourses of racism, and terrains of class struggle. To this research I bring interdisciplinary expertise in Jim-Crow-era African American literature, concrete poetry, political-economic social theory, and the philosophy of art.

My current book project, “The Market Architecture of Modernist Fiction,” argues that a distinct strain of Anglo-American modernism spans the twentieth century and persists today within fiction whose circulation is subsumed by the market. The project first revisits how the principle of aesthetic autonomy gains traction during the fin-de-siècle period within subtle formal problematics rather than overt theoretical commitments. Here, prior to the market-insulated modes of circulation and ideologies of autonomous art 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. Ultimately, the project brings into view a more formally rigorous and historically capacious trajectory of Anglo-American modernism than is typically recognized.

Across four chapters and a substantial introduction and coda, I explore works whose assertions of autonomy have been neglected or misunderstood because their medium-specific logic is so embedded within market-mediated processes and projects typically viewed as as antithetical to autonomous art—e.g., generic reification, the construction of racial categories, political protest, and sequel writing. My concept of “market architecture” thus remedies a blind spot in modernist studies: the literary sociology predominant in this field overlooks aesthetic autonomy while more aesthetically attentive accounts of modernism generally neglect how marketization and its attendant social dynamics galvanize formal innovation. In contrast, I shift sociological and postmodernist critiques of art’s autonomy out of the abstract realm of theory and onto the concrete terrain of interpreting how works assert the autonomy of their form. While my first and fourth chapters comprise a bookending pair that reimagines modernism’s relation to genre fiction and brand recognition in the fin-de-siècle and today, my second and third chapters turn to the 1920s and 1970s, respectively, to explore how the critical immanence of “market architecture” to the commodity form clarifies modernism’s relation to race and politics.

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