Please join us on February 20 at 11am EST for a reading and discussion of a recent article from Modernism/modernity: Ann Ang's "Ecological Modernist Poets of Singapore: Wong May and Ho Poh Fun" (2025). We invite you to pair this reading with a handful of poems by the two writers discussed in the article: Wong May and Ho Poh Fun. We also recommend checking out Eric Hayot's "Chinese Modernism, Mimetic Desire, and European Time" (2012) for a sense of the conversation on Asian Modernisms that Ang's work joins.
We have organized this session of the reading group with an awareness that global modernisms demand our attention as scholars of the environmental humanities. If you want to explore even further, we have curated a list of Asia-related work from the last decade of M/m. As this list shows, Ang's article is the only recent piece from the journal focused on the modernities of Southeast Asia.
Everyone is welcome to join our meeting regardless of how deeply you have had the time to read or think through these ideas---even if you only got through a few pages of the Ang article and a poem, we would love to have you join us as an interlocutor on February 20th! Hope to see many of you there! Access to the Ang and Hayot pieces will be distributed over our listserv. Please join the listserv to get the texts and the zoom link.
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In looking at Ang's work and perhaps at some of the articles below, we hope to explore, among other things, modernity and aesthetic vanguardism as contemporary phenomena, asking: Does ecology help us unpack modernist temporality? How do Asian modernities and modernisms enrich our understanding of modernist ecology?”
Hou, Jue. "Winged Visions: James Joyce, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, and the Anti-Künstlerroman." Modernism/modernity, vol. 32 no. 2, 2025, p. 287-302. Project MUSE, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/mod.2025.a972595.
Chen, Fangdai. "Ecosophy of Time: Can Xue, China, and Global Modernism." Modernism/modernity, vol. 31 no. 4, 2024, p. 699-718. Project MUSE, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/mod.2024.a961641.
Johnson, Ryan. "“An Eternal Dance”: Paul Claudel, Japan, and Thermodynamics." Modernism/modernity, vol. 29 no. 2, 2022, p. 265-282. Project MUSE, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/mod.2022.0008.
Wang, Tiao and Ronald Schleifer. "Shi Zhi and Chinese Literary Modernism in the Late Twentieth Century: Modernity, Consumerist Economics, and Chinese Modernist Poetry." Modernism/modernity, vol. 29 no. 2, 2022, p. 377-398. Project MUSE, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/mod.2022.0013.
Shields, James Mark. "Creative Nothingness: Dada as Art, Politics, and Religion in Interwar Japan." Modernism/modernity, vol. 27 no. 3, 2020, p. 447-466. Project MUSE, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/mod.2020.0036.
Bogdanova-Kummer, Eugenia. "Ink Splashes on Camera: Calligraphy, Action Painting, and Mass Media in Postwar Japan." Modernism/modernity, vol. 27 no. 2, 2020, p. 299-321. Project MUSE, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/mod.2020.0024.
Kee, Joan. "Modern Art in Late Colonial Korea: A Research Experiment." Modernism/modernity, vol. 25 no. 2, 2018, p. 215-243. Project MUSE, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/mod.2018.0017.
Zur, Dafna. "Writing the Real: Modernism in Korean Literature." Modernism/modernity, vol. 25 no. 2, 2018, p. 407-414. Project MUSE, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/mod.2018.0025. (Review Article)