Pamela L. Caughie is a professor and graduate program director in the English Department at Loyola University of Chicago. [1] She served as president of Modernist Studies Association from 2009 to 2010. [2] Caughie received her PhD from the University of Virginia in 1987. [1] She is also a highly acclaimed Virginia Woolf scholar, and in 2010 was granted a National Endowment for the Humanities grant of $175,000 to continue her work on an electronic edition of Woolf's To the Lighthouse . [3] [4] Through Loyola University of Chicago's digital humanities center Caughie has worked on a digital archive for Lili Elbe, a well-known figure in transgender history. The website was launched in July 2019. [5]
Caughie's teaching interests include modern British and American literature, African-American literature and theory, modernism, postmodernism, feminist theory, women's studies and pedagogy.
Modernism is an early 20th-century movement in literature, the visual arts and music, emphasizing experimentation, abstraction, and subjective experience. Philosophy, politics and social issues, are also aspects of the movement, which sought to change how 'human beings in a society interact and live together'. The modernist movement emerged during the late 19th century in response to significant changes in Western culture, including secularization and the growing influence of science. It is characterized as a rejection of tradition and the hunt for newer and original means of cultural expression. Modernism was influenced by widespread technological innovation, industrialization, and urbanization, as well as cultural and geopolitical shifts that occurred after World War I. Artistic movements and techniques associated with modernism include abstract art, stream of consciousness in literature, cinematic montage, atonal and twelve-tone music, and modernist architecture and urban planning.
Postmodernism is an intellectual stance or mode of discourse characterized by skepticism towards scientific rationalism and the concept of objective reality. It questions the "grand narratives" of modernity, rejects the certainty of knowledge and stable meaning, and acknowledges the influence of ideology in maintaining political power. Objective claims are dismissed as naïve realism, emphasizing the conditional nature of knowledge. Postmodernism embraces self-referentiality, epistemological relativism, moral relativism, pluralism, irony, irreverence, and eclecticism. It opposes the "universal validity" of binary oppositions, stable identity, hierarchy, and categorization.
Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English writer. She is considered one of the most important modernist 20th-century authors. She pioneered the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device.
The Hogarth Press is a book publishing imprint of Penguin Random House that was founded as an independent company in 1917 by British authors Leonard Woolf and Virginia Woolf. It was named after their house in Richmond, in which they began hand-printing books as a hobby during the interwar period.
Postmodern literature is a form of literature that is characterized by the use of metafiction, unreliable narration, self-reflexivity, intertextuality, and which often thematizes both historical and political issues. This style of experimental literature emerged strongly in the United States in the 1960s through the writings of authors such as Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, Philip K. Dick, Kathy Acker, and John Barth. Postmodernists often challenge authorities, which has been seen as a symptom of the fact that this style of literature first emerged in the context of political tendencies in the 1960s. This inspiration is, among other things, seen through how postmodern literature is highly self-reflexive about the political issues it speaks to.
Bill Brown is the Karla Scherer distinguished service professor in American culture at the University of Chicago, where he teaches in the department of English language and literature, the department of visual arts, and the college. He previously held the Edward Carson Waller distinguished service professorship in humanities and the George M. Pullman professorship, and served as the chair of the University's English language and literature department from 2006-2008. After a brief term as the deputy dean for academic and research initiatives in the division of the humanities, Brown was recruited to be the new deputy provost for the arts in 2014. As deputy provost, Brown oversees the programming and future of UChicago Arts, serves on the arts steering committee, and chairs the UChicago art institutions subcommittee. He also serves on a number of other committees across campus - including the executive committee of the Karla Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture - and is the principal investigator for the object cultures project at The Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory. He has co-edited the University of Chicago's peer-reviewed literary journal, Critical Inquiry, since 1993.
Ihab Habib Hassan was an Egypt-born American literary theorist and writer.
Modernist literature, originated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and is characterised by a self-conscious separation from traditional ways of writing in both poetry and prose fiction writing. Modernism experimented with literary form and expression, as exemplified by Ezra Pound's maxim to "Make it new." This literary movement was driven by a conscious desire to overturn traditional modes of representation and express the new sensibilities of the time. The immense human costs of the First World War saw the prevailing assumptions about society reassessed, and much modernist writing engages with the technological advances and societal changes of modernity moving into the 20th century. In Modernist Literature, Mary Ann Gillies notes that these literary themes share the "centrality of a conscious break with the past", one that "emerges as a complex response across continents and disciplines to a changing world".
Digital humanities (DH) is an area of scholarly activity at the intersection of computing or digital technologies and the disciplines of the humanities. It includes the systematic use of digital resources in the humanities, as well as the analysis of their application. DH can be defined as new ways of doing scholarship that involve collaborative, transdisciplinary, and computationally engaged research, teaching, and publishing. It brings digital tools and methods to the study of the humanities with the recognition that the printed word is no longer the main medium for knowledge production and distribution.
Professor Patricia Waugh is a literary critic, intellectual historian and Professor of English Literature at Durham University. She is a leading specialist in modernist and post-modernist literature, feminist theory, intellectual history, and postwar fiction and its political contexts. Along with Linda Hutcheon, Waugh is notable as one of the first critics to work on metafiction and, in particular, for her influential 1984 study, Metafiction: the Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction.
Jay Clayton is an American literary critic who is known for his work on the relationship between nineteenth-century culture and postmodernism. He has published influential works on Romanticism and the novel, Neo-Victorian literature, steampunk, hypertext fiction, online games, contemporary American fiction, technology in literature, and genetics in literature and film. He is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English and Director of the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy at Vanderbilt University.
Rita Felski is an academic and critic, who holds the John Stewart Bryan Professorship of English at the University of Virginia and is a former editor of New Literary History. She is also Niels Bohr Professor at the University of Southern Denmark (2016–2021).
Metamodernism refers to a variety of related discourses that aim to describe cultural phenomena beyond the constraints of postmodernism. Both/and mediations between modernism and postmodernism are defining features of the topic; however, their applications differ substantially. Some scholars view it predominately as a way to analyse contemporary artistic expression, and as inspiration for such art, while a growing number of people also seek to integrate metamodern ideas into the liberal arts and popular discourse more broadly.
Danuta Fjellestad is a professor of American Literary studies at The English Department of Uppsala University, Sweden. She was appointed the professor's chair in 2007 and has since then been teaching and conducting research on postmodern and post-postmodern literature, with an interest in visuality studies as-well-as technologies in, and as a part of, literature. As an author, she is widely held in libraries worldwide.
A critical theory is any approach to humanities and social philosophy that focuses on society and culture to attempt to reveal, critique, and challenge power structures. With roots in sociology and literary criticism, it argues that social problems stem more from social structures and cultural assumptions rather than from individuals. Some hold it to be an ideology, others argue that ideology is the principal obstacle to human liberation. Critical theory finds applications in various fields of study, including psychoanalysis, film theory, literary theory, cultural studies, history, communication theory, philosophy, and feminist theory.
Raphael Sassower is a professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs (UCCS). His academic contributions have been in the fields of economics, medical theory and methodology, science and technology, postmodernism, education, aesthetics, and Popperian philosophy. He is also a leader in the field of postmodern technoscience.
Heather Elizabeth Ingman is a British academic, noted for her work on Irish and British women's writing, the Irish short story, gender studies and modernism. Also a novelist and journalist, Ingman has worked in Ireland and the UK, especially at Trinity College Dublin, where she is an Adjunct Professor of English and Research Fellow in Gender Studies.
Maren Tova Linett is a literary critic and Professor of English at Purdue University. Her research focuses on modernist literature and Jewish studies, disability studies, and bioethics, and her major works include Modernism, Feminism, and Jewishness (2007), Bodies of Modernism (2017), and Literary Bioethics (2020). She has also published work in academic journals such as the Journal of Modern Literature, Twentieth-Century Literature, Disability Studies Quarterly, and the Journal of Medical Humanities.
Revista de Occidente is a cultural magazine which has been in circulation since 1923 with some interruptions. It is based in Madrid, Spain, and is known for its founder, José Ortega y Gasset, a Spanish philosopher.