Category Archives: Modernist Studies

“The Call of the Trail,” or How Children’s Lit Shapes Science

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Cover illustration of St. Nicholas magazine, a children’s literary periodical.

“The call of the trail […] was too strong to withstand,” writes a 15-year-old Rachel Carson in one of her earliest publications, “My Favorite Recreation” (1922). Later, Carson would go on to become one of the most important environmental scientists in the world, authoring Silent Spring (1962) and impelling the US government to create the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Carson was always a writer, even from youth, and along with fellow early environmentalists such as Aldo Leopold, she was heavily influenced by the Nature Study Movement and children’s literature.

“My Favorite Recreation” is a prime example of juvenalia, or literary and artistic work produced during youth. Carson was an avid reader of St. Nicholas magazine (an iconic children’s periodical) and this in turn led her to write about the one thing she knew best: the natural world. Children’s stories tells us a lot about the world, including the views we’ll develop later in life.

Children’s literature can also have a profound impact on how we understand science in many ways. First, many stories such as animal fables or educational stories create a “feedback loop” that reflects and shapes discourse about the natural world. When I was young, I was enthralled with Eye Witness Books, a series about all things science and technology. Eye Witness Books such as Sharks or Arms and Armor are obviously based on science, but in writing for a general (often young) audience, these publications also synthesize knowledge. They take a topic and boil it down to its key points, which is itself a way of making knowledge more “real.” We almost take it for granted when scientific explanations are written in children’s books, even though they are still scientific “arguments”–ones based on strong evidence.

Second, children’s stories shape our sense of the natural world in our youth, which in turn impacts us for life. Youngsters who hear animal fables or read about nature are often more sympathetic towards those topics in their adult years. (There’s a wonderful special cluster of empirically driven articles in a 2020 issue of Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment about the impact of literature on environmental awareness and empathy.) Reading is persuasive, especially when you’re young.

Below are two examples to consider when talking about science and children’s lit. The first takes a closer look at Carson’s writing, while the second examines a more controversial children’s book by Elizabeth Olds. Carson’s juvenalia is a great artifact for considering her environmental philosophy, which I’ll show can be traced to both nascent environmental education and St. Nicholas magazine. Olds’s story about petro-culture shows a potentially darker side; it relates the history of oil production in the US but subtly promotes fossil fuel consumption.

Carson’s Early Work

Rachel Carson Portrait. Photo Credit to Pitt Botanic Garden.

Most people know Rachel Carson for her exposé journalism in Silent Spring, which documented the harmful use of DDT pesticides. The piece was particularly powerful given the impact of DDT on the egg shells of American bald eagles (which made them particularly vulnerable), yet the study also raises alarms about threats to human reproduction and health. Carson is a scientist, but she’s also a well-versed writer who knew that the eagle could serve as a metaphor for American health and well-being. As a result of her work, Carson launched the modern conservation movement.

It’s joyful to read “My Favorite Recreation” knowing about the future that’s in store for a young Carson, who is eagerly writing a piece to a children’s literary magazine she enjoys. In her piece, she writes about discovering a bobwhite nest, orioles, and the “lichen covered home of the humming bird” (13). It’s a short piece, but Carson uses terms and phrases like “thrilled” and “exultation,” “discovery” and “gloriously happy.” These are the words of an explorer exposed to sublimity–especially in the form of birdsong–and of scientific observation. She notes the size and color of eggs, she sounds out bird calls, and she teaches us how to discover her favorite bird, the wood thrush. Carson was an “Honor Member” of the St. Nicholas League by the time this story appeared and had even earned $10 for a previous story.

Analyzing the story “My Favorite Recreation” tells us a few things. First, the story uses the scientific practices of observation and description. Carson is well-equipped with a notebook and camera, and, even at 15 years old, she writes her story to portray a scientific subject looking at nature-as-object. I’d argue this is important since even scientific discourse is ideological, with its own conventions and assumptions. This isn’t to suggest that science isn’t fact-driven, but rather to recognize that here, a young Carson is subtly promoting a scientific mindset.

Now, interestingly, Carson puts this in narrative form and also alludes to a sense of sublimity or wonder, especially resulting from scientific practice. Carson does this in Silent Spring as well, which might shock some readers to learn that it opens with “A Fable for Tomorrow.” This section is actually a “Jeremiad,” a prophetic warning about what will happen if we don’t stop environmental degradation. And, it’s incredibly literary for a scientist:

THERE WAS ONCE a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings […] A grim specter has crept upon us almost unnoticed, and this imagined tragedy may easily become a stark reality we all shall know. What has already silenced the voices of spring in countless towns in America? This book is an attempt to explain. (10)

There’s a sort of push and pull even in Carson’s early work, which appears later as well. She writes as a scientist, but she is never entirely disinterested or “objective.” She’s a passionate writer, which, frankly, is something at which some modern scientists might scoff.

In terms of children’s literature, we can see both how Carson’s writing developed (and in some ways stayed the same) over many years. Yet we can also see that even in the children’s literary periodical St. Nicholas, children can advance a scientific ideology or points of view in their writing. In this sense, children’s writing can have incredible persuasive force.

“Oil is Fun, Kids!”

Artwork from Deep Treasure by Olds.

Like all literature, children’s literature constitutes our social realities. It can tell us truths and espouse ideologies, and it can also be used for potentially nefarious reasons. While Elizabeth Olds’s Deep Treasure: A History of Oil (1958) may not explicitly promote oil consumption, it does participate in a broader discourse that assumes oil should be a normal part of our everyday lives. Some scholars of modernism call this “petro-modernism,” which simply refers to the ways we’ve become reliant on fossil fuels as a norm, especially in everyday life due to car culture, planes, and so forth.

Deep Treasure is fascinating, in part because of Olds’s modernist illustration techniques (some pictures look like they could be part of a Cubist exhibit alongside Picasso or Braque). The story uses scientific language to show the history of oil, yet the narrative subtly leads us to the conclusion that oil use is natural and good.

For example, the story starts with “Drake’s Folly,” Edwin Drake’s attempts to be the first to drill for oil in the US. Later renamed “Drake’s Triumph,” this opening section creates a story of conquest. Finally, the story implies, we had been blessed with a genius daring enough to drill for “deep treasure.” Modern readers would recognize that this is not just a history lesson but a sort of training; i.e., children are inculcated in a society that praises oil.

The next section documents the deep history of oil–its primordial origins, different topographies where it can be found, and so forth. The storybook ends by lauding over all that oil has brought: “Petroleum has transformed whole nations, has changed the way we move, what we wear, eat and play with–all of this from the same type of sticky substance the Indians, centuries ago, scooped up so patiently from seeping ground and scummy stream.” The sense of “civilizing technology” is especially apparent in this last line about how Native Americans never fully realized the power of petroleum. It implies that it wasn’t until Westerners arrived that the land could be used “properly” (which we might now view as questionable if not outright inaccurate).

I’m often torn when reading Olds’s book because it is so beautiful, and elsewhere she’s a proponent of laborers who sacrificed so much to power American industry. But Deep Treasure is, undeniably, a good example of how children’s literature can be used to perpetuate ideologies. It trains us to think about oil in a particular way that would make topics like green energy harder to stomach.

In the end, both of these examples–stories by Rachel Carson and Elizabeth Olds–are good examples of children’s books that shape scientific understanding. It’s easy to dismiss these stories, but, in reality, the children’s book industry has always played a substantial role in shaping culture. The next chance you get, return to a beloved children’s book from your youth and reflect on what it’s truly saying. You might be surprised.

Modernist Literature and Anti-Fascism

How Hemingway and Orwell Challenge Far-Right Extremism

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Far-right extremism is on the rise in the United States in recent years, and many Europeans have also seen a problematic rise in pro-fascist organizations. For example, Marine Le Pen (daughter of notorious far-right extremist Jean-Marie Le Pen) has led the National Rally party in France since 2017. The Alternativ für Deutschland (AfD) party in Germany — labeled an extremist organization by German intelligence since 2021 — received record votes in 2025. And the Human Rights Research Center notes in a 2025 article that American politics are beginning to mirror many aspects of Viktor Orbán’s policies in Hungary, which target ethnic minorities, use emergency powers to seize control of courts, and censor journalists and academics.

Like many other literary scholars living through troubling times, my instinct is to turn to the past to understand how we got here. Specifically, I’ve been revisiting works by various authors from the modernist period who were dealing with modern fascism at its inception, including books such as For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) by Ernest Hemingway and Homage to Catalonia (1938) by George Orwell (among a few other books by Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf, Hannah Arendt, and Hermann Hesse).

Hemingway and Orwell aren’t without their own problems, but they provide a useful starting point for comparing different reactions to fascism — and they’re both nuanced in their approaches. Furthermore, for the purposes of this post, For Whom the Bell Tolls and Homage to Catalonia deal with strikingly similar situations involving foreigners (an American and a Brit) who travel to Spain during the 1930s during the Spanish Civil War and later volunteer to fight fascism.

Modern Fascism and 1930s Spain

Modern fascism took root in Europe at the start of the twentieth century, though it spread quickly across the globe. It’s not just a political movement; it’s closely tied to literature and culture. For example, Filippo Marinetti, author of the Futurist Manifesto and leader of the Futurist movement, worked with other Italians to author the Fascist Manifesto in 1919. Mussolini and the National Fascist Party took hold of Italy in 1922. By the 1930s, political fascist groups in Germany and Spain had amassed power as well.

Fascism is defined by its reference to the fasces, a Roman symbol for the “right to rule.” This signals the authoritarian and nationalistic nature of modern fascists; i.e., they believe in centralized power (in a dictator or oligarchy) and sacrificing democracy for the sake of the “nation” or a single “race.” Most fascist organizations are conservative, or far-right, on the political spectrum. As Umberto Eco and others note, fascism isn’t really a stable, clearly defined political system (unlike Communism or social democracy), but it does have some consistent features, like a cult-like obsession with a dictator, praise for “masculinity” and violence, anti-socialism, anti-feminism, and an emphasis on a mythic past (e.g., the Aryan race or Roman culture).

In 1936 in Spain, a revolution started, pitting the Republicans (left-leaning) and Nationalists (far-right) against each other. Several countries viewed the Spanish Civil War as a representative struggle between Communism/democracy and Fascism/authoritarianism. That’s also why journalists such as Orwell traveled to Spain and later joined the fight. While Hemingway also reported on the Spanish Civil War, For Whom the Bell Tolls is his novel based on what he documented during his time in Spain.

Hemingway: Anti-Fascism is a Personal Fight

Love him or hate him, Hemingway is a master of narrative tension. For Whom the Bell Tolls follows Robert Jordan, an American-turned-guerilla fighter, who works with a band of Spanish resistance fighters to blow a bridge. The novel is over 500 pages but is hard to put down, as readers learn what these guerilla fighters must do to secure the future of a free Spain. [[Spoilers ahead]]

Notably, Jordan is not a communist, and he’s really fighting for the Spanish people whom he had gotten to know over the previous decade while traveling the region. Yet, he works with Marxists and other groups; he recognizes he must be politically strategic to fight extremism. We later learn Jordan was actually a Spanish instructor at the University of Montana who, on his summers off, worked for the state forestry division. He learned to clear land using dynamite, which in turn led him to become a dynamiter and saboteur in the Spanish Civil War. (This might seem far-fetched to modern readers, but using dynamite for land clearing in rural areas was — and sometimes still is — fairly commonplace for farmers and homesteaders.)

Jordan actively chooses to join the fight, but he also stumbles into his position in many ways. If the war had broken out in another country, he probably wouldn’t be involved. If he hadn’t learned how to use TNT while working in the summers, he wouldn’t have been asked to get involved with the bridge. Fate plays an important role in the novel, and, in some ways, it seems like Jordan is destined to sacrifice his life for the Spanish Republicans.

Hemingway portrays the fight against fascism as a personal struggle as well as a socio-political one, as a cycle that we must all face at some point in our lives (even if we don’t literally join a band of resistance fighters). For example, the novel opens and closes with the same image:

“He lay flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees . . .” (3).

“Robert Jordan lay behind the tree, holding himself very carefully and delicately to keep his hands steady. He was waiting until the officer reached the sunlit place where the first trees of the pine forest joined the green slope of the meadow. He could hear his heart beating against the pine needle floor of the forest” (507).

The narrative is circular in this sense, and several times throughout, the character Pilar suggests that Jordan is fated to die. She reads his palm and knows what will happen. As scholar Michael Allen notes, this feeling of repetition pervades the novel, as Jordan has a sense of deja vu throughout: “Robert Jordan had the feeling of it all having happened before” (409). In the end, Pilar is right in predicting Jordan’s death, though Hemingway never tells us whether she really is clairvoyant.

The point, I think, is that Jordan views his sacrifice as one that we all must make at some point. For him, humans are defined by their capacity to decide how they will live their lives with purpose: “You have it now and that is all your whole life is; now. There is nothing else than now. There is neither yesterday, certainly, nor is there any tomorrow” (169). As Hemingway writes, the novel shows the struggle that all humans must experience when faced with injustice. Jordan’s life could have ended differently, but he chooses to do what he thinks is right — to fight fascism and protect the Spanish people he loves. He’s not driven by nationalistic pride (he’s not even from Spain) nor is he an anarchist deliberately trying to disrupt the social system as much as possible.

Additionally, Hemingway avoids the temptation to make the fascists clearly villainous or the rebels perfect (there’s no ‘light side’ and ‘dark side’ like in Star Wars). Republicans and Nationalists are human beings who make mistakes — and some of them are just caught up in the fight. When one resistance fighter asks Jordan whether there are fascists in America, Jordan responds, “There are many who do not know they are fascists but will find it out when the time comes” (226). This is perhaps one of the most prescient moments in the novel. Hemingway knows that many Americans would do horrible things as a result of self-interest, tribalism, and apathy. And sadly, I’m not sure much has changed since Hemingway’s time.

Orwellian Resistance: Fighting Fascists

Homage to Catalonia is the start of Orwell’s political consciousness, and it arguably led to the authorship of 1984 and Animal Farm. Homage is a memoir documenting his involvement in the Spanish Civil War from 1936 to 1937. He joins up to fight with the Republicans, trains how to fight in Barcelona, is shot and injured, and later escapes to France.

It’s unclear how much actually happened to Orwell — whose real name is Eric Arthur Blair — and he takes certain liberties in much of his nonfiction. As I write elsewhere, Orwell was a staunch critic of capitalism and his three major nonfiction books, Down and Out in Paris and London, Road to Wigan Pier, and Homage to Catalonia, are perhaps best understood as political polemics more so than documentary essays.

I think one of Orwell’s main points is summarized at the very end of Homage:

“Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood: the railway-cuttings smothered by wild flowers, the deep meadows where the great shining horses browse and meditate, the slow-moving streams bordered by willows, the green bosoms of the elms, the larkspurs in the cottage gardens; and then the huge peaceful wilderness of outer London [. . .] all the sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs” (231-232).

Here he’s talking about the return to England after his endeavors, but he knows that the world is about to be set ablaze with political fanaticism. England and France seem almost boring compared to what’s happening in Spain, but at least in Spain, per Orwell, the people are “awake.”

In many ways, Orwell notes that there doesn’t seem like a peaceful solution, or at least one that leaves a unified nation intact. Fascism is inconsistent with liberal democracy, which is why it often relies on scapegoating and force to drive out minorities or dissenters. In a liberal democracy, disagreements are part of the process. But with fascism, your views simply don’t matter if you’re not the dictator or oligarchic party in charge.

Homage describes in minute detail the political situation in Spain, so it can be less interesting for some readers than For Whom the Bell Tolls. It’s not a narrative with a clear conclusion or “goal”; it describes the reality of the world, which lacks clear resolutions. What Orwell leaves us with in the quote above is the notion that it isn’t over yet — that the struggle will continue indefinitely.

And, in many ways, Orwell was right. The fight for freedom continues.

Works Cited

Allen, Michael. “The Unspanish War in For Whom the Bell Tolls.” Contemporary Literature, vol. 13, no. 2, 1972, pp. 204-212.

Hemingway, Ernest. For Whom the Bell Tolls. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1940.

Orwell, George. Homage to Catalonia. Harcourt, 1952.

Modernist Parasites

My new book, Modernist Parasites: Bioethics, Dependency, and Literature, Post-1900, analyzes biological and social parasites in the political, scientific, and literary imagination. With the rise of Darwinism, eugenics, and parasitology in the late nineteenth century, Sebastian Williams posits that the “parasite” came to be humanity’s ultimate other—a dangerous antagonist. But many authors such as Isaac Rosenberg, John Steinbeck, Franz Kafka, Clarice Lispector, Nella Larsen, and George Orwell reconsider parasitism. Ultimately, parasites inherently depend on others for their survival, illustrating the limits of ethical models that privilege the discrete individual above interdependent communities.

Learn more at the website: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/modernist-parasites-9781666921298/

Reviews

We tend to think of parasites as greedy, self-serving figures. Yet Modernist Parasites explores what these figures have given to, rather than taken from, literary writers. From the First World War poetry of Isaac Rosenberg to the experimental writing of Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector, Williams argues that the figure of the parasite is central to modernist writers’ imagining of a relational, interdependent model of selfhood – one that productively troubles the liberal humanist conception of the self as bounded, singular, and autonomous. Readers of modernism, animal studies, and posthumanism will find much to draw on this generous and generative study of literary parasitism.

— Rachel Murray, University of Bristol

Modernist Parasites: Bioethics, Dependency, and Literature is a welcome contribution to the current critical conversation on modernism and the posthuman. The analysis moves deftly between national, historical and socio-economic contexts. From the unimaginable squalor of everyday life on the Western Front, through the choked landscapes of the American dust bowl, to the contradictions of twentieth-century metropolitan culture, parasitism defines modernist biopolitics.

The study amasses a wealth of textual evidence and theoretical argument, drawing from the American and the European traditions (Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, John Steinbeck, Erskine Caldwell, Franz Kafka, Clarice Lispector, Mina Loy, Nella Larsen and George Orwell) to show that the parasite inhabits the century’s most vivid expressions of the marginalised and the abject.

— Ruben Borg, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Radium Age Fiction and Nuclear Energy

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With the recent announcement that researchers have achieved nuclear fusion, atomic energy is once again in the news. But debates surrounding nuclear energy have actually existed before fission was fully realized. As H. Bruce Franklin notes, “for fifty years, the first atomic explosion in Robert Cromie’s 1895 novel The Crack of Doom until 1945, nuclear weapons existed nowhere but in science fiction” (131). H. G. Wells was the first to coin the phrase the “splitting of the atom,” and writers such as Karel Čapek explored the impact of atomic energy on sustainability and human progress.

Put differently, many of the debates surrounding nuclear energy — its benefits and dangers — are deeply impacted by literature, film, and other cultural products.

This is important to understand because, as Ann Stouffer Bisconti notes, one of the greatest factors shaping the public opinion about nuclear energy is media representation — whether real or fictional stories. For example, something like the Chernobyl disaster is relatively rare for nuclear reactors, but it received extensive media coverage and is still widely discussed today. This includes fictional stories about Chernobyl, such as the five-part HBO series by the same name. In short, stories matter, especially when it comes to environmental discourse.

Sci-Fi and Nuclear Disaster

Several scholars explore the cultural fascination with nuclear apocalypse as well as indirect reactions to the Atomic Age. For example, Cyndy Hendershot notes that many of the B-movies from the 1950s and 1960s — such as It Came from Outer Space (1953), The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), and Them! (1954) — may be a sort of psychological displacement about the horrors of nuclear annihilation. In other words, people struggle to deal with the fact that humans have created world-ending technologies, so “monster flicks” are a way of confronting our fears — at least indirectly.

Susan Sontag similarly wrote about this issue in a now-famous essay called “The Imagination of Disaster.” Why are people so captivated by disaster films, especially in science-fiction? Sontag theorizes that there’s a convergence between “high-brow” philosophical issues about the ethics of nuclear power (and nuclear weapons) and the “low-brow” B-movie genre. We should analyze film as an expression of cultural anxiety, for Sontag, precisely because it’s not rigid, academic discourse.

This view has had some effect, as many film viewers can’t see Godzilla as anything other than an allegory for nuclear war. But looking to cultural products like science-fiction is an important way to continue studying — including writers like Karel Čapek, who may not be a household name for Americans (yet!).

The Radium Age: Nuclear Before Nuclear

Cultural artifacts such as film and literature offer insights about how we discuss nuclear power today, because many of these films and books deal with the same issues. But these early films and novels are perhaps more notable, because they had these conversations before fission technology even existed.

Joshua Glenn describes an entire movement or “era” that pre-dates fission as the “Radium Age.” H. G. Wells, Robert Cromie, and others knew about radioactivity (radium, in particular, was widely discussed in the early twentieth century), and therefore imagined the many things that could be made from it. Cromie saw disaster as imminent; Wells imagined a utopic vision of a world forced into pacifism by the threat of nuclear holocaust.

For me, though, one writer stands out: Karel Čapek (pronounced cha-pek). Čapek wrote two novels around the same time dealing with nuclear power, The Absolute at Large (1922) and Krakatit (1924). And the former is really about what happens when we do achieve sustainability. Is it really enough to have the technology, or is there perhaps more at play, like politics and rhetoric?

Čapek’s Portrayal of Nuclear Energy

Čapek is perhaps best-known today for introducing the term “robot” along with his brother Josef in the 1920 play R. U. R. (which stands for “Rossum’s Universal Robots”). Čapek wrote extensively, and is one of the most influential Czech-language writers in history. His journalism and nonfiction are just as powerful as his novels and plays, particularly his writings about anti-fascism and anti-authoritarianism.

The Absolute at Large follows the development of nuclear energy through the creation of the “Karburator,” a technology vaguely described in the book as using atomic energy to create virtually unlimited power. There’s one horrible side effect: the technology releases the “Absolute,” a transcendent, possibly spiritual, force that drives humanity to fanaticism.

Čapek uses nuclear energy as a metaphor for political division and authoritarianism, a problem he recognized would become increasingly dire in the twentieth century. But his story’s reliance on atomic energy roughly 15 years before fission was fully realized is important because it shows the role of imagination in shaping public opinion.

In many ways, the technology works well: it creates energy like it should. The engineer who creates the Karburator realizes that there’s a side effect when you destroy matter (at least in this fictional world). The primordial memories of the universe, as well as the power of the Absolute (which seems to have a mind of its own), is no longer constricted by matter. Therefore, Čapek raises a fundamental question: simply because you can create a technology, does it mean you should?

The Absolute at Large is a good read for any sci-fi buff. It’s an interesting concept, and Čapek occasionally uses experimental writing techniques, especially toward the end of the book. He asks big questions about historiography (how we write history after major world events) and what he views as the key problem of environmental sustainability: Sustainability is not simply a technological problem, but it is also an ethical one.

We need humanists, novelists, journalists, and philosophers, to help us navigate the ethical and rhetorical dilemmas posed by sustainability. More people should study and read Radium Age fiction if they really want to understand the nuances of the nuclear debate (and also find some really good science fiction), and Čapek is a great place to start.

Sources

Bisconti, Ann Stouffer, “Changing public attitudes toward nuclear energy.” Progress in Nuclear Energy, vol. 102, 2018, pp. 103-113, doi.org/10.1016/j.pnucene.2017.07.002.

Čapek, Karel. The Absolute at Large. University of Nebraska Press, 2005.

Franklin, H. Bruce. War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination. Oxford UP, 1988.

Glenn, J. “Science Fiction: The Radium Age.” Nature, vol. 489, no. 1, 2012, pp. 204–205.

Hendershot, Cyndy. “From Trauma to Paranoia: Nuclear Weapons, Science Fiction, and History.” Mosaic, vol. 32, no. 4, 1999. Reproduced in Mosaic, 54.2 (2021): 37-54.

Sontag, Susan. “The Imagination of Disaster.” Against Interpretation and Other Essays, Ancho, 1966, pp. 201-25.

Why Does Modernism Matter?

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What is Modernism?

Modernism is a term used to refer to a collection of aesthetic, philosophical, and (in some cases) scientific movements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For example, in the arts, movements such as surrealism, expressionism, imagism, and vorticism are usually included under the umbrella term modernism. Today, many scholars use the term generally, but, since the inception of New Modernist Studies in the late 1990s, many agree that modernism is really more of a loose term than a rigid definition.

For many, modernism encapsulates some of the most significant events in recent history, such as the First World War and the Second World War (and consequently, the Holocaust), as well as events such as Einstein’s discovery of quantum physics, the invention of atomic warfare, the shift from primarily rural to urban populations (in the US), and the women’s suffrage movement (in the US and Britain). The list goes on.

Naturally, this is not to suggest the modernist period is more important than, say, the medieval or early modern periods (i.e., the Renaissance), but it is necessary to note that Western and even non-Western societies changed drastically during the modernist era.

Why Should I Care About Modernism?

For starters, modernists address many of the same issues that we still deal with today. One of the key ideas I’ll address here is the alienation of the modern world, which authors in the modernist period sought to critique. Let’s take Franz Kafka as an example.

Kafka was a Czech-born German Jewish writer who never really received literary fame until after he died. Today, we have the word Kafkaesque to describe the alienating, seemingly pointless (and often bureaucratic) way of life we experience on a day-to-day basis, and Kafka appeals to so many because he foregrounds precisely the things we might try to hide or avoid: our sense of awkwardness in social situations, our frustrations with work, failed romances, and the chaos of the modern world. Kafka teaches us that its OK to feel out of place, that there’s beauty in trivial circumstances, and that there are very real and unexpected threats to our freedom.

One of his best-known novels, The Trial (Der Prozess, or “The Process” in German) follows the protagonist, K., as he’s unexpectedly arrested for a crime he didn’t commit. As far as we know, at least, he seems innocent. As the story unfolds, K. meets a cast of strange characters, like a painter, a priest, and a lawyer, who seem to know the ins and outs of the system, yet no one can tell K. precisely everything he seeks to know. K. never finds the answers he’s looking for, and he ultimately resigns to his fate: two men (who originally arrested him) come to his apartment to carry out a death sentence. K. dies “like a dog” in the final pages, and we’re left with a sense of hopelessness.

What Kafka advances in The Trial is a theory of contingency to describe the modern world. In other words, K. has an ordinary job at a bank, and he lives his life in a rather ordinary fashion; he is, for all intents and purposes, a sort of “everyman” (or woman). But, the novel is about what happens when our expectations, our understanding of the world, is disrupted. For Kafka, the modern world is chaos, even though we might try to make some sense out of it. Kafka jolts us out of complacency, impelling readers to experience the harsh realities of life; that is, K. feels secure before the events of The Trial, but that security is misplaced. The Trial not only forces its readers to consider the contingency of everyday life, but also the ways modernity creates an alienating environment. K. gets caught up in his trial like a wave, like an unceasing and incomprehensible process.

While this story might seem depressing, it also serves as a wake-up call. Kafka was writing in the years leading up to the Nazi rise to power (though he died in 1924, before Hitler took control of Germany), and, as critics like Walter Sokel have illustrated, Kafka was also writing in a period when thinkers like Freud questioned the idea that we have conscious control over our actions. Kafka seems to be trying to liberate his readers, to grab them by the shoulders and insist they question everything they take for granted.

Where Do We Go From Here?

In the twenty-first century, we’re still dealing with many of the same issues Kafka raises in The Trial. That’s perhaps one reason in the recent film Blade Runner 2049 the protagonist is named K. (a transparent reference to Kafka’s work). It’s easy to be complacent, to settle for our jobs, for the current state of affairs, but what happens when that’s disrupted? Or, as Blade Runner 2049 asks, what if we’re not who we thought we were?

Kafka has a particularly bleak outlook, but some modernists, like Hermann Hesse, T.S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf, offer some answers. For Hesse, the alienation of the modern world leads to enlightenment, while Eliot insists (in works like “Tradition and the Individual Talent”) that in drawing from history we necessarily change it. Woolf shows us that there’s beauty in the quotidian, everyday stuff of the world, even if its something as simple as stopping in a garden or shopping on a busy street.

Modernism is important because it fundamentally asks us to change our perspective, whether it’s to question our surroundings or to simply stop and appreciate the world around us. For philosopher Martin Jay, in modernism, there are many viewpoints of the world–not just one. And this idea, for many, can be quite liberating.