#MeToo and Modernism

Robin E. Field is Professor of English at King’s College in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. She is co-editor of Transforming Diaspora: Communities beyond National Boundaries (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2011) and has authored articles and book chapters on Jhumpa Lahiri, Sandra Cisneros, Alice Walker, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, and Ayad Akhtar. Her research interests include gender, trauma, contemporary literature, and postcolonial studies. She is the Director of the Center for Excellence in Learning and teaching at King’s College and the Managing Editor of the journal South Asian Review. Jerrica Jordan is a professor of English at Tarrant County College in Fort Worth, Texas. She holds a Ph.D. in English from Southern Illinois University, where she specialized in twentieth-century American literature and culture. Her research interests focus on women writers of color and American modernism, including Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ann Petry. Her work has either been published or is forthcoming in Feminist Modernist Studies, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, Pacific Coast Philology, and The Journal of American Culture. She also serves as co-advisor to TCC’s award-winning literary magazine, Roots & Reflections.

• Introduction: #MeToo and Modernism (Robin E. Field and Jerrica Jordan)Part One: Questioning Modernist Misogyny“I’d have my life unbe”: Undoing Experience in Tess of the d’Urbervilles Bailey ShawMuses and Misogyny in Decadent Modernism Angie BlumbergDefiant Martyrs, Repentant Sinners, and Pioneer Players: Translating and Transforming the Works of Hrotsvit of GandersheimBen Lee TaylorFord’s Creepy Candor Beci CarverPart Two: #MeToo, Modernism, and Trauma5. Locating Women’s Shared Trauma and Precursors to the Me Too Movement in Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out and Moments of Being Ellen Campbell6. Phonograph as Witness: New Media’s #MeToo Evolution Zan Cammack7. Street Harassment in Wells, Joyce, and Woolf Candis E. Bond8. “full yell of full woman, delight, joy, indignation”: Women Out-spoken in Joyce’s UlyssesMichael LevensonPart Three: Aftermath: Outrage and Its Reactions 9. Modernist Memoir and the Social Structures of Sexual ViolenceEmma Heaney10. What Happened in the Cane? A Re-Reading of Jean Toomer’s “Fern”Samantha Wallace11. Histories of Rape Resistance: Revolution in Ann Petry’s The StreetJerrica Jordan12. Why All Rape is Interracial: Wide Sargasso Sea and the Possibility of Feminist SolidarityCarine Mardorossian Part Four: #MeToo Modernist Pedagogy13. Rescuing Women from Historical Amnesia: How Three Twenty-First Century TV Series Address #MeToo and Foreground the Role of Women in the Twentieth-CenturyDaniel R. Schwarz14. #MeToo vs. Modernism in the ClassroomCara Lewis15. “Equally, if you stop to laugh”: Teaching the Humor of A Room of One’s Own in the #MeToo Classroom Lauryl Tucker

‘The editors suggest that the “very tenets of modernism allow for a robust reckoning about what we teach and how we conduct our research,” and applying the lens of #MeToo to these texts “allows readers new ways of comprehending the world.” In doing so, readers may reframe the ways in which society engages with the past, unearth new ways to bear witness to and call out injustice, and push for a safer, more just, and more equitable future.’Bryonie Carter, Feminist Modernist Studies