Communal Modernisms: Teaching Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture in the Twenty-First-Century Classroom

Communal Modernisms: Teaching Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture in the Twenty-First-Century Classroom. Emily M. Hinnov, Laurel Harris, and Lauren Rosenblum, eds. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) 216pp.

Communal Modernisms offers generative discussions of modemist women writers' texts, and the assignments and courses one can design around them. The contributors to this volume provide rich readings of work by authors such as Jessie Redmon Fauset, Djuna Barnes, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Virginia Woolf, and suggest how to best bring the texts to life in the classroom. In the editors' introduction, Emily M. Hinnov, Laurel Harris, and Lauren Rosenblum invoke the history pageant in Woolf's final novel, Between the Acts, which, the editors posit, offers an alternative (multivocal, participatory) historiographic model. In addition, they write that for Woolf, like Walter Benjamin, "the seemingly small, vibrantly lived, personal moments are actually what make up the larger (antifascist) narrative of human history" (2). These concepts of history inform their use of the term "communal modernisms," which-in contrast to "Monolithic Masculine Modernism"-incorporates a range of other writers, media, and aesthetic forms to contextualize the creation of modemist texts (3). Several of the chapters suggest pairing literature with works from other media, like photography, films, periodicals, advertisements, and painting.

Every chapter ends with a section devoted to a lesson plan. Each author approached this section differently, and the variety provokes creativity on the part of the reader. Some authors outline assignments; others provide discussion topics; others write out a script of questions, assignments, or classroom activities. The lesson plans range from formally organized plans with learning objectives, assessment, and sample assignments, to a narrative reflection on teaching the text. A few of the chapters engage with digital pedagogy to foster collaboration and community among students. In "Visual Pleasure and the Female Gaze: 'InterActive' Cinema in the Film Writing of HD and Dorothy Richardson," Laurel Harris describes how students create a cinematic critical community as they share reviews on a course blog. Emily Wojcik's "Editing Children of the Sun: Jesse Redmon Fauset, Little Magazines, and the Cultivation of the New Negro" similarly describes possible assignments involving a periodical studies-inspired course blog or Facebook page. Many of the contributors note the availability of relevant archival materials online, including through the Modernist Journals Project, the...