Gayle Rogers

In the modern world, why do we still resort to speculation? Advances in scientific and statistical reasoning are supposed to have provided greater certainty in making claims about the future. Yet we constantly spin out scenarios about tomorrow, for ourselves or for entire societies, with flimsy or no evidence. Insubstantial speculations―from utopian thinking to high-risk stock gambles―often provoke fierce backlash, even when they prove prophetic for the world we come to inhabit. Why does this hypothetical way of thinking generate such controversy?

In this cultural, literary, and intellectual history, Gayle Rogers traces debates over speculation from antiquity to the present. Celebrated by Boethius as the height of humanity’s mental powers but denigrated as sinful by John Calvin, speculation eventually became central to the scientific revolution’s new methods of seeing the natural world. In the nineteenth century, writers such as Jane Austen used the concept to diagnose the marriage market, redefining speculation for the purpose of social critique. Speculation fueled the development of modern capitalism, spurring booms, busts, and bubbles, and recently artificial intelligence has automated the speculation previously done by humans, with uncertain and troubling consequences. Unraveling these histories and many other disputes, Rogers argues that what has always been at stake in arguments over speculation, and why it so often appears so threatening, is the authority to produce and control knowledge about the future.

Recasting centuries of contests over the power to anticipate tomorrow, this book reveals the crucial role speculation has played in how we create―and potentially destroy―the future.

How and why did a country seen as remote, backwards, and barely European become a pivotal site for reinventing the continent after the Great War? Modernism and the New Spain argues that the "Spanish problem"-the nation's historically troubled relationship with Europe-provided an animating impulse for interwar literary modernism and for new conceptions of cosmopolitanism. Drawing on works in a variety of genres, Gayle Rogers reconstructs an archive of cross-cultural exchanges to reveal the mutual constitution of two modernist movements-one in Britain, the other in Spain, and stretching at key moments in between to Ireland and the Americas.

Several sites of transnational collaboration form the core of Rogers's innovative literary history. The relationship between T. S. Eliot's Criterion and José Ortega y Gasset's Revista de Occidente shows how the two journals joined to promote a cosmopolitan agenda. A similar case of kindred spirits appears with the 1922 publication of Joyce's Ulysses. The novel's forward-thinking sentiments on race and nation resonated powerfully within Spain, where a generation of writers searched for non-statist forms through which they might express a new European Hispanicity. These cultural ties between the Anglo-Irish and Spanish-speaking worlds increased with the outbreak of civil war in 1936. Rogers explores the connections between fighting Spanish fascism and dismantling the English patriarchal system in Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas, along with the international, anti-fascist poetic community formed by Stephen Spender, Manuel Altolaguirre, and others as they sought to establish Federico García Lorca as an apolitical Spanish-European poet.

Mining a rich array of sources that includes novels, periodicals, biographies, translations, and poetry in English and in Spanish, Modernism and the New Spain adds a vital new international perspective to modernist studies, revealing how writers created alliances that unified local and international reforms to reinvent Europe not in the London-Paris-Berlin nexus, but in Madrid.

Speculative manias seem to be everywhere, from cryptocurrencies to NFTs. But calling them "manias" or "crazes" in the first place is a recent, and misleading, phenomenon. This brief article traces the history of how that came about, and why we can rethink speculation as a means of calculated risk.

We seek submissions for a prospective peer-reviewed cluster of 6-8 brief (3000 word) position papers for Modernism/modernity's Print-Plus platform on the topic of translation and/as disconnection in modernist literary history. Translation was central to the formation and uneven expansion of the cultural field of modernism, and it has become vital to conceptions of global modernisms, but here, we are posing a different set of questions: how did translational concepts and practices undermine, shrink, critique, and disconnect modernism? When and where did translation illuminate or even create gaps, boundaries, missed opportunities, and irreconcilable conflicts as it operated beyond—or even opposed to—the aims of networked modernism? What new understandings of modernism appear when we treat translation as a problem, an unstable, fragmenting, and potentially disabling practice, rather than as a utopian, unidirectional, or unilateral force of interconnection? By asking such questions, we invite fresh approaches that dig beneath some longstanding assumptions—i.e., do alternative views of modernism emerge if we assume neither the preexisting coherence of its tenets/aesthetics nor the beneficial, productive effects of translation? How might translation critically reassess or even push back against the " worlding " of modernist studies? Langston Hughes, for example, was a crucial translator of Hispano-and Francophone authors such as Federico García Lorca, Nicolás Guillén, and Jacques Roumain. His translations certainly expanded the racialized and politicized circuits in which he was an intermediary figure. But he also translated—and never published—several baldly racist, anti-African poems during the Spanish Civil War, thereby participating in a longstanding, fracturing, and ugly demonology of Berber North Africans (" Moors ") as a distinctly inferior black people who had no claims to diasporic solidarity. Familiar figures like Pound, Eliot, and Joyce all produced translations that failed in multiple ways, too: what if we approach these translations as disconnections, texts that created limits and insurmountable cultural barriers despite (or because of) their desires to flatten or overrun them? These questions and complications lead to broader methodological issues that we hope to see addressed: how and why does modernism—in its older, well-known guises and in its recent incarnations—look different when we consider its formations in and through translation in non-Western countries, for instance, where translations of Eliot and Pound appeared for the first time alongside first translations of Shakespeare, Tagore, and Twain? How did translations of modernist texts figure into the cultural politics of the Korean resistance to Japanese occupation in the early twentieth century? How might translational practices from the Global South imply different models of modernism that alternately clash, compete, or blend with those proposed primarily by Euro-American scholars? How does translation collapse temporalities and disorganize literary histories into which modernism might or might not fit? How might new media theory or adaptation studies suggest new perspectives on print cultures and book history, and how did translational ruptures affect the history of early cinema? And if alternative modernisms do not cohere or if they veer toward trajectories that scholarship has generally not considered, what implications might this have for scholarship on regional, hemispheric, global, postcolonial or geo-modernisms? Please submit abstracts of 500 words by October 1, 2016 to Joshua Miller (joshualm@umich.edu) and Gayle Rogers (grogers@pitt.edu). Proposals will be reviewed and decisions made by October 15, with the essays themselves due by March 31, 2017.