Modernisms after Modernism: the New Modernist Studies with Potential and Challenges

This paper aims to introduce the new modernist studies and investigate its significances and contradictions. In the 1990s, the genealogy of modernism and modernity reached an entirely new phase under the influence of globalization and postcolonial studies. Scholars began to expand the study of modernism and modernity in terms of space and time, modifying the scope of their research from a Western-centric modernism/modernity to that of other regions and periods. The new modernist studies enlarges the field without restricting its object to high culture, and thus achieved temporal and spatial diversity in its discourse. The movement was accelerated with the establishment of the Modernist Studies Association (MSA) in 1999 and the ensuing publication of its journal, Modernism/Modernity. However, such approaches have the potential to distort domestic scholarship, for which Janet Poole serves as a good example when she wrote When the Future Disappears: The Modernist Imagination in Late Colonial Korea (2014), awarded in the following year by MSA. For she is quite different from Korean scholars in terms of the object of study. The new modernist studies are still important as they build the foundation for the expansion and diversification of modernism, but their follow-up studies will also be significant.