Afterword

Abstract

Can modernism be disciplined? Can it be contained within consensual definitional boundaries or within the borders of the disciplines that took shape in the twentieth-century academy? Has modernism been institutionalized into a discipline—namely, modernist studies, with its associations, journals, conferences, and reproductive training of new generations of scholars? What is the ethics/politics of such ‘disciplining’? For its stand on these questions, Disciplining Modernism might just as aptly have been titled Undisciplining Modernism. For the contributors do not agree on what modernism was or is, most advocate for the open-ended undecidability of terms, and some question the politics of its institutionalization. All refuse simplistic representation of what modernism means within their respective disciplines. Moreover, the interdisciplinary travels of some contributors into economics, psychoanalysis, anthropology, history, religious studies, gender studies, and postcolonial studies perform a twenty-first century insistence on interdisciplinarity as essential to the survival of the disciplines.