Modernist Studies Old and New: An Interview with Douglas Mao

Douglas Mao is Professor in the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University, and has written extensively on Modernism. His first book, Solid Objects: Modernism and the Test of Production, published by Princeton University Press in 1998, takes its title from a short story by Virginia Woolf, and explores the relationship which Modernist writers (Woolf, but also Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Wallace Stevens) established with physical objects, drawing on philosophy, social history, and economics. With Rebecca Walkowitz, he co-edited Bad Modernisms (Duke University Press, 2006), an invitation to reflect on “badness” as a means of keeping the subversive impact of Modernism aflame. This book also illustrates the extension of both the Modernist canon (or the refusal even to think in terms of “canon”), and the scholarly methods applied to Modernist texts, a double extension which has come to define the “New Modernist Studies”—themselves the object of another edited volume by Douglas Mao (Cambridge University Press, 2021). He was kind enough to answer our questions.