Revival Modernities and the Modernist Present

In this chapter, Shir Alon suggests a framework to account for global modernist aesthetics that forgoes a diffusionist model of “traveling forms,” yet still acknowledges European literature’s inevitably hegemonic and influential position on the sphere of literary production. Looking at debates about modernity and literary form taking place in Hebrew and Arabic letters, she extracts a theoretical framework that traces the emergence of modernist prose forms to the lived experience of modernity, an experience that often fails to align with modernity’s promises. Recognizing modernity as singular, happening everywhere simultaneously but experienced differently and unevenly, the chapter undoes the “Europe first” diffusionist model of modernist aesthetic, while still recognizing the outsized effect of Europe’s hegemonic position as the rest of the world’s designated future. Modernism is not simply the outcome of European literature’s influence, but a project that emerges in numerous sites within the modern world system.