Starting from the premise that modernism in both literature and art at large was never a program or a fashion of the present, but rather has always operated in hindisight, as ”a retrospective rearrangement of values”, as stated by Jean-Michel Rabate in a recent interview, or as ”an involuntary tendency that one can only attest to retrospectively”, according to Thierry de Duve, the aim of our special issues, titled Integrated Modernisms, is to engage in a critical task undertaken from the postwar period to the present, to see whether modernism cand function in today's world and literature, and if it can work as "a discourse of the legitimation of change", as seen by Peter Osborne.
In doing so, we aimed not only to incorporate as many forms of modernisms, from East to West, in a transnantional endeavor, but also to explore how these forms of modernisms are connected today, through which means and methodologies, and to further investigate the relationships among them. First, we are particularly interested in the links between modernisms and modernity, which we consider a central focus of our issue. Second, we examine the relationships between modernisms and avant-gardes, that, despite their distinct traditions in Europe, often become interwined concepts for and Anglo-American audience. We are also interested in the perspective of artistic modernism, rather than just literary modernism - on how modernism is viewed from instance, from the vantage point of visual arts, theater or film studies. Last but not least, we explore the temporal connections of modernism with other contemporary -isms and theoretical clusters, such as ecocriticism, posthumanism or object-oriented ontology, especially since these help maintain the relevance of literary modernism today, and hence its afterlife.