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This introductory chapter outlines the role of the modernist narrative in linking ethics and politics using the novel Untouchable (1935) by Indian writer Mulk Raj Anand as an example. The novel tells the story of Bakha, an “untouchable” working as a sweeper and cleaner of latrines. Untouchable was one of the first novels to feature a member of the outcaste as a hero, documenting the conflict between Bakha's obligations as a sweeper and his rising ethical awareness, which grows over the course of the novel. The story also revolves around the argument for eradicating the caste system in India. The chapter describes how modernist narrative connects ethical attitudes and responsibilities to the active creation of political relationships and just conduct. It argues that the act of narration, which goes between and among people, constitutes a “web of human relations” in which political action takes place.

This chapter compares the variety of relationships between Islamic communities in Europe and in the United States. In particular, it displays the variety of forms that the ‘establishment’ of religion in European countries takes, tracks the ‘secularization’ of Islamic organizations, observes the emerging public face of American Islam, and argues that the presence of Muslims in the West has weakened secularist ideology and contributed to the decline of the Modernist narrative.

This chapter situates the Spanish Civil War narrative into modernism and politics. It examines the works of Spanish writer Max Aub, whose six-novel Civil War cycle El laberinto mágico (The Magic Labyrinth, 1943–1968) is a narrative innovation of chronicling war. This type of modernist narrative serves as a politically committed hyper-verisimilitude—or what Max Aub calls “transcendental realism”—that produces fiction which inscribes the war's chaos, disruption of temporal order, and challenge to social and familial relationships within the narrative proper. These narratives develop particular modernist strategies to respond to the extraordinary events of the conflict, while at the same time displaying their partisanship. The chapter then questions this partisanship during the Civil War by exploring the role of multimedia propaganda. It looks into the films The Spanish Earth (1937) directed by Joris Ivens and L'espoir (1945) directed by Andre Malraux.

Chapter 2 explores the hybrid poetry and artwork of David Jones, a figure often identified as late modernist. With close attention to the interplay of word and image in The Anathemata (1952), it analyses Jones’s use of illustration and inscription, divine and human embodiment, and vulnerable built and printed material—especially his depiction of crumbling theological structures, Greek and Roman statues, and medieval city fortifications. Focusing on the colloquy of material across forms, this chapter shows how columns and stone structures in Jones’s poetry propel audiences between word and matter, demanding new modes of corporeal reading engagement. It also considers the architecture of the page, and the design models that inform the late modernist text’s inscriptions, words, and images.

This essay explores the challenge of teaching Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding because of its experimental form, subtle allusions, and seeming lack of plot. Given that students are typically adept at reading for character, the essay describes a technique of assigning every student a character in the novel to follow. Though rather simple in execution, this strategy has had very positive results. Students became experts on their characters, allowing them a feeling of mastery even on a first reading of the text. When engaging in discussion, the students reenacted and then understood the novel’s experiment in deploying multiple perspectives through free indirect discourse. This technique also works well in other Welty works, such as The Golden Apples.

This chapter explores the relationship between UFOs and the Protocols, in which beings from outer space “reveal” the fact that the Zionist conspiracy reaches into the worlds beyond ours. While the topic may prove humorous, it nevertheless reveals some epistemological vulnerabilities in the study of the Protocols. Having discarded the modernist grand narrative, these elaborate fantasy narratives adopt the Protocols without even bothering to address the critical issue of forgery. Furthermore, these narratives allow for the return of the Protocols, among other ways, by leveraging their status as “stigmatized knowledge.” As a result, a collection of discredited and fantastic ideas gains mutual affirmation—that the Protocols is true, that on their way to Earth are spaceships peopled with “Ascended Masters” carrying directions from Atlantis for the next evolutionary leap in humanity. Together, they make a compelling narrative attractive to far more people than “modern” intellectuals imagine.