Nissa Ren Cannon, who joined the Program in Writing and Rhetoric in 2020, truly epitomizes the teacher-writer-scholar. In addition to teaching PWR 1 and PWR 2 and tutoring at the Hume Center, Nissa regularly presents her research at conferences – most consistently those of the Modernist Studies Association – and publishes in literary studies, including forthcoming chapters in edited volumes on Ernest Hemingway and Claude McKay. She is the book reviews editor for the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies and a member of the advisory board for the Hemingway Review blog. Nissa’s research focuses on transatlantic modernism, interwar infrastructure, expatriation, and print culture.
Can you tell us about your involvement in the new edition of Sinclair Lewis’s 1929 novel Dodsworth, published by Smith & Taylor Classics?
I fell in love with Dodsworth as I was finishing my dissertation, and I was really disappointed (on behalf of other potential readers) to realize it was out of print. I spent a few years quietly thinking to myself “someone should really re-publish this!” before I realized “oh, the someone to make this happen is going to have to be me.”
I then spent a few years talking to publishers (mostly in MLA & MSA book exhibit halls) about whether it would be a fit for them, and I kept striking out as most of the publishers wanted to publish novels that are being taught in classrooms. I found a university press that was excited about the project, but it was really important to me that, if possible, it get printed in a way that made it feel like the light, fun read that it is, rather than a serious scholarly book.
Then a friend was involved in a re-issue of Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs through Smith & Taylor Press, and suggested Dodsworth might be a fit for them. I reached out, they read it, and they loved it as much as I do!
Smith & Taylor are publishing lesser-known and out of print novels by major writers in beautiful and accessible versions, and it’s such a dream as a place for Dodsworth to land. I am so in love with the cover they chose for it.
The book comes out at the end of June, and I’m really hoping people will love it like I do! It’s a book about being middle aged, finding happiness, and leading a meaningful life, set against a backdrop of Americans traveling around Europe in the 1920s. Like all of Lewis’s novels, it’s deeply critical of American culture and attitudes, but it’s also funny, and it even has a happy ending. I’m advocating for it as a summer beach read.
Congratulations! I haven’t read it, nor any of Lewis’s novels, so something to look forward to during a future summer.
What led to your scholarly focus on literary modernism?
Well, I’ll start by saying that, like many people who work on early 20th century literature in the 21st century, I shy away from the word “modernism” in talking about my research. I think it’s more accurate to say I work on “interwar literature,” as I’m less interested in a literary movement than in a period of time.
I’m always telling my students they should pick a topic they genuinely love for their research to make the work so much easier, and I feel like this is definitely how I’ve approached things as a scholar. At least since I was a teenager, I’ve had a romantic fascination with the artistic scene in Paris in the 1920s, so when I was applying to grad school (my second “career” after nearly a decade in film production) and trying to figure out what period of literature I wanted to study, it felt like the obvious choice.
What was it about that Paris scene that you found so captivating? Were there specific artistic figures you were drawn to?
I’m a product of the American literary canon: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is probably what sparked my love of the 1920s, and reading Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises at 18 formally introduced me to expatriate life in Paris (I carried around my copy for so long that the cover fell off). Truthfully, I find it embarrassingly cliché to have fallen in love with Jazz Age Paris, which is something Americans have been doing since the Jazz Age! I’m loathe to bring up Woody Allen, but the enormous box office success of Midnight in Paris in 2011 is evidence of how fascinated contemporary audiences remain with Paris of the 1920s (as is the fact that if you go on any “travel experience” website right now they’ll try to sell you walking tours where you visit the haunts and houses of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein).
There are some interesting structural reasons why Americans haven’t been able to stop reading, thinking, and talking about interwar Paris for 100 years. For one, the foreign artists who flocked to Paris because it was affordable in the 1920s and 1930s were forced to leave when WWII broke out. So there was a lot of pent-up nostalgia for a happier time and place that resulted in literally dozens of memoirs being written in the 1950s and 1960s about how wonderful life in interwar Paris was, and those ideas have stayed with us culturally. Plus, a significant number of books written in or about Paris in the 1920s and 1930s have stayed in our literary canon, making it a time and place people have often been positively exposed to.
Art history and film studies scholars still often use the term “modernism,” to refer to both a historical period and a set of aesthetic practices. Can you say more about the form and style of the literature that you work on?
Once upon a time (basically the 1950s through the 1980s), there was an agreed upon modernist canon that generally included T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Virginia Woolf—all writers whose work responded to the changing experience of living in the modern world by introducing new forms and themes in their writing. A definition of modernism during this period generally focused on the formal innovations those writers’ works displayed (including stream of consciousness and textual fragmentation) and a set of texts largely limited to the beginning of WWI through the mid-1930s. In the decades since, the term has been pushed and prodded and challenged in many directions (expanding its temporality, its globality, and its formal elements). I particularly love Jessica Berman’s definition of modernism as “a constellation of rhetorical actions, attitudes, or aesthetic occasions, motivated by the particular and varied situations of economic, social, and cultural modernity worldwide and shaped by the ethical and political demands of those situations” (Modernist Commitments, Columbia University Press (2011), 7). I don’t have the time or space here to do any justice to the decades of debate as to what “modernism” now means to literary scholars, but if any readers want to ask for recommendations on what to read, I’ve got plenty!
But also, as I mentioned earlier, I don’t think of myself as working on modernist texts but on interwar ones—alongside formally innovative novels I’m interested in middlebrow magazine writing and newspaper journalism.
You’re the Contingent Faculty Representative to the Modernist Studies Association board. What does that work involve?
A few years ago, the Modernist Studies Association (MSA) decided to take seriously the fact that an enormous number of those involved in modernist studies are contingent (which we define as those in positions without recourse to tenure) or independent scholars. The MSA created an elected position on the organization’s board to represent the interests of that caucus. I’m the third person to hold this position (my term is 2025-2027). Being involved with the MSA is one way I maintain my academic identity as a scholar alongside my academic identity as a teacher in PWR, and it’s an honor to be able to serve this community of scholars as the Contingent and Independent faculty representative!
My role is to make sure the needs of Contingent and Independent members of the MSA are being met. Last year, I co-organized a workshop on trying to enact more transparency within institutions about the tiered nature of academic labor. Employees can’t demand better working conditions if they don’t know what they’re missing, so it’s important that contingent faculty know what tenure line faculty “get” (and vice versa). For this summer’s upcoming conference, I’ve co-organized a workshop on creating “mutual aid” networks among modernist scholars—thinking about ways to exchange resources (like access to local archives or housing swaps) when people don’t have travel funds or access to databases or libraries. On behalf of the MSA, I’ve organized a roundtable for the 2027 MLA on the work people are doing to make sure modernist studies persists as a field of research, even as it’s been particularly hard hit as a hiring field (and so is a field made up increasingly of contingent and independent scholars).
The humanities, overall, are being hit really hard with regards to hiring – why do you think modernist studies is especially vulnerable, and what do you think the consequences are for future study and scholarship?
Yes, absolutely, there’s been a cataclysmic contraction in hiring across the board in the humanities. I think that, practically, one of the reasons modernist studies seems particularly threatened to extinction is that, as a teaching field, it covers a relatively short temporal window (perhaps, generously, the 1890s-1950s), so universities have been able to claim the material can still be covered by those working on earlier or later periods (e.g. 19th or 20th c. literature), even if these texts/decades aren’t really their areas of expertise.
As to the consequences: I mentioned earlier that I’ve organized a roundtable for 2027’s MLA on the work people are doing to sustain research in modernist studies. The panel’s promise is that “participants will discuss the work of journals, scholarly societies, conferences, classrooms, mentorship programs, mutual aid networks, and more in keeping modernist studies lively and alive,” which is my way of saying here that there’s a lot of work happening to try to keep this field alive, even if there are no longer people who, by job title, are considered modernists!
What are you currently working on?
At the moment, I’m really trying to prioritize finishing writing my academic book! It’s about how interwar travelers were subject to a specific set of infrastructural experiences (passports, steamships, and foreign language periodicals), and how these experiences facilitated the emergence of a distinct “expatriate” identity in the period. I trace the term “expatriate” through novels and magazine writing of the 1920s and 1930s—looking at how its meaning was formed and shifted over those decades.
I’ve been saying I was going to finish the book for almost a decade (it’s evolved out of my dissertation, which means I’ve been working on it for nearly 15 years…), and I keep getting distracted by other research and publication opportunities. I’m hoping this is the year I actually get it done. I finally have something I’m willing to call a draft (instead of just “words on a page”) of the introduction written!
Do you focus on specific regions and countries? What are some key expatriate novels that you think are especially significant in reflecting the emergence of this identity?
The book mostly focuses on American writers. For various reasons (that I go into in the book) Paris is overrepresented as a site of expatriation, and the book spends time examining the representation of that community, but I look at interwar Anglophone writers in other places as well—Germany, and Mexico, and China…
Since it was published in 1926, people have read The Sun Also Rises as the expatriate novel par excellence, so of course I talk about it in relation to the interwar expatriate identity, and Dodsworth, and Claude McKay’s Banjo, and magazine writing by people including Dorothy Parker, Sherwood Anderson, Nathanael West, Harold Stearns, and Ford Madox Ford.
Really interesting to hear about the global scope of your work. Because I’m fascinated by all things Hollywood, West has long been on my to read list. And I’m looking forward, very much, to reading your book when it is published.
