Ulysses : Burlesque modernism and antipodean parallax

[Extract] The very idea of modernism is itself based on a temporal premise, implying as it does a categorical differentiation between old and new. The question of how modernism might also be considered a geographically contingent term has also recently been much discussed, with Ian Tyrrell commenting on how the transnational turn needs to be correlated with temporal as much as spatial boundaries, since it cuts against conventional spatiotemporal markers across both axes: “the transnational,” writes Tyrrell, “changes time as well as space.”[1] In their 2005 critical anthology Geomodernisms, Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel suggested that expanding the circumference of modernism from Anglo-American to global horizons necessarily involved an acknowledgment of how these “histories are multiple and interconnected in surprising, unforeseen ways,” while in a 2008 PMLA essay on “The New Modernist Studies,” Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz described how a new emphasis on transnational exchange was “widely seen as crucially transformative” within this field.