Best of 2023
2023 was an exciting year for Genealogies of Modernity, particularly in light of the release of our new podcast!
We recently asked journal contributors to send in their favorite text from 2023—either a new publication or something old they discovered over the past year.
Kirsten Hall Herlin: Mary Harrington's Feminism Against Progress was one of the highlights of my year's reading and represents genealogical thinking at its best. Engaging, rigorous, and original, Harrington questions the common narrative of women's liberation as inevitable moral progress and tells an alternative story about how feminism and ideas about women's rights arose out of specific material conditions in the wake of the Industrial Revolution.
Ryan McDermott: This year I was fascinated by Joseph Minich’s rewriting of the standard secularization narrative in The Bulwarks of Unbelief: Atheism and Divine Absence in a Secular Age. Minich asks how it became possible not to believe in God, or at least to assume some transcendent numinous mystery. He traces the rise of unbelief as default position to very recent times, even the early 20th century. The major factor, and Minich’s signal contribution to the conversation, is technology. Minich is an excellent close reader of technologies and technoculture. More than anything else I’ve read or heard, this book made me question my dependence on screens large and small.
Katy Carl: I am delighted to recommend this episode of the Manifesto! podcast—to which I devotedly listen and which always makes me a bit smarter than I was before, but this particular episode on modernity and virtue speaks right to what I see as the heart of the Genealogies of Modernity project. So does the essay from which the conversation arises, found here in Commonweal: "A transvaluation of values may be in order: faster, easier, and more may have to give way to slower, harder, and less—not only for ecological reasons but also for reasons of mental and moral hygiene. And even if we decide, as a society, to spit out the poisoned apple of consumerism and technological addiction, is there a path back—or forward, for that matter?”
Xavier Symons: Liberalism and Its Discontents by Francis Fukuyama (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2022). A very concise and eminently readable defense of classical liberalism. Fukuyama is very balanced in his presentation of the arguments for and against a liberal political order; he is, perhaps, too successful in offering a robust account of critiques of liberalism from both the left and the right. But for anyone looking for a survey of controversies surrounding liberalism today, this book is a good starting point.
Travis DeCook: The novel Laurus, by Eugene Vodolazkin (trans. Lisa C. Hayden). A profound and moving portrait of spiritual life in medieval Russia, haunted by vestiges of our modernity (including discarded plastic bottles).
Vaishnavi Patil: Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life. A list of book recommendations would be incomplete without one that urges the reader to yearn for an intellectual life! Drawing on philosophy and the author’s own experiences, Lost in Thought is a passionate and timely reminder that a rich life is a life rich in thought.
LuElla D’Amico: A book I keep recommending to everyone since I read it earlier this year is Daniel Nayeri's 2020 Everything Sad is Untrue (A True Story). The memoir's twelve-year-old protagonist compares himself to Scheherazade in One Thousand Nights, who captivates her new husband with tales to avoid losing her life at dawn. Similarly, Nayeri captivates his audience with stories of his childhood, including the historical context they need to know to understand his experience as an Iranian immigrant to Oklahoma. Genealogies of Modernity readers will be interested in how Nayeri crafts his personal story alongside that of a broader political and religious conflict. How do we tell the history of our own lives while recognizing that we are part of a broader narrative being constructed at every turn, both by ourselves and those around us?
JD Lyonhart: The Spiritually Incorrect Podcast hosts wild and challenging conversations that often subvert the assumptions of modernity, featuring interviews with leading figures in religion, philosophy, and science, such as MIT professors, NASA scientists, exorcists, ghost hunters, witches, and everything in between. We recently featured an episode with Ryan McDermott on the subject “What’s wrong with the Modern World?”
Matthew Scarince: My best of 2023 pick is Hayao Miyazaki's film The Boy and the Heron, a beautiful and creative attempt to grapple with the consequences of the disenchantment of the modern world. The film is a strong but sympathetic reminder of the dangers of escapism and the necessity of grounding our hopes and dreams in what is real, true, and good.
John-Paul Heil: Charles Péguy's Portal of the Mystery of Hope (1912) is an extended meditation on hope—arguably the most mysterious and least understood of the three theological virtues—and its connections to childhood, fatherhood, sleep, and the inner life of God in his relationship with us. Reading this book (/play/poem/philosophical discourse, whatever it is generically) is a transformative experience—it simultaneously reveals to us how hopeless we can allow our lives to become (and how corrosive that is to a life well-lived) and points towards how to receive the gift of hope from God more fully. To paraphrase Michael Hanby, Portal is the type of book you would want somebody to read to you on your deathbed. I'd recommend reading it sooner.
Heil’s runner-up picks:
-Josef Pieper, Abuse of Language — Abuse of Power (1974)
-David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (1997)
-Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections (2001)
-Randy Boyagoda, Dante's Indiana (2021)
-Katy Carl, "Sequatchie Valley," in Fragile Objects (2023)
Jake Grefenstette: A favorite from 2023 was Becoming Done, the latest volume of poetry from Samuel Hazo, inaugural state poet of Pennsylvania and founder of the International Poetry Forum. The title poem opens with an epithet from Salvador de Madariaga: “A thing in German is not done; it becomes done.” Hazo’s volume offers at once a beautiful reflection on personal grief as well as a poetic way to think about language, tense, and our relationship to the past.
Anthony Shoplik: John Guillory’s Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study was published on December 30th of 2022, but the questions it poses about both the history and present state of the discipline of literary criticism—mainly, what do we think an article published in an academic journal is really capable of accomplishing?—ramified well into 2023. Nathan Heller’s “The End of the English Major” (published in February and much discussed in English departments ever since) doesn’t reference Guillory’s book, but it does register a similar concern about the institution of literary studies as enrollment levels continue to plummet across humanities majors. 2023 was the year of naming a set of problems and trends in the humanities—and actually witnessing public universities like West Virginia cut many of their humanities degree programs in response to these larger trends. The question is: will 2024 bring more of the same (as some worry) or will we see a reinvention and/or resurgence of the English major?
On a lighter note, Robert Putnam’s famous “bowling alone” thesis may be on the wane. A set of uplifting articles in the New York Times record “The Rise of Run Clubs” throughout the US and Europe—clubs that gained in membership during the pandemic when people were looking for outdoor social opportunities. Jessica Grose’s “The Church of Group Fitness” first described the phenomenon in July of 2023, when she noted the relationship of exercise clubs to organized religion in the US: Churches continue hemorrhaging members but neighborhood running groups (and the like: CrossFit, SoulCycle, etc.) have plenty of converts. I’m a member of a running club in a northern neighborhood of Chicago, so I can attest to the emergence of run clubs with plenty of opportunities for socializing. (We won’t be challenging Kelvin Kiptum’s world record marathon time of 2 hours and 35 seconds any time soon (set in Chicago on October 8th), but we will have a good time staying in shape!)