Modem drama, the question raised by the conveners of the Modern:Drama (defining the field) conference and the current editors of Modern Drama, has a past that is selectively remembered and denied in the institutions that support our scholarship. It is nearly absent from current scholarship investigating the times, spaces, and practices of Western modernity and modernism. It is also absent from the academic memories of those who, like me, found themselves happily ensconced in high school literature classes that, even through the 1960s, were dominated by the methods and ideology of the New Critics." Focusing on the autotelic object, most often the short poem, to the exclusion of authorial biography, tradition, and historical context, New Criticism sought to create a preserve of literary language in imitation of T.S. Eliot's modernist imperative to purify the language of the tribe. In its heyday in the 1940s and 1950s, New Criticism exhorted us to never "go outside the poem" lest we merely use literature to defend a depleted liberal humanism or, far worse, to illustrate a Marxist analysis of social forces.