A Companion to the Modern American Novel 1900 - 1950 by Matthews John T.; Matthews John T.;

Author:Matthews, John T.; Matthews, John T.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated
Published: 2013-03-21T16:00:00+00:00

If these traits represent what the modernist work of art “has become as a result of successive canonizations” (p. 53), not only do they caricature the volatile exchange between cultural realms described by Adorno, they also exclude many other kinds of artistic engagement with the vast enterprises of modernity. By contrast, once we take modernism more broadly as a set of imaginative responses to the grounds of modernity, numerous other kinds of modernism, or numerous other modernisms, come to light.

In an important consideration of modernism and imperialism, Fredric Jameson (1990) enumerates some of the central features of modernity that modernist literature may treat. In the following sentences you’ll see that the key claim of his argument appears first: Jameson will contend in this piece that works of British modernism (exemplified here by E. M. Forster’s 1910 novel Howards End) figure out how to evade the reality of modern colonialism (in the instance of Forster’s novel by offering distracting visions of a harmonious English countryside), while a work like Ulysses, written from the position of colonial subjugation, manifests the bruising reality of exploitation, and forces the issue of coherence by resorting to mythological parallels, which provide only a partial answer. In the latter part of the passage, Jameson identifies several other major elements of the modern:

I want in fact to suggest that the structure of imperialism also makes its mark on the inner forms and structures of that new mutation in literary and artistic language to which the term modernism is loosely applied. This last has of course multiple social determinants: any general theory of the modern – assuming one to be possible in the first place – would also wish to register the informing presence of a range of other historically novel phenomena: modernization and technology; commodity reification; monetary abstraction and its effects on the sign system; the social dialectic of reading publics; the emergence of mass culture; the embodiment of new forms of the psychic subject on the physical sensorium.

(Jameson 1990: 44)

Writing in 1988, Jameson anticipates many of the projects that eventually comprised the so-called New Modernist Studies movement over the next two decades. In a wide range of efforts to look behind (or below) the modernist work’s assumed pretense to absolute autonomy, scholars of modernism have investigated almost every conceivable sector of modern life to see how the period’s literature responded to its truly seismic upheavals. (See Mao and Walkowitz 2008 for a summary of the movement’s defining features.)

The ultimate consequence of such projects has been to challenge earlier views of modernism as oppositional to dominant bourgeois culture. Anthony Appiah maintained that “a rough consensus about the structure of the modern-postmodern dichotomy” had been reached on the basis of the contrasting sociological functions of art in each period (Appiah 1992: 142), a distinction best articulated by Jameson:

high modernism, whatever its overt political content, was oppositional and marginal within a middle-class Victorian or philistine or gilded age culture. Although postmodernism is equally offensive in all the respects enumerated (think

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.