Walter Kalaidjian

The Cambridge companion to American modernism

Chronology Introduction Walter Kalaidjian 1. Nationalism and the modern American canon Mark Morrisson Part I. Genre: 2. Modern American fiction Rita Barnard 3. Modern American poetry Cary Nelson 4. Modern American drama Stephen Watt Part II. Culture: 5. American modernism and the New Negro Renaissance Mark Sanders 6. Jazz and American modernism Jed Rasula 7. Visual culture Michael North 8. The avant-garde phase of American modernism Marjorie Perloff Part III. Society: 9. Gender and sexuality Janet Lyon 10. Regionalism and American modernism John Duvall 11. Social representations of American modernism Paula Rabinowitz 12. Modern American literary criticism Douglas Mao Guide to further reading Index.

Nationalism and the modern American canon

London was a Mecca for modernist writers and visual artists, with its Bloomsbury experiments in aesthetics and lifestyles, its avant-garde exhibitions and arts workshops, its audacious poetry readings, and its fiercely independent small presses and little magazines. But as Hugh Kenner has noted, none of the “masterpieces” of modernist literature ( Ulysses , The Waste Land , or the first third of Ezra Pounds Cantos , for instance) were written by English writers. Moreover, the English language and English literature itself had become decentered: Kenner went on to argue that “by midcentury . . . English was the language not only of the Three Provinces but also of several masterpieces best located in a supranational movement called International Modernism.” The literature that he espoused - primarily the work of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, James Joyce, William Carlos Williams, William Butler Yeats, Marianne Moore, and Samuel Beckett - all, in Kenners view, belonged to this “supranational movement.” Indeed, modernism has often been conceptualized as a stridently international phenomenon across art and literature. But if we accept such a vision of modernism as international, what could the phrase “American modernism” possibly mean? Does it refer to a specific subset of international modernism (that is, work produced by American modernists), or to a different kind of writing altogether? In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many American writers (modernist or not) were grappling with the “American-ness” of their own writing, seeking to understand what could define their literature as a national literature and not simply as a provincial footnote to English literature. American literary nationalism proved a powerful cultural force even as modernists began to engage with international avant-gardism. The national (or international) identity of modernism was by no means as lucid then as later scholarly assessments, including Kenner’s, might suggest.

Jazz and American modernism

Approaching the topic of jazz and modernism, one might begin with the emergence of bebop, which was routinely called “modernist” in the 1940s. While the debate about bop replicated aspects of earlier disputes about literary and artistic modernism, the parochial nature of the debate (largely confined to fans, journalists, and record collectors) insulates it from the more compelling issues associated with modernism. An alternative approach to the topic might enumerate encounters with, and opinions about, jazz by recognized modernists. Ezra Pound, for instance, backed George Antheils concert hall amalgamation of jazz with futurism, even as he disparaged the piano as an agent of jazz (confusing it with ragtime). But most of the modernists had little interest in jazz, and to detect fugitive traces of their encounter with it one would have to scrape deep recesses of the biographical barrel (and, in most cases, the evidence would illustrate a larger pattern of Negrophilia or Negrophobia, adding little to the study of jazz). A third approach, adopted here, is to regard jazz as a conspicuous feature of modernity as it was manifested during and after the Great War. In that capacity, jazz unquestionably informed modernism as intellectual challenge, sensory provocation, and social texture. Around World War I, because of widespread uncertainty about what it was – a kind of music, an attitude to life, a mannerism, cheap vulgarity, or a spirited emotional impulse – the social career of jazz was launched with opportunities for interested parties on all sides of the issue to hold forth. “The word ‘jazz,’ in its progress toward respectability, has meant first sex, then dancing, then music. It is associated with a state of nervous stimulation, not unlike that of big cities behind the lines of war.” F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous pronouncement has served as the decisive link between jazz and modernism for seventy years. Although it is no longer tenable to associate jazz with anything he meant by the term, nonetheless, he pinpoints the controversy that made jazz appear responsible for upending genteel America with its Gilded Age proprieties.

Modern American fiction

Introduction There is no need for us to quarrel with Alfred Kazin when he writes in the introduction to On Native Grounds (1942) that modern American fiction is “at bottom only the expression” of American life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. No one cause or project can be singled out as the defining feature of this diverse body of writing. “Everything,” says Kazin, “contributed to its formation.” Its roots were “nothing less than the transformation of our society in the great seminal years after the War” and its project was ultimately a cognitive one: “the need to learn what the reality of life was in our modern era.” The social transformation in question has been characterized in many different ways, both before and since Kazin’s day. The historian Warren Susman saw the period as marking a transition from a producer-capitalist culture (with a focus on work, thrift, and self-denial) to a new culture of abundance (with a focus on leisure, spending, and self-fulfillment). This broad shift, he observed, was partly the consequence of new communications media, which affected not only the distribution and circulation of goods and ideas, but altered perceptions of time and place and thereby changed consciousness itself. The novelist John Dos Passos, whose U. S. A. trilogy (1938) is a veritable archive of the technological, political, and linguistic changes that shaped the nation from the turn of the century to the Great Depression, saw these years in terms of the “crystallization” of monopoly capitalism out of an earlier, more individualistic competitive capitalism.

Regionalism in American modernism

Any attempt to link regionalism to American modernism may seem, at first blush, a perverse enterprise. After all, definitions of modernism tend to cast it as nearly the antithesis of regionalism. If regionalist fiction between the 1890s and 1910s typically focused on matters of domesticity in rural localities, modernism was an international movement, encompassing the fine arts as well as literature. In so many of its manifestations, from Cubism in painting to atonality in music and stream-of-conscious narration in fiction, modernism bespeaks a self-conscious difficulty intended to shock the middle class out of its complacency and to create the possibility of fresh perception. The radical formal experiments of modernism often are accompanied by an equally radical politics, from Ezra Pounds open embracing of fascism to the many American authors who were drawn to Communism in the 1930s. Not surprisingly then, modernism is typically associated with urban centers, places where the arts flourish; Vienna, Paris, London, and New York more immediately come to mind when thinking of cutting edge aesthetic and political thought than, say, Red Cloud, Nebraska; Richmond, Virginia; or even Oxford, Mississippi. The years this volume covers (1890–1939) also create problems for seeking the ground of regionalism and modernism. In an American context, modernism is typically thought to “happen” between World Wars I and II, as writers respond to T. S. Eliot’s diagnosis of the spiritual wasteland of modernity, a world in which all the institutions (the Church, the State, the University) that previously had sustained value seemed for many intellectuals to have failed. Writers such as Ernest Hemingway, Djuna Barnes, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner all specifically engaged The Waste Land so that, even when critical of Eliot, they nevertheless signaled their membership in the club of international modernism. No one would call Eliot (born in St. Louis, Missouri) a Midwestern writer. Nor, for that matter, would Midwestern literature typically claim Hemingway or Fitzgerald, despite their being from, respectively, Oak Park, Illinois, and St. Paul, Minnesota.

Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910-1945.

A poststructuralist literary history - Nelsons premise that the history of modernist culture is one we no longer know we have forgotten and he aims to recover the political questions many forgotten modern poets looked straight in the eye.