HANDOUTS FOR MODERNISM IN LITERATURE

9/6/07

Sorum: English 648—Modernism in Literature
Bibliography of selected studies of modernism

Armstrong, Tim. Modernism: A Cultural History. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2005.
This is one of the newest introductions to modernism, and it reflects scholars’ current interest in the relationship between social, technological, and cultural innovations. Armstrong organizes his book around concepts like time, the market economy, sexual and political reform, which he uses to analyze the impulses and techniques found in modernist literature. While the book provides a useful introduction to methods of reading literature in relation to culture, its discussions of literary texts are abbreviated and the presentation of the history tends to feel rushed.

Berman, Marshall. All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. 1982. New York: Penguin Books, 1988.
Berman’s book gives us a narrative of the political, social, and cultural attempts to make sense of an increasingly disorienting world. His scope is more expansive than the other books on this list (he begins with Goethe’s Faust (1832) and ends with the 1970s New York scene), and Berman wants to argue for the continuities between past and present articulations of “modernism.” His reading of Marx (chapter 2) and Baudelaire (chapter 2) are most pertinent to this class, especially in terms of how he works to bring together Marx’s theories and the modernist tradition.

Howarth, Peter. British Poetry in the Age of Modernism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Howarth’s book enters one of the major debates about early twentieth-century poetry: what constitutes the divide between those poets who seem “modernist” (Pound and Eliot) and those who are considered traditionalists—the “Georgian” poets like Hardy, Owen, and Thomas. Howarth unsettles the terms of this debate by arguing that the divide dissolves when we look at the aims of these seemingly disparate groups. They shared a common goal, Howarth argues, of hoping to unify form and feeling and to enable direct transmission of the poetic impulse. While this book is, in many ways, a defense of those poets who are usually placed on the sidelines of discussions of modernism, it also provides a thorough look at the major aesthetic debates about poetic genealogies and the relationship between Romanticism and modernist poetry.

Levenson, Michael. A Genealogy of Modernism, 1908-1922. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
I return to this book again and again, for the most part because of Levenson’s wonderful readings of individual ur-texts of modernism—most specifically The Waste Land. This book is useful as an introduction to some of the major intellectual influences on modern literature, for it provides clear and compelling examinations of the ideas of Hulme, Bergson, and Pater. Levenson is interested in the structure of modernist writing—its particular aesthetic projects and methods. His study is brief and therefore limited in its scope, only treating some of the recognized fathers (this is definitely a male-dominated version of modernism): Ford, Conrad, Pound, and Eliot. Despite these limitations, it is one of the best brief introductions to the period and the literary concerns.

Nicholls, Peter. Modernisms: A Literary Guide. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
Between the time that Levenson published A Genealogy and Nicholls wrote this book, ‘modernism’ had become ‘modernisms’. As the title suggests, this is a book that charts interwoven and often opposing strains of modern literature and art, and Nicholls emphasizes the variety and complexity within the monolithic term ‘modernism.’ The book gives us a broader European view of modernism, as it examines the various “isms” that came into being during this time of aesthetic movements and manifestos. Nicholls therefore helps locate Anglo-American modernism (the type that Levenson talks about) in a more inclusive framework.

Modernism/Modernity [The official journal of the Modernist Studies Association and published through Johns Hopkins University Press. Access is available through Project Muse.]
This journal is a good place to start if you are interested some of the newest and most exciting research in the field. As the journal title suggests, the articles it publishes tend to interweave cultural and literary criticism. They also are international in focus, for both Modernism/Modernity and the Modernist Studies Association aim to expand the boundaries of the scholarship in the field.

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Excerpt from The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (New York: Bantam, 1992). Reproduced from the text of the 1888 English edition, edited by Engels.

From Part I: “Bourgeois and Proletarians,” p. 21 (my emphasis):

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

From Part II: “Proletarians and Communists,” p. 36-38:

And the abolition of this state of things is called by the bourgeois, abolition of individuality and freedom! And rightly so. The abolition of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly aimed at.
By freedom is meant, under the present bourgeois conditions of production, free trade, free selling and buying.
But if selling and buying disappears, free selling and buying disappears also. This talk about free selling and buying, and all the other "brave words" of our bourgeois about freedom in general, have a meaning, if any, only in contrast with restricted selling and buying, with the fettered traders of the Middle Ages, but have no meaning when opposed to the communist abolition of buying and selling, or the bourgeois conditions of production, and of the bourgeoisie itself.
You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society.
In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend.
From the moment when labor can no longer be converted into capital, money, or rent, into a social power capable of being monopolized, i.e., from the moment when individual property can no longer be transformed into bourgeois property, into capital, from that moment, you say, individuality vanishes.
You must, therefore, confess that by "individual" you mean no other person than the bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of property. This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and made impossible.
Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labor of others by means of such appropriations.
It has been objected that upon the abolition of private property, all work will cease, and universal laziness will overtake us.
According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the dogs through sheer idleness; for those who acquire anything, do not work. The whole of this objection is but another expression of the tautology: There can no longer be any wage labor when there is no longer any capital.
All objections urged against the communistic mode of producing and appropriating material products, have, in the same way, been urged against the communistic mode of producing and appropriating intellectual products. Just as to the bourgeois, the disappearance of class property is the disappearance of production itself, so the disappearance of class culture is to him identical with the disappearance of all culture.
That culture, the loss of which he laments, is, for the enormous majority, a mere training to act as a machine.
But don't wrangle with us so long as you apply, to our intended abolition of bourgeois property, the standard of your bourgeois notions of freedom, culture, law, etc. Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of the conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property, just as your jurisprudence is but the will of your class made into a law for all, a will whose essential character and direction are determined by the economical conditions of existence of your class.
The selfish misconception that induces you to transform into eternal laws of nature and of reason the social forms stringing from your present mode of production and form of property -- historical relations that rise and disappear in the progress of production -- this misconception you share with every ruling class that has preceded you. What you see clearly in the case of ancient property, what you admit in the case of feudal property, you are of course forbidden to admit in the case of your own bourgeois form of property.

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