Handbook of the American Novel of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

Timo Müller

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9783110422542
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Increasing specialization within the discipline of English and American Studies has shifted the focus of scholarly discussion toward theoretical reflection and cultural contexts. These developments have benefitted the discipline in more ways than one, but they have also resulted in a certain neglect of close reading. As a result, students and researchers interested in such material are forced to turn to scholarship from the 1960s and 1970s, much of which relies on dated methodological and ideological presuppositions.

The handbook aims to fill this gap by providing new readings of texts that figure prominently in the literature classroom and in scholarly debate ? from James's The Ambassadors to McCarthy's The Road. These readings do not revert naively to a time "before theory." Instead, they distil the insights of literary and cultural theory into concise introductions to the historical background, the themes, the formal strategies, and the reception of influential literary texts, and they do so in a jargon-free language accessible to readers on all levels of qualification.

Part I Systematic Questions

Matthew Stratton

1Modernism

Abstract: Scholars have recently and dramatically expanded the concept of modernism, and the term is now used to describe a wide variety of transnational artists and artworks that appeared roughly from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. These artworks and artists are also recognized as being situated in and responding to a broader field of historical and social forces than was long assumed. Nonetheless, some characteristics of the concept “modernism” seem to persist: a turn away from “realistic” representation of external events and toward interiority and psychology; concern with the possibilities of representing past and future; and the role of the individual artist in representing both solitary and collective experience. Finally, rather than focusing on what precisely modernism “was” or “wasn’t,” it is more productive to consider how the conceptual frame of “modernism” itself changes our understanding of the artists, art, and ideologies to which the term refers.

Keywords: American modernism; consciousness; individual; transnational

1Introduction

All investigations start with questions, so let us ask some: “What exactly is modernism? What did it look like? When did it start? When did it end?” There are no simple answers, for there are many ways to talk about the painters, poets, architects, composers, and novelists who are conventionally understood through that loose, controversial, and protean concept known as “modernism.” Indeed, in recent years scholars have expended a good deal of energy analyzing the significance of particular figures and movements within this wide field of cultural production, but also debating, stretching, revising, and questioning the term itself. Certainly, one can still turn to the traditional definition of a word that “is widely used to identify new and distinctive features in the subject, forms, concepts, and styles of literature and the other arts in the early decades of the twentieth century, but especially after World War I” (Abrams 2005, 175). In this sense, the term has been used for the better part of a century to describe dynamic developments in culture that featured thinkers, thoughts, and works of art – from the paintings of Pablo Picasso and the poetry of Gertrude Stein to the music of Igor Stravinsky and the novels of James Joyce – that still seem to share identifiable and recognizable approaches to representing the world and people in it.

In recent decades, however, the scope and range of the concept has been stretched and revised to include such a wide array of figures, ideas, styles, ideologies, and years that the plural term “modernisms” has sometimes seemed more accurate. Of course, there were always many movements and subdivisions associated with modernism: Surrealism, Imagism, Futurism, Dada, Cubism, Bauhaus, Expressionism, and so forth. But the plural form of the word has also been useful – perhaps even necessary – to describe not only the larger historical period, geographic range, and kinds of texts that are considered modernist, but to describe the dynamic increase in critical methodologies used to understand the artists, arts, and very concept of “modernism” itself. As two major literary scholars have influentially concluded, “Were one seeking a single word to sum up transformation in modernist literary scholarship over the past decade or two, one could do worse than light on expansion” (Mao and Walkowitz 2008, 737). Indeed, they write, “the purview of modernist scholarship now encompasses, sometimes tendentiously but often illuminatingly, artifacts from the middle of the nineteenth century and the years after the middle of the twentieth as well as works from the core period of about 1890 to 1945” (738); thus, the concept of modernism now includes a global cast of characters working independently and collaboratively to produce a vast, diverse range of different work rather than the relatively small, overwhelmingly male and racially homogeneous coterie working in Paris, London, and New York to which the epithet “modernist” used to refer.

For critics like Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz, using the qualifier “about” to describe a historical period of cultural production does not reveal an unwillingness to be precise, and also should not suggest that the meaning of the word has become so unwieldy and vast as to become unrecognizable or unhelpful. Rather, such imprecision is necessary when grouping any wildly diverse set of particulars within a general concept, and indicates the fact that the boundaries and borders – geographic, temporal, formal, stylistic, political, and aesthetic – of what we call “modernism” are still in flux. In fact, the term will likely remain a contested and shifting object of inquiry, for it has always been the case that “terms like ‘modernism,’ ‘late modernism,’ ‘postmodernism,’ and so on, are the tools of the historians, professional assigners of labels not always chosen by the original participants” (Miller 1999, 22), and each successive generation of scholars brings a new and different set of concerns, assumptions, archives, and findings to the critical table. Decades of students have been taught, for example, that American poet Ezra Pound’s call to “make it new” was the aesthetic rallying cry of a revolutionary artistic generation who rejected their forebears and privileged novelty in form, style, and substance. Very recently, however, critics have shown that the supposed literary battle cry “has been accorded a wholly unwarranted authority in the understanding of ‘modernist poetics.’ Not concocted until 1934, and targeted to the work of translation primarily, ‘make it new’ was not the ordaining precept it has become, now, in the regular refrains of critical appreciation for the major instigations of literary modernism” (Sherry 2015, 14). In short, scholars continue to make the concept of modernism itself “new” as an interpretive lens by expanding and contracting the criteria for including, excluding, valuing, and revaluing the parameters of the concept and those whom it seeks to describe and explain.

In the years around World War II in the United States and the United Kingdom, for example, the term “modernist” gained institutional currency and legitimacy as the literary canon of “great works” from the period was being established roughly in accordance with the criteria of literary value propounded by another unruly and diverse group of thinkers known as the “New Critics.” These critics emphasized the value of irony, ambiguity, paradox, and the formal study of texts as self-sufficient works that could be understood and interpreted without recourse to the biography or intention of their authors, without reference to the historical or political circumstances in which the works were written, and with an eventual interpretive goal of experiencing a harmonious interplay of a text’s different elements. Yet these literary values were not necessarily the ones endorsed by all literary modernists. Moreover, the multitude of biographies, histories, and literary theories suggests that different interpretations were produced by the situations – historical, geographic, political, and social – in which those works first appeared. What definition of modernism, for example, allows us to see a family resemblance between an agrarian Nebraska bildungsroman written by Willa Cather in 1918 (↗ Cather, My Ántonia) and the fluid narrative consciousness of traumatized Londoners in Virginia Woolf’s 1920s London? What vital differences between these works are obscured by placing them under one roof? How do the cubist dislocations of vision offered by Pablo Picasso relate to the surreal curves of Salvador Dali’s depiction of a dream, and how do those innovations in painting relate to the poetic forms and narrative styles of writers as obviously different as Vladimir Nabokov (↗ Nabokov, Lolita), William Butler Yeats, Djuna Barnes (↗ Barnes, Nightwood), Henry James (↗ James, The Ambassadors), and Richard Wright (↗ Wright, Native Son) – all of whom have at one time or another been described and investigated by critics specifically as “modernist”?

2Modernism and Modernization

Perhaps it would be more efficient to arrive at a positive understanding of what modernism “is” by understanding what modernism – for now – is not. By definition and convention, modernism has traditionally been distinguished from the artistic movements that came before it – the late nineteenth-century genres known as realism and naturalism – and from postmodernism, the encyclopedically playful genre that emerged and rose to prominence in the decades after World War II. The next essay in this volume will tell you more about postmodernism (↗ 2 Postmodernism), so for now think about what kind of art the modernists were understood to be in revolt against, and the defining features and basic moral assumptions of which were repudiated and discarded.

In 1889, the influential American novelist and critic William Dean Howells offered what is still the most succinct definition of realism: “Realism is nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material.” Not content with description, he characteristically added a firm prescription: “Let not the novelist, then, endeavor to add anything to reality, to turn it and twist it, to restrict it” (966). In this conception of literature, the world is ultimately knowable by observation; reality is fixed and available as an object of factual representation to the artist who could not only perceive the objective “material” of existence, but could translate that perception into language so that readers would also know that slice of a fixed and stable “truth.” A particularly unflinching form of realism came to be known as naturalism, wherein the secular insights of evolutionary biology (among other influences) led to an understanding of the universe where humans no longer occupied a privileged and blessed position atop an embodied chain of being that previous generations had assumed and asserted. In the realist worldview, human actions are determined by environment and circumstance rather than by free will, divine guida...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Editors’ Preface
• Contents
• 0 Introduction
• Part I Systematic Questions
• Part II Close Readings
• Index of Subjects
• Index of Names
• List of Contributors