Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern

by Michael North

This engaging study returns to a truly remarkable year, the year in which both Ulysses and The Waste Land were published, in which The Great Gatsby was set, and during which the Fascisti took over in Italy, the Irish Free State was born, the Harlem Renaissance reached its peak, Charlie Chaplin's popularity crested, and King Tutankhamen's tomb was discovered. In short, the year which not only in hindsight became the primal scene of literary modernism but which served as the cradle for a host of major political and aesthetic transformations resonating around the globe.

In his previous study, the acclaimed Dialect of Modernism (OUP, 1994), Michael North looked at the racial and linguistic struggles over the English language which gave birth to the many strains of modernism. Here, he expands his vision to encompass the global stage, and tells the story of how books changed the future of the world as we know it in one unforgettable year.

Genres: Nonfiction, History

288 pages, Paperback

First published October 28, 1999

About the author

Michael North is a Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature, The Final Sculpture: Public Monuments and Modern Poets, Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern, The Political Aesthetic of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound, and Henry Green and the Writing of His Generation, as well as many articles on various aspects of twentieth-century literature.

Reviews

[Cat · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such a compelling, eloquent, and well-organized and well-argued account of the currents connecting high modernism, mass culture, and popular fiction during not just 1922 but the modern period. North is so eloquent, and I was really excited by his writings on irony, mischief, and authority in one of the chapters on Seldes and Chaplin (the conflict between "impudence" as a negative from the point of view of would-be censors and "effrontery" as a positive from the point of view of modern artists); I wish I had read that chapter before and could have drawn on it for my own writing in *Playing Smart*. North writes so clearly and cogently; many of his examples could work beautifully in an undergraduate lecture. Each chapter explored rich juxtapositions, and the conclusion makes an earnest and necessary case for bridging the "Great Divide" between modernism and mass culture, an undertaking that modernism/modernity studies has been pursuing ever since. North explores the rich paradox between the wish for universality and the insistence on particularity and relativism in the modern period.

[Stella Ottewill]

Informative, clear and interesting. I feel like I’ve been studying Eliot and Joyce and James for the past decade and North’s book is filled with ideas, images, and works of which I was unaware. Surely an essential text in the study of Modernism.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

A masterpiece. North read everything published in the US and England in 1922. That's already scary, but then he goes on to demonstrate that he is in fact smarter than everyone else. Almost all of his readings are awesome, and his theoretical heart is in the right place. North puts paid to the idea that literary modernism can be distinguished from contemporary popular culture on any of the elitist traditional grounds--superior self-consciousness, allusiveness, irony, etc. Yet it's amazing that after spending all that time in the archive he didn't want to venture even one quantitative generalization. The qualitative generalizations turn out to be everything you already thought about early-20c culture: people had a sense of the relativity of culture but aspired after universal knowledge, people were aware of global horizons and big social changes; people were sexists, racists, and homophobes; movies can be analyzed like other art forms; etc.

[Hannah Sikorski · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not my methodological cup of tea--so it says a lot that I enjoyed it so much. Wonderful readings and got to give a guy credit for having appeared to have read every book published and every movie made in 1922.