Discovering Modernism: T.S. Eliot and His Context

by Louis Menand

When Discovering Modernism was first published, it shed new and welcome light on the birth of Modernism. This reissue of Menand's classic intellectual history of T.S. Eliot and the singular role he played in the rise of literary modernism features an updated Afterword by the author, as well as a detailed critical appraisal of the progression of Eliot's career as a poet and critic. The new Afterword was adapted from Menand's critically lauded essay on Eliot in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Volume Seven: Modernism and the New Criticism. Menand shows how Eliot's early views on literary value and authenticity, and his later repudiation of those views, reflect the profound changes regarding the understanding of literature and its significance that occurred in the early part of the twentieth century. It will prove an eye-opening study for readers with an interest in the writings of T.S. Eliot and other luminaries of the Modernist era.

Genres: Literary Criticism, History, Poetry, Criticism, 20th Century, American

231 pages, Paperback

First published December 11, 1986

About the author

Louis Menand, professor of English at Harvard University, is the author of The Metaphysical Club, which won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize in History. A longtime staff writer for The New Yorker, he lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Reviews

[Cat · Rating 4 out of 5]

A scholarly book about T. S. Eliot's influential literary criticism (with an awesome reading of Heart of Darkness as commentary on the modern artist and phases of capitalism in here as well). Menand is an ironic, articulate critic and tackles the criticism of another eloquent ironist in this book about the ways that T.S. Eliot streamlined the contentions of his contemporaries, reformulated those of his predecessors (while claiming to disagree with them), and channeled the skeptical spirit of a doubting age in his opportunistic and fiercely influential critical work. Menand's phrases are sharp, rewarding, and rhetorically delicious. My personal favorite:

"wordiness is a way of muting the force of individual words in the hope that the whole will be more compatible with the modesty of our intentions."

Menand has an ability to parse out ideas and stare pretty phrasing levelly in the eye and make it blush. This review makes it sound like Menand is criticizing Eliot, but he actually trains our attention on what Eliot did so spectacularly, which was not introduce new ideas but instead paint himself as an outside observer, a wit with no country, who could verbalize the modernist project both as a salubrious recovery of tradition and departure from its immediate past. (though Menand points out that the nineteenth century value of "sincerity" gets reimagined in the "impersonal" appeal of the individual artist to emotion and tradition) Menand does an amazing job pointing out when Eliot's rhetoric actually makes little practical or metaphysical sense, when it sounds better than it means. He connects Eliot's valorization of literary formalism with the professionalization aligned with late capitalism, and Menand points out the challenges presented by imagining what literature does and what relationship it has to the word of objects and the mind of the author. In short, for students of modernism and the modern period, this is a very helpful, very engaging book.

[Liam Guilar · Rating 3 out of 5]

In a series of discrete chapters Menard is very good at showing how what seemed so original in much of Eliot's critical writing was simply a memorable restatement of existing orthodoxy. He's also very good at showing how much of Eliot's critical writing sounds good until you look at it too carefully, when it starts to evaporate.

As someone else wrote, probably John Harwood, it doesn't matter how many times the term "literary modernism" is shown to be a meaningless creation of 1960s academics; a whole industry (which includes books proving Modernism is the meaningless creation of 1960s academics) is built on the myth. It underwrites the equal myth of 'Literary Post-Modernism". So too much is at stake for it all to stop and so the industry of books, essays, articles and PhDs go on being trundled out.

Fortunately the academic discussion, though often entertaining, is often irrelevant and self-defeatingly unreadable.

At least Menard is both readable and thought provoking.

None of this should stop anyone from picking up the poems and reading them. The critics all tend to forget that reading is an enjoyable activity. As someone else said, probably John Harwood, the best way to understand the poems is to reread the poems.