A Homemade World: The American Modernist Writers

by Hugh Kenner

The "homemade world" Hugh Kenner describes exists alongside the world of Pound, Joyce, and Eliot. While they were laying the international foundations of literary modernism, another modernism far more specifically American was being born in the work of William Faulkner, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Kenner deals in turn with each of the six, with the American conditions that shaped them, and with the peculiarly homemade strengths that led to their achievement. "A Homemade World" is a book to stimulate thought, argument, and an altogether fresh consideration of twentieth-century writing.

Genres: Criticism, Literary Criticism, Literature, Nonfiction

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1974

Reviews

[Jonfaith · Rating 3 out of 5]

She was the Mondrian of prose, and her intuitions were often profound, even as her prose was often unreadable.

Closer to 3.5 stars. This struck me as a Axel's Castle: A Study of the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930 for the burgeoning culture wars of the mid 1970s, all filtered through (the vastly superior) In the American Grain. Kenner addresses six figures of American Modernism (at the expense of many others?) and uses them as platforms. Stevens particularly is besmirched. there are excellent readings of Fitzgerald and Faulkner but the other critiques appear blindered, especially politically. Kenner wants a Gospel but chose a means which is all too human and then smiles when questioned-- it is just literature. Particularly Kenner broaches the idea of sincerity as mendacity as an American enterprise (in all senses of the term) and then chooses to ignore any application after Jay Gatsby is fished from the pool.

[J. Alfred · Rating 3 out of 5]

The excellencies and the shortcomings of Hugh Kenner are fully on display in this work: he increases our understanding of the authors he touches on by a great deal; he comes up with a sweeping theory that encompasses much of the literature that you're ever likely to be interested in... but he ignores much that is lovable and is needlessly dismissive of some great writers. Still intensely interesting, especially if you happen to want to know more about the ways Marianne Moore, Hemingway, or Fitzgerald do business, or want to see the thoughts of a great mind in the 70s as to where American art could go from the place it found itself (Objectivism? Probably not. The 'Open Novel'? Depends, I suppose, what you mean...).

[Kit · Rating 3 out of 5]

Terrific on Hemingway, Moore, Williams, Fitzgerald; dismissive of Stevens; commits the heresy of calling Pale Fire a "mirthless hoax". His mockery of Amy Lowell smells bad even if her work can't bear comparison to these others'.