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The Cambridge Companion to Modernism
In this Companion, eminent British and American scholars offer a guide to the revolutionary cultural transformations of the first decades of the twentieth century. Chapters on the major literary genres, on intellectual, political and institutional contexts, and on film and the visual arts, provide close analyses and a broader set of interpretive narratives. A Chronology and Guide to Further Reading supply valuable orientation within the field. Students will find much-needed help with the difficulties of approaching Modernism, while the essays' original contributions will send scholars back to this volume for stimulating reevaluation.
263 pages, Hardcover
First published February 11, 1999
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
April 1, 2015
And THIS is how it’s done, folks! Truly, one of the most satisfying and enjoyable theory reads I have had till now. Levenson has truly done a very intelligent job of putting these 9 essays together, each of which touches upon an individual and very interesting aspect of Modernism.
Let’s do a brief and modest vivisection, an essay a time.
The companion begins with a small, well-written Introduction by Levenson himself. He briefly discusses modernist fiction and art, its ambitions and the major impetus behind most of modernist creation. What exactly happened on 1910 when, according to Virginia Woolf, the “human character” changed? What were the leading events to 1910 or had Modernism already begun several decades ago? We all talk of creative freedom that the Modernist movement entailed but what need was there for this so-called freedom, and what was the avant-garde asking freedom from?
..."the recurrent act of fragmenting unities (unities of character or plot or pictorial space or lyric form), the use of mythic paradigms, the refusal of norms of beauty, the willingness to make radical linguistic experiment, all often inspired by the resolve (in Eliot's phrase) to startle and disturb the public."
Alright, the freedom from stylistic strictures that were a part of Victorian and Realist/Naturalist literature. But the first part of the question remains: why?
Levenson answers this why in his preface along with Michael Bell in the first essay of the companion, The metaphysics of Modernism. While reviewing the VSI I mentioned how Butler gives a lengthy exposition on the subjectivism in modern art but what he failed to do was to explain clearly why this subjectivism was necessary. Sure, the individual gained precedence but what were the reasons, philosophical or otherwise, that entailed this precedence? This is an important question which Bell answers in his essay. This individual-gaining-priority thing slightly reeks of a humanistic disposition which, again, would not make any sense as most of the modern works are flagrantly anti-humanistic. Joseph. K in The Trial , accused and persecuted by a world that is hostile, indifferent and has the power to squash him like an insect (lol "insect" get it? :P). There is very little in modern literature that sings of human integrity and the goodness of the human soul. So, the question remains: what made the individual experience gain such importance?
This subjectivism was the result of a kind of epistemological skepticism that had set in the modern collective consciousness (whatever that is). Modern philosophy had expressed its distrust with factual certainties and a big part of modern philosophical thought had a shaky epistemology: we can’t ever know things for sure or as they truly are. Zola and his children were trying to give a naturalistic explanation of the world based on their observation of human individuals as if they were rats in a laboratory experiment. This is what people do, this is what drives them to do the things they do: this empirical approach that bragged of its objectivity and generality was proven to be false and highly inapplicable to the human individual or to humanity at large.
"Pearson expressed this for a general public by saying that science does not "explain" the workings of the universe, it merely describes what happens in given conditions. Quite evidently, this recognition of epistemological limitation did not impede the progress of science, indeed it reinforced the creative need to think outside commonsense or inherited terms, but it brought home the recognition that science is a construction of the human mind before it is a reflection of the world."
I haven’t read Kant yet and the little I know of him has had been from second-hand sources but his noumenon/phenomenon dichotomy is really important for Bell’s argument (though Bell hasn’t used it himself). The noumenal world is completely unknowable, where human reason is concerned, and is the domain of faith. What we know are observable phenomena, things that can be directly and explicitly perceived by the senses: the rest and the most important stuff, the metaphysical constructs that befuddle us so can never be known for what they really are, the things-in-themselves. And through this statement Kant delimits the function of human reason and renders it fallible and limited.
Nietzsche, again, was wary of scientific certainties and exactitudes. In The Birth of Tragedy, while explicating his dramatic theory, he says:
"... all understanding, by its very nature, is limited and conditional, thereby rejecting decisively the claim of science to universal validity and universal goals. Thanks to this demonstration it has been recognized for the first time that it is an arrogant delusion to believe that we can penetrate to the innermost essence of things by following the chain of causality.
This explains his famous quotes that there are no facts and only interpretations and no Truth with a capital T but merely truths. So when the naturalist gives a theory of human behavior and equates the human world with the Darwinian animal world, no matter how valid to an extent, it is clearly not viable, not something that literature could have had rested upon for long. Freud turned human consciousness into a kaleidoscope, a whirlpool, a mess and a labyrinth that is beyond any scientific reductionism. Thus, subjectivism and individual experience gains precedence, and the individual is allowed to speak for himself and simply for himself, without being presented as an archetype or a representative for the rest of his kind.
This answers the need for a new narratology; moving on to other aspects of modernist forms, their need arose because, as Levenson puts it:
"War! Strike! Women! The Irish! Or (within the popular press), Nihilism! Relativism! Fakery! This century had scarcely grown used to its own name, before it learned the twentieth would be the epoch of crisis, real and manufactured, physical and metaphysical, material and symbolic. The catastrophe of the First World War, and before that, the labor struggles, the emergence of feminism, the race for empire, these inescapable forces of turbulent social modernization were not simply looming on the outside as the destabilizing context of cultural Modernism; they penetrated the interior of artistic invention. They gave subjects to writers and painters, and they also gave forms, forms suggested by industrial machinery, or by the chuffing of cars, or even, most horribly, the bodies broken in the war."
A topsy-turvy world produces topsy-turvy aesthetic products, presupposing of course that aesthetic products are in fact contingent on social conditions. Therefore, freedom from stylistic strictures is understandable. The inception of Futurism and its celebration of technology; Surrealism and Dada and their irregular associations and juxtapositions; Expressionism and its pictography of soul-states; Imagism and its verbal economy; the multivalency of the concomitants of all these movements stems from disbelief in absolute truths and definitive definitions. And their “creative violence” simply stems from the violence of their world.
And I had used the word “brief” in the beginning of my review. Damn.
The second essay, though seeming very dull in the beginning, is actually one of the most captivating in this companion. In The cultural economy Lawrence Rainey discusses the sometimes correlative and symbiotic and sometimes impeding relation between culture and art. This essay, though very interesting, seems slightly inconclusive as Rainey doesn’t give straight answers but what is amazing about this is that it almost reads like a story. The leading events to the publication of The Waste Land and Ulysses, Pound’s emergence in the modernist scene and the concept of patronage on which most modernists survived, publishing houses and their relation with the avant-garde, Marinetti’s popularity in England and his dynamic relation with the masses and Futurism’s success: this essay covers a lot of ground and, yes, reads like a very interesting story.
Then comes an essay on The modernist novel and David Trotter explores the evolution of the genre through Ford Madox Ford to Faulkner and Woolf. Full of insightful commentaries, this essay can prove to be very educational and fruitful for the student. In Modern poetry, James Longenbach does the same thing with modern poetics as Trotter does with the novel. Imagism and its aesthetics are dealt with in detail especially, and many other names in modern poetry like Eliot, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Auden reappear from time to time.
Christopher Innes then moves on to Modern drama and in this essay we learn how Strindbergian expressionism came to have a massive impact on modern dramaturgy. Where impressionistic treatment of the human mind became the interest of the modern novel that was nothing more than a “study of consciousness”, in drama, expressionistic techniques began to be practiced. Strindberg’s A Dream Play was the seminal modern drama that influenced Eugene O’Neill and several other dramatists to write their own expressionist and surrealist plays. Bertolt Brecht and his epic theatre is, of course, discussed as well (you cannot have a discussion of modern dramaturgy without including this guy). Brecht completely transformed the relation between the audience and the stage and instead of giving them the semblance of reality, he stripped away the illusions of the stage and made his audience see the play as a play and not as a piece of reality, cut out and presented before them. Innes makes Brechtian dramaturgy sound incredibly interesting though I don’t know how it would feel like watching a play that is as self-referential and self-conscious as Brecht’s are said to be.
(This review is getting too long.)
Sara Blair in Modernism and the politics of culture veers away from the traditional discussion on modernist art and talks of the political attitudes of many artists. She argues that art forms cannot be “hermetic literary machines, indifferent to contemporary experience” and must be in some sense contingent on the socio-political conditions of their time which inadvertently will be reflected in them. Hence she analyzes Pound’s and Eliot’s poetry in terms of their “fascist”, conservative beliefs, and then moves on to a discussion of the Harlem Renaissance and the quest of left-wingers for freedom and equality, whether in terms of race or gender.
Marianne DeKoven takes gender out of Blair’s essay and writes her own essay on it, Modernism and gender. This might be a favorite of many readers, it is definitely one of mine. I wish to ramble on it in detail but I have already said far more than I had intended—suffice it to say, this essay is a crash course on the first-wave of feminism, how it was reflected in the works of Woolf and Chopin, the problem of equality and acclimatization, and how these feminist writers ushered in the “New Woman” midst the androcentric prejudices of many male modernist writers.
Following is Modernism in visual arts by Glen MacLeod in which we have a detailed study of Dada, Surrealist and Cubist art, the role of Picasso and the abstractionists with illustrations and charts, Cézanne and his "still-lifes", Duchamp and his "readymades", all of these are discussed in detail. And (FINALLY!) the last essay, Modernism and film by Michael Wood talks of technological innovations in the film industry; experimental and surrealist short films like Dali’s Un Chien andalou and Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera are taken as examples and discussed. Those who have seen The Artist would be cognizant of the bewildering changes that had started taking place from the 30s onwards; for some these changes began a new career, and for some it was a bleak end.
If you’ve made it this far, reader, I applaud you and apologize for my lack of reviewing skills. This companion is truly a great read on Modernism in all its manifestations. To those who seek a proper study on this subject, I suggest Levenson’s companion with all enthusiasm.
(Phew.)
Let’s do a brief and modest vivisection, an essay a time.
The companion begins with a small, well-written Introduction by Levenson himself. He briefly discusses modernist fiction and art, its ambitions and the major impetus behind most of modernist creation. What exactly happened on 1910 when, according to Virginia Woolf, the “human character” changed? What were the leading events to 1910 or had Modernism already begun several decades ago? We all talk of creative freedom that the Modernist movement entailed but what need was there for this so-called freedom, and what was the avant-garde asking freedom from?
..."the recurrent act of fragmenting unities (unities of character or plot or pictorial space or lyric form), the use of mythic paradigms, the refusal of norms of beauty, the willingness to make radical linguistic experiment, all often inspired by the resolve (in Eliot's phrase) to startle and disturb the public."
Alright, the freedom from stylistic strictures that were a part of Victorian and Realist/Naturalist literature. But the first part of the question remains: why?
Levenson answers this why in his preface along with Michael Bell in the first essay of the companion, The metaphysics of Modernism. While reviewing the VSI I mentioned how Butler gives a lengthy exposition on the subjectivism in modern art but what he failed to do was to explain clearly why this subjectivism was necessary. Sure, the individual gained precedence but what were the reasons, philosophical or otherwise, that entailed this precedence? This is an important question which Bell answers in his essay. This individual-gaining-priority thing slightly reeks of a humanistic disposition which, again, would not make any sense as most of the modern works are flagrantly anti-humanistic. Joseph. K in The Trial , accused and persecuted by a world that is hostile, indifferent and has the power to squash him like an insect (lol "insect" get it? :P). There is very little in modern literature that sings of human integrity and the goodness of the human soul. So, the question remains: what made the individual experience gain such importance?
This subjectivism was the result of a kind of epistemological skepticism that had set in the modern collective consciousness (whatever that is). Modern philosophy had expressed its distrust with factual certainties and a big part of modern philosophical thought had a shaky epistemology: we can’t ever know things for sure or as they truly are. Zola and his children were trying to give a naturalistic explanation of the world based on their observation of human individuals as if they were rats in a laboratory experiment. This is what people do, this is what drives them to do the things they do: this empirical approach that bragged of its objectivity and generality was proven to be false and highly inapplicable to the human individual or to humanity at large.
"Pearson expressed this for a general public by saying that science does not "explain" the workings of the universe, it merely describes what happens in given conditions. Quite evidently, this recognition of epistemological limitation did not impede the progress of science, indeed it reinforced the creative need to think outside commonsense or inherited terms, but it brought home the recognition that science is a construction of the human mind before it is a reflection of the world."
I haven’t read Kant yet and the little I know of him has had been from second-hand sources but his noumenon/phenomenon dichotomy is really important for Bell’s argument (though Bell hasn’t used it himself). The noumenal world is completely unknowable, where human reason is concerned, and is the domain of faith. What we know are observable phenomena, things that can be directly and explicitly perceived by the senses: the rest and the most important stuff, the metaphysical constructs that befuddle us so can never be known for what they really are, the things-in-themselves. And through this statement Kant delimits the function of human reason and renders it fallible and limited.
Nietzsche, again, was wary of scientific certainties and exactitudes. In The Birth of Tragedy, while explicating his dramatic theory, he says:
"... all understanding, by its very nature, is limited and conditional, thereby rejecting decisively the claim of science to universal validity and universal goals. Thanks to this demonstration it has been recognized for the first time that it is an arrogant delusion to believe that we can penetrate to the innermost essence of things by following the chain of causality.
This explains his famous quotes that there are no facts and only interpretations and no Truth with a capital T but merely truths. So when the naturalist gives a theory of human behavior and equates the human world with the Darwinian animal world, no matter how valid to an extent, it is clearly not viable, not something that literature could have had rested upon for long. Freud turned human consciousness into a kaleidoscope, a whirlpool, a mess and a labyrinth that is beyond any scientific reductionism. Thus, subjectivism and individual experience gains precedence, and the individual is allowed to speak for himself and simply for himself, without being presented as an archetype or a representative for the rest of his kind.
This answers the need for a new narratology; moving on to other aspects of modernist forms, their need arose because, as Levenson puts it:
"War! Strike! Women! The Irish! Or (within the popular press), Nihilism! Relativism! Fakery! This century had scarcely grown used to its own name, before it learned the twentieth would be the epoch of crisis, real and manufactured, physical and metaphysical, material and symbolic. The catastrophe of the First World War, and before that, the labor struggles, the emergence of feminism, the race for empire, these inescapable forces of turbulent social modernization were not simply looming on the outside as the destabilizing context of cultural Modernism; they penetrated the interior of artistic invention. They gave subjects to writers and painters, and they also gave forms, forms suggested by industrial machinery, or by the chuffing of cars, or even, most horribly, the bodies broken in the war."
A topsy-turvy world produces topsy-turvy aesthetic products, presupposing of course that aesthetic products are in fact contingent on social conditions. Therefore, freedom from stylistic strictures is understandable. The inception of Futurism and its celebration of technology; Surrealism and Dada and their irregular associations and juxtapositions; Expressionism and its pictography of soul-states; Imagism and its verbal economy; the multivalency of the concomitants of all these movements stems from disbelief in absolute truths and definitive definitions. And their “creative violence” simply stems from the violence of their world.
And I had used the word “brief” in the beginning of my review. Damn.
The second essay, though seeming very dull in the beginning, is actually one of the most captivating in this companion. In The cultural economy Lawrence Rainey discusses the sometimes correlative and symbiotic and sometimes impeding relation between culture and art. This essay, though very interesting, seems slightly inconclusive as Rainey doesn’t give straight answers but what is amazing about this is that it almost reads like a story. The leading events to the publication of The Waste Land and Ulysses, Pound’s emergence in the modernist scene and the concept of patronage on which most modernists survived, publishing houses and their relation with the avant-garde, Marinetti’s popularity in England and his dynamic relation with the masses and Futurism’s success: this essay covers a lot of ground and, yes, reads like a very interesting story.
Then comes an essay on The modernist novel and David Trotter explores the evolution of the genre through Ford Madox Ford to Faulkner and Woolf. Full of insightful commentaries, this essay can prove to be very educational and fruitful for the student. In Modern poetry, James Longenbach does the same thing with modern poetics as Trotter does with the novel. Imagism and its aesthetics are dealt with in detail especially, and many other names in modern poetry like Eliot, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Auden reappear from time to time.
Christopher Innes then moves on to Modern drama and in this essay we learn how Strindbergian expressionism came to have a massive impact on modern dramaturgy. Where impressionistic treatment of the human mind became the interest of the modern novel that was nothing more than a “study of consciousness”, in drama, expressionistic techniques began to be practiced. Strindberg’s A Dream Play was the seminal modern drama that influenced Eugene O’Neill and several other dramatists to write their own expressionist and surrealist plays. Bertolt Brecht and his epic theatre is, of course, discussed as well (you cannot have a discussion of modern dramaturgy without including this guy). Brecht completely transformed the relation between the audience and the stage and instead of giving them the semblance of reality, he stripped away the illusions of the stage and made his audience see the play as a play and not as a piece of reality, cut out and presented before them. Innes makes Brechtian dramaturgy sound incredibly interesting though I don’t know how it would feel like watching a play that is as self-referential and self-conscious as Brecht’s are said to be.
(This review is getting too long.)
Sara Blair in Modernism and the politics of culture veers away from the traditional discussion on modernist art and talks of the political attitudes of many artists. She argues that art forms cannot be “hermetic literary machines, indifferent to contemporary experience” and must be in some sense contingent on the socio-political conditions of their time which inadvertently will be reflected in them. Hence she analyzes Pound’s and Eliot’s poetry in terms of their “fascist”, conservative beliefs, and then moves on to a discussion of the Harlem Renaissance and the quest of left-wingers for freedom and equality, whether in terms of race or gender.
Marianne DeKoven takes gender out of Blair’s essay and writes her own essay on it, Modernism and gender. This might be a favorite of many readers, it is definitely one of mine. I wish to ramble on it in detail but I have already said far more than I had intended—suffice it to say, this essay is a crash course on the first-wave of feminism, how it was reflected in the works of Woolf and Chopin, the problem of equality and acclimatization, and how these feminist writers ushered in the “New Woman” midst the androcentric prejudices of many male modernist writers.
Following is Modernism in visual arts by Glen MacLeod in which we have a detailed study of Dada, Surrealist and Cubist art, the role of Picasso and the abstractionists with illustrations and charts, Cézanne and his "still-lifes", Duchamp and his "readymades", all of these are discussed in detail. And (FINALLY!) the last essay, Modernism and film by Michael Wood talks of technological innovations in the film industry; experimental and surrealist short films like Dali’s Un Chien andalou and Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera are taken as examples and discussed. Those who have seen The Artist would be cognizant of the bewildering changes that had started taking place from the 30s onwards; for some these changes began a new career, and for some it was a bleak end.
If you’ve made it this far, reader, I applaud you and apologize for my lack of reviewing skills. This companion is truly a great read on Modernism in all its manifestations. To those who seek a proper study on this subject, I suggest Levenson’s companion with all enthusiasm.
(Phew.)
December 24, 2013
This overview of Modernism (generally considered to be between 1910 and 1940) includes not only an examination of Anglo-American Modernism, but also contextualizes it with a strong European note. Though there is a clear emphasis in discussing American authors and works, it seems that the British get the largest say (perhaps not surprising given that this is a Cambridge edition?). Granted some key figures of this literary period are also traditionally taught as British authors, despite being US expats (I'm looking at you, Eliot and Pound).
My favorite chapters were actually not particularly related to authors: I loved the examination of visual art, cinema, music, and religion in this context. The Music and Cinema sections were particularly interesting and have potential ramification for my own project.
I still think I prefer Baldick's Oxford History of Modernism compared to this, but that may be because of the exclusive focus on British literature. Both works, though, bring in wonderful cultural connections.
My favorite chapters were actually not particularly related to authors: I loved the examination of visual art, cinema, music, and religion in this context. The Music and Cinema sections were particularly interesting and have potential ramification for my own project.
I still think I prefer Baldick's Oxford History of Modernism compared to this, but that may be because of the exclusive focus on British literature. Both works, though, bring in wonderful cultural connections.
March 18, 2019
Updating my bookshelf
March 2, 2020
The worst book ever written!
December 14, 2011
The comps reading continues. This book is a comprehensive overview of Anglo-American modernism, and it offers a lot of great information about the different stages of modernism within literature, poetry, art, drama, criticism, etc. The chapters on literature and poetry were very helpful for my targeted areas of study, and the information about T.S. Eliot's critical work is incredibly insightful. For the most part, this book focuses on the usual suspects: Eliot, Pound, James, Woolf, Joyce et al; but lesser-known literary figures such as H.D. are also discussed in surprising detail. As I was reading, I was particularly interested in the ways in which modernism aged and the how certain people were marginalized or omitted from the canon entirely, only to be rediscovered by the deconstructionists. It's also worth mentioning that Levenson's introduction to this collection is outstanding.
March 1, 2011
Helped me a lot with my assessment for my Modernist Fiction module
September 1, 2011
despite some good observations the entire book is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of postmodernism. consequently, the language is often grotesque. a hard labour to read and not very profitable.
April 4, 2010
Another good introductory text to this literary era that continues to be influential.
December 18, 2017
'The Metaphysics of Modernism' is a great essay-length introduction.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews