Modernism/modernity

Modernism/Modernity 7.2 (2000) 336-338

Book Review

Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents

For a decade or more the commercial nous of publishers and the intellectual and pedagogic concerns of academics have united to produce a generation of "readers" in areas of literary and cultural theory. The result, for good or ill, has been a common theoretical lexicon, and, in
England at least, a new uniformity of critical textbooks in the classroom. New volumes of this type are now, however, infrequent. Is this because the market has sagged and the life has gone out of this (increasingly costly) genre or because the intellectual and cultural mapping this exercise performs now seems hastily conceived? Whatever the reasons, publishers now seem to have decided against the most conspicuous examples of this type of reader, in postmodernism and postcolonialism. Both tendencies have taken their definition from perceived relations with an earlier modernism, and where this has amounted to a rejection it has in its turn provoked a newly invigorated argument for modernism's complexity, variety, and continuing relevance. The [End Page 336] volume under review is a sign of this renewed interest. We are presented with "sources and documents" (signally a scholarly archive rather than a "Guide to" or "Critical Reader" in modernism) and encouraged to look behind the familiar construction of modernism as a homogenized movement to the "conflict and upheaval and . . . contradictory positions" this usage has occluded (xvii).

There can be little doubt that students and researchers will find valuable materials here that are otherwise difficult to access and assemble, most obviously in a substantial subsection of manifestos. It is good, also, and consistent with current reevaluations, to have entries by W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, May Sinclair, H. D., Mina Loy, Dora Marsden, as well as by Thorstein Veblen, Antonio Gramsci, and even Adolf Hitler. Experienced readers will nevertheless inevitably question some of the selections (there is no Émile Durkheim or Ferdinand de Saussure, no Vladimir Mayakovsky or Henri Gaudier-Brzeska) and categorizations (by what reckoning are Clive Bell and Roger Fry examples of the avant-garde, or Ford Madox Ford, E. M. Forster, and Edwin Muir modernists?). A further, broader, and perhaps unwitting limitation is that modernism is committed here to a world of written discourses. Dmitri Shostakovitch and Igor Stravinsky receive only one page reference apiece in the index. The welcome inclusion of essays on design and film (from Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, Walter Gropius, Sergei Eisenstein, and Dziga Vertov) is matched by omissions in visual culture, the plastic arts, and architecture (no Alesandre Rodchenko or Lyubov Popova, no Marcel Duchamp and no Le Corbusier). To put this criticism at its simplest--there are no illustrations. When cubism is limited to Apollinaire's enigmatic reflections and Wyndham Lewis appears without a Vorticist image, when there is no set of stills to help understand the "montage of attractions" and no picture of a Bauhaus product, one feels that modernism has been stripped of one or two dimensions. In this respect a teacher or student using the volume would still have much to supply.

These considerations apart, my own queries concern the book's organization and related rationale both as an intervention in debates on modernism and as a pedagogic resource. The mistake--which it does not do enough to discourage--would be to see this volume simply as a self-selecting portfolio of essays when it is in fact governed by a conception of modernism produced in the context of "postmodern" perceptions of modernism's demise or continuity with the present. The editors want to avoid any mention of the postmodern; it would, they suggest, be "beyond chronology" (xix), a curious notion, especially in a book that stretches the conventional modernist period further backwards and forwards than the usual bookends of 1910-1930. Unfortunately, however, the postmodern is as unavoidable as history. We occupy, as Raymond...