Modernism, Mass Culture, and Professionalism (review)

While critics have long recognized that modernist writers have made use of the materials of mass culture and that modernism’s formal innovations sometimes are inspired by popular media such as movies or comic strips, the rise of mass culture has largely been ignored as an essential element in the production of modernism as a body of work and as a category of analysis. By contrast, Thomas Strychacz’s Modernism, Mass Culture, and Professionalism argues that literature in the modern period exists by virtue of the distinction it claims from mass culture. The need to maintain this distinction is all the more acute because the modernists cannot exclude the influence of mass culture from their work; it is not only a new and omnipresent feature of the cultural environment but, more importantly, it is understood as competing against literature for the hearts and minds of the people. In Strychacz’s view, modernist writers and the academic critics who support them win this battle by giving up the audience to mass culture in order to establish professional authority and thus gain a greater share of what Bourdieu calls symbolic capital. The obscurity of modernist texts is thus linked to the esoteric writing produced in professions such as medicine and law as well as in the academic disciplines. Both forms of writing exclude the mass audience, but, if the analogy works, also command its assent. Modernist literature and the discipline of literary studies thus constitute a privileged cultural space existing in/as relief from mass cultural schlock.

This interesting argument about the professional character of literary modernism is presented mainly as the context for Strychacz’s interpretation of modernist texts as sites of struggle between literature and mass culture. He identifies two strategies by which modernist works strive to deal with mass cultural materials. He names these with terms borrowed from Piaget, assimilation and accommodation: “the process of assimilation disguises the shaping of one cultural terrain into another, whereas the act of accommodation highlights the transformative act while problematizing it” (9). Critics have usually treated modernist literature as assimilationist, so that works are said to borrow formal techniques from mass culture in such a seamless way that they remain entirely untainted. Strychacz, however, focuses on works that are accommodationist, that in some way call attention to their borrowing from mass culture. Perhaps as a result, he writes about authors and works that exist on the edges of modernism: Henry James’s The Reverberator and The Sacred Fount, Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, John Dos Passos’s U.S.A., and Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust.

All of the readings are plausible enough interpretations, though only the chapter on Dreiser seems likely to have a major impact on future criticism. Strychacz successfully reads An American Tragedy as a novel about mass culture and its impact on literature, culture, and society, and this should once and for all dispense with the notion that the book merely imitates—or plagiarizes—newspaper sensationalism. The literally unassimilated materials of mass culture in An American Tragedy are the perfect illustration of accommodation: “To read the novel is to enter a border region between the already shifting and hazy categories of literature and mass culture” (115). By contrast, Strychacz sees Henry James’s works as characterized by a careful cordoning off of mass culture which is treated as inferior and threatening. Strychacz’s readings place James within a significant historical context, a welcome project given that James criticism for so long ignored such contexts. But while Strychacz is convincing that The Reverberator and The Sacred Fount are about the problem of mass culture, his readings offer little to make us revise our sense of James’s relations to mass culture or modernism.

If Strychacz’s readings are to varying degrees valuable, one might still wonder why the claims about modernism made in the introduction should be succeeded by a series of interpretations of individual texts rather than being developed as an historical argument. The...