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Reviewed by:
  • Women’s Experience of Modernity: 1875–1945
  • Priscilla Wald
Women’s Experience of Modernity: 1875–1945. Ann L. Ardis and Leslie W. Lewis, eds. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2003. Pp. vii + 312. $22.00 (paper).

In their edited collection, Ann L. Ardis and Leslie W. Lewis take up the challenge posed by Rita Felski in The Gender of Modernity (1995) to imagine what modernism and modernity might look like if women were placed at the center of analysis. Their project is to unearth the assumptions about modernism, modernity and women that literary history has put almost beyond inquiry. The informing assumption of both their and Felski's project is that "women" have a special connection to "everyday experience" so that a focus on either will bring new insights to the other.

Ardis and Lewis are mindful, however, as they lay out the terms of their inquiry, of Joan Wallach Scott's charge to historians not to privilege the idea of "experience" as a grounding term. Not only are people's "experiences" a function of their location in history, but the concept itself obscures the constructedness of the idea of an "individual." Scott supplies the more nuanced motivation for the volume as well as the explanation for its methodology when she counsels historians to countermand the naturalizing tendencies of the concept of "experience" by reading [End Page 729] "for 'the literary'" (2). Ardis and Lewis understand Scott's claim as "a particularly powerful articulation of contemporary feminist standpoint theory" that "not only invites us to treat turn-of-the-century representations of 'women's experience' as constructs, interpretations in need of interpretation and historical contextualization" but also "urges us to attend to the gendered dimensions, and contradictions, of 'modern' life" (2). Feminist standpoint theory emphasizes the importance of the location—historical, geographical, social—of the interpreter in the shaping of interpretation. When Scott urges historians to read for "the literary," she directs their attention to the role of language, images, and narratives in the production of both the subjects' and the interpreter's experience.

Ardis and Lewis use her formulation to explain the particular insights that literary critical analysis can bring to other disciplines. Their goal for the volume is to bring the traditional and the more broadly methodological meanings of "the literary" together in order to tell a new story about the past. "The literary" in the sense of aesthetic production is "itself . . . a historically contingent category" and "literary texts participate in the making of history" (3). But Scott's "literary" refers as well to the means by which people inhabit, experience, and "read" the world. Thus Ardis, Lewis, and the other contributors offer their analyses as a demonstration of how, and an explanation of why, the methods and approaches of literary criticism may be applied to the study of the past and to "experience" generally: how they may be of use to the investigations of historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and political theorists in their study of "modernity." Their objective in the volume is to bring new eyes to what may have happened in the past, but also to explore the importance of stories in the construction of experience and, therefore, to consider the possibilities their approach offers for social and political transformation. As Julian Yates explains in the concluding sentence of the final essay of the volume, the goal is "to construct a new kind of story about modernity, a story that may lead us to frame a very different kind of future" (287). For Ardis and Lewis, this attention to "the literary" is therefore a markedly (although not exclusively) feminist project, and it is in that formulation that the volume makes its most distinctive contribution.

The organization of the volume evinces both this expanded understanding of literary criticism and its feminist inflection. The first section, entitled "Negotiating the Literary Marketplace," features five author-and-text-centered essays that at once establish literary textual analysis as the methodology of the volume and challenge the implicit equation of "modernity" and "modernism" that has characterized literary studies. The second section, "Outside the Metropolis," registers the assumptions of the (feminist) politics of location in its implicit but overarching assertion that modernity...

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