Editor's Introduction

This issue is, for the most part, Benjaminian, by which I mean that quite a number of the articles testify, in some way or other, to the pervasive influence of the critical tools and dialectical analyses developed by the German critic Walter Benjamin; these include the conceptual couples of auratic versus non-auratic art, of myth versus history, of messianic promise versus archeological recapitulation. This surprising and productive convergence derives in great part from the fact that many of our contributors decided to work on authors from the thirties or to take this period as a point of reference, an ideological nodal point that has to be reinvested imaginatively, as Muriel Spark did in her brilliant novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Indeed, for most of us who are interested in twentieth-century modernism, the thirties appear as a testing ground, a moment when the political polarization brought about by the rise of totalitarian regimes and a global economic crisis seemed to condemn or cancel previous decades marked by more or less "innocent" stylistic experimentation. In his groundbreaking essays, Walter Benjamin repeatedly analyzed the tension between revealing mythical images stolen from the past and a more critical historical analysis—in other words a tension between dialectical materialism and a mystical or theological belief in a "messianicity" (to quote Derrida) that keeps the openness of the future while presenting a sharper perspective on the present. A central insight of Walter Benjamin, later echoed by Adorno in Minima Moralia, is aptly quoted by Roger Bellin in his essay on Breton: "The only philosophy which can be responsibly practiced in face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere technique. Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will one day appear in the messianic light." Thus for Breton, in the end, only love would provide a way to reconcile a future that was to remain future and a neo-Hegelian understanding of past history.

Most of the writers discussed in these pages tend to combine surprise and prophecy, historical understanding and new perspectives on art, culture, and society. For them, the present offers some hope for an awakening from the shackles of capitalistic alienation while betraying its determination by the grim specters of the past. Such a tangle of themes provides a common starting point, or the lineaments of a general problematic linking art and politics for most of the authors gathered in this issue: Roger Bellin, who in "Retrospection and Prophecy in the Structure of Mad Love" analyzes ideological contradictions in Breton's prose text; Nathaniel Mills, who follows the ramifications of the image of electricity, which is both a sign of alienation and a mark of power in "The Dialectic of Electricity: Kenneth Fearing, Walter Benjamin, and a Marxist Aesthetic"; and Carla Billitteri, whose "William Carlos Williams and the Politics of Form" interprets Williams's Objectivism by comparison with the esthetics of the German "New Objectivity," so as to make sense of the opposition between an auratic and a non-auratic art. A second web of images and questions that can be described as no less "Benjaminian" surfaces again in a cluster of three other essays. In "Dubliners' IOU: The Aesthetics of Exchange in 'After the Race' and 'Two Gallants,'" Carey Mickalites pays attention to the dynamics of capitalistic exchange and to the Marxist logic of fetishism as it is deployed by Joyce. Meanwhile, Roy Benjamin connects Joyce's last text with the history of urban development marked by destruction and the influx of money and power in "Creative Destruction in Finnegans Wake: The Rise and Fall of the Modern City." Then Karen Bishop retraces the subtle enmeshing of historical documents and imaginative fiction in a contemporary recycling of the Eva Peron myth in "Myth Turned Monument: Documenting the Historical Imaginary in Buenos Aires."

Another section moves from late modernism, seen as poised between...