Introduction: MSA Peer Seminar Cluster: Modernist Authenticities

Peer seminars have been central to intellectual exchange at the MSA conference since its inception; founding member Gail McDonald advocated importing the model from the Shakespeare Association's annual meeting as one strategy for breaking up the monotonous hegemony of three-paper panels. Yet until now there has been no rendering of the distinctive lively processes of the seminars within the pages of Modernism/modernity. After leading the seminar on "Modernist Authenticities" in Chicago, we felt we had the perfect opportunity to address this lacuna. We've tried here—both in selecting the papers from the larger group of seminar participants, and in our subsequent work with the writers—to present a cluster that reproduces the ferment of the seminars, the sense of intellectual risks being taken, of considering and revising one's hypotheses in light of the feedback from one's seminar colleagues, and of working collaboratively. Ideally, then, these short essays (kept to strict word limits better to reproduce the format of the original seminar papers) would be read together, as contributions to a communal meditation on what might constitute "authenticity" in the field of modernist studies. Each of the essays, on its own, provides original insights into the question: but the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. And this, finally, is what's most distinctive about the MSA Peer Seminars.

Our own interest in the designedly broad topic of "Modernist Authenticities" came from our shared background in popular music studies, and our suspicion that the changes in the strategic deployment of the term "authenticity" in that field would be useful for understanding (and prompting) its plural rehabilitation within modernist studies. In fact the similarities, while inexact, prove to be very suggestive. The first generation of popular-music scholars, who established a base in the university in the 1970s, began by defending the aesthetic and intellectual bona fides of the music, and "authenticity," delineated most successfully in the writing of Lawrence Grossberg (rock music's version of F.R. Leavis), proved a versatile concept with which to define the canon. As might be expected in the work of a Frankfurt School student like Grossberg, anything bearing the taint of commercial contamination was suspect: a de facto distinction between "rock" and "pop" was the result. No accident, then, that a bluesman from the Mississippi Delta who got $15 per side for his records, Robert Johnson, became the patron saint of musical authenticity; Dylan and the "next" Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, were celebrated as torch-bearers. Authenticity, thus deployed nostalgically, became a critical shibboleth—like Eliot's "the new (the really new)," one knew it when one saw it and usually, as this first generation aged, crankily, through its absence.

Later rock writers rejected the racial essentialism they saw as implicit in these early versions of "authenticity," rarely using the term without the scare quotes; rather than pointing out the racial mimicry of Elvis's cover of Big Mama Thornton's "Hound Dog," current scholarship would more likely be interested in the fact that Elvis learned the song not through the African American original, but via a cover performed by a white lounge singer. What's more: Thorton's "original" was penned by two white, Jewish kids in L.A., Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller, who themselves learned to ventriloquize African American R&B by listening to black singers on the radio. So where's the "authenticity" in this tissue of simulation?

While popular-music scholarship has yet to recuperate usefully the "authenticity" it once fetishized and later interrogated (though David Shumway's contribution here is a beginning), we suspected that given its full generation's head start, contemporary modernist studies could do so—that we've come out the other side of that dialectical process. In setting up the seminar, then, we chose not to rehearse in our shared reading familiar statements of modernist ontological insecurity like Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," but to recur to a taxonomy of possible modes of "authentic" performance (a selection from Peter Kivy...