Genders, Races and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908-1934 (review)

Genders, Races and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908-1934. Rachel Blau DuPlessis. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xiv + 238. $64.95 (cloth); $22.95 (paper).

Despite its ambitious title this is a short book; it does not, fortunately, intend to be comprehensive on the subjects of genders, races, and religious cultures. Rather, and far more usefully, it provides a strategy of reading for information on these topics in and their impact on modernist poetry, which has often been considered apart from its sociological or demographic milieux. Perhaps because its canon is a relative late-comer to academic respectability, studies in modern poetry have been slower to adopt the historicist orientation sweeping more established fields like Shakespeare studies or Romanticism. Venues like this journal and the now-yearly New Modernisms conference of the Modernist Studies Association are going some distance toward redressing this aculturalist shortcoming in conventional modernist studies. DuPlessis's study offers a specific methodological tool for how a politically engagé historicism can happily co-exist with and even enhance (imagine that!) a literary-aesthetic reading experience.

DuPlessis proposes a method she calls "social philology," a term both catchy and alarming in its oxymoronicity, as it summons the ghost of a bygone era of desiccated word-parsing and stagnant etymological quibbling--the "it's a tough job but someone's got to do it" approach to words and their affective, sociohistorical, and denotative resonances. She reawakens the spirit of careful, nuanced attention necessary for various forms of close reading, but does so with a generosity that supersedes a rigid relationship between words and their history. Instead she encourages a wide-ranging, associative approach to "philology"-- including aural phenomena like homonyms, embedded or "encrypted" words (seeing the word "white" emanating from within the word "whit" in Countee Cullen's "Incident," for example), as well as a form of etymological study that resembles Nietzsche's or Robert Duncan's. This loose, imaginative etymological study stresses simultaneity and interplay (the coexistence of all past and current meanings of a word in the usage under discussion, rather than a linear supersession of one meaning by another), and, most importantly, emphasizes the ideological significance of all these intricate interactions of word-meanings within a poem, which in turn functions within a sociohistorical and biographical context. Equal attention to the outlying context surrounding poetry's production, distribution, and reception, and to its inner workings will reveal how mutually imbricated, constitutive, and reflective these are.

In its emphasis on method and ample instantiation, this book is admirably pedagogical. The range of possibilities opened up by a "social philology" is refreshingly multivalent, though as in a classroom where one says, "Okay let's take a stab at what a difficult or key passage in a poem means; don't forget there are no wrong answers," one can expect a variety of results from the banal to the brilliant, all of which work together to generate new socially inflected readings. This is all to the good, however, as banality is an oft-banished subject from discussions of high modernism, and deserves to be reintegrated into the conversation beyond Andreas Huyssen's useful but limited opposition of modernism (brilliance)/mass culture (banality), which, of course, invokes the banal only to show how "High Modernism" cordoned it off definitively.

A minute digression, speaking of banality: DuPlessis does not include much poetry that is not already well known in the modernist canon; one moment when she does so is the discussion of the (by me) much-appreciated "Hebrews" (1922), a bit of "banal propaganda" by James Oppenheimer: "I come of a mighty race...mighty race! mighty race! --my flesh, my flesh / Is a cup of song, / Is a well in Asia" (146). The verse is quoted in contrast to Ezra Pound's, T. S. Eliot's, and other non-Jewish poets' association of Jews with dirt and diseased flesh. A culturally engaged poetic...