In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

ELT 47 : 1 2004 most endearing figure treated in this book because he is "the most generously disposed towards the human—at least in theory. It is not the posthuman or the nonhuman that is the object of Beckett's quest, but the human" (183). There are a number of problems with this Beckettian quest (e.g., the human does not exist), but I, for one, enjoyed meeting Sheehan's Beckett more than anyone else's—and even more than his Conrad, Lawrence, or Woolf. KRISTIN BLUEMEL --------------------------- Monmouth University Victorian Modernism Jessica R. Feldman. Victorian Modernism: Pragmatism and the Varieties of Aesthetic Experience. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. xiii + 261pp. $60.00 "FROM THE MODERNISM that you want," the poet David Antin has quipped, "you get the postmodernism you deserve." It is an adage that applies nicely to Jessica R. Feldman's argument: from the modernism that she wants, she gets the Victorianism she would have us think was central. Her "Victorian Modernism" (1837-1945) consists of four "critical discourses"—"sentiment, sublimity, domesticity, and aestheticism " (2-3)—as they manifest themselves in the work of four exemplary Victorians, two British, two American (16): John Ruskin ("art critic"), Dante Gabriel Rossetti ("poet and painter"), Augusta Evans ("popular domestic novelist") and William James ("scientist and philosopher"). James belongs here, so Feldman contends, because his Pragmatism, defined as the "anti-dogmatic, anti-metaphysical, anti-foundational, anti-positivist, anti-systematic" (2), subsumes the four categories cited above. Victorian Modernism, a.k.a Victorian Pragmatism, is thus a special way of understanding sentiment, sublimity, domesticity, and aestheticism . And it seems to cover such diverse cases as the fiction of Marcel Proust, the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, and the satire of Vladimir Nabokov. Victorian Modernists, moreover, don't distinguish sharply between "life" and "art," and their works explore—here comes the magic number four again!—a "filigree of four major . . . strands": "the artist herself, the actual worlds in which that artist participates... the work of art, and the audience" (4). These terms—artist, audience, work, and the reality to which the work refers—are familiar to us from the classic studies of Roman Jakobson and, later, Meyer Abrams, carried out more than fifty years ago. For Jakobson, the four terms were the poles that defined the dominants of 90 BOOK REVIEWS literary criticism: the relation of work to "reality" (the mimetic), of artist to work (the expressionist), artist to audience (the affective), and concentration on the work itself (the formalist). Why, then, should these poles be somehow peculiar to Victorian Modernism? It is a question Feldman never answers. She is sensitive to the fact that "a rich critical literature reading Modernism across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries " already exists. But whereas most such studies define the modernist work as a form of resistance to "spiritual crisis," and "exile from the homeland of certainty," resulting in an "autonomous art," Feldman defines the link between the Victorians and moderns as, on the contrary, their concern for "tenderness, pleasure, beauty, playfulness, fascination " (4). Seek and ye shall find. By limiting herself to a highly particular set of Anglo-American authors and largely ignoring the roots of modernism as they took hold on the Continent, Feldman is able to come up with a coherent picture of an aesthetic-cultural complex that we might call the sentiment-cum-sublime camp in later nineteenth / earlier twentieth century Anglophone culture. In the introduction, Feldman's exemplar of this complex is—and here she does choose a European—Proust, evidently because he was a disciple of Ruskin's. Proust's great novel is so rich and varied that one can find in it almost any emotion or aesthetic trait one is looking for. Foregrounding the quite untypical third-person narrative of Un Amour de Swann (less than a tenth of the novel), Feldman finds her four categories: sentiment (Swann's sympathy for Vinteuil ), aestheticism (Swann's profound love of art), sublimity (Swann's recognition of Vinteuil's genius) and domesticity (the emergence of Vinteuil 's art from the "richness of daily life in Combray," 14). To characterize Proust's great phantasmagoric novel as domestic will strike most readers as more than a little...

pdf

Share