Modernism, Art & Literature

BOOK REVIEWS Bloomsbury contemporaries were reading and how the ideas in those texts appear in Woolfs novels. More recent works in science and literature have tended to reject linear "influence" models, arguing instead that literature and science are continually interacting within a fluid cultural system. In Chaosmos:Literature , Science, Theory, Philip Kuberski weaves together poetry, physics and contemporary theory, in the process providing subtle and insightful readings of a number of poems, including The Waste Land. John Rogers's recent The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton might stand as a model for future studies in science and literature; instead of arguing that one discipline has definitively influenced another, Rogers demonstrates that literature, science, and political ideologies are all inextricably intertwined. Suzanne Shimek University of California, Los Angeles Modernism, Art & Literature Daniel R. Schwarz. Reconfiguring Modernism:Explorations in the Relationship Between Modern Art and Modern Literature. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997. χ + 241 pp. Cloth $45.00 Paper $18.95 THE RELATION between modernist literature and visual art is a tempting subject yet one that, as Daniel Schwarz notes, relatively few critics have tackled. Perhaps some who were tempted may have been deterred by the difficulties of bringing these two arts together, and by an embarrassment of riches that brings with it problems of scale and coherence . Order might be imposed through a "grand theory" of modernism; but Schwarz renounces the use of Marxism, structuralism or the like. He aims instead to "reclaim the aesthetic" ( 18) as a category of cultural criticism , arguing that only the aesthetic can give us the "feel" of an Eliot poem or a Cézanne still-life, and suggest the nature of their relationship. So far, it is easy to agree; but a book on this subject still faces formidable obstacles in the execution. First, there is the danger of being overwhelmed by sheer vastness and multiplicity; and Schwarz courts this danger by launching out into the empyrean of cultural impressionism, rather than steering by the obvious existing landmarks of the field. The modernist writers in English that one thinks of first in connection with the visual arts are probably Ford, Yeats and Woolf, who had painting "in the family"; Wyndham Lewis and D. H. Lawrence, who both practiced art and wrote about it memorably; and Pound, a collector and all-round 341 ELT 41 : 3 1998 connoisseur. But Schwarz's literary analysis is mainly devoted to Conrad , T. S. Eliot, Joyce, and Wallace Stevens. Woolf does figure substantially , and Schwarz's discussion of Lily Briscoe's painting in To the Lighthouse is one of the most convincing and imaginative sections of his book. Even here, though, he makes his approach by way of Impressionism and Post-impressionism while passing over what is closest to hand, in Woolfs intimacy with Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. A salient tendency in current modernist studies is the close study of the immediate social, political and economic context in which modernist works were produced. Some of this work may be rigid and short-sighted, but most of it offers us a firmer grasp on this immensely complex movement . We know much more now about, for example, Futurism's impact on Lewis and Lawrence, or Pound's involvement with the market for Gaudier-Brzeska's art. Apart from this knowledge of modernist nuts and bolts, every modernist critic benefits by having an "eye," as Hugh Kenner demonstrates so effectively in The Pound Era. Schwarz prefers, however, to develop his themes by way of analogy and generalization, rather than mine the archives or examine the proximities of modernist art and literature that are evident "at a glance." In a short review, it is best to give some examples of Schwarz's method, for the reader to judge their usefulness. The chapter on James's The Turn of the Screw and Manet offers this: "Do we not see affinities between the Impressionists and the naturalism and realism of Zola, Moore, and Bennett (who lived in Paris in the 1880s) and the exoticism of Wilde?" (54). Yes, we do see affinities but too many of them, perhaps, for comfort; and we see discontinuities as well. Are...