Joseph Frank on Dostoevsky and Modernity

In the essays published in Responses to Modernity Joseph Frank is as committed to the unexpended spirit as he was in his own life. Nineteen pieces gathered here—some from the fifties, some from a few years ago—celebrate his intellectual strength and moral clarity, for they with certainty limn their cultures and dramatize the poses, stages, and attitudes that lead literary men and women to their greatest accomplishments. Frank's modest manner and his generous inclusiveness make his work a memorable example of a continuing humanism of which in these parlous times we cannot have too much. To know itself, modernism had to establish its own standards. This it did between 1910 and 1930. Published shortly before the end of Frank's life (he died on February 27, 2013, aged ninety-four), this small book doesn't cite everyone who contributed to modernism, but it does describe all the forces and name the names central to the age. Excellent in itself, like Frank's "spatial form," it marks a fresh excellence.

He was born Joseph Nathaniel Glassman on October 6, 1918, on New York's Lower East Side and his father died a half a dozen years later. He and his brother, Walter, subsequently moved with their mother, Jennifer, who had remarried, and their stepfather, William Frank, to Sheepshead Bay. A stammer that later kept Joseph out of military service had hindered him in high school, where a librarian, who knew he had won national essay competitions, helped him attend lectures at the New School. He even attended classes at New York University; but, when his mother and stepfather died within the year, he was left penniless. He moved to Madison, Wisconsin, where he studied briefly at the university while establishing residency before applying to a program sympathetic to Jewish scholars. America entered the war and the young Frank took an editorial job at the Bureau of National Affairs.

Three years later this magazine under Allen Tate published Frank's breakthrough essay "Spatial Form in Modern Literature" in three installments (Sewanee Review, spring, summer, autumn 1945). During the next several years, the New Critics caught on, some seeing his theory as a formal definition of the aesthetic experimentations of the preceding two decades, and others taking it to apply to literature far outside the modern movement and soon uniting it with structuralism. Frank himself said in 1981 that "the theories of this critical movement have shown not only that spatial form is a concept relevant to a particular phenomenon of avant-garde writing but also that it plays a role, even if only a subordinate one, throughout the entire history of literature." In a later essay, after he had dived deeply into Dostoevsky and learned to read Russian, he wrote that, like Mikhail Bakhtin, whom he greatly admired, "Many years ago, also inspired by a reading of William Worringer, I made a somewhat similar attempt myself—not for an individual writer but for an entire style, the style of modern experiment in the language in both poetry and prose. This was the origin of my concept of 'spatial form,' the tendency of modernist writers to undergo or circumvent the linear time-nature of language, which I interpreted as the expression of a negation of history and a return to the mythical imagination." In 1991 the essay metamorphosed into a book, The Idea of Spatial Form, published by Rutgers.

A number of the essays in Responses to Modernity are particularly subtle, profound, and powerfully theoretic; but in none is Frank's kind but astutely critical approach clearer than in "The Novel in Wonderland," a review of two English critics' histories of the novel, both of which he finds limited in scope and sadly deficient in understanding. In response to one critic's comparing Avellaneda's false Quixote to Cervantes's part II, Frank points out that "this...