Moving Through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism by Andrew Thacker (review)

Andrew Thacker’s Moving through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism, recently reissued as a paperback, is an exciting book and an agenda-setting text. It should be read by all Joyceans who are interested in the future of culturalist and historicist approaches to James Joyce’s oeuvre and to various modernisms. It will soon be two decades since Joyce was first read as a postcolonial writer; at much the same time, a whole political-cultural turn in Joyce studies was born, beginning with Cheryl Herr’s ground-breaking Joyce’s Anatomy of Culture.¹ Many of the questions raised by this phase of Joyce scholarship remain to be answered, and whole areas of investigation still await scholars. Nevertheless, scholarly fashion having its own trajectory that need not conform to any rational research agendas, it seems clear that what might be called the “representations” model of cultural studies is in abeyance, and we are entering an exciting new phase in which directly allegorical or ideological readings are becoming more rare. Rather than see this as a loss, it can be viewed as a sign of critical progress: now that the idea that Joyce’s texts are political is more or less accepted—and indeed has become a completely respectable critical truism—it is time to develop subtler models of the massive pervasiveness of regimes of power in all their complexity, which animate cultural productions of all kinds. Thacker’s book is one project in this direction, pointing the way beyond more conventional cultural-studies models of reading towards a sense of modernist texts as implicated in hitherto undiscerned ways in the rhizomatic power structures dreamed up in modernity. Thacker takes the matter of space and its enfolding in modernism as his own critical route beyond cultural studies as we know it. This is an excellent and concise book in terms of the investigation it sets itself; that is, it is a fine survey of the ways in which spaces are represented in modernist fictions. Moreover, it is a highly suggestive volume, in that the topic of space, and more particularly that of movement within it, offers one path towards a new critical theory of modernism. Specifically, the study of space in Thacker’s terms and beyond might point the way to new post-postcolonial studies.

I should be clear that Moving through Modernity does not set out to make for itself most of the grand claims of the type outlined above. With commendable modesty, it initially presents the range of important work in recent decades mainly by British geographers and French theorists who have engaged with the issue of space and then explores how their insights might be useful in innovative readings of the spatial dynamics of work by E. M. Forster, Ezra Pound, and other Imagists, Joyce in Ulysses, Virginia Woolf, and Jean Rhys. The introduction and the first chapter, “Theorizing Space and Place in Modernism,” offer nothing less than a graduate seminar in miniature as they survey the field of the “new geography” and deftly summarize the impact of Martin Heidegger and Gaston Bachelard, treating in detail the central work in this area of Henri Lefebvre.² Then they move on to Michel Foucault’s short, seminal essay “Of Other Spaces” (his early-career manifesto) and Michel de Certeau’s famous work on micro-resistance in spaces, and they culminate with the crucial work of David Harvey, who carries on the Lefebvrean tradition.³ All this sets the scene for the American dissemination of these ideas, especially in the work of Fredric Jameson on “cognitive mapping” and on British work by John Urry, Doreen Massey, and many others.⁴ Thacker then explores how all of these ideas matter to modernism: he considers the representation of actual spaces, especially of the city, and how new technologies altered the perception of spaces (a topic brilliantly explored by Stephen Kern in The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918⁵).Thacker looks...