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

Reviewed by:
  • Marginal Modernity: The Aesthetics of Dependency from Kierkegaard to Joyce by Leonardo F. Lisi
  • Brian O’Keeffe
Leonardo F. Lisi, Marginal Modernity: The Aesthetics of Dependency from Kierkegaard to Joyce New York: Fordham University Press, 2013, 334 pp.

Marginal Modernity: The Aesthetics of Dependency from Kierkegaard to Joyce is a book that attempts to tread a path through the theoretical thicket that has grown up around European literature of the sort described as modernist, or high modernist. The matter of “aesthetic autonomy,” as we know, is a thorny matter and a trap for the unwary. Autonomy may indeed describe the condition art won for itself when it veritably came into its own, and severed itself thereby from the domain of human praxis, but that does not mean such art ignored life, or abandoned the social world for the sake of its own mystique as art, departing for another world altogether. There are barbs and prickles standing in the way of any simple assessment of the modernism of the early twentieth century avant-garde. Too simple would be the literary history that regards “progress” as a matter of the avant-garde having moved beyond, and vigorously critiqued nineteenth-century doctrines of art for art’s sake. For what is complex, as we are constantly told by theoreticians of the avant-garde, in respect of the aesthetic praxis of the avant-garde, is deciding whether “aesthetic” is a valid qualifier for such praxis at all. Consider, as Peter Buerger asked us, the sheer promiscuity of its techniques, and how no artistic form or aesthetic doctrine has any especial validity. Consider the avant-garde in the visual arts, in which the doctrine of realism is aped, but not rejected, in the stuck-on scrap of a newspaper, and the fact that such familiar realism co-habits with more recognizably “modernist” techniques that seek to defamilarize the real by warping and morphing space, line and volume (or perhaps simply the body). Consider those collages and [End Page 356] montages—in literature, painting and film—that mix and match to such an extent that artistic making becomes a free-for-all. Once we get here, the end of any kind of aesthetic norm is nigh, as is too perhaps, the end of art itself. Can there be any point to “aesthetics,” once we reach this point? Is the very ground for discussion, whatever art form one chooses to discuss, simply moot in this case? If art lies ready-made, and as ready to hand as a urinal, there can surely be no aura anymore, haloing art and prompting us into a specific experience we might call “aesthetic.”

All this we know. For modernists, and especially for modernists who seek recourse in aesthetics, or use the term at all, this is the theoretical briar patch. So the lock engineered upon discussions of European modernism by doctrines of aesthetic autonomy on the one hand, and the doings of the avant-garde on the other, is a predicament we might now wish to release ourselves from. It is not necessarily a question of finding a third way, but of offering alternatives that are sensitive, nonetheless, to the theoretical difficulties that lie to either side. What Leonardo Lisi proposes instead is the “aesthetics of dependency.” In part, the argument is that one should descend from aesthetic theory and do some sustained reading. “Dependency” will soon emerge into view as a characterization of the strange condition of modernist texts, inasmuch as our reading is a complex experience of being solicited to deploy our usual habits of meaning-making (wanting a text to proffer itself as a meaningful whole, wanting the text to write itself into a coherent plot, and so on) but then having such habits disrupted. The text, for its part, needs those habits, depends on them, in order to work its effects upon the reader (such that we have a modernist experience), and in order to dramatize the effects of modernity upon the writing self, on the warp and woof of textuality, and on aesthetic form itself. In many ways, therefore, this is a familiar approach to literary modernism. Take Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte...

pdf