Invisible Bullets: A Return to the 1910s in American Literary Studies

The 1910s occupy a strange place in the US literary critical imagination, simultaneously overly familiar and startlingly unknown. On the one hand, everyone recognizes the consequentiality of these years, as a matter of watershed historical events as well as seismic shake-ups of literary and artistic practice. Virginia Woolf famously observed that sometime “on or around December 1910” human character changed (4); Willa Cather described “1922 or thereabouts” as the fault line where the world broke in two (v). Although neither author wrote with a specifically US frame of reference in mind, the threshold dates they offer bookend a decade of American experience we have learned readily to associate with literary and historical upheaval.

On the other hand, and as the discrepancy between Woolf’s and Cather’s dates suggests, the 1910s in themselves often disappear in this process of putative recognition. If 1910 and 1922 are both radical rips in time, how do we talk about the no-man’s land in between? Where does its substance lie? What does its materiality consist of? What are the exemplary texts of this period, and how do we conceive of them? Indeed, when we talk about the 1910s, are we really talking about this decade at all, or rather talking through visions of temporality that come from the outside, and that seem always to be rushing their way through, imposing their distributions of the visible on, and making a self-referential vanishing-point of those years?

At least three problems inform our difficulties in coming to terms with US literature, culture, and history of the 1910s. One is a retrospective approach to the decade, often operating in the name of “modernism,” which engages the value and interest of these years backwards through the primary concern, interest, and vantage of literary expression of the 1920s and 1930s. Here, the world of the former becomes visible principally in light of and in relation to the world as it is engaged by the latter, and at the limits, the former becomes little more than an empty, existentialized, symbolic threshold of the latter (often “the War”). A second prospective approach complements this problem. This critical mode generally reaches back to various moments in the nineteenth century to identify large historical forces and factors to articulate expansive conceptions of US modernity, of which the 1910s are a fundamentally continuous, integral, and symptomatic part. There is helpful debunking here of singularized changes attributed to the 1910s that are actually part of a much larger modern whole, but often at the expense of a highly selective or fly-over relation to the decade in its own sinews of autonomous complexity. The prospective approach tends to overgeneralize the 1910s in its own wider images of “modernity,” just as the retrospective approach tends to overparticularize those years through the looking glass of “modernism.” Both of these problems, moreover, are reinforced by a third disciplinary problem that situates them: the fact that the 1910s represent an uncertain, ragged edge of intellectual territory where scholars of the long nineteenth century and “new” modernist studies meet on a kind of darkling plain with uneven exchanges of vocabulary, knowledge, and reciprocity—all necessary, but substantially underdetermined in the tabula that would make it possible for the 1910s to speak for themselves.

Although squarely before our eyes and repeatedly on our lips, the 1910s remain a deceptively undiscovered country—the most undermapped and in some sense unmappable of all the decades of American literary modernity, and an object of study defined by its propensity for disappearance. This is a matter of some concern because as a matter of international range, domestic political and constitutional developments, latitude in artistic and cultural production and media, and overall elasticity of imagination, the 1910s are easily the equal in interest and consequence of any decade in US history. They are of particular interest, furthermore, in what I...