Modern Lives: A Cultural Re-Reading of “The Lost Generation” by Marc Dolan (review)

BookReviews 209 Oboler concludes what I consider to be an exemplary work on the politics of naming in the context of government policy with a clearly articulated appeal and demonstrated need for more research, together with a wellargued rationale for fostering appreciation of the diversity of all "minority" groups among today's students if we are to realize commitments to social responsibility. Having found only occasional sites in the text where I would have appreciated additional problematization of perspectives and contexts, and having been impressed by the meticulous research of a wide range of materials (outlined in a very useful "Selected Bibliography"), I look forward to Oboler's future publications. On the whole, Ethnic Labels, Latino Lives is a significant and accessible resource that will serve a wide variety of socially-conscious readers including students and scholars of policy, sociology, gender, women's studies, literature, culture, history, and diversity studies. M11rie Lovrod Hunter College Marc Dolan. Modern Lives:A Cultural Re-Readingof "TheLost Generation." West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press, 1996. Pp. 253. Bya number of different apocryphal accounts, Gertrude Stein first heard the phrase that she used to describe Ernest Hemingway and his coevals from an automobile mechanic on the road in rural France. Convinced that readers chronically failed to give proper attention to her major works in preference for aphorisms and hearsay, Stein would surely not have been surprised to learn that the words "lost generation" have endured. Seventy years later, however, the expression is now a staple of undergraduate overgeneralisation; its usefulness for anything beyond a quick and approximate reference to the figures of a vastly more complex literary era has long since diminished. Marc Dolan's new study assumes the ambitious task of both attempting to reveal the limitations of this phrase while working to some extent to rehabilitate it. While lamenting the tendency to view the 1920s as simply the era of the "lost generation," Dolan still values the durability of its associated historical model. So, in an attempt to trace the affinities between the recognised personalities of American expatriation and a greater assortment of literary figures of the 1920s and 1930s, he hopes to refigure the "lost generation" as 210 Canadian Review of American Stu~tes simply one important piece of a larger cultural puzzle. But if this makes for an ambitious and resourceful book, Modern Liues: A Cultural Re-Reading al "The Lost Generation" struggles to rise above the tension that underlines Dolan's basic premise. He claims quite validly that the emphasis on multiplicity that seeks to endow the "lost generation" with a new relevancy for the late twentieth century does not necessarily undermine the status of its works as important canonical texts of American modernism. Dolan sees the adoption and recognition of a cultural dominant as inevitable, and he defines his task here as a desire to make it more inclusive. But while one might well agree that the canonical works of expatriate writers should not be displaced by a wholesale reversion to a counter canon that is equally narrow and restrictive, the recontextualisation of the twentieth century canon serves to highlight the limitations of long-accepted works and, ultimately, to weaken the status of the "lost generation" and its achievement. This study proceeds from a recognition of the interesting shift that saw individuals born during the 1890s move from being referred to as the "younger" generation in the period directly after the first world war, when Americans developed an interest in these labels, to the "lost" generation. The European lament of Stein's mechanic for a coeval group "lost" in the war became for Americans the censure of a "lost11 generation of moral decay. This suggestion of moral critique was best captured in books like Frederick Lewis Allen's Only Yesterday. But while subsequent works like Malcolm Cowley's Exile's Return shared the critical spirit of Allen's approach, Dolan perceptively points out that the eventual autobiographical works of the "lost generation" coevals marked a movement from moral to cultural critique. As it turned out, these types of texts helped. rejuvenate and further the reputation of figures like F. Scott Fitzgerald through the 1940s and 1950s. More importantly, the...