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1 Arresting Poetry Kitsch, Totality, Expression Unpopular Pop Once upon a time, long before it had been reduced to a synonym for mediocrity in the arts, the term “kitsch” functioned as a lightning rod in debates about mass culture and the fate of modernism confronting the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. For a word now applied quite casually to trivial and spurious things, “kitsch” has a surprising history of provoking alarm and extreme reactions: Hermann Broch called kitsch “the element of evil in the value system of art.”1 Theodor Adorno refers to kitsch as “poison” and, drawing upon the German etymology of the term, as “artistic trash.”2 Clement Greenberg later refers to the “looting” and “traps” associated with kitsch, to its criminal aspect.3 In these same essays, the “evil” of kitsch acquires an array of sinister qualities: it is said to be at once parasitic, mechanical, and pornographic; a “decorative cult” and a “parody of catharsis.”4 These attributions—always linked to a presumption of complicit , indulgent pleasure—acquire specific and sometimes contradictory historical contours in Broch’s and Greenberg’s assertions about the correlation of kitsch and fascism.5 In addition, noting the presumed affinities between the mimeticism of kitsch and homosexuality, Andrew Hewitt claims that kitsch “marks the aesthetic meeting point of homosexuality and fascism for the contemporary cultural imagination.”6 The focal point of these accusations, the term “kitsch” was introduced into art criticism by modernist writers to identify (and condemn) productions of mass culture. Things characterized as kitsch, the original doctrine asserts, are derivative, sentimental, trivial, stereotypical, and therefore contrary to the values of true art. Kitsch is an object of complacent and harmless gratification, yet it bears an indelible moral stain: it flourishes in the 2 My Silver Planet shadow of its bad name. The discourse of kitsch thus acknowledges an important new source of aesthetic pleasure, even as it sponsors frequently vicious attacks on such pleasure. This ambivalence is reinforced by the fact that kitsch has never been embraced as an aesthetic category by any particular collective or subcultural formation (unlike, for example, the gay community’s adoption of camp). Kitsch survives without a halo of collective identification—without belonging, it seems, to any group. In addition, the fugitive aspect of the term now appears to have been overtaken by a vague sense that its orientation toward popular culture is outdated: the very idea of kitsch may be an anachronism. If relations between elite and popular cultures are now changing in fundamental ways, then perhaps the category of kitsch is irrelevant, moribund. For all of these reasons, kitsch continues to evoke, despite the apparent simplicity and innocence of its pleasures, a sense of ambivalence and polarization ; the concept seems to be in perpetual flux, lacking clear definition, unsteady. As a result, the exact meaning of kitsch remains elusive in fundamental ways: it is commonly confused with camp and occasionally even with art itself. Theories about where and when kitsch originated are usually inexact and unconvincing; answers to the question of whether kitsch has a basic affinity with one art or medium have shifted erratically over time. Today, kitsch tends to be associated primarily with visual or material culture , yet the inaugural essays on the subject in the 1920s and 1930s identify poetry as a crucial matrix for the development of kitsch. Modernist definitions of kitsch refer (as I will explain in subsequent chapters ) to various canonical and noncanonical poets as a way of illustrating the features of kitsch and its wider cultural significance. Embedded in the essays I cited earlier is the idea that the cultural history of elite poetry, especially its relation to everyday language—to the vernacular—offers a crucial framework for understanding kitsch as an index of tensions (and transactions) between elite and popular cultures. Kitsch is therefore confusing and even incoherent today in part because its true history remains a secret history: a genealogy—reaching back to the early eighteenth century—in which poetry stands at the very source. Tracing this lineage, our assumptions about kitsch as a category of material culture will be called into question by viewing it through the matrix of poetry and poetics, even as the face of modern poetry will begin to look rather strange, and perhaps even disturbing, when it is seen from the perspective of kitsch. The vehemence of the modernist campaign against kitsch demonstrates [3.15.4.244] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 10...

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