Selling modernism

In 1917 the editors of The Little Review, the quintessential American avant-garde magazine whose motto was to “make no compromise with the public taste,” consulted a prominent advertising agent, James Howard Kehler, about plans to market the magazine. In December 1913 the poet Richard Aldington, even while espousing a vehement rhetoric of contempt for the masses, suggested hiring sandwich-board-men to march around London advertising and selling copies of The Egoist, the British organ of Imagism and aesthetic revolt for which he served as assistant editor. ¹ What are we to make of strange moments like these in the history of modernism, when modernists’ public anti-mass-market rhetoric seemed to be undercut by flirtations with consumer culture? The years 1996 and 1997 saw the publication of a number of books about the marketing of modernist art and literature, as scholars address precisely these issues.

About a decade ago, Andreas Huyssen’s much-cited study After the Great Divide (1986) gave a convenient name to the modernist antithesis between high art and mass culture. But at the same time, Huyssen complicated the Adorno/Horkheimer vision of this split, not only to suggest the necessary relationship between “High Modernism” and mass culture, but also to demarcate a corner of modernism that had a positive relationship to mass culture—what he calls avant-gardism. In the years following Huyssen’s book, new works on the cultural history of advertising in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and on advertising’s role in modernism, as well as new studies of the professionalization of literature and the history of publishing and readership, have given scholars fresh perspectives from which to approach the Great Divide. ² This trend, and recent work in cultural studies, feminism, and the study of material culture, have informed this last year’s works and brought them to an exciting level of sophistication and historical richness. The range of topics considered in Dettmar and Watt’s collection alone attests to the fact that questions about the marketing of modernism are no longer seen as irrelevant at best or belittling at worst to modernist literature.

Kevin Dettmar and Stephen Watt assembled their impressive collection of essays, Marketing Modernism: Self-Promotion, Canonization, Rereading, precisely not to belittle, as one prominent critic had interpreted such a project, but rather to explore Anglo-American modernists’ search for readers and markets. Some of these essays concern traditional questions about modernists’ concerns over money and the ideology of the professional writer—for example Daniel Morris’s “A Taste of Fortune: In the Money and Williams’ New Directions Phase,” and Joyce Wexler’s “Selling Sex as Art,” which examines the profits possible for censored books by D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce. And some, like Leonard Diepeveen’s “‘I Can Have More Than Enough Power to Satisfy Me’: T. S. Eliot’s Construction of His Audience,” and Timothy Materer’s “Make It Sell! Ezra Pound Advertises Modernism,” explore modernists’ self-positioning before audiences. Materer’s essay is especially interesting in that it explores Pound’s construction of Imagism as itself an advertising strategy, and interprets the similarities between Imagism and new advertising techniques in the commodity realm. Pound wished to avoid what he called, quoting Joyce, the “poster novelty” of the commercial realm (27), but Materer argues that the same emphasis upon the direct treatment of the “thing” appeared in both elite literary culture and in popular consumer-culture images.

In addition to essays that explore how modernists themselves interpreted and fashioned their place within a consumer culture, Michael Murphy’s “‘One Hundred Per Cent Bohemia’: Pop Decadence and the Aestheticization of Commodity in the Rise of the Slicks” explores the other side of this issue. Murphy looks at the “slicks”—glossy...