Disciplining Modernism (review)

Regardless of the ongoing debates over its historical duration, geographical expansion, and stylistic definition, modernism is not normally considered as a discipline. There are no university departments of Modernist Studies. However, the terms "modernism" and "modernity" are keenly debated in many of the professional disciplines studied in universities and, although there are many points of difference and disagreement in subjects across the social sciences and humanities, the usage of a conception of being modern or modernist, or being related to modernity, can probably be found across most departments within these faculties, whether in law or literature, politics or philology. Different disciplines study particular texts and practices they understand to be "modernist" and, in so doing, they discipline the parameters of that object of knowledge. Or, as Michel Foucault once put it, a discipline is a "principle of control over the production of discourse."¹

Is modernism, however, better grasped as "interdisciplinary avant la lettre," as the editor of Disciplining Modernism asserts (9)? Pamela Caughie's stimulating book of essays attempts to both consider how professional disciplines as diverse as anthropology, sociology, and the visual arts, have controlled the production of discourses of modernism and modernity, while also proposing that the most profitable way to understand these deeply contested terms is by means of a "'genuinely interdisciplinary' field of modernist studies" (3). Caughie's deft introduction surveys the emergence of the "new modernist studies" over the last decade or so and finds that while much of this work was pioneered by literary scholars, the thrust of the work was always in the name of interdisciplinarity, a trope that itself echoes the manner in which early twentieth-century modernism spread across the arts of literature, painting, architecture, music, dance, et al. Disciplining Modernism thus sets itself some grand aims: to introduce this new interdisciplinary field of modernist studies; to explore how modernism has shaped and been conceived by various disciplines; and, most tentatively of all, to offer some provisional definitions of the terms "modern," "modernity," and "modernism" themselves.

The first three essays, in different ways, tackle some of these key questions and form an impressive opening to the book, pursuing the implications of envisaging modernism and modernity without conventional disciplinary borders. An important essay by Susan Stanford Friedman on the definitional conundrums facing contemporary modernist studies—first published in a 2001 issue of Modernism/modernity and reprinted as the first chapter of the book—acts as a point of reference for many of the other contributors. Thus, Stephen Ross offers a provocative and insightful critique of Friedman's essay, in particular for her aestheticization of modernity as a category, and argues for the uncanny nature of a modernist studies that is eager but unable to escape from the limitations of earlier definitions of modernism. Jessica Berman then explores the implications of another key point in Friedman's article: that postcolonial theory has provoked modernist studies to re-think the boundaries and borders of the field to include work outside of the Anglo-American and European canon of writers and artists. Berman suggests that a "comparative modernist studies" (69) might take us beyond what she describes as an homogenising "international modernism," pointedly stating: "There can be no avoiding the task of approaching different modernisms differently" (61).

Not surprisingly, given its high aims, the rest of the book does not quite live up to the intellectual challenges laid down in these opening chapters. We get plenty of different modernisms—such as Mary Lou Emery's elegant outline of a Caribbean "countermodernism"—but not that many chapters that think modernism differently. Garry Leonard does take up this challenge, viewing cultural modernism not as a representation of modernity, but as a symptom of its deprivations. But his theoretical model is driven by Lacan's account of subjectivity as desire and lack; in 2012, this can hardly be described as approaching modernism differently. However, taken on their own terms, some of the most successful chapters are those that engage with smaller topics within the enlarged panoply of modernist studies. Strong essays...