Modernism/modernity

Hayot, Eric, 1972-
Bad Modernisms (review)
Modernism/modernity - Volume 14, Number 2, April 2007, pp. 364-365

The Johns Hopkins University Press

Eric Hayot - Bad Modernisms (review) - Modernism/modernity 14:2 Modernism/modernity 14.2 (2007) 364-365 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Reviewed by Eric Hayot University of Arizona Bad Modernisms. Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, eds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. Pp. vii + 365. $89.95 (cloth); $24.95 (paper). There are many kinds of badness in the world, and they run from genuine wickedness to indeliberate stupidity, from hypocrisy to the secret goodness of the radical misbehaver (everyone's favorite mode: Jesse James, James Dean, James Joyce, Storm Jameson). At various moments modernism and its avatars have been accused of each of these, and of course, modernism being a complex and capacious object (more than ever these days), each of these accusations has rung the tinny bell of truth. You could tell a story about modernism's critical fortunes that begins with the perception of a profoundly "good" badness (the disobedient laughter of dada, the formal disintegrations of the avant-garde) and ends, after the critical revisions of the 1980s that tied modernism to...