Bad Modernisms (review)

There is, it seems, no way to contain modernism. Rather than fading into the distance, the term, once attached mainly to a movement of the early twentieth century that challenged aesthetic conventions and offended mainstream audiences, has become a ubiquitous presence. It is pluralized and attached to various adjectives: post, high, pulp, black, gendered, bad. A recent study is even named Twenty-First-Century Modernism. The eleven contributors to this group of ambitious new essays are collectively dedicated to extending the reach of modernism across national and temporal borders, well beyond the original elite circle of European and American artists who fashioned the modernist canon. The essays' subjects include the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus, the romance writer E. M. Hull, Josephine Baker and Marlene Dietrich, Carlos Bulosan, Graham Greene, and W. E. B. DuBois, along with some of the usual suspects—Woolf, Auden, Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis.

The gene linking this unlikely family is "bad" in the sense of insubordinate, provocative; the spirit of defiance has survived the halo effect of canonization. The best of the essays also suggest that playing such roles exacts a price. The characters in Lisa Fluet's examples from high and pulp modernism (in her wide-ranging "Hit-Man Modernism") share a "lonely, cosmopolitan self-reliance," a freezing of affect and loss of communal ties. The "Rear-Guard" modernists of Martin Puchner's quick-witted study of the movement's manifesto writers are resentful rivals with a taste for "defensive aggression." In these and other contributions, the continuing vitality of modernism depends less on its internal coherence as a movement than on the opportunity it offers for selective affiliation without exacting the burden of filial loyalty.