Guide to Modernisms

BOOK REVIEWS Guide to Modernisms Peter NichoUs. Modernisms: A Literary Guide. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. xiii + 368 pp. Cloth $50.00 Paper $16.00 THE FIRST obvious strength of this new literary guide to modernism , reflected in NichoUs's choice of title, is its insistence on viewing modernism as a plurality of intersecting aesthetic theories and practices rather than the monolithic movement some critics have attempted to construct. NichoUs argues that many studies of modernism lack a sufficiently complex understanding of what constitutes a political stance and where it might be located; i.e., they ignore the inscription of political ideologies within literary styles (NichoUs specifically targets John Carey's The Intellectuals and the Masses—a harsh critique of modernism 's reactionary politics—as an example of this kind of oversimplification ). NichoUs thus identifies the "main subject" of his book as the "translation of politics into style, and the tensions it reflects between the social and the aesthetic." In order to focus effectively on this particular topic, NichoUs finds it necessary to begin with the early traces of modernism in Baudelaire and the French symbolists and to then concentrate primarily on the various avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century. NichoUs locates modernism's tendency toward a "grounding of the aesthetic in an objectification of the other" in the complex conditions of modernity itself, and suggests that this aesthetic negotiation of the other might very well "constitute the recurring problem of the later modernisms." No general formula in NichoUs's preface, however, does justice to the rich explorations he goes on to offer in the individual chapters. Rather than aim at completeness or comprehensiveness, NichoUs has chosen to proceed through close analytic readings of particular texts and authors, bringing together movements, personalities and specific works from French, German, Russian, Italian and English artistic movements. After a general introduction outlining various cultural developments in the nineteenth century, NichoUs begins with Baudelaire and then moves through symbolism (Rimbaud, Mallarmé), decadence (Verlaine, de l'IsleAdam , Huysmans, Pater, Swinburne), Italian Futurism (Marinetti, Ungaretti), Cubism (Picasso, Braque, Apollinaire), Russian Futurism (Khlebnikov, Mayakovsky, Kruchenykh), Expressionism (Rilke, Kandinsky , Trakl, Kokoschka), the "Men of 1914" (Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Lewis), "Other Modernisms" (Stein, H.D., Williams, Stevens), Dada and Neo105 ELT 40:1 1997 Classicism (Tzara, Duchamp, Artaud), High Modernism (the men of 1914 plus Woolf), and Surrealism (primarily Breton). In the book's introduction, "Ironies of the Modern" (one of its most useful sections), NichoUs outlines the political and economic developments in nineteenth-century Europe within and against which various modernisms develop and define themselves. The significant developments he identifies include the following: the process whereby capitalism 's emphasis on innovation and diversification in production simultaneously reproduces the same political and economic relations of production; the resulting link between economic and industrial progress on the one hand and cultural stagnation on the other, a social dynamic which eventually produces a gulf between what NichoUs labels bourgeois modernity and aesthetic modernity; the emergence of a new modern urban subject, hypersensitive, distracted and at times irrational ; art's separation of itself from traditional bourgeois principles of utility and social obligation; the rejection of the political optimism associated with romanticism's linking of poetic vision and social transformation ; the emergence of an aesthetic aristocracy (ruled by the dandy) to replace the traditional political, economic and social aristocracy decaying at the hands of capitalist society; the dialectical relation between the artist and the city—the artist first immersing himself in the city and then withdrawing to an ironic distance or escaping into a mythical/pastoral fantasy in order to save himself from absolute dispersion into the crowd; the perpetual devaluation and hollowing-out of the material realm in commodity culture which establishes allegory (the dead or frozen historical image) as a prevailing artistic trope. Another major strength of the book is its attention to gender—its acknowledgment that manipulations of gender constructions are central to the formal and thematic developments of all modernisms, and to the politics they represent. NichoUs recognizes, for example, that "the masochistic turning back inherent in the decadent style necessarily encrypted within it a guilty and fascinated sense of the male's feminization . If modernism...