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Reviewed by:
  • The Modernist Nation: Generation Renaissance and Twentieth-Century American Literature
  • Michael A. Antonucci
The Modernist Nation: Generation Renaissance and Twentieth-Century American Literature. By Michael Soto. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. 2003.

Working within contours etched by twentieth-century critical, political, and scholarly discourse, Michael Soto’s The Modernist Nation: Generation Renaissance and Twentieth-Century American Literature announces that the study of literary modernism produced by writers from the United States remains a field where illuminating connections and significant structural features continue to emerge. Citing the outpouring of scholarship on American modernism that has come forth since the middle half of the 1990s, he locates his work within this conversation. He suggests that “if the last decade provides any indication of things to come” the American century has given way to what “may turn out to be ‘the modernist American Studies century’” (4). [End Page 170]

Soto explains that his project in Modernist Nation was motivated by a simple method and mode of inquiry. He sets his discussion of literary modernism in the United States within “the broadest possible” terms and uses a set of “almost embarrassingly inductive” questions to direct an investigation of American modernist movements, examining various well-known historis and encyclopedias of American literature (5). Charting the principles and definitions of modernism generated by these texts and conversations, Soto establishes a basic, but significant, pattern of organization and suggests that while a number of the movements identified as American modernism were associated with “a journal, a university, or both” and a relatively small number were linked to “a clearly articulated aesthetically program,” most were named and identified in “socio-historical rather than aesthetic” terms (6). By doing so over the course of Modernist Nation, Soto presents American literary modernism, bundled in a succession of generations and renaissances.

Listing his evidence, naming the “Younger, Lost, Beat, Silent, X, and scores of immigrant generations and identifying the Chicago, Little, Harlem, Southern, San Francisco, Chicano, Native American, and Queer renaissances,” Soto surveys a set of critical and theoretic limits for American literary modernism. To do so, he conjures pairings that consider modernist writers from the United States, seldom, if ever, considered together. For example, in Modernist Nation Soto links Claude McKay with John Clellon Holmes and James Weldon Johnson to Diane di Prima. Soto develops his case convincingly, discussing the vital relationships that connect movements in American literary modernism to notions of bohemia and to the possibilities that accompanied these relationships. Examining that “the rhetoric of immigration metaphors,” Soto writes that texts such as McKay’s Home to Harlem (1928) and Holmes’s Go (1952), like di Prima’s Memoirs of a Beatnik (1969) and Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) share a “fascination with differential boundaries, distinguishing ‘here’ from ‘there’ as well as ‘us’ from ‘them’” (103–104).

In its examination of American bohemia(s)—whether comprised of beatniks or hippies or expatriots—Soto’s Modernist Nation succeeds because it recognizes the singular impact that jazz, through its various forms and modes, has brought to American literary modernism. The study makes claims for jazz’s capacity to repeatedly demonstrate “its ability to capture alienation and angst in the ‘blues’ as well as its gift for improvisation and adaptation” (174). Modernist Nation concludes with a roll call of writers that includes Maya Angelou, Gregory Corso, John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, Michael S. Harper, Frank O’Hara, Gertrude Stein, Lorenzo Thomas, Jean Toomer, and Eudora Welty. Soto asserts that “jazz is the language” of these moderns, bringing attention to a critical axis upon which American modernism may be both turned and measured (176).

Michael A. Antonucci
Kenne State College
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