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  • Modernism and the Ordinary
  • Connor Byrne
Modernism and the Ordinary, by Liesl Olson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. xiv + 200 pp. $65.00.

Liesl Olson looks past the shock of the new in arguing for the centrality of the ordinary and the everyday in modernist literature. This is no ordinary task, and it is an important one, given modernism's self-conscious experimentation, its striking aesthetics of defamiliarization, and its formal embodiment of the crises of the early twentieth century. As Olson argues, attention to such features "fundamentally obscures modernism's commitment to the ordinary," a commitment marked by the concern for "the overlooked, forgotten, and insignificant elements of experience, and the representation of them as such" (4, 5). Olson's revaluative readings of four major modernist innovators—James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein (in concert with William James), and Wallace Stevens (along with a brief conclusion discussing Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time)—redresses such critical oversight by illuminating, for instance, how the commonplace serves as a fabric for collectivity in an era ostensibly typified by alienation; how close attention to facts and things interrogates the revelatory power of the epiphanic moment; and how habit and routine function as pleasurable and salutary practices, especially in a period deeply affected by the trauma and instability of war.

Modernism and the Ordinary takes on crucial work in thus examining a facet of modernism too often taken for granted. Frustratingly, however, Olson's study struggles to develop a sophisticated thesis inclusive enough to tie her different discussions together in a satisfying fashion. Generally, the book could offer a clearer, more nuanced analysis of why exactly these authors share an interest in ordinary life. Specifically, the argument is confounded by an unresolved tension in Olson's conception of the ordinary, by which it becomes both ever-present and inevitably elusive. The consideration of how literary modernism sees the "ordinary as ordinary" is what makes Olson's study so compelling, and in this regard there are important insights to be found (5). Yet Modernism and the Ordinary also emphasizes how the authors under consideration "questioned the possibility of successfully [End Page 169] doing so," and, as a result, the study fails fully to explore its main field of investigation (25).

Olson's introduction effectively lays out the stakes of her project: a comprehensive understanding of modernism must take into account not only its hallmark aesthetics of shock and difficulty but also its engagement with "the diffuse and messy particularities" of everyday life that offer "stability, efficiency, and comfort" (5). Olson regards the mundane, for example, as a necessary context within which the epiphany actually acquires meaning; at stake is a process, not a moment. Similarly, habit is, for Olson, a quotidian practice useful in its ability to counterbalance the disruptive and traumatic effects of war. In Olson's account, these distinct and valuable characteristics of the ordinary—the factual, the habitual, the routine—stand in contrast to the ordinary as unimportant, disregarded, and, therefore, difficult to represent. Olson asks, "How does a writer replicate what is overlooked, if the nature of literary representation is to look closely at its subject?" (7). Olson's study is, in part, guided by this ostensible "paradox of representing the unrepresented" (11). The problem, of course, is that to be "unrepresented" is hardly to be unrepresentable—as Olson's attention to the quotidian practices depicted by these authors plainly demonstrates.

The discussion of Joyce and Ulysses in chapter 1 exemplifies this problematic. Olson ably examines Joyce's debt to Henrik Ibsen, illustrating how Joyce's interest in the commonplace, like Ibsen's, works as a means of resisting romanticism and, moreover, how Ulysses moves beyond epiphany in its handling of the quotidian. Joyce's lists serve as Olson's main body of evidence. They present ordinary facts straightforwardly, but, by running out of control or becoming hyperobjective (as in "Ithaca"), they also draw attention to the limitations of mimetic representation. The argument is sound. For this reviewer, though, Olson spends unnecessary time developing a standard reading of Joyce (relying on Karen Lawrence's and Franco Moretti's considerations of Joycean stylistics1), when she might...

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