Recovering the New: Transatlantic Roots of Modernism, and: Imaginary Communities: Utopia, the Nation, and the Spatial Histories of Modernity, and: The Avant-Garde and American Postmodernity: Small Incisive Shocks (review)

Modernist studies have always suffered something of an identity crisis, and as we pass conclusively now beyond what most critics understand to be the modernist period, that identity crisis appears to be less a crisis and more an identity. Periodization has always been at the root of the problem. What happens, for instance, when a previously accepted notion such as "high modernism" (say, 1910 to 1940) is juxtaposed with a more recent concept like "the early modern period" (previously known as "the Renaissance") or, for that matter, with that ubiquitous and ineluctable cipher "postmodernism"? Modernist studies have traditionally foregrounded matters of style, emphasizing dramatic shifts in artistic modes and tending to subordinate (if not repress) ideological dimensions. Indeed, in some quarters, modernism was once virtually synonymous with formalism. What is the significance, then, under the aegis of the new historicism and postcolonial studies, of the recent insistence that the modes of discourse we tend to classify as modernist are inextricably bound up in the rise and fall of the nation-state? Modernism once meant rupture and revolution. And whenever and wherever one located this great cultural spasm, there appeared to be an identifiable before and after. If this is still the case, modernism implies a very long revolution, with an emphasis on Marx's "[c]onstant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social relations, everlasting uncertainty and agitation" (my emphasis). Or as Walter Benjamin puts it: "That things 'just keep on going' is the catastrophe."

The three studies under review here all betray a healthy skepticism toward fixed definitions of modernism. Theoretically flexible, all three, broadly speaking, are invested in new historicist methodology, though they recognize that it will never yield easy answers. To their credit, none of them neglects matters of style and genre. If we were to follow an older approach—just the sort that these books call into question—then we could neatly line them up diachronically: Recovering the New is firmly ensconced in the nineteenth century; Imaginary Communities, despite chapters on More's Utopia and Bellamy's Looking Backward, focuses on the early to middle twentieth century; and The Avant-Garde and American Postmodernity, while considering modernists Nathaniel West and Djuna Barnes, is primarily concerned with postmodernists as diverse as Don DeLillo and Laurie Anderson. But such an ordering actually reveals the inadequacy of older temporal narratives, which may be richly complicated through what Fredric Jameson, cited in Imaginary Communities, calls the "cognitive mapping" of particular cultural phenomena in order to lay bare and analyze previously unsuspected historical links and ruptures. The task of the literary historian, then, as understood by all three authors here, is to identify those temporal (dis)junctures that constitute Benjamin's jetzeit, the messianic now that fulfills the promise of the past hidden by an exploitative social order and points to the unfulfilled revolutionary promise of the future. As Phillip Wegner notes in Imagining Communities, it is these very "holes" in time, "the punctuations of crisis, conflict, change, and open-ended potentiality . . . that mark the uneven, lurching, and deeply contested movement of modernity" (10).

With Benjamin his most direct influence, Edward Cutler sees his Recovering the New as a "counterpoint" to The Arcades Project. Drawing on Benjamin's methodology, which produces the understanding of Paris as the center of "the new," Cutler moves nimbly between Europe and the United States, demonstrating in...