Virtual Modernism: Writing and Technology in the Progressive Era by Katherine Biers (review)

The word “virtual” appears frequently, yet remains ambiguous in many humanities texts. Authors have taken inspiration from early philosophers such as Aristotle and Plato to more contemporary writers like Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze, using “virtual” to signify anything from video games and online technologies to artistic motifs and conceptual schemas. For this reason, Katherine Biers’s Virtual Modernism provides a welcome collection of well-thought-out, critical, and deeply insightful readings of Modernist texts that elucidate the power of the virtual as a concept. Demonstrating how it can be employed in critical analysis by reflecting on “progressive era” writers from Henry James to Gertrude Stein, Biers begins with the argument that “American writers developed a poetics of the virtual in response to the rise of mass culture and mass communications technologies” (1). She convincingly builds this argument by choosing diverse instances in which writers of the time “do not dispense with reference, but slow it down, virtualizing the objects to which they refer,” and suggests that this “virtual poetics seeks to unleash a hidden capacity for objects in language to become other than what—or who—they are” (2).

Biers, an assistant professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, reveals how technologies like the telegraph, radio, and modern printing press enabled new questions to be explored by writers, who, despite their differences in style and technique, all became transfixed with the possibility of evoking the virtual in their writings. Her choice to produce five distinct sketches is both a strength and a weakness of the book. It allows readers to see different possibilities. But it also feels somewhat disjointed, the pieces not quite fitting into a coherent, overarching whole, much like the frequently frustrating literary experiments she explores.

The first chapter examines Stephen Crane who wrote his most acclaimed novel, The Red Badge of Courage (1895), without ever seeing or experiencing war outside of newspapers and other popular media. His ability to paint vivid pictures in readers’ minds, Biers argues, is closely linked to the coloristic effects of the mass presses and their chromolithographic techniques. In the next chapter, she explores the intense popularity of George du Maurier’s Trilby (1894) and suggests that “while Trilby is often heralded as the ‘first bestseller,’ conjuring images of a reading public hanging on every serialized word, in fact the novel was known almost as much through images, music, and performances as it was through the words” (77). Thus, Biers highlights how du Maurier’s creation, and his reliance on impressionistic drawings, opened the possibilities of a trans-mediated narrative far earlier than many might think. In “Syncope Fever,” she argues that James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) underscores the similarities to the phonograph that literary characters such as Johnson’s black ragtime piano player embodied through their ragged timing and staccato narratives. In a similar sense, Biers’s fourth chapter explores how Djuna Barnes, author of Nightwood (1936), developed her progressive writing style as a stunt journalist who wrote about, embodied, and made virtually present many of the street scenes she covered within New York City for popular newspapers and magazines. Beirs concludes that the journalist’s “baroque staging of New York life suspends her readers in between the vanishing hope for social salvation and the unmistakable glare of the publicity era to come” (172). This statement leads nicely into Biers’s final chapter, in which she considers Gertrude Stein’s 1934 American tour where reporters greeted the writer—known for her obscure and difficult literary style—with amazement that her lucid, conversational interviews sounded so different form her prose. Journalists literally asked her “Why don’t you write like you talk?” Biers uses this seeming incongruity to compare contemporary understandings of communication theories regarding the public and celebrity, contrasting thinkers such as Lippmann, who was skeptical of the public’s ability to overcome propaganda, and Dewey, who sought a way back to rational public dialogues...