Modernism Is the Literature of Celebrity

Notes

[ 175 Notes Introduction Author’s note: the second epigraph is quoted in Monaco, xi. 1. It has become de rigueur to cite Huyssen as the instigator of the 1990s sea change in the field of modernism. (See for example Latham 7; North, Reading 1922 11; Morrisson 5; Dettmar and Watt 1; Jaffe 19, etc.) This constant invocation of his influence , I would argue, signals that the new treatments of modernism are still meeting with resistance within the academic profession—even fifteen years after Kevin Dettmar and Steven J. Watt’s anecdote of the senior academic who objects to their Marketing Modernisms project on the grounds that it will “belittle Joyce, Woolf, Ford, et al.,” by casting them as “junior academics with a way to make” (1). 2. See Jennifer Wicke, Advertising Fictions 4. To cite just one example of this strain of criticism: Ellen Berry reads Stein’s claim that Stein’s use of language resembles the cinema and takes it at face value. Berry proceeds to find that Stein’s writings are “drawn with reference to or metaphorically linked with” film (17), but does not go on to consider that the relationship might be more one of shared origins than of appropriation. 3. Tyrus Miller writes, “From writer-critics like Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot to their latter-day heirs in the academy, critics have defined the movement in large part with figurative and evaluative underpinnings of modernism itself, with the Poundian imperative to Make It New” (5). Miller goes on to give an account of the critical tradition that affirms the high modernists as “rebel experimenters working in emerging modes and forms.” 4. The term is from Leo Braudy (588), whose The Frenzy of Renown is often cited as the most comprehensive history of fame in western society. 5. Interestingly, Lowenthal’s quantitative approach has been employed by scholars who write about the rise of the professional sports star during this period. Warren Susman notes that in 1921 more journalistic words were devoted to Babe Ruth than had ever before been accorded an athlete (145). Statistics, used to gauge competitive achievement, lend themselves to assessing non-traditional celebrity achievement. Numbers are also used to evaluate the fame of the period’s ultimate example of a celebrity without intellectual credentials.The racehorse Seabiscuit was the “subject of the most newspaper column inches in 1938” in America (Hillenbrand xi). The horse, one might say, constitutes a variation on my argument that celebrity creates the objectification of the subject. 6. The Frankfurt School writers and associates are particularly effusive on this point. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno incorporate celebrity into their attack on “The Culture Industry,” writing about the “pseudo individuality” of “the film star whose hair curls over her eye to demonstrate her originality” (154). Walter Benjamin, 176 ] Notes to pages 13–25 similarly, argues, “the cult of the movie star” preserves “the phony spell of the commodity ” (“The Work of Art” 231). 7. Chaplin was a British subject whose oeuvre was mostly made in Hollywood. Stein was a famed expatriate who returned to the United States to promote herself. Rhys, less exemplary, was born in Dominica, to which she figuratively returned in her best-known work. Dos Passos was an American heavily influenced by European modernism and his World War I tenure. Joyce never made the Atlantic crossing, but, as I consider in Chapter 2, Ulysses did, and that has made all the difference. Chapter 1 1. “Case Details for Trade Mark 1.” Intellectual Property Office. Web. 2. Whether Wilde actually said this is apparently in dispute. Though Frank Harris unflinchingly records it (55), Richard Ellmann remains skeptical (Oscar Wilde 152). Of course, we need not quibble; even if apocryphal or invented later and elsewhere, the claim makes the case for Wilde as inventor of this particular brand of celebrity. As the legend has indeed become fact, we print the legend. 3. This is according to L. Lewis and H. J. Smith and their fascinatingly eccentric account of Wilde’s journey,Oscar Wilde Discovers America, first published in 1936. See pp. 323–324. 4. See Lewis and Smith 74–77. Also see Blake’s thorough examination of Whitman ’s fame. 5. He goes on to say, “Every time my name is mentioned in a paper, I write at once to admit that I am the Messiah.” The detail shows Wilde thinking that his fame creates a parallel between himself and Jesus Christ long before writing De Profundis...