Revisiting the New: Recent Fault Lines in American Modernist Criticism

American modernism is a doubly fraught subject of inquiry. Modernism continues to be defined by its seeming imperviousness to critical definitions, generating a proliferating array of literary critical discriminants, chronologies, and canons. It has been alternately viewed as a response to transformational economic and social changes as well as a perceived abstraction from those changes. Likewise, modernism has been characterized as a period of flourishing generic experimentation whose core anxieties persist to the present as well as a circumscribed or entirely failed aesthetic and political project, the period remaining one of the slipperiest fish in the literary critical sea. Michael North, whose two towering works The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language and Twentieth-Century Literature (1994) and Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern (1999) have contributed indelibly to the contemporary landscape of American modernist criticism, has gone so far as to see this difficulty as a measure of modernist innovation itself: "Attempts to formulate a unified formalist definition of modernism have always run afoul of the fact that modernism ceaselessly creates forms and in so doing confounds critical desires for formal consistency" (1999, 209). Modernism's critical contingency is, for North, a measure of its formal inventiveness, a claim which could be said with equal authority about modernist criticism and theory and their efforts to contend with and contain (however incompletely) a wholly coherent definition of modernism.

These generative complications are compounded by the question of America in American modernism, one largely forestalled in early formulations of American literary history. A Library of Congress subject heading for modernist literature from the United States did not come into being until the 1970s—Hugh Kenner's A Homemade World: The American Modernist Writers (1975) being the first important study so listed—and the cosmopolitan and transnational orientations of much modernist writing have obscured the role that America has played in the genesis and development of modernism. Indeed, despite being a paradigm of economic, industrial, urban, and demographic change in the twentieth century, America was long regarded as anathema to modernist revolutions in art, literature, and culture, largely figuring into traditional histories of the period only as American-born writers escaped its provincial orbit. Earlier tellings of America in modernism are thus chronicles of belatedness or accounts, as David Harvey claims, of America's "absorption of a particular kind of modernist aesthetic into official and establishment ideology, and its use in relation to corporate power and cultural imperialism" (1990, 37). Even as recent American modernist scholars have argued for a more thoroughgoing and meaningful role for America in the history of modernism, the very notion of "America" is being radically transformed in the wake of the revisionist work of John Carlos Rowe (2000), Amy Kaplan (2002), and a growing chorus of American Studies scholars who have fundamentally reconsidered "America" as a hermeneutically valuable term. As a result, American Studies has seen multiple geographic turns—globalization studies, hemispheric studies, the return of regionalism—embodying trends that have begun to affect modernist studies as a whole, including the edited volume Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity (2005) and the spring 2009 special issue of Modern Fiction Studies on "regional modernism." Thus America, like modernism itself, remains an idea both subject to increasing scrutiny and undergirding an extraordinary amount of scholarly inquiry.

Because of this doubly fraught enterprise, the critical impulse in the last twenty years has been toward an increasing heterogeneity in the modernist canon and a consistent troubling of the conventional chronology of so-called high modernism. Building on the work of canon-expanding scholars as distinct as Houston A. Baker (1987), Shari Benstock (1986), and Walter Benn Michaels (1995), among many others, some of the most exciting research in the field in recent years (appearing, at times, under the moniker "new modernism studies") has...