Modernism, Inc.: Body, Memory, Capital (review)

This fetching volume of thirteen radiant interventions into the haunting of the postmodern by encrypted secrets of modernism was conceived in response to two convictions. One is that scholarship on modernism, until at least the mid-1990s, could be characterized as antitheoretical; the other is a belief that a gulf presently exists between "American studies" and "modernist studies." Casting a wide net that embraces interdisciplinarity as well as up-to-the-minuteperspectives on gender, multiculturalism, and material culture, Jani Scandura and Michael Thurston have assembled an ambitious collection distributed around the rubrics of "body," "memory," and "capital."

The first cluster of essays feature anthropologist Kathleen Stewart's meditation on a train as metaphor for modernity and three English professors—Janet Lyon, Marlon Ross, and Julia Walker—discussing Josephine Baker, the New Negro, and Eugene O'Neill's The Hairy Ape. Part 2 showcases five scholars—Daniel Rosenberg, Walter Kalaidjian, Maria Damon, David G. Nicholls, and Walter Lew—on topics such as the construction of the Hoover Dam, Armenian-American literature mourning the 1915 genocide, the Jewishness of Gertrude Stein, the spatial binaries of Jean Toomer's Cane, and the reception of Younghill Kang's 1937 East Goes West. Four U.S. literature specialists—Paula Rabinowitz, William Maxwell, Jani Scandura, and Cary Nelson—offer a potent grand finale to the collection with studies of nationalism and feminism in celebrated female painters, communism and nationalism in the Harlem Renaissance, the gendered "Fordist" aspects of the "Reno Divorce Factory," and the political functionality of turn-of-the-century worker poetry largely distributed through newspapers, circulars, and booklets.

The editors are insistent about offering select definitions of a number of key terms; in one case, "body" is taken straight fromthe 1976 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. Moreover, they ritualistically incant central categories such as "incorporate" and "encrypt." Yet for all the energy of the volume in the realm of imaginative and original interpretations, clarity is in short supply when it comes to offering a coherent vision. This blurriness is principally because the rather central relationship between "modernism" and "modernity" is never explained, explored, or defined. Once a cultural practice is described as falling within "modernity," it is then unquestioningly treated as "modernist." (At least, this is the perspective that the editors impose on the volume; some of the essays appeared previously in other contexts, and the individual authors may have divergent motives for their use of terminology.)

In effect, the two terms are used interchangeably without justification, although "modernism" is customarily employed to refer to rebellious styles erupting episodically mostly over the past two centuries, and "modernity" is a chronological designation for the recent past. The conflated terms are said to hold certain characteristics, but their limits are never delineated, rendering it difficult to fathom if any cultural activity in the twentieth century should be excluded from the designation "modernist." The view that everything produced in the era of modernity is ipso facto "modernist" might well be put forward with care and precision, but such an argument is missing.

In the meantime, it is not altogether clear whether one is moving forward or backward in skipping such logical steps. For example, if twentieth-century realism and naturalism are also "modernist" as part of "modernity," then literary categories and traditions lose their elucidating power and simply become manners of talking about culture with a new vocabulary, although without a means of judging and evaluating new insights.

Complicating the issue of conflation is that the two founding premises of the volume—the claim about the antitheoretical character of modernist studies before the late 1990s, and the absence of modernist American studies—does not ring true, especially given the wide latitude of the volume. In fact, the early 1990s publica-tions of many of the contributors—Rabinowitz, Nelson, Kalaidjian, Maxwell, Damon, for starters—were precisely part of a trend that addressed modernism in U.S. cultural studies from a theoreticalperspective.

The problem, however, is more in the packaging than in the individual essays. Skandura...