American & Canadian Literature, Poetry - Literary Criticism, Italian Literature, General & Miscellaneous Literary Criticism, Irish Literature, Literary Movements, English Literature

Institutions of Modernism

Name: Institutions of Modernism
Author: Lawrence Rainey
ISBN: 9780300070507

by Lawrence Rainey

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Overview

This book provides a radical and revisionary account of modernism, its many contradictions, and its troubled place in our public culture. Lawrence Rainey, widely known for his contributions to the debates on modernism, looks beyond the well-examined themes and innovative forms of the movement, asking instead where modernism was produced and how it was transmitted to particular audiences. Delving into previously unexamined primary materials, the author tells new and startling stories about five major modernist figures - James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, H.D., and F. T. Marinetti - whose individual tales offer fresh perspectives on the larger story of modernism itself. The book ranges in time from the formation of Imagism in 1912 to the slow dissolution of modernism during the late 1930s.

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Editorials

Roger Kimball

For anyone interested in what chic academic criticism looks and feels like today, Institutions of Modernism is as good a place to start as any. The spiritual aridity, the rebarbative prose, the programmatic subordination of literature to an ideological agenda—all make the book an exemplar of the discipline, which is to say, they make it an exemplar of a discipline in crisis, a discipline that has lost its way. The fact that the book was published in Yale's Henry McBride Series on Modernism and Modernity adds to the shame of it.
— First Things Magazine

Mark Ford

Rainey's book eloquently and deftly outlines the possibilities and pitfalls of modernist self-fashioning.
&151#; The Times Literary Supplement

Kirkus Reviews

Focusing on anglophone literary modernism from 1912 through the postwar period, Rainey (Modernist Literature/Univ. of York, England) examines such issues as the shift from elitist to mass culture, the rise of the market in determining aesthetic values, and the role of patronage. Ezra Pound's transformation from an esoteric poet to the founder of Imagism, which appealed to new institutions of mass culture, epitomizes a sweeping change in modern artistic practices. In 1922, the publication of Joyce's Ulysses by Sylvia Beach and of Eliot's The Waste Land in the journal Dial marked the entry of modernism into the public sphere via the process of its commodification. Rainey uses these simultaneous literary events to demonstrate the collapse of aesthetic autonomy under the weight of commercial criteria. Nevertheless, his meticulous exploration of Dial archives fails to convince the reader that modernism rendered superfluous "close reading," the idea that works should be evaluated solely by their intrinsic aesthetic value. True, publishers practiced "not-reading," since their parameters for book evaluation were dictated largely by practical considerations. This doesn't mean, however, that the general public, and particularly students of literature, also judged books by their marketability. While "close reading" did undergo a noticeable decline, Rainey is premature in declaring it obsolete. The most enticing chapters of the book deal with the problem of patronage. Interpreting the Malatesta Cantos, Rainey reveals Pound's attempt to encourage Mussolini to develop Italy as a thriving cultural center. His discussion of H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) challenges her reputation as an icon of modernistmarginality in terms of sexual identity, race, and art. After dismissing ideological criticism, which only accepts "politically correct" values, Rainey portrays H.D. as a more three-dimensional personality, who takes advantage of financial comfort provided by generous sponsors and indulges in coterie poetics.