The Concept of Modernism by Astradur Eysteinsson Review by: Susan De Sola Rodstein MLN, Vol. 106, No.

5, Comparative Literature (Dec., 1991), pp. 1082-1085 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2904608 . Accessed: 09/04/2013 20:33
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In his denouncement of Humbert's morals, Alexandrov bypasses the deeper moral dilemma of reading Lolita: that of the reader's growing sympathy with a child molester. The ethical and moral force of this novel is not a statement about ethics or morals; rather it is the horrifying realization of writing's seductive possibilities and an ensuing consciousness of the slide into unconsciousness, a critical awareness of an immanent seduction. Just as Humbert is shockingly aware of Lolita's seduction of him in the hotel room, of his slip beyond the boundaries of fantasy and action, so readers become uncomfortably sensible of Lolita's seductive powers, the book's ability to press on the limits of moral categorization. Nabokov's Otherworldthus provides a long-overdue counterbalance to years of work on Nabokov's ironic style, his metaliterary reflections, his allusive (and elusive) contexts; and yet the critical polemic so engages Alexandrov as to build into his project a number of rigid resistances. Alexandrov's book eventually serves best as the opening of a new door in Nabokov criticism, an opening that will lead critics to the recognition that Nabokov's aesthetics and ethics are interwoven and that humorous texts may have serious thematics within them. Nabokov's Otherworldbrings one other unexpected offering; in the last twenty pages of the conclusion, the influences of Russian symbolism and Acmeism on Nabokov's aesthetics are carefully mapped out. Six years ago, Alexandrov published an excellent study of Russian symbolism, and those interested in Nabokov's Russian literary context and the impressions made on the young artist by the works of Bely, Gumilev, and Evreinov will find Alexandrov's established expertise on these authors well-demonstrated in his subtle depictions of aesthetic conjuctions in the Silver Age of Russian culture.
TheJohns Hopkins University CHRISTY L. BURNS

Astradur Eysteinsson, The Conceptof Modernism Ithaca & London: Cornell U.P., 1990. x + 265 pages. Astradur Eysteinsson approaches "modernism" as neither a broad cultural category nor a canon of representative works but as a concept shaped, indeed created, by critical and theoretical forces. In The Concept of Modernism he analyzes dozens of formulations of the modern, ranging from the theories of Adorno, Brecht, Shlovsky, Wellek, Greenberg, and Gilbert and Gubar to the novels of Kafka and Musil and the sound poems of Hugo Ball-to name just a few of his foci. Such a study-classificatory criticism on a grand scale-faces nearly insurmountable obstacles of generality and abstraction. The only point of loose consensus that Eysteinsson allows is the notion that modernism is a

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concept "broadly signifying a paradigmatic shift, a major revolt, beginning in the mid and late nineteenth century, against the prevalent literary and aesthetic traditions of the Western world" reaching-the crucial wordsan "explosive climax in the first three decades of the twentieth century." This momentous shift, he argues, cannot be precisely located in literature, consciousness, everyday life, or historical phenomena. He rejects "reflection theories" on the grounds that they reduce modernism to a simplified reverberation of social modernity and, more controversially, because "most of us do not experience modernity as a mode of disruption, however many disruptive historical events we may be aware of." Modernism is rather "an attempt to interrupt"(breaking communicative contracts, "blowing open the social strata of false normativity") the modernity "most of us" live and experience as normal. In Eysteinsson's model, literary history-a term he never quite defines but which for him designates the inevitable locus of any theorization of the modern-mediates modernism's relation to (and substitutes for) "history in the broader sense," while literary tradition (chiefly the norms of nineteenth century realism) encodes the "false normativity" through which we process social modernity. The theoretical (i.e. literary historical) construction itself of the modernist paradigm is thus both a historical event and a radicalizing, disruptive tool. Eysteinsson's metaphors of shattering, disruption, and explosion (reminiscent of Morris Peckham's "rage for chaos") are of course a sustained challenge to the autonomy, organic unity, ambiguity, and anorgasmic "unresolved tensions" the New Critical paradigm persistently associated with modernism. Although he emphasizes the crises of representation and of the disunified subject as defining components of a modernist paradigm, Eysteinsson is at pains to reject post-structuralism as a theoretical model for modernism. Post-structuralism's ubiquitous (and therefore ameliorative) detection and celebration of these crises differs from modernism's (in his view) more selective and self-conscious practice. Although he finds more productive models in Russian formalist defamiliarization and Adorno's theory of negative mimesis, his arguments are nevertheless saturated with post-structural assumptions. His argument that post-structural theory issues from modernist literary practice (which has, he asserts, taught us to read this way) risks a simplifying teleology for modernism the end of which is chiefly to dismantle the critic's idea of what literature is and means. Eysteinsson's concept of the modern seeks definition within the context of differential readings of post-modernism, the avant-garde, and realism. In formulations of the post-modern, he identifies a frequent desire to posit a strong break with modernism with insufficient historical or analytical inquiry into the mutation. Most problematic are those formulations that would re-cast modernism as a conservative aesthetic project against which the post-modern appropriates the qualities of disruption, and in which

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modernism takes on the very qualities it had imputed to realism. Eysteinsson's careful examination of the claims of post-modernism (to produce uncertainty, to synthesize modernism and realism, to bridge high and popular culture, to reflect a de-centered world, etc.) leads him to conclude that modernism has already done all of these things more effectively. Eysteinsson is eager, however, to preserve within modernism the radicalizing potential of the avant-garde (expressionism, dadaism, surrealism, and futurism) in both its general adjectival meanings and as a historically contemporaneous "project." Allowing the terms modern and avant-garde to slide apart would either reduce the avant-garde to a preparatory stage for modernist achievements or, more threateningly,judge the avant-garde as the only true revolt. Less thorough than in his treatment of postmodernism, Eysteinsson refuses to analyze the avant-garde's own articulations of its aims, rashly dismissing the manifestos as atypical productions-whereas in some instances they were the only productions. He insufficiently differentiates the extremity of avant-garde anti-art negation from modernism's creative urges; in fact, his concept of the modern is often indistinguishable from definitions of the avant-garde. Realism, as consolidated in nineteenth century fictional norms, although antithetical to modernism, is to be valued on those grounds. The conventionality of realism supplies the dialectical opponent against which to gauge modernity and the modernist aesthetic of "interruption" Eysteinsson develops. Yet, this model may make realism too monolithic, given the complexities of its conventions and its self-critical variants such as satire (which also defines many strands of modernism). If Eysteinsson finds modernism's strength to lie in its marginal, elitist, oppositional status, and finds little grounds for a distinctive postmodernism that would not vitiate or distort modernism (or for unassimilated avant-gardes, or for a realism that has become fully historical), the consequences of these positions for his own theory of literary history remain unexplored. The embattled defining characteristic of modernismrevolt-threatens to lose all historical specificity. The refusal to stabilize modernism opens the vertiginous possibility of a modernism denied the historical mutations that shape other period concepts, reserving a special, on-going status for "high" modernism even as we depart the twentieth century. Eysteinsson's arbitrary origin designated in the mid nineteenth century (presumably standing for Baudelaire and Flaubert) is seemingly a gesture toward historical coherence, which leaves him in the awkward position of invoking TristramShandy and Jacques le Fataliste as examples of modernist interruption, only to reject them as too early. Eysteinsson is also left presupposing a model in which we are still at war with the nineteenth century-a model which paradoxically (and conservatively) nullifies the very real and radical departures from that world which modernism both represents and helped to create.

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Although Eysteinsson calls for resistance to the "insulation" of literature, modernist rupture may be only incidentally and negatively part of historical consciousness. The conflation of literary tradition with communicative and social norms assumes that all modernisms locate oppression in the same place (parallel to the "we" that does not experience modernity as a mode of disruption) and neglects the uniquely modernist sense of loss, which often issues less in a desire to rupture than in a desire to salvage and to heal. While Eysteinsson analyzes literary history, he suggests little that would unseat conventional, canonical designations. His skeptical analysis of the theories of periodization and canonicity that place modernism in literary history yields few surprises: modernism's difficulty serves as ajustification of the professional academic; women authors are excluded; there is Anglo-American bias; and a small group of "superwriters" is privileged over the historical texture of broader literary movements. Despite gestures to history, Eysteinsson's model is perhaps itself ahistorical. If, as he acknowledges, the majority of literary production in the twentieth century has not been recognizably "modernist," he nevertheless leaves us to continue making period designations and canonical inclusions on the basis of catalogues of perceived, formal characteristics which facilitate the paradigm of rupture rather than on the basis of historical particularity and a consideration of the spectrum of literary activity existing at any particular moment. This formulation of modernism neglects the extent to which modernist works may become conventional, overemphasizes and simplifies the hold of the nineteenth century, and potentially reduces modernism to a negative, contentless practice which works to unsettle wherever it goes (modernism is "writerly," a "skeptical hermeneutics," a "pedagogic project" that fosters a "critical attitude")-thus homogenizing wildly and excitingly different works; and perhaps constituting the most sweeping formalism of all. Once modernism is lifted from the process whereby what was once revolutionary comes to seem familiar, modernism, properly speaking, is no longer a literary period at all. The view that the modernist revolution is "impossible," always deferred or "held in abeyance," places Eysteinsson's conceptualizations in the utopian strain often identified, by Calinescu and others, as uniquely modern. Yet, if modernism is that which permanently unsettles the academy, it is also that which invokes its aid and buttresses its traditions; it calls upon the canon Eysteinsson would have it leave behind. The conceptual history has yet to be written of modernism's continuities with the past-and of the intensity of the engagement of many moderns with even the immediate past.
TheJohns Hopkins University SUSAN DE SOLA RODSTEIN

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