Receptions of Modernism

I'm Max Saunders. I'm a professor of English at King's College London,

and in this course I'm going to be talking about the new modernist studies

where modernism is today.

And in this first section

I'll be talking about the receptions of modernism

then and now.

The art critic Robert Hughes wrote an excellent

TV series called The Shock of the New,

about how surprising and unexpected modernist art and

architecture seemed in the early 20th century.

But modernism is now around a century old,

and much of its shock value has worn off

images and objects that scandalised public

taste have now become museum merchandising,

a tea towel or a T shirt.

Our relation to modernism isn't the same as it

was for people alive in the 19 twenties,

and the reception of modernism has changed over time

in ways that have affected our view of it. Today.

In the 19 sixties, say,

another generation of youthful revolutionaries celebrated the

modernists for that same revolutionary quality.

So if you had read a book on modernism or studied it at school a generation or two ago,

it was its modernity that God emphasis modernism as experimental,

as innovative,

as different

for me,

the visual arts of modernism still have that freshness,

that sense of invention.

Even if they don't look like the contemporary art of today,

which is more concerned with video,

with kitsch or with the environment,

they still managed to look as if they were painted yesterday.

Whereas the literature of modernism probably doesn't feel new or

contemporary in quite that weight to today's young readers,

I don't think that's because its fragmentary or difficult or elusive necessarily.

It was those things for it's original audience, too.

And much of our culture, especially online culture, works with fragments.

The tweet, the hashtag, the gift that the like

even work like the wasteland.

Mixing so many fragments and different voices and

languages and classes and feelings and religions together

shouldn't be a challenge to a generation brought up on mash

ups and covers and the rapid montage of TV advertising.

But I think the point is that the whole idea of literacy as itself changed,

and that's partly a matter of what you were expected to know at any one time.

The Latin and Greek allusions and names

in the wasteland would have presented no problem to many of

Elliott's middle class public school educated readers in the 19 twenties.

The references to Shakespeare in the operas of Wagner

were just what an educated person was expected to know and to recognise at the time.

But it's also that what intelligent people are expected to know

nowadays are not just different texts and more contemporary ones.

Toni Morrison, Zadie Smith, Chimamanda, Ngozi, Adichie here

but different media

the illusions in a contemporary work are likely to be to film

to popular culture. It's songs and TV,

and the language is likely to be slang earlier.

So all this makes modernism now seem doubly like it has more to do with the past

than with the present or the future.

True, its relations to the past is always paradoxical.

It wants to be classical

rather than romantic.

It's obsessed by tradition,

but it wants to make something new out of these things, as we saw

Ezra Pound said,

Make it new. But the it that was being made new was often the classical being made over

Joyce's novel Ulysses

Pound's Cantos, his long poem sequence

taking its name from

the sections of Dantes great mediaeval poem, The Divine Comedy

as T. S. Elliot put it in his landmark early essay Tradition.

And the individual talent

tradition

involves in the first place the historical sense,

which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would

continue to be a poet beyond his 25th year.

And the historical sense involves a perception, says Elliott,

not only of the past nous of the past, but of its presence.

The historical sense compels a man to write not

merely with his own generation in his bones,

but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe,

from Homer and within it the whole of the

literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence

and composes a simultaneous order.

And it's that feeling that historical sense, says Elliott,

which makes a writer feel traditional.

But

he goes on,

It's at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time

of his contemporary society.

Because Elliot and his sort of co modernist Ezra Pound,

wrote so much criticism and because Eliot

worked for the leading literary publisher,

Faber and Faber, which published both of them,

their views became really dominant.

Modernism was defined often, according to their pronouncements,

as we've seen it, was mostly male,

mostly white,

classical, fragmentary, Western.

Eliot and Pound were American,

but they immigrated to Europe before the first World War and stayed.

But around the millennium there was a

noticeable shift in

modernist studies,

and it's that I really want to concentrate on here.

There was an important essay in 2008

called The New Modernist Studies by Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walker Wits,

and they argued that the field had expanded

along three different axes,

and I want to talk a bit about each

of them because I think they're really interesting.

First of all,

they spoke about the chronological expansion, uh,

and then the special expansion and the third one,

which they called the vertical expansion.

That's a little harder to

grasp.

And what they mean is that it's one in which quite sharp

boundaries between high art and popular forms of culture have been reconsidered,

one in which cannons have been critic, peaked and reconfigured,

in which works by members of marginalised social groups

have been encountered with fresh eyes and ears,

and in which scholarly inquiry has increasingly extended

to matters of production dissemination and reception.

Oh, say more about what all those terms mean

later on.

But first of all, I want to pause on that word cannon,

which in that sense, is a term coming from the church,

meaning the list of sacred books accepted as genuine

in literature. It doesn't mean quite that, but it's the books we call classics

that have become

the equivalent of the sacred texts,

the kind of text that I looked at in the course on classic modernism.

Um, which for many years was effectively an agreed list of the greatest,

most valuable modernist works.

And, paradoxically, writers like T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, who wanted to

turn the cannon on its head,

to tell people to stop reading romantic poets like Shelley and Keats,

and that they should be reading, Done and Dante Instead.

It's those writers like Eliot and Pound,

who then became canonical figures in their turn.

But in the late 20th century,

there was a massive assault on that whole idea of cultural authority

and literary value

and on canons of any kind.

We'll be looking in the other sections of this course

at the kinds of expansion that mall and walk awaits

discuss here and how it's opened up the whole study

of literary modernism and made it vastly more inclusive.