Modernism and the Culture of Market Society

Abstract

Many critics argue that the modernist avant-garde were always in opposition to the commercial values of market-driven society. For John Xiros Cooper, the avant-garde bears a more complex relation to capitalist culture than previously acknowledged. He argues that in their personal relationships, gender roles, and sexual contacts, the modernist avant-garde epitomized the impact of capitalism on everyday life. Cooper shows how the new social, cultural, and economic practices aimed to defend cultural values in a commercial age, but, in this task, modernism became the subject of a profound historical irony. Its own characterizing techniques, styles, and experiments, deployed to resist the new nihilism of the capitalist market, eventually became the preferred cultural style of the very market culture which the first modernists opposed. In this broad-ranging study John Xiros Cooper explores this provocative theme across a wide range of Modernist authors, including Joyce, Eliot, Stein, and Barnes.

Fenyő Miksa kritikusi és szerkesztői munkássága a Nyugatban (1908-1925)

“…As a result, I use what I describe as Nyugat's "marginalia" (advertisements, notifications regarding company board meetings, calls for applications to submit products to military supply, train schedules) to illustrate the periodical's function not only as a literary journal but also as an artefact that demonstrates how the intersecting points of consumerism, capitalism and modernization led to certain social and historical effects. With support from theories established by Brooker and Thacker, 500 Matthew Chambers, 501 John Xiros Cooper, 502 Jerrold Spiegel, 503 Peter Wagner, 504 Güntner Leypoldt, 505 Raymond Williams 506 and Anthony Giddens, 507 I explore the question of how the flow of information-primarily traced through Fenyő's articles addressing public issues-may have connected GyOSz's economic interests to the emergence of Nyugat's cultural formation.…”

“…Ennek jegyében a Nyugatban található "margináliák" (azaz: reklámok, felhívások, vonatmenetrendek) alapján igyekszem a Nyugatot nem csupán szépirodalmi folyóiratként láttatni, hanem a fogyasztás, a kapitalizmus és a modernizáció társadalmi, illetve történeti hatásainak vetületeit is felhasználva. Brooker és Thacker, 19 Matthew Chambers, 20 John Xiros Cooper, 21 Jerrold Spiegel, 22 Peter Wagner, 23 Güntner Leypoldt, 24 Raymond…”

Rewriting Tarr Ten Years Later: Wyndham Lewis, the Phoenix Library and the Domestication of Modernism

“…As John Xiros Cooper puts it, 'there were three "first" Tarrs, all of them different. 8 Even by the standards of small-scale institutions of modernism (little magazines and small presses), Tarr was not a commercial success. Harriet Shaw Weaver, who paid £50 for the serialization rights, 'still had a £36 deficit in 1924'.…”

3. Rewriting Tarr Ten Years Later: Wyndham Lewis, the Phoenix Library and the Domestication of Modernism

“…They were all aimed at bringing the flow of narrative continuity and the reading process itself into moments of violent arrest, into moments of crisis or undecidability. 55 In 1928, Lewis decided to polish his antagonistic style for the larger audience that would read Tarr in the Phoenix Library. 'I have throughout finished what was rough and given the narrative everywhere a greater precision', he wrote in the new preface.…”