Modernism and the politics of culture

Blair, Sara

doi:10.1017/ccol9781107010635.007

Cited by 6 publications

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“…Indeed, scholarship on late modernism can exert its most profound influence on the field by expanding our understanding of the politics of modernist aesthetics, through an archive pushing modernist studies beyond a misleading binary of radicals and reactionaries. In The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism, Sara Blair (2011) To be sure, like its British counterpart, an American late modernist studies will necessarily produce variable and complementary insights into the period, exceeding those I have outlined here. Yet, in closing, I would offer two foundational premises for any future scholarship working in this direction.…”

Section: Towards An American Late Modernismmentioning

confidence: 83%

Style, autonomy, and ideology: Making room for late modernism in the American scene

Afflerbach

2017

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While the growing field of late modernist studies has established coherent geographic and temporal boundaries for its period in Britain, it has struggled to do the same for the United States. This essay proposes that ongoing critical efforts to establish an American late modernism have been organized and constrained less by national history than by a pair of aesthetic categories: style and autonomy. Scholars have deployed these categories in two competing ways: first, by defining late modernist style as a heroic escape from the reactionary autonomous art of “high” modernists like Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot; second, by defining late modernism as an ideology of autonomous art established in the United States by critics like Cleanth Brooks and Clement Greenberg. Through a methodological critique of these two accounts, this essay argues for an American late modernism grounded upon a more dialectical understanding of the relationship between style and autonomy in modernist studies, one attuned to the political and cultural changes in the United States from the 1930s to the 1960s.

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Section: Towards An American Late Modernismmentioning

confidence: 83%