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Mao, Douglas & Walkowitz, Rebecca L. Bad Modernisms. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. vii + 365 pp. $89.95/£67 (cloth); $24.95/£15.95 (paperback). ISBN 0–8223–3784–3/3797–5, Forum for Modern Language Studies, Volume 43, Issue 3, JULY 2007, Page 323, https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqm033
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Extract
The ways in which modernism can go “bad” range from subversion to incorporation, and from criticism to quietism; badness may be a function of (mis)reading or of marketing, of canonicity or obscurity. Contributors pursue the syncretic, the homoeopathic, the provisional, the euphemistic and the distracted, in text and image, through readings that multiply what modernism can be and do. Engaging with disparate primary materials and critical approaches, they answer to the various critical and cultural disappointments with, and in, modernism, from its selling-out to its over- or under-reaching politics and its un/compromising aesthetic limits. Topics include Pater's shrinking resistance; the rear-guardism of Wyndham Lewis; Wittgenstein's unwritten ethics; pornographic desert romance; Woolf's inattentive anti-imperialism; upside-down homage to Josephine Baker in Sternberg's Blonde Venus; the black dandy's failure to embody authenticity of race; Auden's hopes for the shamanic highbrow; Bulosan's subversive laughing minstrelsy; Greene's hit-man and his social worker girl; and the productive failure of sustained attention in cultures of the impression. We are left to reconsider whether modernism's legacies, including the co-optation of critical styles into mass culture, enable the badness of modernism to continue its good work, or typify the goodness of modernism gone irredeemably bad.
