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Introduction: Literary Modernism: From Hardy To Pound
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14423 |
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MODERN THOUGHT
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6 / 1988 |
373 Words |
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This month the Modern Thought section is presenting a series of essays on literary modernism. A shared assumption of all the contributors is that an artistic revolution of broad cultural significance occurred in the early twentieth century. Hugh Kenner, who identifies this event with the overarching figure of Ezra Pound, has written on the "Pound Era" and a specifically Poundian influence on a whole generation of writers. But the other contributors to our series--Denis Donoghue, William Chace, H.M. Daleski, Eugene Goodheart, and Jeffrey Meyers--show the seeds of modernism taking form in other literary innovators. Such men were the contemporaries of Pound or, in the case of Thomas Hardy, had roots in the Victorian age.
Much of this attempt to trace the genealogy of modernism is related to the question of definition. What exactly is literary modernism? Certainly it entails innovative syntactical constructions and the association of poetic language with images, both of which Pound pioneered. The use of stream of consciousness in plot development that characterized the works of James Joyce, William Faulkner, and (more embryonically) D.H. Lawrence is another largely modernist invention. So is the often tormented emphasis on sexuality and sexual encounters that Daleski locates in Hardy's novels and that Goodheart explores in Lawrence's fiction. Another modernist characteristic is the sense of a disintegrating reality, which Donoghue, Chace, and Meyers all highlight in studies of their subjects. Whether questioning the reliability of perceived reality, the application of reason to the external world, or the stability of one's era and culture, all the modernists welcome (even in some cases against their own protestations) the advent of a certain disorder. This stance was more apparent in social rebels like Joyce, but also
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