Abstract
Writers’ occasional, though certainly striking, outbursts about the literary market led many early scholars of modernist literature to suggest that some authors were opposed to operating in the marketplace. While this extreme generalization can still be found occasionally in criticism today, many contemporary scholars, attentive to postmodern critiques of totalizing systems and poststructural disruptions of binary oppositions, have been highly critical of such a simplistic dichotomy. Most critics reflecting on this shift, in what is now a well-worn story of the historical development of modernist studies, claim that the transformative figure was Fredric Jameson. Jameson, in his widely cited article “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” proposes that high culture and mass culture are interrelated and can only be understood through a historical analysis of their joint emergence under the conditions of capitalism.1 While some scholars have expressed unease with the wide acceptance of such a simplistic and linear narrative,2 few would deny either the influence of Jameson’s work or the transformative effect that materialist critical approaches have had in the sphere of what is now called “modernist studies.” The last three decades have witnessed an explosion of volumes examining the various ways in which canonical authors, despite their occasionally strident rhetoric, have engaged with and been implicated in the marketplace.3
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Notes
Fredric Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” Social Text 1 (1979): 133–34.
As many contemporary scholars note, theorists in the 1930s had already advanced the idea that no cultural product exists outside of market relations. Richard Keller Simon, for instance, has pointed out an influential exchange between Clement Greenberg and Dwight Macdonald in the late 1930s that led them to advocate a dialectical approach to high and mass cultural forms. See Richard Keller Simon, “Modernism and Mass Culture,” American Literary History 13, no. 2 (2001): 345–48.
Andreas Huyssen also finds the idea in the work of Theodor Adorno, whom he ironically notes is a “key theorist of the [aesthetic] divide.” Andreas Huyssen, “High/Low in an Expanded Field,” Modernism/modernity 9, no. 3 (2002): 367.
See Daniel Borus, Writing Realism: Howells, James, and Norris in the Mass Market (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989)
Patrick Brantlinger and James Naremore, eds., Modernism and Mass Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991)
John Xiros Cooper, Modernism and the Culture of Market Society(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)
Kevin J. H. Dettmar and Stephen Watt, eds., Marketing Modernisms: Self Promotion, Canonization, Rereading (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996)
Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986)
Mark S. Morrisson, The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception, 1905–1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001)
Lawrence S. Rainey, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998)
Jani Scandura and Michael Thurston, Modernism, Inc.: Body, Memory, Capital (New York: New York University Press, 2001)
Thomas Strychacz, Modernism, Mass Culture and Professionalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)
Catherine Turner, Marketing Modernism between the Two World Wars (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003)
Joyce Piell Wexler, Who Paid for Modernism?: Art, Money, and the Fiction of Conrad, Joyce, and Lawrence (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1997)
Jennifer Wicke, Advertising Fictions: Literature, Advertising, and Social Reading (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988)
Ian Willison, Warwick Gould, and Warren Chernaik, eds., Modernist Writers and the Marketplace (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996)
Christopher Wilson, The Labor of Words: Literary Professionalism in the Progressive Era (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985).
Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, “The New Modernist Studies,” PMLA 123, no. 3 (2008): 744.
Aaron Jaffe, Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 10.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, F. Scott Fitzgerald on Authorship, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), 37.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Afternoon of an Author, ed. Arthur Mizener (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1957), 85.
Jackson R. Bryer, ed., F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Critical Reception(New York: Burt Franklin & Co., 1978), 22–23, 28
H. L. Mencken, “Untitled Review,” The Smart Set 62 (1920)
Jackson R. Bryer, ed., F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Critical Reception (New York: Burt Franklin & Co., 1978), 22–23, 28; H. L. Mencken, “Untitled Review,” The Smart Set 62 (1920); R.V.A.S., “Untitled Review,” New Republic 22 (1920).
R.V.A.S., “Untitled Review,” New Republic 22 (1920).
Seldes says, “He is this side… of a full respect for the medium he works in; his irrelevance destroys his design.” The work, he claims, suffers from the author’s “carelessness about structure and effect.” Jackson R. Bryer, The Critical Reputation of F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Bibliographical Study (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1967), 109.
Perhaps the most famous account from this period came from another of Fitzgerald’s Princeton acquaintances, Edmund Wilson, who said that The Beautiful and Damned was “animated with life” and acknowledged that Fitzgerald had “an instinct for graceful and vivid prose.” He also claimed, “[Fitzgerald] has been given imagination without intellectual control of it; he has been given the desire for beauty without an aesthetic ideal; and he has been given a gift for expression without very many ideas to express.” Edmund Wilson, The Shores of Light (New York: Farrar, Straus & Young, 1952), 27. Less than a year before, Wilson wrote Fitzgerald a letter criticizing America’s “commercialism” and the “ease with which a traditionless and half-educated [American] public… can be impressed, delighted, and satisfied.”
Edmund Wilson, Letters on Literature and Politics, 1912–1972, ed. Elena Wilson (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1977), 64.
Janice Radway, A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month-Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 127–86.
Gertrude Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography (Cambridge, MA: Exact Change, 1993), 6.
For more on Harcourt’s marketing of The Autobiography, see Ibid., 111–26. This discussion is much indebted to her analysis. For perspectives on the conflict between genteel literary notions and modern culture, see Frank Lentricchia, Modernist Quartet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), ix–xiii, 47–77
Joan Shelley Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 1–33.
Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995), 71.
T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in Selected Essays, 1917–1932 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1932), 10–11.
Charles Tomlinson, ed., Marianne Moore: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969), 48.
T. S. Eliot, “London Letter,” The Dial LXXIII, no. 6 (1922): 370–72. The piece later appeared in a shorter form in Eliot’s Criterion. In the later version, several of the references to Marie Lloyd’s upbringing have been cut, but Eliot’s argument in the piece remains unchanged. Such modifications suggest many interesting avenues for the study of Eliot’s own self-presentation.
For a useful reassessment of Eliot’s relationship to mass culture, which positions the Marie Lloyd article as a precursor to Eliot’s own attempts to connect with a “popular” audience through dramatic verse, see David E. Chinitz, T S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
For the Criterion reprint, see T. S. Eliot, “Marie Lloyd.” For a readily available version of Eliot’s original text from The Dial, see T. S. Eliot, London Letter, 1922 (Rickard A. Parker, December 3, 2004 [cited March 11, 2009]); available from http://world.std.com/~raparker/exploring/tseliot/works/london-letters/london-letter-1922-12.html.
Michael Nowlin, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Racial Angles and the Business of Literary Greatness (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 10.
F. Scott Fitzgerald and Maxwell Perkins, Dear Scott/Dear Max: The Fitzgerald-Perkins Correspondence, ed. John Kuehl and Jackson R. Bryer (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971), 47.
Ulla E. Dydo, Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises, 1923–1934(Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003), 419–20.
Daniel Joseph Singal, “Towards a Definition of American Modernism,” American Quarterly 39, no. 1 (1978): 12.
Robert Scholes, Paradoxy of Modernism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006), xi–xii.
For more on the emergence of the middlebrow, see Janice Radway, “The Scandal of the Middlebrow: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Class Fracture, and Cultural Authority,” South Atlantic Quarterly 89, no. 4 (1990)
Rubin, Making. For more on Vanity Fair as a form of middlebrow production, see Michael Murphy, “‘One Hundred Per Cent Bohemia’: Pop Decadence and the Aestheticization of Commodity in the Rise of the Slicks,” in Marketing Modernisms: Self-Promotion, Canonization, Rereading, ed. Kevin J. H. Dettmar and Stephen Watt (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996).
Van Wyck Brooks, America’s Coming-of-Age (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1915), 4–7, 112.
For several different versions of this argument, see Jean-Christophe Agnew, “Coming up for Air: Consumer Culture in Historical Perspective,” Intellectual History Newsletter 12 (1990)
Stuart Ewen, All Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture(New York: Basic, 1988)
Terry Smith, Making the Modern: Industry, Art and Design in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 285–301.
Warren Susman, Culture and Commitment, 1929–1945 (New York: G. Braziller, 1973), 82–83. In part as a result of these shifts, Jean-Christophe Agnew notes, Americans came to see their lives more and more in terms of the commodities they purchased, so that, by the 1940s, the United States could go to war on “conspicuously private, consumptionist themes.” As one wartime GI was reported to have said, “I am in this damn mess… to help keep the custom of drinking Cokes.” Agnew, “Air,” 14.
John William Tebbel, A History of Book Publishing in the United States, vol. 4 (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1981), 1, 721–25.
Quoted in David Welky, Everything Was Better in America: Print Culture in the Great Depression (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 149.
Linda Wagner-Martin, The Mid-Century American Novel (New York: Twayne, 1997), ix–x, 1–15.
Alfred Kazin, Starting Out in the Thirties (Boston: Little, Brown & Company 1965), 15.
Mark Conroy, Muse in the Machine: American Fiction and Mass Publicity (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004), 10.
For a detailed examination of writers in Hollywood during the 1930s, see Richard Fine, Hollywood and the Profession of Authorship, 1928–1940. (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1993).
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© 2011 Timothy W. Galow
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Galow, T.W. (2011). Critical Reassessments: Celebrity, Modernism, and the Literary Field in the 1920s and 1930s. In: Writing Celebrity. American Literature Readings in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119499_2
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