Andrew's Wiki
Institutions Of Modernism

Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture. Lawerence Rainey, 1998.

Stuff

• Begins with his 1989 essay on Waste Land and its publication history: it’s a commodity that Pound marketed for Eliot’s profit. And adds more of this kind analysis for more works: Imagism, Ulysses, Marinetti’s Futurism
  • To create “Counternarratives” about modernist works that have been given a “hagiographical” history by critics
  • To go against the critical commonplace that by 1910, the high / low distinction was codified and obeyed by modernists
    • ex: 1906 “middlebrow” lit appears as a word, between the two
• Modernists Did Not Scorn Marketplace (see Modern Philology review)
  • “not implacable enemies but fraternal rivals”
• Modernist works were commodities: “economic circuit of patronage, collecting, speculation, and investment”
• His deepest point: “the final and consummate paradox…the effect of modernism was not so much to encourage reading as to render it superfluous”
  • b/c the point is collecting, selling, value
• Modernists restrict supply of their books to up the value

Examples

• Imagism
  • The 1912 day when everyone avoided Pound’s lecture for Marinetti’s, making Pound realize the value of having a collective movement that was publicized and theatrical
  • thus, it’s the “first anti-avant-garde”
  • although he admits in a footnote that Pound’s statement of imagism, contained in his mss for his book Ripostes, came out BEFORE Marinetti’s lecture
• Ulysses
  • Sylvia Beach’s Ulysses mostly designed for speculators and dealers who would then sell for high-end collectors, and people were holding them back to sell them at inflated prices
  • BUT people have pointed out that there were cheaper editions that sold BEFORE the deluxe editions
  • And that instead of poor readers being victimized, the readers were seeking copies out at any price
• Another counterargument is that the presses of modernism (Monnier’s and Woolf’s) distributed to avoid commercialism and to maximize readership
• Another counterargument is that he can’t use a few examples to say that modernism as a whole is like that
• Another counterargument is that the arguments about the Daily Mail and the Coliseum don’t automatically express how modernists writers themselves thought of commodification of their works: did modernists really care about the concert hall and the high-circulation newspaper? did it really mean they rejected the salon?
  • Did they really think that the end of the “private house” as venue for writers meant they had to find their way in the commodified mainstream?
  • Cuz maybe it was about the people around them, rather, who did this
  • And maybe it wasn’t as constitutive for modernism as he says
• I would say that maybe instead of the high culture bowing down and becoming low culture, that the mechanism of becoming high culture necessarily happens within low culture: that you need the opinion of mass culture to be an elite.