VV(12): 1922
Dave Monroe
davidmmonroe at hotmail.com
Wed Apr 4 07:17:49 CDT 2001
"One May morning in 1922" (V., Ch. 9, Sec. i, p. 224)
Still have to get a copy of this, but, in the meantime, on Michael North,
Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern (NY: Oxford UP, 1999) ...
For modernism, 1922 was the year to remember. James Joyce published Ulysses
that year, and T.S. Eliot The Waste Land. The world of literature was never
the same. "The world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts," wrote Willa
Cather, who found her own brand of realism falling out of favor in the wake
of the self-consciousness of high modernism.
To write Reading 1922, Mr. North set himself an ambitious task. "I told
people I was going to read everything written in 1922," he says. "Then I
found out that there were 16,000 books published in England alone in that
year."
Instead, he chose to read everything reviewed in the Times Literary
Supplement and its American counterparts. He can't say how many books he did
slog through. But for every newly discovered treasure, like Elizabeth von
Arnim's The Enchanted April, there was plenty of forgettable stuff. "I can't
tell you how many novels I read about cannibalism, how many books I read by
retired colonial officers," he says.
[actually, that sounds like the interesting stuff, but ...]
Yet what made the project worthwhile, Mr. North says, was the chance to read
and discuss books -- and other cultural artifacts -- that rarely get grouped
together. Literary modernism flourished in 1922, but so did the movies, and
tourist photography. Pivotal texts in philosophy and anthropology --
Wittgenstein's Tractatus Philosophicus and Malinowski's Argonauts of the
Western Pacific, respectively -- were published that year. So was Walter
Lippmann's Public Opinion.
Finding connections between high and low culture, literature and other
writing, is a way to shake up the study of modernism, which has been closely
linked to New Critical interpretations that focus on a text's formal
properties, argues Mr. North.
Reading 1922 describes the first flourish of a global media culture in which
literary experimentation played a crucial part. Poets, philosophers, and
even actors like Charlie Chaplin remarked on the ways individual lives were
enacted on numerous planes. Modernity was the melding -- or clash -- of many
points of view.
"The unity and the disunity of the modern world appear together, as effects
of one another," Mr. North writes. "The parochialism of the particular point
of view could never have appeared until it had been qualified by exposure to
a more cosmopolitan experience."
http://chronicle.com/free/v47/i17/17a01601.htm
Will follow up as soon as possible ...
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