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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