MDDM Ch. 76 ..a sort of Shadow ever in the Room [747.27]

[Dave Monroe]

>From Lawrence Rainey, Institutions of Modernism:
Literary Elites and Public Culture (New Haven, CT:
Yale UP, 1998), "Introduction," pp. 1-9 ...

"... the early twentieth century, when new strategies
for reputation building ... responded to increasingly
international cultural interchanges, the growing
prominence of the early mass media, the rising
pressure of advertising, the unprecedented fusion of
information and entertainment, and the challenges
presented by a dense, highly differentiated array of
institutional arenas in which to speak to an
increasingly fragmented public.  Strategies of
authorial construction changed as authors sought to
address different publics ....
   "Those strategies, diverse and contradictory as
they were, must be situated within the institutional
field in which they unfolded.  More typically,
instead, scholars and critics have attempted to define
modernism through a unilateral focus on formal devices
and ideological constellations....  Such claims
typically draw on arguments derived solely from the
reading of literary texts or artworks, a procedure
that evinces excessive faith in our capacity to
specify the essence and social significance of
isolated formal devices and to correlate them with
complex ideological and social formations, slighting
the intervenient institutions that connect works to
readerships, or readerships to particular social
structures.  To focus on these institutions, instead,
is to view modernism as more than a series of texts or
the ideas that found expression in them.  It becomes a
social reality, a configuration of agents and
practices that converge in the production, marketing,
and publicization of an idiom, a shareable language in
the family of twentieth-century tongues.  To trace the
institutional profile of modernism in the social
spaces and staging venues where it operated can teach
us a great deal about the relations between modernism
and popular culture, the fate of aesthetic autonomy,
authorial self-construction in advancing modernity,
and the troublesome place of literary elites in public
culture." (pp. 4-5)

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