One May Morning in 1922 ...

[Dave Monroe]

Manganaro, Mark.  Culture, 1922: The Emergence of
   a Concept.  Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2002.

Culture, 1922 traces the intellectual and
institutional deployment of the culture concept in
England and America in the first half of the twentieth
century. With primary attention to how models of
culture are created, elaborated upon, transformed,
resisted, and ignored, Marc Manganaro works across
disciplinary lines to embrace literary, literary
critical, and anthropological writing. Tracing two
traditions of thinking about culture, as elite
products and pursuits and as common and shared systems
of values, Manganaro argues that these modernist
formulations are not mutually exclusive and have
indeed intermingled in complex and interesting ways
throughout the development of literary studies and
anthropology.

Beginning with the important Victorian architects of
culture--Matthew Arnold and Edward Tylor--the book
follows a number of main figures, schools, and
movements up to 1950 such as anthropologist Franz
Boas, his disciples Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict, and
Zora Neale Hurston, literary modernists T. S. Eliot
and James Joyce, functional anthropologist Bronislaw
Malinowski, modernist literary critic I. A. Richards,
the New Critics, and Kenneth Burke. The main focus
here, however, is upon three works published in 1922,
the watershed year of Modernism--Eliot's The Waste
Land, Malinowski's Argonauts of the Western Pacific,
and Joyce's Ulysses. Manganaro reads these masterworks
and the history of their reception as efforts toward
defining culture. This is a wide-ranging and ambitious
study about an ambiguous and complex concept as it
moves within and between disciplines.

http://pup.princeton.edu/titles/7371.html

Cf. ...


North, Michael.  Reading 1922: A Return to the
   Scene of the Modern.  NY: Oxford UP, 2001.

This engaging study returns to a truly remarkable
year, the year in which both Ulysses and The Waste
Land were published, in which The Great Gatsby was
set, and during which the Fascisti took over in Italy,
the Irish Free State was born, the Harlem Renaissance
reached its peak, Charlie Chaplin's popularity
crested, and King Tutankhamen's tomb was discovered.
In short, the year which not only in hindsight became
the primal scene of literary modernism but which
served as the cradle for a host of major political and
aesthetic transformations resonating around the globe.

In his previous study, the acclaimed Dialect of
Modernism (OUP, 1994), Michael North looked at the
racial and linguistic struggles over the English
language which gave birth to the many strains of
modernism. Here, he expands his vision to encompass
the global stage, and tells the story of how books
changed the future of the world as we know it in one
unforgettable year.

http://www.oup.com/

And recall ...

"One May morning in 1922 [...] a young engineering
student named Kurt Mondaugen [...] arrived at a white
outpost near the village of Kalkfontein South." (V.,
Ch. 9, p.229)

http://www.hyperarts.com/pynchon/v/extra/sud-cities.html

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