Discovering Modernism: T.S. Eliot and His Context

by Louis Menand

A study of a literary success, and the forces that combine to create a successful literary movement, Discovering Modernism places T.S. Eliot in his cultural context to discover why his poetry and criticism answered the needs of a particular moment. Menand's analysis, which includes a
reevaluation of the influence of Eliot's doctoral dissertation in philosophy on his later work, yields fresh readings of some familiar features of Eliot's style--the use of literary allusion, the valorization of "tradition," the critical formulae of the objective corrolative and the dissociation of
sensibility, and the notes to The Waste Land. But this book is about more than T.S. Eliot. Because Menands's larger subject is the crisis in literature that produced Eliot and the entire Modernist movement, he examines the ways in which the literary values of the 19th century became problems for
their 20th-century counterparts. With discussion of such topics as Conrad and the rise of professionalism, Darwinism and the late 19th century notion of style, Tennyson's posthumous reputation, and Pater and the Imagists, he contributes to our knowledge of the ties that bound Modernism to the 19th
century, and sheds new light on how writers go about "making it new."

Genres: Literary Criticism, History, Poetry, Criticism, 20th Century, American

222 pages, Paperback

First published December 11, 1986

About the author

Louis Menand, professor of English at Harvard University, is the author of The Metaphysical Club, which won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize in History. A longtime staff writer for The New Yorker, he lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Reviews

[Cat · Rating 4 out of 5]

A scholarly book about T. S. Eliot's influential literary criticism (with an awesome reading of Heart of Darkness as commentary on the modern artist and phases of capitalism in here as well). Menand is an ironic, articulate critic and tackles the criticism of another eloquent ironist in this book about the ways that T.S. Eliot streamlined the contentions of his contemporaries, reformulated those of his predecessors (while claiming to disagree with them), and channeled the skeptical spirit of a doubting age in his opportunistic and fiercely influential critical work. Menand's phrases are sharp, rewarding, and rhetorically delicious. My personal favorite:

"wordiness is a way of muting the force of individual words in the hope that the whole will be more compatible with the modesty of our intentions."

Menand has an ability to parse out ideas and stare pretty phrasing levelly in the eye and make it blush. This review makes it sound like Menand is criticizing Eliot, but he actually trains our attention on what Eliot did so spectacularly, which was not introduce new ideas but instead paint himself as an outside observer, a wit with no country, who could verbalize the modernist project both as a salubrious recovery of tradition and departure from its immediate past. (though Menand points out that the nineteenth century value of "sincerity" gets reimagined in the "impersonal" appeal of the individual artist to emotion and tradition) Menand does an amazing job pointing out when Eliot's rhetoric actually makes little practical or metaphysical sense, when it sounds better than it means. He connects Eliot's valorization of literary formalism with the professionalization aligned with late capitalism, and Menand points out the challenges presented by imagining what literature does and what relationship it has to the word of objects and the mind of the author. In short, for students of modernism and the modern period, this is a very helpful, very engaging book.

[Liam Guilar · Rating 3 out of 5]

In a series of discrete chapters Menard is very good at showing how what seemed so original in much of Eliot's critical writing was simply a memorable restatement of existing orthodoxy. He's also very good at showing how much of Eliot's critical writing sounds good until you look at it too carefully, when it starts to evaporate.

As someone else wrote, probably John Harwood, it doesn't matter how many times the term "literary modernism" is shown to be a meaningless creation of 1960s academics; a whole industry (which includes books proving Modernism is the meaningless creation of 1960s academics) is built on the myth. It underwrites the equal myth of 'Literary Post-Modernism". So too much is at stake for it all to stop and so the industry of books, essays, articles and PhDs go on being trundled out.

Fortunately the academic discussion, though often entertaining, is often irrelevant and self-defeatingly unreadable.

At least Menard is both readable and thought provoking.

None of this should stop anyone from picking up the poems and reading them. The critics all tend to forget that reading is an enjoyable activity. As someone else said, probably John Harwood, the best way to understand the poems is to reread the poems.