Out of Context: The Uses of Modernist Fiction

289 Pages·2018·12.432 MB·English

by  Michaela Bronstein

Out of Context
ii
Modernist Literature & Culture
Kevin J. H. Dettmar & Mark Wollaeger, Series Editors
Consuming Traditions The Great American Songbooks
Elizabeth Outka T. Austin Graham
Machine Age Comedy Without Copyrights
Michael North Robert Spoo
The Art of Scandal The Degenerate Muse
Sean Latham Robin Schulze
The Hypothetical Mandarin Commonwealth of Letters
Eric Hayot Peter J. Kalliney
Nations of Nothing But Poetry Modernism and Melancholia
Matthew Hart Sanja Bahun
Modernism & Copyright Digital Modernism
Paul K. Saint- Amour Jessica Pressman
Accented America In a Strange Room
Joshua L. Miller David Sherman
Criminal Ingenuity Epic Negation
Ellen Levy C.D. Blanton
Modernism’s Mythic Pose Modernist Informatics
Carrie J. Preston James Purdon
Pragmatic Modernism Blasphemous Modernism
Lisa Schoenbach Steven Pinkerton
Unseasonable Youth The Poetry of the Americas
Jed Esty Harris Feinsod
World Views The Modernist Art of Queer
Jon Hegglund Survival
Benjamin Bateman
Americanizing Britain
Genevieve Abravanel In and Out of Sight
Alix Beeston
Modernism and the New Spain
Gayle Rogers Culture Writing
Tim Watson
At the Violet Hour
Sarah Cole Out of Context
Michaela Bronstein
Fictions of Autonomy
Andrew Goldstone
Out of Context
The Uses of Modernist Fiction
Michaela Bronstein
1
iv
1
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Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
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© Oxford University Press 2018
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Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Bronstein, Michaela, author.
Title: Out of context : the uses of modernist fiction / Michaela Bronstein.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2018] |
Series: Modernist literature and culture | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017038161 | ISBN 9780190655396 (hardback) | ISBN 9780190655419 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Modernism (Literature) | Fiction—20th century—History and criticism. |
Time in literature. | Narration (Rhetoric) | Discourse analysis, Literary.
Classification: LCC PN56.M54 B75 2018 | DDC 809/.9112—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017038161
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
To accept one’s past— one’s history— is not the same as drowning in it; it is
learning how to use it.
— James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
How can we “prey” on the rich humanist and democratic heritage in the
struggles of other peoples in other times and places to enrich our own?
— Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind
A shiny new ax, taking a swing at somebody’s next year’s split-l evel
pinewood pad, bites all the way to the Civil War.
— Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion
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Contents
Series Editors’ Foreword ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction: Works for Other Times 1
1. Rescue Work: Innovation and Continuity in Modernist Fiction 28
2. Character and Identity 58
3. What Chronology Demands of Us 111
4. Needing to Narrate 160
5. Modernism Today, or The Author Becomes a Character 206
Notes 221
Works Cited 243
Index 259
viii
Series Editors’ Foreword
“Literature,” Ezra Pound remarks in ABC of Reading, is “news that stays news.”
A few decades later his friend William Carlos Williams responded in “Asphodel,
That Greeny Flower”:
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
Late in life, Williams invokes Pound’s characteristically blithe assertion in
order to acknowledge the space of reading— an often difficult space— in which
literature may or may not endure, may or may not translate from one context
to another. Locating what poems have to offer in the moment of their recep-
tion, Williams anticipates a key aspect of Michaela Bronstein’s Out of Context, a
study of modernist and midcentury fiction that explores the forms writers proj-
ect into the future and how later writers- as- readers receive and rework them.
Bronstein asks, how did Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and William Faulkner so-
licit the attention of future readers through their formal innovations, and how
did James Baldwin, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, and Ken Kesey, respectively, respond to
their appeals?
But this account, accurate though it is, does not really get at the radical
nature of Bronstein’s interventions in modernist studies and contemporary
theory. Take the following remark on Conrad, James, and Faulkner: “For
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