T.E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism

257 Pages·2006·1.55 MB·English

by  Edward P. Comentale

T. E. HULME AND THE
QUESTION OF MODERNISM
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T. E. Hulme and the
Question of Modernism
Edited by
EDWARD P. COMENTALE
Indiana University–Bloomington, USA
ANDRZEJ GASIOREK
University of Birmingham, UK
© The contributors, 2006
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
Edward P. Comentale and Andrzej Gasiorek have asserted their moral right under the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work.
Published by
Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company
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Croft Road 101 Cherry Street
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
T. E. Hulme and the question of modernism
1.Hulme, T. E. (Thomas Ernest), 1883–1917 – Criticism and interpretation 2.English
literature – 20th century – History and criticism 3.Modernism (Literature) – Great
Britain
I.Comentale, Edward P. II.Gasiorek, Andrzej, 1960–
828.9'1209

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
T. E. Hulme and the question of modernism / edited by Edward P. Comentale and Andrzej
Gasiorek.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7546-4088-4 (alk. paper)
1. Hulme, T. E. (Thomas Ernest), 1883–1917. 2. Modernism (Aesthetics) 3. Modernism
(Art) 4. Modernism (Literature) 5. Philosophy, Modern. I. Title: Thomas Ernest Hulme
and the question of modernism. II. Comentale, Edward P. III. Gasiorek, Andrzej, 1960–
B1646.H84T4 2006
192–dc22
2005034559
ISBN-13: 978-0-7546-4088-2
ISBN-10: 0 7546 4088 4
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire.
Contents
Contributors vii
Introduction
On the Significance of a Hulmean Modernism
Edward P. Comentale and Andrzej Gasiorek 1
1 The Imagery of Hulme’s Poems and Notebooks
Paul Edwards 23
2 A Language of Concrete Things: Hulme,
Imagism and Modernist Theories of Language
Andrew Thacker 39
3 ‘A Definite Meaning’: The Art Criticism of
T. E. Hulme
Rebecca Beasley 57
4 Abstraction, Archaism and the Future: T. E.
Hulme, Jacob Epstein and Wyndham Lewis
Alan Munton 73
5 T. E. Hulme and the ‘Spiritual Dread of Space’
Helen Carr 93
6 Hulme’s Compromise and The New
Psychologism
Jesse Matz 113
7 Hulme Among the Progressives
Lee Garver 133
8 Towards a ‘Right Theory of Society’?:
Politics, Machine Aesthetics, and Religion
Andrzej Gasiorek 149
vi T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism
9 ‘Above Life’: Hulme, Bloomsbury, and
Two Trajectories of Ethical Anti-Humanism
Todd Avery 169
10 The Politics of Epochality: Antinomies of
Original Sin
C. D. Blanton 187
11 Hulme’s Feelings
Edward P. Comentale 209
Bibliography 231
Index 243
Contributors
Todd Avery is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts
Lowell, where he teaches nineteenth- and twentieth-century British literature. He
has published articles on Bloomsbury, Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, and
modernist ethics, and he is currently completing a book on literary modernism and
early British radio.
Rebecca Beasley is Lecturer in English at Birkbeck College, University of London,
where she teaches modernist literature. Her articles on modernism and the visual
arts have appeared in American Literature, New Formations and Paideuma, and
she has recently completed a book on Ezra Pound and visual culture. A short book
on the poetics of Eliot, Pound and Hulme is forthcoming in Routledge’s Critical
Thinkers series.
C. D. Blanton is Assistant Professor of English at Princeton University. He has
written on Robert Browning, T. S. Eliot, poetic translation, regionalism in British
poetry, and the problem of nominalism in modernist aesthetics. He is currently
working on Aftereffects, an analysis of late modernism in British poetry, and
Untimely Histories, a study of nineteenth- and twentieth-century forms of poetic
historiography.
Helen Carr is Professor of English at Goldsmiths College, University of London.
She is a co-editor of the journal Women: A Cultural Review, and her publications
include Inventing the American Primitive: Politics, Gender and the Representation
of Native American Literary Traditions (Cork University Press/New York
University Press, 1996) and Jean Rhys (Northcote House/British Council, 1996).
Her group biography of the imagist poets The Verse Revolutionaries is
forthcoming from Jonathan Cape.
Edward P. Comentale is an Associate Professor of Literature at Indiana University.
His teaching and research focus on modernism, the avant-garde, and twentieth-
century popular culture. He is the author of Modernism, Cultural Production, and
the British Avant-Garde (Cambridge, 2004) and the co-editor of Ian Fleming and
James Bond: The Cultural Politics of 007 (Indiana, 2005).
viii T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism
Paul Edwards is Professor of English and History of Art at Bath Spa University.
He has written extensively on Wyndham Lewis and early modernism, and he is the
author of Wyndham Lewis: Painter and Writer (Yale University Press, 2000).
Lee Garver is Assistant Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in English at
Butler University. He has published on Katherine Mansfield and written
introductions to volumes eight and nineteen of The Modernist Journals Project
online edition of the New Age. He is currently working on a book manuscript titled
‘Recovering Radical Modernism: The New Age and Edwardian Cultural Conflict’.
Andrzej Gasiorek is a Reader in Twentieth-Century English Literature at the
University of Birmingham, UK. He is the author of Post-War British Fiction:
Realism and After (Edward Arnold, 1995); Wyndham Lewis and Modernism
(Northcote House, 2004); and J. G. Ballard (Manchester University Press, 2005).
He is co-editor of the electronic journal Modernist Cultures (www.
modernist.bham.ac.uk).
Jesse Matz is Associate Professor of English at Kenyon College. He is author of
Literary Impressionism and Modernist Aesthetics (Cambridge University Press,
2001) and The Modern Novel: A Short Introduction (Blackwell, 2004). He is
currently at work on two projects: a book on the cultural uses of narrative
temporality and a book on the legacies of Impressionism in contemporary culture.
Alan Munton is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Plymouth. His
research interests include European Modernism, the literature and politics of the
1930s, and contemporary poetry and film. He has recently published articles on
Wyndham Lewis, Evelyn Waugh, and Ken Loach, and he is the author of English
Fiction of the Second World War London (Faber, 1989). He is editor of the
Wyndham Lewis Annual.
Andrew Thacker is Senior Research Fellow in the School of English, De Montfort
University, Leicester. His most recent publications are Moving Through
Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism (Manchester University Press,
2003) and Geographies of Modernism: Literatures, Cultures, Spaces (Routledge,
2005). He is currently completing a short book on The Imagist Poets, and working
upon a larger project on Modernist Magazines.
Introduction
On the Significance of a
Hulmean Modernism
Edward P. Comentale and Andrzej Gasiorek
One Sunday morning I had gone to Flemings in Oxford Street for a meal. This was a
different kind of establishment from the new-fangled Flemings of today. It had retained
quite a Victorian atmosphere, and so had most of the customers, whose appearance
suggested that they were food-faddists or Plymouth Brethren or Jehovah Witnesses or
something else a trifle odd. . . . On this particular occasion a burly young man with a
massive, florid countenance came and sat down opposite me. At first glance I associated
him with the open air and rural pursuits. Yes, probably a young gentlemanly farmer
spending the weekend in town. He gave his order and then, to my astonishment, unfolded
the Observer at the book review page. This hardly confirmed my surmise about him and I
was left wondering who he could be.
Paul Selver, on first seeing T. E. Hulme, pp. 25-6
T. E. Hulme arrived in London in June 1906 and plunked himself down – quite
literally – in the midst of the city’s most advanced artistic and intellectual circles.
His striking figure – 6’2” and 14 stone – could be seen in the Oxford Street
Flemings, the ABC in Chancery Lane, or the Café Royal in Piccadilly. It muscled
its way into the Twenty One Group, the Poets’ Club, and the pages of the New Age,
taking charge of the conversation and clearing room for the most radical voices of
the day. By all accounts, this young man from Staffordshire made sure that he was
a central player in the modernist primal scene, acting the role of café-swinging
avant-gardiste with grand aplomb. Yet, as Selver’s statement suggests, Hulme
arrived somewhat after the violent habits of modernism had already taken hold,
and his self-fashioning was always vexingly contradictory. Hulme seems to have
approached the modern scene once it had exposed its more regressive aspects and
thus he always addressed it with a keen awareness of its paradoxes. His work, as it
adopts one radical position after another, maintains a critical detachment from
them all; his life, as it teeters uncomfortably between the pre-modern, the modern,
and the post-modern, throws each of these moments into utter confusion as well as
high relief. More pointedly, Hulme, as a self-fashioned public intellectual, seemed
to resituate modernism in the complex, uneven trajectories of the public sphere. He
certainly was not the first man to enjoy that particularly bourgeois pleasure of
reading and eating at the same time, yet his writing wittily conflates reason and