MySpace Modernism

David Earle

doi:10.1353/mod.0.0134

Excerpt - Is “making it new” a linear process of continual reinvention, or does this process involve cycling back to earlier forms of the old? Whereas the traditional definition of modernism denies any mantle of commercialism, the current age of modernist studies firmly establishes modernism’s dependence upon market dynamics. The field of “Material Modernism,” initiated over the last few decades by critics such as Lawrence Rainey, Kevin Dettmar, Stephen Watt, and George Bornstein, has persuasively shown how modernism marketed itself and was disseminated to an increasingly popular audience.1 Jonathan Rose and Patrick Collier, among others, have explored how modernism became the purview of working class intellectuals and was available in populist forms.2 Fewer scholars, however, have taken into consideration how modernism was defined and canonized by academia. Jennifer Wicke, for one, points out the need for scholars and critics to acknowledge their own implication in establishing modernism’s “brand name,” how our scholarship is involved in the ongoing and self-defining modernist industry.3 I would take Wicke’s suggestion one step further and point out that not only is our research involved in the “marketing” of modernism, but so is our pedagogy. We, as teachers, are dealers in the multivalent forms of modernism, and the classroom is the place where the movement is “bought and sold.” Yet, as Helen Sword points out in her introduction to this collection, pedagogy is often overlooked in our highly theoretical field of study. There is a divide between what we write and the praxis of the classroom. This gap, I believe, may very well be an echo of that old academically constructed bias against seeing modernism in the marketplace. [End Page 478]