Robert S Lehman

Impossible Modernism

T. S. Eliot, Walter Benjamin, and the Critique of Historical Reason

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Robert S. Lehman is Assistant Professor of English at Boston College.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 272
• Erscheinungstermin: 24. August 2016
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 232mm x 155mm x 24mm
• Gewicht: 548g
• ISBN-13: 9780804799041
• ISBN-10: 0804799040
• Artikelnr.: 45001608

Autorenporträt

Robert S. Lehman is Assistant Professor of English at Boston College.

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
Introduction: The Poetry and the Prose of the Future
chapter abstract
The Introduction examines three moments that have proven foundational for
the fraught relationship between poetry and history. The first occurs in
the fourth century B. C. in Aristotle's Poetics, the earliest attempt to
provide a systematic definition of the structure and effects of poetry and,
consequently, the origin of all later crises of verse. The second appears
in Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire, a text that offers a complicated poetic
response to a moment of crisis in Marx's own historical method. The third
appears in the early writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, where, against the
onset of the nineteenth-century science of history, the demand to see
history become poetry is made explicit. Focusing on these three moments,
the Introduction establishes the intellectual-historical coordinates of the
poetico-historical problem that T. S. Eliot and Walter Benjamin inherit.
1Lyric
chapter abstract
The first chapter addresses T. S. Eliot's struggle with history as this
struggle unfolds between 1910 and 1920, between the composition of "The
Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and the publication of "Gerontion."
Challenging readings of Eliot's project as, from its inception,
conciliatory-the terminus of a certain narrative of literary modernism, the
moment when modernism became reconciled to its institutional status-this
chapter reveals in Eliot's lyric practice an opposed tendency. During the
1910s, Eliot characterizes the poetic ordering of literary history not only
as a synthesis of diverse works but also as a practice whose success
depends on a series of divisions, divisions inscribed in the consciousness
or the life of the "mature poet" and reduplicated in the poet's literary
creations.
2Satire
chapter abstract
The second chapter treats the formal role played by satire in the drafts of
The Waste Land, focusing in particular on T. S. Eliot's parody of Alexander
Pope's Rape of the Lock in an early version of "The Fire Sermon." In
Eliot's hands, satire becomes a means of responding to a specifically
modernist crisis in aesthetic judgment: the seeming impossibility of
distinguishing, after the collapse of traditional standards of beauty,
popular charlatans from individuals of real talent. By placing The Waste
Land under the sign of satire, Eliot attempts to distinguish his long poem
from the wasteland of literary history that it recollects. The
disappearance of satire from the final version of The Waste Land following
the editorial suggestions of Pound, and Eliot's replacement of his earlier
satirical method by the so-called "mythical method" reflect satire's
failure to accomplish its task.
3Myth
chapter abstract
The third chapter focuses on T. S. Eliot's turn to the "mythical method" as
a strategy of literary creation through division. Examining the
delimitation in The Waste Land of the history of verse as it develops from
Chaucer to Whitman, it shows that Eliot turns to myth not to forge
connections with something temporally or spatially other but to cut his
poem free from its literary-historical past. Within the realm of myth,
broken off from the unending historical cycles that provide The Waste Land
with its subject matter, Eliot attempts to place the poet's creative act.
The results are volatile: history remains, in the poem, the space of
production, however fallen its products, while myth stands apart from
history as a space where nothing-not history and certainly not literary
history-happens.
4Order
chapter abstract
The book's fourth chapter reads Walter Benjamin's earliest programmatic
writings in light of early-twentieth-century debates over the legacy of
Kantianism. And it treats in particular Benjamin's attempt to replace
Kant's transcendental philosophy-Kant's ostensibly complete description of
the conditions of human cognition-with what Benjamin refers to as a
"doctrine of orders," a system of interlinked but non-identical structures
of knowledge derived from linguistics, theology, aesthetics and other
domains. It finds Benjamin taking seriously Kant's claim that human
experience is constitutively finite and expanding this notion of
constitutive finitude to include the Kantian transcendental itself, leaving
the latter open to transformation through its encounters with a material,
historical outside. Although references to Kant are rare in Benjamin's
later writings, a modified version of Kant's philosophy-this is the claim
of the chapter-is the foundation for Benjamin's later critique of
historicism.
5Anecdote
chapter abstract
Focusing on some of Walter Benjamin's scattered remarks on "anecdote" in
The Arcades Project and ancillary works, this chapter asks how anecdote
came to appear to Benjamin to provide a critical model of historical
perception, critical in the sense that it eludes the failings of both the
rationalist approach to the past (which Benjamin associates with Hegel) and
the empiricist approach to the past (which Benjamin associates with Ranke).
It argues, finally, that the critical, anecdotal model of historical
perception is concretized in Benjamin's late "physiognomies," that is, in
his examinations of the gambler, the flâneur, the melancholic and other
modern historical types. These figures and their diverse forms of life
provide historical time with the "standard" that Benjamin seeks.
6Allegory
chapter abstract
This chapter concerns the role of allegory in Walter Benjamin's writings,
and specifically on the challenge that allegory presents to time as the
latter manifests itself by ordering human history. Benjamin develops his
allegorical challenge to time in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, his
studies of Baudelaire and, most profoundly, the ninth thesis "On the
Concept of History." In the last of these texts, Benjamin's allegorical
presentation of the "new angel" depicts a vision of history without time, a
vision in which events occur absent any temporal continuity. In this
impossible vision, the critical force of what Benjamin calls the
"allegorical intention" emerges.
Conclusion: The Lightning Flash and the Storm of Progress
chapter abstract
Impossible Modernism concludes with a short discussion of two figures: the
flash of lightning that cuts across the desert scene in the last section of
The Waste Land and the "storm of progress" that blows through the ninth
thesis "On the Concept of History." These images, it is maintained, in
their attempt to present together tradition, on the one hand, and event, on
the other, bring to the fore modernism's paradoxical historical
imagination, and the relevance of this imagination to our contemporary
aesthetic and political concerns.