Modernism and Style

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Modernism is fundamentally determined by its relationship to its own notions of style: oscillating between the poles of 'pure' style and 'purely' style, this traces the stylistic self-conceptualization of modernism from Schopenhauer and Flaubert in the 1850s, through Nietzsche and the symbolists in the 1880s, to the high modernists of the 1920s.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Series Editor Preface (p. ix)
• Acknowledgements (p. xviii)
• List of Abbreviations (p. xix)
• Introduction (p. 1)
• From 'pure style' to purely style (p. 1)
• Style and form (p. 8)
• Modernist criticism and style (p. 13)
• 'Saturated with style' (p. 40)
• 1 Philosophical Beginnings (p. 45)
• Arthur Schopenhauer and the symbolist 'will to style' (p. 45)
• Friedrich Nietzsche and 'the art of style' (p. 59)
• 2 1857: Literary Beginnings (p. 81)
• Gustave Flaubert and 'les affres du style' (p. 89)
• Charles Baudelaire and 'le style nerveux' (p. 101)
• 3 The 'Virus of Prose': Decadent Style and the Modernist Novel (p. 117)
• Prose poetry, stream of consciousness, interior monologue (p. 117)
• 'Une écriture blanche'? Edouard Dujardin, Les Lauriers sont coupés (p. 120)
• Decadent style and the death-drive (p. 125)
• Thomas Mann and 'stylistic and formal talent' (p. 130)
• Marcel Proust and the 'palimpsest' of style (p. 135)
• Ulysses and 'the English styles' (p. 142)
• 'Women's writing' and the 'disease' of style (p. 149)
• 'Beyond language': the late modernist novel (p. 153)
• 4 1922: Style and the Modernist Lyric (p. 156)
• Paul Valery and 'absolute poetry' (p. 157)
• R.M. Rilke and Orphic style (p. 174)
• T.S. Eliot and 'the style of direct speech' (p. 186)
• 5 The 'Alibi' of Style: Modernist Manifestos (p. 198)
• 'Style without rhetoric'? From he Problème da style to The Flowers of Tarbes (p. 199)
• Filippo Marinetti, 'The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism' (1909) (p. 209)
• Mina Loy, 'Feminist Manifesto' (1914) (p. 213)
• Ezra Pound, 'A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste' (1913) (p. 217)
• Tristan Tzara, 'Dada Manifesto' (1918) (p. 221)
• Kurt Pinthus, 'Foreword' to Menschheitsdämmerang (1919) (p. 226)
• Andre Breton, Surrealist Manifesto (1924) and Louis Aragon, Treatise on Style (1928) (p. 231)
• Conclusion (p. 239)
• Notes (p. 245)
• Bibliography (p. 276)
• Index (p. 287)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

This book appears in the "Modernism and " series, which seeks a broader understanding of modernism. What is fundamental to Hutchinson (Univ. of Kent, UK) is the language of modernism. He focuses on the period from 1857--the genesis of modernism as codified by both Fredric Jameson and Henri Meschonnic--to about 1922. Nonetheless, the reader senses in him a desire to look further back than 1857 to discover other possible ur texts. Hutchinson's foundation for modernism rests principally on four significant authors: Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Flaubert, and Baudelaire. His incorporation of philosophy into the discussion is particularly vital; it is fit that literary modernism grows from the same roots as existentialism. He subjects Flaubert's and Baudelaire's differing trajectories--the former moving "from modernity to pure style" and the latter "from pure style to modernity"--to a robust inquiry as to the movement's origins. Later chapters focus on such seminal figures as Mann, Proust, and Eliot. A section on Joyce's Ulysses is quite poignant in its analysis of "The Oxen of the Sun." Here Hutchinson's argument that style is a vehicle for truth in modernism is at its most convincing. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty. A. P. Pennino Stevens Institute of Technology