Modernism and the Culture of Market Society
Cambridge University Press, 9/2/2004
EAN 9780521834865, ISBN10: 0521834864
Hardcover, 300 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 2.1 cm
Language: English
Many critics argue that the modernist avant-garde were always in opposition to the commercial values of market-driven society. For John Xiros Cooper, the avant-garde bears a more complex relation to capitalist culture than previously acknowledged. He argues that in their personal relationships, gender roles and sexual contacts, the modernist avant-garde epitomised the impact of capitalism on everyday life. Cooper shows how the new social, cultural and economic practices aimed to defend cultural values in a commercial age, but, in this task, modernism became the subject of a profound historical irony. Its own characterising techniques, styles and experiments, deployed to resist the new nihilism of the capitalist market, eventually became the preferred cultural style of the very market culture which the first modernists opposed. In this broad-ranging 2004 study John Xiros Cooper explores this provocative theme across a wide range of Modernist authors, including Joyce, Eliot, Stein and Barnes.
Acknowledgements
Introduction
The modernist avant-garde and the culture of market society
Part I. The Posthuman Scene
1. Approaching modernism
2. Ideology
3. Permanent revolution
4. Epistemology of the market
Part II. The Regime of Unrest
Four Precursors
5. Bloody face
6. A variegated daguerreotype
7. The unnameable
8. Childhood as resistance
Part III. The Margin is the Mainstream
9. Artisanal production, Ulysses and the circulation of goods
10. History and the post-psychological self in The Waste Land
11. La bohème
Lewis, Stein, Barnes
12. Bloomsbury nation
Notes
Bibliography
Index.