Modernism Today ed. by Sjef Houppermans etal. (review)

Reviewed by: Modernism Today ed. by Sjef Houppermans etal. Verita Sriratana Houppermans, Sjef, Peter Liebregts, Jam Baetens, and Otto Boele, eds. Modernism Today. Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2013. Pp. 283. Modernism Today is not only a scholarly attempt to revise, as well as expand, the many shifting definitions of Modernism, but also a strong testimony to the transnational quality inherent within Modernism as an aesthetic and intellectual movement that thrives on the cross-fertilisation of ideas in different spatial, temporal and cultural contexts. In “What Modernism Was and Is: By Way of an Introduction”, Sascha Bru and Dirk de Geest offer a succinct overview of the past, present and even prospective trends in Modernist studies, charting and re-charting the critical and physical terrains which tend to be overlooked by scholars of Modernism. Central Europe’s shifting national borders and multicultural interrelationships form cases in point: “the rediscovery of that Other Europe, that is Central Europe, is slowly beginning to manifest the importance of notions like ‘transnational’ precisely by pointing at the capital importance of national differences and the cultural exchanges between them” (6). Jacqueline Bel, in “Intellectual Scepticism versus Avant-Garde Bragging: Modernism in Dutch Literature”, leads readers into the mellow jazz-resounding world of Dutch Modernism, in which the notion of “Modernism” has been interrogated and, at times, dismissed as obsolete as it fails to capture (if the use of this verb is possible at all) the sense of the just-now “newness” of modernity. The author of this review was also fascinated to learn that avant-gardism, in the case of the Netherlands, where the term was introduced only in 1984, is truly “a literary-historical construction” (77). The collection’s revisionary project, as outlined in the introductory section, puts on centre stage the concept of the “arrière-garde”: “Arrière-garde artists are not merely representatives of a conservative ideology or aesthetic, they deliberately attempt to renew literature, yet not by destroying its rhetorical foundations but rather by trying to re-interpret older and widely shared components from the literary tradition” (8). What the author of this review finds to be Modernism Today’s important contribution is the discussion of the ways in which the arrière-garde writers and artists venture to question even the tenets of the increasingly canonised avant-garde movement. Graham Greene, as Peter Liebregts points out, is an example of a sceptical arrièregarde daring to criticise what the reading public of his time—and even to this day—perceived to be avant-garde writings: literary works by T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ezra Pound and Virginia Woolf. A discussion of Greene’s 1945 essay “François Mauriac”, in which he audaciously comments upon Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), a novel considered by readers and critics to be the quintessence of Modernism, confirms that the label “Modernism” as we know it today is a posthumous designation of the living, changing and contradictory literary landscape of his time: [End Page 325] Mrs Dalloway walking down Regent Street was aware of the glitter of shop windows, the smooth passage of cars, the conversation of shoppers, but it was only a Regent Street seen by Mrs Dalloway that was conveyed to the reader: a charming whimsical rather sentimental prose poem was what Regent Street had become: a current of air, a touch of scent, a sparkle of glass. But, we protest, Regent Street too has a right to exist; it is more real than Mrs Dalloway. (37) It is made apparent in this volume that the writers whom readers often regard as prototypically Modernist par excellence form only one of the many artistic waves in the twentieth-century literary ocean. Peter de Voogd’s essay tells the gripping story of the makings of James Joyce in his study of Joyce and the small magazines, particularly a magazine called transition, which earned the nickname la maison de Joyce [the home of Joyce] from the French critic Marcel Brion for publishing the later Finnegans Wake: “English literary Modernism manifested itself mostly through a large number of small and struggling magazines and journals which were part of...

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