Content area
Full Text
Modernist Communities Across Cultures and Media asks us to reconsider notions of community as both practiced and proposed by modernists. As the title suggests, the collection is particularly attuned to how media enable, constrain, and foreclose community, forcing modernist practitioners to remediate not just texts, but larger conceptions of publics as well. The collection is itself an experiment in community across cultures, arising from the first conference of the French Société d’Études Modernistes (SEM) in 2014, adding contributors from India, the UK, Canada, and the US. In arguing for “diffuse and evanescent” conceptions of community, the book deploys a range of methodologies, reads texts in numerous languages, and explores works from the forbidding heights of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939) down to Dashiell Hammett’s hardboiled detective novel Red Harvest (1929), which in Benoît Tadié’s brilliant reading forms part of modernism’s protest against Woodrow Wilson, “who is obliquely evoked as a figure representing autocratic systems of power, outdated languages, and the sins of the fathers” (2, 124). The upshot of such a catholic approach is that the collection demonstrates what it strives to describe: “provisional ideas of community . . . ones that linger on the isolated experiment rather than focusing on its value and applicability to an overall society” (4).
Some communities traditionally considered under the modernist flag, like Bloomsbury, worked side by side, but not necessarily in close collaboration (Vanessa Bell’s book jacket designs are a case in point, with Bell producing them independently of input from her sister, Virginia Woolf). If scholars of modernism used to describe these groupings via the rubric of individual authors considered serially, Modernist Communities productively shifts the conversation by focusing on creative works and looking outward from that vantage to the communities that surrounded their production. Take for instance a chapter that covers the evolution of the Dada artwork L’Œil cacodylate, which—though attributed to Francis Picabia—is exemplary of “the group-making effort” of Dadaists whose “self-representations and mimicry . . . subvert traditional authorship boundaries” (51). As Irene Gammel points out, Picabia first decorated the canvas in his hospital...