Recovering the new : translatlantic roots of moderism / Edward S. Cutler.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Cutler, Edward S.

Series:

Becoming modern

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Whitman, Walt, 1819-1892.

Poe, Edgar Allan, 1809-1849.

American literature--19th century--History and criticism.

American literature.

Modernism (Literature)--United States.

Modernism (Literature).

European literature.

Comparative literature.

Criticism and interpretation.

United States.

Poe, Edgar Allan, 1809-1849--Criticism and interpretation.

Poe, Edgar Allan.

Whitman, Walt, 1819-1892--Criticism and interpretation.

Whitman, Walt.

Comparative literature--American and European.

Comparative literature--European and American.

Poe, Edgar Allan, 1809-1849--Influence.

European literature--American influences.

Whitman, Walt, 1819-1892--Influence.

Modernism (Literature)--Europe.

Europe.

Physical Description:

x, 215 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm.

Place of Publication:

Hanover [N.H.] : Published by University Press of New England [for] University of New Hampshire, [2003]

Summary:

Historians and cultural critics have customarily viewed modernism as a movement with western European origins that established an aesthetic in opposition to mass culture. In sharp contrast to these established views, Edward S. Cutler argues that modernity is best understood as a transatlantic urban phenomenon and that aesthetic practices which consolidate under modernism in the early twentieth century are themselves historically implicated in the very mass culture against which they declared "autonomy." Recovering the New opens with a rich examination of the relationship between manifestations of early high capitalism and the mid-nineteenth-century emergence of aesthetic modernity. Cutler uses historically rooted examples such as the debates over paper currency, the rise of quasi-scientific spiritual movements, and the belief in the superior reality of the photographic image to demonstrate the profound cultural pressure new forms of exchange placed upon the very possibility of representation, aesthetic or otherwise, in the era of high capitalism. Turning next to the translatlantic circulation of New York City print culture, especially its daily newspapers, he demonstrates a significant "low-brow" component to modernism. His examination of the urban fiction of Edgar Allan Poe reinforces the connection of New York and Paris and demonstrates that transatlantic circulation of urban texts is more crucial to the development of modernism than specificities of time or place. A discussion of Walt Whitman's growing ambivalence to industrial modernity closes the book. Looking closely at Whitman's poetic encounter with the New York's Crystal Palace exhibition of 1853, Cutler argues that Whitman's shift away from the temporal present and toward myth marks the beginning of an aesthetic appropriation characteristic of later modernism, which seeks to redeem the present age through recourse to the past.

Contents:

Part I Modernity, Media, and the Era of High Capitalism

1. Ephemeral Media: Aesthetic Modernity and Early High Capitalism 25

2. News and the "New Spirit" in Art: Mass Media Roots of the Temporal Aesthetic 65

Part II Walter Benjamin's Nineteenth Century in Transatlantic Perspective

3. Ruins of Type: On Some Motifs in Poe 97

4. Passage through Modernity: Leaves of Grass and the New York Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1853 134

Conclusion: The Persistence of the Nineteenth Century 168.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [201]-210) and index.

ISBN:

1584652594

1584652713

OCLC:

50144042