Modernism and the Culture of Market Society

A broad-ranging 2004 study exploring the relation between the modernist avant-garde and capitalist culture.

John Xiros Cooper (Author)

9780521120111, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 24 September 2009

300 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm, 0.44 kg

Review of the hardback: '… I would urge anyone working on modernism to go away and read. … John Xiros Cooper's passionately argued Modernism and the Culture of Market Society … his is a brilliant polemic. This is an unremittingly materialist analysis … that situates modernism in relation to the complex process of economic, technological, social and political modernization that created it.' Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory

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.

Subject Areas: Literary theory [DSA]