Will to Literature

David Trotter

• Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture by Lawrence Rainey
  Yale, 227 pp, £16.95, January 1999, ISBN 0 300 07050 0
• Modernism, Technology and the Body: A Cultural Study by Tim Armstrong
  Cambridge, 309 pp, £14.95, March 1998, ISBN 0 521 59997 0
• Body Ascendant: Modernism and the Physical Imperative by Harold Segel
  Johns Hopkins, 282 pp, £30.00, September 1998, ISBN 0 8018 5821 6
• Solid Objects: Modernism and the Test of Production by Douglas Mao
  Princeton, 308 pp, £32.50, November 1998, ISBN 0 691 05926 8

Modernism must be reckoned one of the lengthiest and most strenuous campaigns ever undertaken in the name of literature. Acutely conscious at once of the burden of the past – the intimidating totality of what had already been written – and of the present’s lightness, its free and easy way with burdens, its failure to be intimidated, the Modernist did not propose to carry on as before. To be literary at all, in such circumstances, one would have really to mean it, to work at it. And the best way to mean it was to begin all over again, to rebuild literature from the ground up, to demand obtrusively the privileges of inauguration. For it might be possible to alleviate and even to resolve one’s own anxiety by making other people anxious.