Joseph B. Entin, Sensational Modernism: Experimental Fiction and Photography in Thirties America Sensational Modernism: Experimental Fiction and Photography in Thirties America . Joseph B. Entin. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Pp. xi+325.
2011; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 108; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/659133
ISSN1545-6951
Autores Tópico(s)Cinema and Media Studies
ResumoPrevious articleNext article FreeBook ReviewJoseph B. Entin, Sensational Modernism: Experimental Fiction and Photography in Thirties America Sensational Modernism: Experimental Fiction and Photography in Thirties America. Joseph B. Entin. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Pp. xi+325.Paula RabinowitzPaula RabinowitzUniversity of Minnesota Search for more articles by this author University of MinnesotaPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint SectionsMoreIn Sensational Moderism: Experimental Fiction and Photography in Thirties America, Joseph B. Entin demonstrates that he is an adept reader of the interconnections between literary imagery and photographic image. Moreover, his argument for sensation as a significant aesthetic category implicitly (and at times explicitly) offers new ways of thinking about periodization and literary movements. For example, in an earlier essay, “‘Unhuman Humanity’: Bodies of the Urban Poor and the Collapse of Realist Legibility,” Entin presents authors Stephen Crane and William Dean Howells as participating in “post-sentimental modes of narrating the poor.”1 Connecting the city tramp to the urban flaneur, these varying sketches are linked to visual cues meant to see poverty in novel ways. Entin's dynamic approach undermines the usual distinctions between naturalism and realism as it expands—sometimes beyond recognition—what we think of as experimental writing.Likewise, by eliding the distinction between photographic essays and literary narration, Entin challenges the pristine borders between the image and the word, as well as any regressive emphasis on media specificity prevalent in various disciplinary approaches, especially those of art history. His attention to the language of image in the various descriptive renderings of work, bodies, and space makes it clear that modern(ist) literature is essentially a form of photography. As such, it also makes clear how the image works as language, demanding—at least in those images attached to human form—narrative depth. In naming a new version of modernism, Entin contributes to the ever-burgeoning new modernist studies currently reanimating literary scholarship. His “sensational modernism” joins what Jani Scandura and Michael Thurston call Modernism, Inc., an expanding set of works written during the past decade that take to task the traditional concept of literary modernism. Rather than seeing it as limited to works written in opposition to popular culture, these works push the boundaries—as any viable corporation should—to include previously dismissed cultural practices and a host of other modernisms identified by scholars of film, architecture, literature, and radio: vernacular, street, low, pulp, queer, and others.2 Sensational Modernism joins a prestigious list of books about the 1930s published by University of North Carolina Press, among the premier publishers in the field of American studies. Entin's intervention into the well-trod terrain of the 1930s offers some new figures to the usual canon of 1930s authors/artists, but it also reassesses those better known or more studied. Entin's primary contribution to the field is to establish the “sensational” as a mode of aesthetic practice that dwells between the borders of the sentimental and the spectacular. Connecting remnants of nineteenth-century sentimental literature's portrayal of the needy or downtrodden to twentieth-century spectacles of the grotesque or impoverished, sensation acts to bring the distorted body of laborers, the poor, and others socially marginalized out of abjection and into view, not as titillation but as aspects of social upheaval. Entin's argument is that the photographers and writers he surveys—as diverse as William Faulkner and Aaron Siskind—focused on the bodily contortions wrought by social changes during the Depression decade. Moreover, he argues that what connects these artists is a mode of revealing the body as a dynamic force within the machinery of capitalism—subject to its pains but also capable of resistance—that could stand metonymically for the larger distortions of alienated labor within modern life. Even the Harlem dancers Siskind captured in awkward positions demonstrate that art itself was undergoing a major transformation as it sought a means to signify defiance to regimes of race and class.This attention to the levels of “scrutiny,” to use one of Entin's keywords, that artists provided their audiences opens up new modes of inquiry. Entin shows how William Carlos Williams's examinations of his patients allegorized the entire enterprise of social observation cultivated by experts, including literary experts. In this, his analysis dovetails in provocative ways with Lois Cucullu's insights about modern expertise in Britain.3 Reclaiming Williams as a proletarian writer is an important and needed recuperation of an author usually anthologized as a naive imagist focused on juicy plums and red wheelbarrows. Entin retrieves Williams's roots as a member of left-wing literary movements and as a family doctor, a writer who brought his work to bear on his words. This chapter and the final one on Richard Wright's Native Son (1940) offer new readings of two writers whose works have been the subject of countless studies. Like the chapter on Pietro di Donato's underappreciated Christ in Concrete (1939), these bookend chapters bring a keen writerly sensibility to texts that seem readerly and transparent. Entin's close reading reveals the language of gesture, movement, exhaustion, effort—the torsion of the body at work.By oscillating between the residues of popular forms from nineteenth-century sentimental novels and twentieth-century tabloid journalism, writers and photographers associated with the 1930s Left found a vocabulary that enabled a new articulation of the working body to appear as a visual and linguistic presence. Poised between the poles of piety and scandal, these works created visceral forms of address meant to evoke physical responses in their readers/viewers. Descriptions of images of bodies torqued and contorted through accidents, efforts, or (occasionally) pleasure induce a reciprocal sensation in the reader. They, in effect, reproduce the literary or photographic text within the reader's/viewer's body, reversing notions of representation, not from reality to imitation but the inverse. In the texts and pictures Entin examines, bodily disfigurement as image precedes and makes legible the actual deformities produced by modern capitalism. Thus, the experience of astonishment Entin finds connecting as disparate works as The Great Gatsby (1925) and Native Son engage avant-garde aesthetic practices in the mundane, everyday world of popular magazines, movies, and tabloids. Modernism is yet another form of a freak show.Entin reads di Donato and Wright as linked by their mutual interest in finding a mode of expression that confounds easy identification, one that comes out of and contributes to deep social and linguist alienation (in each case based in ethnicity and race). In astutely deciphering this no-man's-land, Entin shows that precisely what has been seen as failure in these and other didactic “protest” novels are actually rhetorical, even aesthetic, strategies—and successful ones at that. Novels that beat their readers over the head, so to speak, do so for a reason. They want to effect a sensation of pain within the reader, both through emulation by way of engrossing description and through the discomfort of the overt and obvious, especially among sophisticated readers expecting high-modernist vagaries. Although submerged deeply within Sensational Modernism, this is a remarkable insight into the workings of proletarian literature, one I do not think anyone has noticed before.I was less persuaded by the chapters on William Faulkner, Tillie Olsen and James Agee, and Aaron Siskind. The arguments within each seem, well, contorted. Thus, rather than explicating how the description or images of bodily contortion and pain worked within the texts, the critic appears to be the one wringing each text for meaning. Entin's readings here are too overdetermined. Why distinguish “modernism” from “documentary,” when documentary is itself a modernist form and practice? Posing this dichotomy reduces Entin's claims that sensational modernism depends on the interlinking of form and reality, of text and body. It is as if he is working out ideas here (they appear to be the earliest iterations of his thesis) that are more theoretically dense as he elaborates them in the introduction and other chapters. Still, Sensational Modernism opens wide avenues for perusal in the field of new modernist studies. Like Jani Scandura's Down in the Dumps, Entin's approach argues implicitly for a necessary imbrication of image and text when analyzing the 1930s.4 With the triumph of the visual in the Golden Age of Hollywood, it became impossible to read without seeing. Writing and photography, both forms that seemed to be superseded by cinema, remained crucial to each other because of their unique ability to convey motion through stillness. In this, they actually produced a new kind of sensation. Notes 1. Joseph B. Entin, “‘Unhuman Humanity’: Bodies of the Urban Poor and the Collapse of Realist Legibility,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 34 (2001): 314.2. Jani Scandura and Michael Thurston, eds., Modernism, Inc.: Body, Memory, Capital (New York University Press, 2001). Examples of boundary pushing work include Colleen Lamos, Deviant Modernism: Sexual and Textual Errancy in T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Marcel Proust (Cambridge University Press, 1998); Diane Collecott, H.D. and Sapphic Modernism, 1910–1950 (Cambridge University Press, 1999); Michael Szalay, New Deal Modernism: American Literature and the Invention of the Welfare State (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); David Trotter, Paranoid Modernism: Literary Experiment, Psychosis, and the Professionalization of English Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Christopher Schedler, Border Modernism: Intercultural Readings in American Literary Modernism (New York: Routledge, 2002); Michael Trask, Cruising Modernism: Class and Sexuality in American Literature and Social Thought (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003); George Cotkin, Reluctant Modernism: American Thought and Culture, 1880–1900 (New York: Twayne, 2004); Rebecca L. Walkowitz and Douglas Mao, eds., Bad Modernisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); Todd Avery, Radio Modernism: Literature, Ethics, and the BBC, 1922–1938 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006); and Juan Suárez, Pop Modernism: Noise and the Reinvention of the Everyday (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007).3. Lois Cucullu, Expert Modernists, Matricide and Modern Culture: Woolf, Forster, Joyce (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).4. Jani Scandura, Down in the Dumps: Place, Modernity, American Depression (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 108, Number 4May 2011 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/659133 Views: 54Total views on this site © 2011 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]. Crossref reports no articles citing this article.
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