Satirizing Modernism: Aesthetic Autonomy, Romanticism, and the Avant-Garde

Description

Satirizing Modernism examines 20th-century novels that satirize avant-garde artists and authors while also using experimental techniques associated with literary modernism. These novels—such as Wyndham Lewis’s The Apes of God, William Gaddis’s The Recognitions, and Gilbert Sorrentino’s Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things—were under-recognized and received poor reviews at the time of publication, but have increasingly been acknowledged as both groundbreaking and deeply influential. Satirizing Modernism analyzes these novels in order to present an alternative account of literary modernism, which should be viewed neither as a radical break with the past nor an outmoded set of aesthetics overtaken by a later postmodernism. In self-reflexively critiquing their own aesthetics, these works express an unconventional modernism that both revises literary history and continues to be felt today. Title Page Copyright Page Contents Acknowledgments Chapter 1 Introduction: Autonomy, Satire, Romanticism, Avant-Garde 1 Autonomy 2 Satire 3 Romanticism 4 Avant-garde 5 Chapter summaries Notes Chapter 2 The Romantic Satire of Romanticism: Thomas Love Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey 1 Antiromantic romanticism 2 The Philosophy of Melancholy 3 Indeterminacy and the comedy of humors 4 Satire after romantic irony Notes Chapter 3 Modernism Against Itself: Wyndham Lewis’s The Apes of God 1 Self-reflexive satire and the modernist avant-gardes 2 Wyndham Lewis’s “satire for its own sake” 3 Ape and original 4 Mimesis, humanism, and satire Notes Chapter 4 Exhausting Modernism: Satire, Sublimity, and Late Modernism in William Gaddis’s The Recognitions 1 Satire and late modernism 2 Indeterminacy and judgment 3 Apophaticism and self-reflexive satire 4 Late-modern satire and the ambivalent sublime Notes Chapter 5 Aporia and the Satiric Imagination: The Limit-Modernism of Gilbert Sorrentino’s Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things 1 Satire without content 2 Satire and aporia 3 Satire, autonomy, imagination Notes Chapter 6 Conclusion: Satire and Radical Apophasis in Evan Dara’s The Easy Chain 1 Situating avant-garde satires of the avant-garde 2 “Negate negate negation”: Evan Dara’s The Easy Chain Notes Bibliography Index