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Modernism, Art & Literature Daniel R. Schwarz. Reconfiguring Modernism:Explorations in the Relationship Between Modern Art and Modern Literature. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997. x + 241 pp. Cloth $45.00 Paper $18.95
THE RELATION between modernist literature and visual art is a tempting subject yet one that, as Daniel Schwarz notes, relatively few critics have tackled. Perhaps some who were tempted may have been deterred by the difficulties of bringing these two arts together, and by an embarrassment of riches that brings with it problems of scale and coherence. Order might be imposed through a "grand theory" of modernism; but Schwarz renounces the use of Marxism, structuralism or the like. He aims instead to "reclaim the aesthetic" ( 18) as a category of cultural criticism, arguing that only the aesthetic can give us the "feel" of an Eliot poem or a Cézanne still-life, and suggest the nature of their relationship.
So far, it is easy to agree; but a book on this subject still faces formidable obstacles in the execution. First, there is the danger of being overwhelmed by sheer vastness and multiplicity; and Schwarz courts this danger by launching out into the empyrean of cultural impressionism, rather than steering by the obvious existing landmarks of the field. The modernist writers in English that one thinks of first in connection with the visual arts are probably Ford, Yeats and Woolf, who had painting "in the family"; Wyndham Lewis and D. H. Lawrence, who both practiced art and wrote about it memorably; and Pound, a collector and all-round connoisseur. But Schwarz's literary analysis is mainly devoted to Conrad, T. S. Eliot, Joyce, and Wallace Stevens. Woolf does figure substantially, and Schwarz's discussion of Lily Briscoe's painting in To the Lighthouse is one of the most convincing and imaginative sections of his book. Even here, though, he makes his...