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Fictions of Autonomy: Modernism from Wilde to de Man. Andrew Gold- stone. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Pp. xiv + 204. $65.00 (cloth).
Fictions of Autonomy is about a conflict between understanding literary form as autonomous- a law unto itself-or as always imbricated in the specificity of history. If we subscribe to the old religion of art, be it Wildean l'art pour l'art or Eliotic impersonality, we ignore the political. Yet extremist contextualism, so the dichotomy goes, risks missing the thing itself-the poem.
The problem is an old one. Goldstone revisits it out of a commitment to reading autonomy with more subtlety. Overlooked as moribund, naïve, and passé in modernist studies, ideas around aesthetic autonomy, Goldstone contends, in fact reflect a central concern throughout twentieth- century literature. He challenges us to think about this: it's no longer useful to attack autonomy as merely the reactive, elitist logic of our literary critical forbears, or to champion its antirealist or anti-representational tendencies as resistant to empirical research (Goldstone places Charles Altieri and Richard Lansdown in this bracket) (189). Nor is it enough to seek extraliterary cor- relatives for modernism's aestheticist tendencies, "as though modernism needed to be saved from [itself]" (4). Goldstone characterizes such critical tendencies as rendering literature passively "responsive" to history, however politically motivated. (He names Jed Esty, Rebecca Walkowitz, and Douglas Mao as practitioners of the New Modernist studies that "still" grant aesthetics "direct political effects.") Instead, as this book seeks to provide, we need a sociological history of the aesthetic concept that is attentive to formation but also to form. Goldstone mobilizes Pierre Bourdieu's The Rules of Art here-particularly the idea that the aesthetic autonomy of literature is (in Bourdieu's words) a "position to be made," something to be "conquered" (9). Goldstone lays claim to autonomy in modernism as an entity frequently desired by writers, as well as a "confront[ation]" with social embeddedness-that is, with the fact that art can never be fully detached from the world and the history in which...