Mosaic Modernism: Anarchism, Pragmatism, Culture

Abstract

Combining close readings of canonical texts with insights from key authors' letters, reading notes, and other papers, David Kadlec has produced a compelling examination of literary modernism's intellectual roots in European anarchism and U.S. pragmatism. In doing so, he attempts to politicize a movement notoriously enigmatic in its engagement with material concerns of the day. By linking individual writers with such early-twentieth-century matters as eugenics, the gold standard, sexual disease, prohibition, immigration, and racial identity, Kadlec proves once again that modernism grew out of doors, sustaining itself on far more than aesthetically ambitious introspection. He says little about modernism's contribution to political discourse overall. For all its contextualist attention to the period's social thought, this remains a work of literary criticism focusing on the compositional qualities of modernist prose and verse. In trying to break through formal systems of linguistic representation, Kadlec argues, modernist writers turned to anarchist calls for direct action as well as face-to-face barter exchanges: economic interest in superseding preestablished market values for goods and services motivated the modernist search for ways to unsettle the deep grooves of consciousness so that “language might be made to embody dynamic experience.” With separate chapters on Ezra Pound, James Joyce, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and Zora Neale Hurston, Mosaic Modernism offers considerable biographical and textual evidence of these figures' engagement with the thought of the European anarchists Dora Marsden, Max Stirner, and Pierre Proudhon. The American Benjamin Tucker's definition of anarchism as the refusal of “beginnings, origins, and principles” provides the cornerstone for Kadlec's appreciation of modernist antifoundationalism; it is here that pragmatism enters the picture through William James's interest in anarchism for dissolving all things “big” and, in turn, the modernists' attraction to him and other pragmatists. Kadlec's genealogy of modernism is intricate but coherent—and well worth the effort. It adds historical dimension to his reading of such modernist aesthetic experimentation as Pound's textual collage practice and of Hurston's investment in an American cultural mosaic.

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