Harry Levin opened his famous essay “What Was Modernism?” (1960) with his somewhat bewildered lament that a new apartment building in New York City had been named the Picasso. For Levin, this meant that modernism—understood as a revolt against the increasingly commercialized aesthetic sensibilities of the bourgeoisie—was now dead, commodified just like wallpaper and pop music. We have all had analogous moments. Years ago in Madrid, I saw a placard advertising Burger King's new salad menu; it read: “Verde que te quiero verde” (Green, how I want you green), the opening line of Federico García Lorca's surrealist masterpiece “Romance sonámbulo.” In such moments, the cognitive dissonance sometimes results from a shattering of our previous beliefs that the artist, poem, or movement in question was somehow pure—and thus, that capitalism's pernicious reach had tainted a more authentic artworld. But in many cases, what startles us is an incongruence: the widespread social...
Fingerprints of a Haze
GAYLE ROGERS is professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of Incomparable Empires: Modernism and the Translation of Spanish and American Literature (2016) and Modernism and the New Spain: Britain, Cosmopolitan Europe, and Literary History (2012). With Sean Latham, he is coauthor of Modernism: Evolution of an Idea (2015), which launched the New Modernisms series that they coedit. His articles and translations have appeared in PMLA, Modernism/modernity, Comparative Literature, Novel, Journal of Modern Literature, James Joyce Quarterly, Revista de estudios orteguianos, A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism, Cambridge Companion to the American Modernist Novel, and other publications. He has previously served on the executive board of the Modernist Studies Association and the Prose Fiction forum of the Modern Language Association. His current book project is a history of the concept of speculation from the medieval era to the present.
Gayle Rogers; Fingerprints of a Haze. Novel 1 November 2019; 52 (3): 475–478. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00295132-7738749
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