Re-Visiting the Arcade

Modernism’s status – a neuropsychic apocalypse like Eliot’s dissociated sensibility, a Yeatsian spume on a ghostly paradigm of a period, a play of text against Weltan­schauung in some hermeneutic circle, a socio­cultural Venn diagram, or just a handy academic taxonomy?

Tracking modernism’s modalities [absit omen] is itself a trek through its avant-la-lettre outcrops, then the episodes of proto-modernism, the arcades of Benjamin’s ur-phenomena, its canonical corpus of high modernism, the spasmodic interplay among its subsets and -isms, the worked exuberance of its imaginary museum (pace Malraux and Davie), its establishment as an international ‘constellation’ (see T.J. Clark), until its disruption into a low-powered anti-modernism (see Josipovici’s critique in Whatever Happened to Modernism?), then its reflexive deconstruction into polymorphous post-modernism (see Jameson passim), until the cheerfully ad hoc eclecticism of current ‘after-theory’ – that itself is quite a schlep.

But Eagleton is far too canny to log it schematically like that; he’s a fleet-footed flâneur of these arcades. Albeit once a culture commissar, he also wrote the novel Saints and Scholars where Wittgenstein, Bakhtin and Joyce’s Bloom played out a cleverly comic pre-script for this, his relaxedly erudite survey of the modernism that stands as an epochal but current presence for all its anomalies and contradictions. The last chapter of this new book is called ‘Conservative Revolutionaries’, echoing his Critical Revolutionaries (2022) which explores how those critics – Eliot and Empson, with Richards, Leavis and Williams – matched what modernism did, and changed the way we read literature.

Eagleton’s four chapters offer a wide-ranging but focused and persuasive account. He readily concedes ...