Jessica Berman (2009) makes the prescient observation that “modernism seems at the heart of the new comparative literature in a way not seen since the final chapter of Erich Auerbach’s foundational text, Mimesis? Why?” (55). While she uses the term “new comparative literature,” she could have easily been asking why modernism plays such a vital role in “new world literature.” Her answer as to why these texts employ modernism is that they do so because it is viewed as a universalizing / homogenizing force, as well as a marketable one (59). Another way of putting it would be to say that these texts privilege “old modernism” because it acts as a dominant aesthetic flow washing over local literature and eroding differences. As a hegemonic form
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Old modernism still performs valuable critical work because it serves as a geographical and aesthetic model that reproduces many of the main features of world-systems tinged theories of world literature; it functions as core modernism. Even as critics bring in new texts and authors, they are often read, directly or indirectly, against the modernist classics of old modernism. For example, Pound, Eliot, and Woolf have all become modernist mainstays; their works and theories permeate every aspect of it, from books and journals to courses at every level. In a way, they have developed into some of the “men and women of 1890 to 1945” due to their privileged place in the canon of modernism, as well as the budding one of late modernism (and they have kept their place in new modernist studies for good measure). The context of world literature enables us to read Pound, Eliot, and Woolf, and their theorizations of literary space, as modernist precursors to current trends that are attempting to chart the burgeoning realm of global aesthetic flow. Their ideas are a harbinger of things to come; global spaces will (and already have) alter(ed) the way we conceive the circulation of
Old modernism still performs valuable critical work because it serves as a geographical and aesthetic model that reproduces many of the main features of world-systems tinged theories of world literature; it functions as core modernism. Even as critics bring in new texts and authors, they are often read, directly or indirectly, against the modernist classics of old modernism. For example, Pound, Eliot, and Woolf have all become modernist mainstays; their works and theories permeate every aspect of it, from books and journals to courses at every level. In a way, they have developed into some of the “men and women of 1890 to 1945” due to their privileged place in the canon of modernism, as well as the budding one of late modernism (and they have kept their place in new modernist studies for good measure). The context of world literature enables us to read Pound, Eliot, and Woolf, and their theorizations of literary space, as modernist precursors to current trends that are attempting to chart the burgeoning realm of global aesthetic flow. Their ideas are a harbinger of things to come; global spaces will (and already have) alter(ed) the way we conceive the circulation of