Volume 33, Number 20 · December 18, 1986
Catching Up with the Avant-garde
By Roger Shattuck
Bohemian Paris: Culture, Politics, and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life, 1830–1930
by Jerrold Seigel
Viking, 453 pp., $25.00
Pleasures of the Belle Epoque: Entertainment and Festivity in Turn-of-the-Century France
by Charles Rearick
Yale, 240 pp., $29.95
France: Fin de Siècle
by Eugen Weber
Harvard University Press, 294 pp., $20.00
Theory of the Avant-Garde
by Peter Bürger, translated by Michael Shaw, foreword by Jochen Schulte-Sasse
University of Minnesota Press, 135 pp., $10.95 (paper)
Poets, Prophets, and Revolutionaries: The Literary Avante-Garde from Rimbaud through Postmodernism
by Charles Russell
Oxford University Press, 303 pp., $29.95
The Culture of Time and Space: 1880–1918
by Stephen Kern
Harvard University Press, 372 pp., $8.95 (paper)
The Matrix of Modernism: Pound, Eliot, and Early Twentieth-Century Thought
by Sanford Schwartz
Princeton University Press, 235 pp., $25.00
Mapping Literary Modernism: Time and Development
by Ricardo J. Quinones
Princeton University Press, 303 pp., $28.00
Eight books dealing with various aspects of Western literature and the arts during the last 150 years should tell us something about how we are learning to sort out our recent past. The only artist to whom all eight works assign an important place is Baudelaire. Bergson, Nietzsche, Ortega y Gasset, and William James appear in most of them. All are written by professors of history or literature in (with one exception) American colleges and universities. Behind several of these works I detect the needs of higher education as now organized in the United States. Both the survey course and the graduate seminar call for comprehensive categories that can be laid out and illustrated in a semester. The metaphor of the map that appears in Quinones's title recurs in nearly every introduction. The terrain these writers wish to describe is cultural and artistic and can presumably be discovered by careful reference to contemporary documents. All but one of them have a thesis rather than a theory; Bürger carries a fairly heavy burden of Frankfurt-school Marxism. None has written a major critical or historical work. Taken together they reveal enough patterns and omissions to reward careful scrutiny.
Review, 7999 words
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