Volume 5, Number 2 · August 26, 1965
What is Modern?
By Paul de Man
The Modern Tradition: Backgrounds of Modern Literature
edited by Richard Ellmann, edited by Charles Feidelson Jr.
Oxford, 953 pp., $13.75
The full title of this substantial and ambitious anthology twice uses the word 'modern,' thus stressing modernity as the key concept that binds together a miscellaneous collection of literary and philosophical essays dating from the second half of the eighteenth century till 1960. On the other hand, the title also contains two words which, at first sight, seem to contradict this claim: 'tradition' and 'backgrounds.' The various appeals for modernity recurrent throughout the nineteenth and the twentieth century very deliberately set out to demolish tradition and to replace the literary past by actual experience; when Rimbaud, for instance, speaks of the need to be 'absolutely modern,' he means that we should free ourselves precisely from those ideas that are likely to be found in anthologies and strike out instead on our own. That such new departures are often short-lived or illusory should not blind us to the fact that they do nevertheless occur. It is all too easy to point to apparent repetitions in the history of the human mind for proof that there is nothing new under the sun, but this can only be done by confusing tradition with the commonplace and by mistaking the stagnation of one's own mind for the stagnation of history.
Review, 3492 words
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