SPELL IT MODERN: AMERICAN LITERATURE AND THE QUESTION OF MODERNITY

As a student of American Literature with a preference for contemporary cultures and for the Twentieth Century in general, I have found the investigation of modernity and its relation with modernism and postmodernism inescapable. I have read across literary disciplines and outside the literary domain several accounts of modernity and of the many modernisms modernity generates, each indebted to the specific disciplinary tradition from which it originates, and each exploring the complex problematics of modernity from a different vantage point. I have learned a lot. But I have never found systematic studies focused primarily on exploring and explaining the relation between modernity as a condition of knowledge and modernism and postmodernism as categories of literary history. What generally seems to be widely assumed is some continuity binding the terms of this triumvirate in some necessary relation which, however, is generally left unexplained and unexplored. It is from the desire to try out viable and satisfactory missing links that I started considering the set of questions addressed by this book. This book can therefore be described as a sort of inception, a first chapter of what I imagine may become a tome of reflections on modernity, modernism, and postmodernism. It is all but conclusive. To the contrary, I see it as a fragment, a reflection on few aspects of a much larger cluster of phenomena and discourses, and – as such – I can only describe it as tentative, debatable, revisable: an humble attempt at joining from the side of literary studies the philosophical and literary ends of aesthetics and epistemology as they emerge from the immensely inaugurates.