Lewis and Eugenides on Joyce, Modernism and formal innovation in general
A worthwhile discussion hosted by Slate between Jim Lewis and Jeffrey Eugenides. Lewis prefers to think of his favourite Modernists as late Romantics, but this is not as perverse as he assumes it to be, as Modernism is just that: late Romanticism.
Whatever, this kind of misunderstanding is part of why Modernism’s presence endures - a blind spot rather than an idea; a black hole rather than a movement.
I remember somebody into social history and sentimental fiction telling me he’d “rejected Modernism”, which I heard in the same way as if he’d said that he had “rejected the Holocaust”.
Other Splinters posts of interest:
- The Story of the Novel, chapter 2
- The Toad Work/Routes out of Nowhere
- Wyndham Lewis -An Appeal
- Aletheia
- A night on the bile
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