modernism that has inevitably followed it
constitutes a rupture or a continuation of its
Modernism
Marc Caplan
Though a dominant concept in the cultural
history of the English-language academy for at
least the past half-century, the term “Modernism”
says very little of value to an understanding
of the works of literature, music, visual art,
architecture, theater, and dance from the late
19th century to the mid 20th century that are
ascribed to it. In the attempt to establish an
aesthetic commonality among an international
coterie of figures — its hit parade routinely fea-
tures Arnold Schoenberg, Bertolt Brecht, Frank
Lloyd Wright, Igor Stravinsky, Luigi Pirandello,
Martha Graham, Pablo Picasso, Virginia Woolf,
Walter Gropius, Wyndham Lewis, and countless “grievance” that Jacques Derrida has described
others — it betrays the ideological and formal
diffuseness and dissimilarity among its repre-
sentatives; as a historical demarcation it suffers
from the inability of its chroniclers to establish
with certainty when it began, when it ended,
what preceded it, and to what extent the post-
practices. Moreover, in contrast to the procrus-
tean uses to which it has been put in the UK
or the US, one seldom encounters the concept
in French, German, or Spanish-language cul-
tural criticism.
For students of Jewish-language litera-
tures such as Hebrew or Yiddish, the problems
with the term are compounded because even
when working adjacent to the metropolitan
avant-gardes of 20th-century art in culture
centers such as Vienna, Berlin, Paris, or New
York, these Jewish-language writers were denied
recognition for their innovations in their hey-
day because of the marginality of their language
and the cultural distance, and at times hostility,
they experienced from leading critics, even
Jewish ones. Nonetheless, I wish to consider the
term modernism from a new perspective that
not only places Jewish-language authors and
other peripheral figures, paradoxically, at the
center of the concept, but also provides the term
with an aesthetic and historical content that
will ideally generate a clearer understanding of
the cultural dynamics among modernization,
modernity, and modernism itself. Two ideas
will dominate this definition: (1) modernism
is the critique of modernity that mobilizes the
tools of modernization for aesthetic and politi-
cal purposes; (2) because modernity emanates
from the center of a culture out, modernism
migrates from the periphery in.
Modernism develops on the periphery
in advance of the metropolis because modern-
ism itself occupies a position of peripherality, a
in the dual sense of mourning and protest. The
anticipatory character of “peripheral modernism”
responds with the production of narrative —
stories — to historical developments such as
the emergence of new political structures,
urban industrialization, and the disruption of
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Collection Daniel W. Dietrich II, The Daniel W. Dietrich Trust
Barnett Newman. Black Fire 1, 1961.
Oil on exposed canvas, 114 x 84 inches (289.5 x 213.4 cm).
local traditions through linguistic, technological,
territorial, and social dislocations and inno-
vations. This anticipatory character, itself a
consequence of modernity’s belatedness in the
peripheral context, demonstrates the signifi-
cance of the periphery to the center: one can
never identify a center without recognizing
how it differs from and relates to the margins.
As a critique of modernity, the history
of modernism begins in Jewish-language
literature at least three-quarters of a century
before what most Anglo-American critics
have identified as the origins of metropolitan
modernism, with the 1815 publication of Reb
Nakhman of Breslov’s collection of tales Seyfer
sipurey mayses (roughly, “the Holy Book of sto-
ries”). Reb Nakhman’s stories, told in the last
four years of his brief life (1772–1810), are the
first autonomously and originally conceived
fictional narratives to be published in Yiddish,
as well as Hebrew, in Eastern Europe. Well
known for their fantastic plots, their fragmen-
tary narrative structures, and the deliberate
obscurity of Reb Nakhman’s motivations in
telling them, these tales connect personal crises
in Reb Nakhman’s redemptive project as a
religious leader of Eastern European Jews with
a scathing social critique of the politics among
his religious rivals, the interaction of Jews and
non-Jews, and the lures of a belatedly burgeon-
ing modernity encroaching on traditional
Jewish life at the moment that its autonomous
social structures were overtaken with their an-
nexation by the Austrian and Russian empires
at the end of the 18th century.
When subsequent Jewish-language
writers such as Mendele Moykher-Sforim
(writing in both Yiddish and Hebrew), Sholem
Aleichem, Y. L. Peretz (both of whom wrote
primarily in Yiddish), Yosef Chaim Brenner, and
Shmuel Yosef Agnon (who both wrote primarily
in modern Hebrew) harness these grievances
through a comparable anxiety toward language,
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literary structure, and the historical location of
their culture between its origins in Jewish tra-
dition and its participation in global modernity,
they provide a model for the formal and politi-
cal prerequisites of modernism that derives
from social history as well as narrative form.
Modernism in this formulation is the process
by which modernity becomes self-conscious
of itself, which occurs in peripheral cultures
through the persistence and resistance of a
traditional discourse in an era of crisis. Because
of the belatedness of modernity in the Eastern
European context, these writers articulate an
anticipatory modernism that critiques the
discontents of modernization. Where literary
modernism in its conventional, impressionistic
definition develops in a metropolitan culture
at a moment of departure from a dying or lost
tradition, in peripheral cultures this phenom-
enon anticipates the metropolitan canon
because the tradition refuses to submit to a
regime of forgetting necessary for the “business”
of modernization to proceed.
One essential yet complicating concept
in the formation of Jewish-language literature’s
anticipatory modernism is secularization —
as distinct from secularity. Though modernist
Jewish literatures are not secular insofar as they
never lose contact with the rhetoric, symbol
system, and cosmology of traditional Judaism,
they play an integral role in the social and
intellectual modernization program of nearly
every ideological movement available to Eastern
European Jewry. Jewish modernism reconciles
the paradox of a literary discourse communi-
cating its secularizing intentions through the
rhetoric of religious tradition by employing
myth and satire, two pre-modern narrative
discourses capable of reconciling logical con-
tradictions beyond the limits of rationalism.
As Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s
discussion of Homer’s Odyssey in Dialektik der
Aufklärung illustrates, the epic as a mode of
enlightenment subordinates and domesticates
myth to the same extent that “enlightened”
civilization dominates and marginalizes the
cultures it subordinates. Implicit in the epic
struggle of man against nature, though explicit
in later tragedies such as Euripedes’ Medea, is
the conflict between Greek and Barbarian; from
a “mastery” of nature, Greek civilization moves
inevitably to the domination of other groups
of people, a process duplicated in every other
imperial culture. As Horkheimer and Adorno
suggest, enlightenment’s repression of myth
creates a psychic wound that modernity inflicts
on others as well as the self. The task of resist-
ing the internalization of this violence, awaken-
ing from the nightmare of history by mobilizing
the discourse of myth politically, is the work
of modernism, and Jewish-language modernists
stand at the vanguard of this struggle.
suggested readings
Conventional (Exemplary) Descriptions of Modernism
Peter Gay. Modernism: The Lure of Heresy. (New York:
Norton 2007; 2010).
Irving Howe. “The Idea of the Modern” (1967),
Selected Writings, 1950–1990. (San Diego: Har­court, Brace,
Jovanovich, 1990). 140 –166.
Toward a New Definition
Marshall Berman. All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The
Experience of Modernity. (New York: Penguin, 1982; 1988).
Marc Caplan. How Strange the Change: Language,
Temporality, and Narrative Form in Peripheral Modernisms.
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011, forthcoming).
Jacques Derrida. Monolingualism of the Other: or, the
Prosthesis of Origin. Trans. Patrick Mensah. (Stanford:
Stanford University Press 1996; 1998).
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