ABSTRACT Title of Document: BRITISH MODERNIST ... - DRUM

evolution of capitalism strikes me as asserted rather than properly argued, 1 his
account remains a compelling and perhaps indispensable one for students of high
modernism. However, Jameson is more interested in the “why” of modernism than
the “what.” For those like myself who are interested in exploring the stylistic and
formal elements of modernist narrative texts, a definition like McHale’s offers a
useful supplement or substitute that nevertheless connects in important ways to
Jameson’s account.
It is telling that, despite their starkly opposing definitions of modernism, both
Jameson and Friedman maintain the importance of modernism’s formal engagement
with modernity in a way that ends up looking a good deal like McHale’s definition.
Just as Jameson objects explicitly to the proliferation of modernisms in new
modernist studies, Friedman herself acknowledges the continuing pull of the longcanonical
modernist texts, and in particular their formal and stylistic features, as the
core of her concept of modernism: “I find it hard to call a novel like Brick Lane
‘modernist.’ But I think this is my problem, not the problem of the more capacious
understanding of modernism as the expressive domain of modernity I proposed
earlier” (Friedman, “Planetarity” 476). Despite Friedman’s best efforts to move
beyond her instinctual definition of modernism, which might follow something close
to McHale’s formulation, she nevertheless turns to a text that exhibits traditional
modernist stylistic features and even an explicit lineage with a canonical modernist
1 Friedman herself engages Jameson directly on this point: “Such a reductionist view limits the
nominalist definition, even more radically than Giddens does, to a set of one: capitalism.
Jameson’s notion of singularity impoverishes what needs to be a complex approach to the
overdeterminations of history and the enmeshments of different systems of power in
understanding modernity” (Friedman, “Planetarity” 480).
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