The Modernist Papers is a tour de force of analysis and criticism, in which Jame
son brings his dynamic and acute thought to bear on the modernist literature of
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Jameson discusses modernist poetics, inc
luding the work of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarme, Wallace Stevens, Joyce, Proust
and Thomas Mann. He explores the peculiarities of the American literary field,
taking in William Carlos Williams and the American epic, and examines the langua
ge theories of Gertrude Stein.
Refusing to see modernism as simply a Western
phenomenon, he also pays close attention to its Japanese expression, while the c
omplexities of a late modernist representation of twentieth-century politics are
articulated in a concluding section on Peter Weiss's novel The Aesthetics of Re
sistance. Challenging our previous understandings of the literature of this peri
od, this monumental work will come to be regarded as the classic study of modern
ism.
