GUIDO HERZOVICH

On the Translatability
of Cultural Phenomena:
Modernismo and
Modernism within and
without Mass Culture

F OR M AN Y DECA DES, there was very little overlapping or potential confusion

between Spanish-language modernismo and English-language modernism. In
Spanish, even before the turn of the twentieth century, modernismo referred to a
transnational poetic school associated with the Nicaraguan Rubén Darío. Latin
American critics thereafter tended to date modernismo’s demise with the emer-
gence of an avant-garde in the 1920s, laboriously searching in some countries for
groups or figures worthy of that glittering term. Against the latter’s backdrop, the
concept of modernismo crystallized around the image of bohemian poets, a cult of
beauty in a fallen world, and aristocratic imagery mostly of French inspiration.
Original or derivative of highly disputed degrees, there was nonetheless a large con-
sensus over modernismo’s achievements: emancipating Latin American literature
from Spanish “backwardness,” diversifying meters and forms available for poetry,
and autonomizing it from politics.
Modernism, on the other hand, first acquired literary currency in English in the
1920s. It was then essentially a shorthand to dismiss or to defend a diversity of exper-
imental writings— increasingly mired in controversy— over the relation of innova-
tion to tradition, of literature’s modernity to its allegedly civilizational role, or of
form to the reading public. These debates, however, still far exceeded the concep-
tual scope of the term and often dispensed with it. Only after the Second World War
did modernism come to embody a grand art-historical narrative, losing referential
specificity as it gained conceptual breath.
From these divergent beginnings, modernismo and modernism have developed
into central concepts in their critical traditions, acquiring paralyzing complexity
as they mobilize vast and diverse arrangements of scholarship at each step, and
incurring ever more frequent overlaps and occasional confusion. “Spanish Ameri-
can modernismo,” wrote Mexican poet and critic Octavio Paz in 1972, “has no

Comparative Literature 73:3

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connection to what in English is called ‘modernism.’” As late as 1990, Icelandic

scholar Astradur Eysteinsson rejected a joint discussion of modernism and modern-
ismo: “Despite some parallels, the differences between the two concepts are too
many to warrant their critical coalescence” (1). In 2007, however, in a two-volume,
one-thousand-plus-page edited book called Modernism, Eysteinsson and Vivian
Liska sought to “de-limit” the concept by including articles on Latin American
modernismo, on Brazilian and Catalan movements of the same name, as well as
on modernisms from Greece, Russia, Australia, and even the Faroe Islands, among
others. “Global modernisms” has since become a common construct, as much as
calls “to rethink modernism as constituted by never-completed, asymmetrical,
and asymptotic processes of translation” (Rogers 112). “Translation, as a lens,”
American scholar Gayle Rogers recently proposed, “has the potential to preserve
the asymmetries and the irreconcilable elements that characterize the multiple
emergences of movements that insist, however ambivalently, on being called by
the congeries of cognates gathered as ‘modernist’” (136).
In what follows, rather than contributing to bringing together works, forms, or
ideas belonging to different movements or traditions, I will attempt to explain their
increasing entanglement by showing the historical and conceptual conditions of
their (un)translatability. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the debates over the closure of
modernity in the 1960s to 1980s, themselves the product of political and cultural
transformations, constituted a key period of transition for both modernismo and
modernism. This crisis affected the “modern” values of their name-bearing move-
ments, as well as those of the hegemonic critical gaze. As the latter became less com-
mitted to the ideology of literary autonomy that was also a cornerstone of both
modernismo and modernism, these concepts started operating in substantially
new ways—turning from differential to relational categories. As such, today mod-
ernismo and modernism do not describe the differential features of certain texts or
authors, or the categories’ limits—primordial concerns of the autonomic critical
project—as much as they interrogate their relation to other texts, to a variety of
actors and networks, and to the changing conditions in the social existence of liter-
ature more generally. As English-language modernist studies became a bourgeon-
ing academic field in the past few decades, modernism’s already blurry referential
limits have all but disappeared, prompting anxiety-tinged debates. Modernismo, in
turn, has become a name for the cultural aspects of a period of rapid moderniza-
tion rather than a poetic school of any specificity.
In both of these developments, a significant reconsideration of the role of mass
culture has been a common and central element. The emergence and expansion of
industrial infrastructures for the production and distribution of cultural goods,
reaching truly massive and global scales in some cases, and the new modes of
appropriation developed by increasingly heterogeneous arrays of anonymous con-
sumers, have been key interpretative facts. It is largely to this framework that the
concepts of modernismo and modernism owe their current relational status. So
much so, in fact, that these very concepts have become key sites for a contemporary
reflection on mass culture, or, in other words, over the ways in which the dynamics
of culture under capitalism have affected all of the arts in diverse but ultimately
interconnected ways.

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My argument will develop as follows. In the first section, I will show the progres-
sive definition of a differential concept of modernismo. This concept relied heavily
on formal criteria and emphasized values like autonomy and independence, thus
establishing the conditions for untranslatability. The second section will follow the
concept of modernism as it takes shape from the interwar debates over “modern
art,” marked by a distinctly European panic over the fate of tradition, to its climax
in the 1960s with the institutionalization of the neo-avant-garde and the global
expansion of the culture industry through new mass media. My conclusion, in the
third section, will set out to explain how largely comparable changes in perspective
have had opposite effects on the standing of these concepts within their critical
traditions—a fact that is, however, undoubtedly related to their rapprochement.
While modernismo went from being perceived as a post-Romanticism to a proto-
avant-garde, and from closing the nineteenth century to opening the twentieth,
modernism was transfigured from a site of righteous resistance —a reservoir of
human plenitude in an age of mass alienation—to an ideology of exclusion marked
by a fear of contagion by a dangerous, but also fascinating “other”: women, non-
whites, the masses, kitsch.
It should be pointed out, for transition’s sake, that grumbling over the vagueness
of both modernismo and modernism has been a staple of their existence virtually
all along. As modernism’s use and reach expanded in recent decades to become its
own field of research, this process only became more accentuated. “Modernism as a
notion is the emptiest of all cultural categories,” British historian Perry Anderson
claimed in a much-cited passage from 1984. “Unlike the terms Gothic, Renaissance,
Baroque, Mannerist, Romantic, or Neo-Classical, it designates no describable object
in its own right at all: it is completely lacking in positive content” (112). To this, con-
temporary scholars in modernist studies may be said to muse in unison American
Michael Levenson’s riposte from that same year: “Vague terms still signify. Such is
the case with ‘modernism’: it is at once vague and unavoidable” (Levenson, A
Genealogy vii; quoted in Latham and Rogers 98). In Spanish, conversely, early dis-
comfort over modernismo’s elusiveness—topped by Ned Davison’s 1966 book-
length, chaotic attempt to make sense of it—has steadily diminished since a series
of new critical perspectives, generally more broadly cultural than strictly literary,
have reframed the concept since the 1970s. Yet perhaps the issue is less one of vague-
ness than of changing ways of signifying, which are obscured by the persistence of
the same terms, as well as flattened by a field’s tendency to think of itself as always-
already there. A comparative history of these concepts can thus shed unexpected
light in an otherwise crowded space.

To the Ivory Tower of Form: Latin American Modernismo

The concept of modernismo acquired literary, critical, and even journalistic cur-
rency before the turn of the twentieth century. From as early as 1888, modernismo
referred to a transnational poetic movement conventionally dated around 1880–
1920 and associated primarily with Rubén Darío (1867–1916) and Cuban José
Martí (1853–95). When Darío deployed the term briefly in 1888, it still had a largely
negative connotation, meaning roughly what the Royal Spanish Academy’s Diction-
ary offered until recently as its primary sense: “Excessive inclination to modern

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things and disdain for the old” (Roggiano 43–49). “Modern,” here, meant simply
“recent,” as in the Latin modo; the ending in “ism” suggested a parti pris. This
alleged “disdain” points to one of the central tropes of all aesthetic modernisms,
and even of modernity as a human age — one that has been frequently emphasized
by progressives and conservatives alike: the idea of a weakening of historical conti-
nuity, an allegedly “cataclysmic” severance from tradition: “The aim of five centu-
ries of European effort,” Herbert Read wrote in 1933, “are openly abandoned”
(Read 67; quoted in Bradbury and McFarlane 20).
The term’s gradual positive shift also dates from the second half of the nineteenth
century. The popularity of terms like “modern” and “modernity” to describe a spe-
cific period of human history coincided with a revaluation of the present in aes-
thetic reflection. In 1863, Charles Baudelaire made his famous plea to seize art’s
“eternal and immutable” element in “the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent,”
which “must on no account be despised or dispensed with” (Baudelaire 13).
In the late 1880s, Rubén Darío used the term in passing to herd together diverse
manifestations of a “new spirit” in Latin American poetry. He was certainly influ-
enced by his French readings, not least of Baudelaire himself. In France, however,
those fin de siècle aesthetic movements commonly cited as influential to Latin
American modernistas —symbolism, Parnassianism, decadentism—have tradition-
ally lacked a unifying term: modernisme in French, unless it transposes the contro-
versies of its English cognate, has rarely acquired autonomy in the field of aesthetics
or literary criticism and remains tied directly to modernity (Healey 801).
In fact, to autonomize and to limit modernismo, as a concept and a literary move-
ment, was a central task for criticism over several decades—at least as early as
Darío’s enthronement as the “prince of Hispanic letters” after his passing in 1916,
and up until the 1970s. This effort tended to marginalize the epochal concept often
preferred by modernista poets themselves, and to which Federico de Onís, an
important US-based scholar from Spain, gave an oft-quoted formulation in 1932:
“El modernismo es la forma hispánica de la crisis universal de las letras y del espí-
ritu que inicia hacia 1885 la disolución del XIX y que se había de manifestar en el
arte, la ciencia, la religión y la política, y gradualmente en los demás aspectos de la
vida entera, con todos los caracteres, por lo tanto, de un hondo cambio histórico
cuyo proceso continúa hoy” (Onís xv; quoted in Davison 102; modernismo is the
Hispanic version of the universal crisis of letters and the spirit that began the
demise of the nineteenth century towards 1885, to be made manifest in art, science,
religion, politics, and gradually in every other aspect of life as a whole, therefore
showing all of the features of a profound historic change which is still underway
today).1 This broad understanding allowed De Onís to herd together contemporary
“modernismos” from Latin America and Spain(where fin de siècle poets were more
commonly known as the “Generation of ’98”), as well as to coin “ultra-modernismo”
to refer to the avant-garde as a subsequent avatar of the same phenomenon.
Efforts to advance a more autonomous and formal concept of modernismo, as
well as to establish precedence and membership among poets, intensified in the
years to follow. Historical distance was a necessary ingredient in this development,
but it was primarily a symptom that controversies over modernismo were becoming

1 All translations, unless otherwise noted, are my own.

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the domain of scholars, rather than a fairly widespread debate filling the space
available to literary affairs in a growing press or proliferating coffee shops.2
Although specificity and autonomy as critical demands weighed equally on all
concepts, modernismo’s particularity lay in the fact that the autonomy of literature
was allegedly its pioneering achievement. Dominican critic Pedro Henríquez
Ureña, in his classic Literary Currents in Hispanic America, first delivered in English
as the Norton Lectures at Harvard University in 1940–41, included a chapter on
modernismo under the title “Pure Literature.” This meant to him “poetry freed
from the impurities of everyday life which romantic verse so often carried in sus-
pension” (170). It was, indeed, to the Romantic generation of Latin American
“letrados,” who took it upon themselves to give their countries both a state and a
national literature, that Henríquez Ureña opposed the new generation of writers
who were but “journalists or teachers or both” (161). “The traditional tie between
our public life and our literature dissolved with the social transformation and divi-
sion of labor. Martí, of course, was the great exception; in that he stood nearer to the
generation that preceded him than to his own” (173). The son of a doctor and edu-
cator who was interim president of the Dominican Republic in 1916, Henríquez
Ureña’s ambivalence about this momentous development is apparent throughout.
Despite the centrality of a specific category in the title (“literary currents”), his peri-
odization relies on political events. The original lectures, in fact, were delivered
under a different title: “The Search for Expression: Literary and Artistic Creation
in Spanish America” (Degiovanni 136). He expressed it more tellingly in Spanish as
“la busca de nuestra expresión”: a search for individuality that transposes the logic
of political independence to the fields of literature and of language (emphasis
mine). He showed no ambivalence in this respect: “Not only did Spanish America
now show itself independent of Spain in literature: it was a Spanish American,
Rubén Darío, who carried the message of the new movement to the mother coun-
try” (P. Henríquez Ureña, Literary 165).
A more consistent attempt to autonomize the concept of modernismo was
advanced in the 1950s by Pedro’s brother, Max Henríquez Ureña, a high-ranking
diplomat and critic. Opposing an epochal concept, his Breve historia del modernismo
(1954) prided itself on a rigorous chronology of authors and works, claiming thus to
“have exhausted the repertoire of names that . . . deserve to be mentioned”—and
consequently hoping to contribute to a “scrupulous purge of [its] influences” (M.
Henríquez Ureña 7–8). Faced with the challenge of bringing together, under a for-
mal definition, a wide variety of modernista poets and scenes in Buenos Aires, Mon-
tevideo, Caracas, Bogotá, Lima, and Santiago, his introductory “Ojeada de con-
junto” offers a negative one: “Hacer la guerra a la frase hecha, al clisé de forma y
al clisé de idea. Modernista era todo lo que volvía la espalda a los viejos cánones y a
la vulgaridad de la expresión. En lo demás, cada cual podía actuar con plena inde-
pendencia” (M. Henríquez Ureña 12; To wage war on commonplaces, on formal
and conceptual clichés. Anything turning its back on old models and on vulgar
expression was modernista. In all other respects, each poet was granted complete
independence).

2 For academics censoring dilettantes in this transition period, see Torres Rioseco’s 1931 review essay

on three recent books about Darío. See also the brief polemic between Antonio Aita and Manuel Pedro
Gonzalez over originality, rigor, and proper citation. See Aita, “El significado”; Gonzalez, “Marginalia”;
Aita, “Sobre el significado.”

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This, of course, more than a modest answer to a difficult problem was a pro-
grammatic statement preserving each poet’s individuality, originality, novelty—
constitutive values of this critical project. Thus in Max’s book, as in many others
devoted to modernismo, the “Ojeada de conjunto” is followed by a handful of
close readings of individual poets—Martí, Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera, Salvador
Díaz Mirón, Darío, Julián del Casal, and José Asunción Silva— carefully stating,
for instance, the number of Darío’s poems featuring swans: at least twenty-seven
(M. Henríquez Ureña 25).
Until the 1970s, as a rule, studies of modernismo focused almost exclusively on
poetry. They hailed the poets’ ability to synchronize the region’s cultural temporal-
ity to that of the modern West, largely via France, by appropriating and reworking
new themes and forms. Literary achievements, however individual by definition,
were nonetheless granted a national or regional role, since they entailed literature’s
contribution in their countries’ (or the region’s) quest for identity and international
visibility. These priorities, naturally coupled with a conception of literary history as
a history of styles in discreet succession, resulted in a virtually complete untranslat-
ability between modernismo and modernism. Octavio Paz offered a late sanction of
this state of affairs, as he addressed an English-speaking audience during his own
Norton Lectures in 1971–72. Fearing confusion, he paused to make a disclaimer:
Let me clarify my terms: Spanish American modernismo is, to a certain extent, the equivalent of French
Parnassianism and Symbolism, and so has no connection with what in English is called “modernism.”
Modernism refers to the literary and artistic movements that began in the second decade of the twenti-
eth century; as used by North American and English critics, it is what in France and the Hispanic coun-
tries we call vanguardia, the avant-garde. To avoid confusion, I will use “modernismo” to refer to the
Spanish American movement; in speaking of the artistic and poetic movements of the twentieth century
I will use “avant-garde” and “vanguard,” and for Anglo-American poetry, “modernism.” (Paz 88)
By that time, however, both concepts were beginning to undergo a parallel redefi-
nition that would eventually bring them closer together. Paz seems oblivious to
widespread contemporary use of modernism in English to signpost a much wider
aesthetic phenomenon—but he is not, in fact, unaware of its debates. A key cate-
gory in his book, instrumental to his programmatic rapprochement between Euro-
pean and Latin American productions, is that of “modern poetry.” Similar concepts
in every discipline (“modern painting,” “modern art,” etc.), or rather the debates
where these prominently featured, provided a foundational ground to later uses of
modernism, through a series of mutations across historical events, institutional
demands, and disciplinary trends. The next section will briefly survey some of
these changes. This should allow me to present, in the last section, a comparative
analysis of how modernismo and modernism have acquired their current translat-
ability on the basis of both similar and opposite transformations.

Modernism: From Auschwitz to Hollywood

Although the core group of modernist works—what is now sometimes called
“high modernism”—reaches back to around 1910–30, the term’s centrality in Eng-
lish is usually dated to the second postwar period. At this time, the most radical and
transgressive art forms and experiments of previous decades were undergoing a
rapid process of institutional and mercantile incorporation, concurrent with New
York’s ascension to world capital of the arts and the Museum of Modern Art’s rise as

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a trendsetting institution. Part and parcel with this process, the concept of modern-
ism became a totalizing art-historical narrative, capable of covering a long period
of artistic progress from as early as the mid-nineteenth century to as late as the pres-
ent day.
Some scholars have disputed the retrospective nature of the concept by pointing
out that the term modernism was in fact frequently used before the war (Gasiorek
6). Yet even if some of those early uses seem to come close to later ones—as opposed
to many more that clearly do not—the debates that characterize today’s usage sim-
ply were not an integral part of the term. In the early decades of the twentieth cen-
tury “modernism” was largely a referential marker, pointing to recognizable fea-
tures of current literary production—mainly experiments in form—that were
controversial and thus in need of justification, rather than a concept that carried
an explanation, or at least a perspective, within itself.
Laura Riding and Robert Graves’s A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927), credited as
one of the earliest literary works to grant centrality and consistent elaboration to
the term (Latham and Rogers 50–52), is a good example of this. “Modernism”
here is used far more but still interchangeably with “advanced modern poetry” or
“advanced contemporary poetry” (see, e.g., Riding and Graves 9). Unlike other
early uses lately unearthed by contemporary scholars, however, Riding and Graves’s
was an influential book, and it focuses on writers who have remained a cornerstone
in the concept’s later form, such as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce, as well as
E. E. Cummings, Wallace Stevens, and Gertrude Stein. Their modernism is nonethe-
less neither a movement nor strictly a concept: it is a shortcut term to refer broadly to
poetry and poets, as well as a few experimental prose writers, whose formal innova-
tions were controversial within a certain literary establishment (which feared a with-
drawal from poetry’s traditional functions) and what they call “the plain man” (who
allegedly found them too difficult, and rather unsubstantial to be worth the effort).
Riding and Graves’s goal, in fact, was to show that these innovations represented
poetry’s attempt to maintain rather than vacate its traditional function, since older
forms irremediably obsolesced. The authors set out to demonstrate this through an
analysis of “Sunset,” an E. E. Cummings poem tellingly chosen because its formal
experiment is at the service of a most traditional poetic topic. “Its very technicali-
ties,” they claim, “caused it to be mistaken for a mere assemblage of words, a literary
trick,” while in fact it is “capable of yielding the kind of experiences customarily
expected from poetry, in fact the most ordinary of such experiences” (24). Thus a
“genuine modernism,” which is ultimately the only legitimate form of truly contem-
porary poetry, must be solely concerned with ensuring “the proper security and
delivery of them poem” (20). “Modernist poetry as such,” they conclude, “should
mean no more than fresh poetry, more poetry, poetry based on honest invention
rather than on conscientious imitation of the time-spirit” (158). Historical time —
that is, “the pace of civilization” (155)—thus affects it only indirectly, by wearing
out forms, partly through changes in people’s perception. Here they touch on a
central modernist value —the autonomy of literature: “Perhaps more than any-
thing else characteristic modernist poetry is a declaration of the independence of
the poem” (124). In this sense, it must be granted to those who deny modernism a
retrospective character, that it first gained currency concurrently with the critical
perspectives that would later push it to the center-stage of aesthetic debate, like the
New Criticism (see Latham and Rogers 42–52)

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As the Second World War approached, however, a civilizational framework became

more pressing, particularly in Europe. Formal experimentation, especially in prose,
was increasingly read against the backdrop of a great tradition of nineteenth-
century European realism —from Balzac to Tolstoy—assumed to be part of a
project of rational critique for social improvement, and still ultimately tied to
the Enlightenment. While certain avant-garde movements were persecuted in Nazi
Germany as “degenerate art,” critics from within both conservative and Marxist
lines, seeing in Fascism the culmination of a tradition of irrationalist thought,
read into modernist experimentation the decline of the ruling bourgeoisie.
Erich Auerbach (1892–1957), a German Jewish philologist, offered a model inter-
pretation of the relationship between modernist experimentation in prose and “the
pace of civilization,” albeit without ever using the term. His classic Mimesis (1946)
spans almost three thousand years from Homer through the Bible to Virginia
Woolf’s 1927 novel To the Lighthouse. This last chapter argues that a substantial trans-
formation has taken place in the status of represented reality. In the late eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, writers like Balzac or Goethe presented fictional realities
whose objectivity was guaranteed by the reliability of the narrator. In Woolf’s To the
Lighthouse, as well as in James Joyce or even Marcel Proust, Auerbach found a mul-
tiplicity of voices attempting to seize an otherwise inaccessible reality. The modern-
ist novel thus thwarted any chance of totalizing or making sense of it in any reliable
way. It often seemed that plunging the reader into such a state of frustration was in
fact its ambition and perhaps its joy (Auerbach 551). Behind those new formal pro-
cedures that seemed to challenge the premises of literary realism, however, Auer-
bach still found reality, though not by way of representation. Now the experience of
the novel mimed an experience of the present, in that it devised a formal correlate
to the fragmentation, acceleration, and saturation of knowledge which, while pro-
gressing since the sixteenth century, soared in the years between the wars (549).
Like many of his contemporaries, Auerbach diagnosed a vast cultural crisis
marked by a weakening of the unifying force of tradition—this also explained
the spread of fascism “through the countries of old European culture.” His ultimate
assessment of modernist literature was more ambivalent than others, but nonethe-
less he saw in it, particularly in Joyce’s Ulysses, “a hatred of culture and civilization,
brought out by means of the subtlest stylistic devices which culture and civilization
have developed, and often a radical and fanatical urge to destroy” (551).
In American critic Clement Greenberg’s contemporary account, conversely, the
radicalization of formal experimentation in all arts since the second half of the
nineteenth century was perhaps the only sign of cultural resilience in a declining
civilization— one in which both liberal-bourgeois and totalitarian regimes (Fascist
and Soviet) had given up on artistic quality to please the tastes of the many. Usually
credited for the popularization of a totalizing theory of modernism in the 1950s
and 1960s, Greenberg’s prewar writings rather confirm, in fact, the retrospective
character of the postwar concept. In his early essays “Avant-garde and Kitsch”
(1939) and “Towards a Newer Laocoon” (1940), most of the basic lines of his
later, more fully-fledged theories are already present—but the term is not. For a
noun, he still preferred “Avant-garde”—“modernist” only as an adjective —and
used “kitsch” for what would later be more commonly referred to as “mass culture.”
His landmark 1960 essay, “Modernist Painting,” on the other hand, uses “Modern-
ism” exclusively, substituted in one occasion by “authentic art,” and replaces the

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wider cultural-political framework of his prewar texts with an autonomous account

of art development in time under the aegis of an enlightened self-critique. Modern-
ism is now “the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the disci-
pline itself, not in order to subvert it but in order to entrench it more firmly in its
area of competence” (Greenberg 85).
At least since Manet in the 1850s, according to Greenberg, modernism had been
art’s only path to avoid becoming entertainment—that is, its only chance to
survive —not a break with tradition, in other words, but tradition’s only hope:
“Nothing could be further from the authentic art of our time than the idea of a
rupture of continuity” (93). Purifying each discipline of nonessential elements
meant a heightened or even exclusive attention to form.
This narrative was capacious enough to accommodate the old “avant-garde” to its
new institutional and market life. It also allowed those previously disruptive forms,
now capped by America’s own abstract expressionism, to be posited as the pinnacle
of a teleological history of Western art. But its emergence also coincided with the
famous debates over postmodernity and postmodernism. The controversy over the
closure of modernity gave it a sense of urgency, in that it now seemed to possess a
key to the regime of the arts that was coming to an end. Modernism thus acquired a
tinge of nostalgia or an air of heroic resistance, at a time when many observers of the
postwar art scene perceived “a détente, a relaxation, and a collaboration for mutual
profit between the formerly intractable artist and the no longer hostile bourgeoi-
sie,” in the words of Harvard professor Harry Levin (628). On the other hand, as
youth culture acquired progressive legitimacy in those same years, and finding
sophisticated ways of appropriating mass culture became an increasingly fitting
challenge for aesthetes—as noticed by Susan Sontag’s 1964 “Notes on ‘Camp’”—
modernism’s formal ambition and proverbial difficulty were now also suspect of
elitism, if not something worse (Sontag 89).
In 1960, the year Clement Greenberg’s “Modernist Painting” was broadcast on
the radio, Levin published an article provocatively titled “What Was Modernism?”
He used the past tense in revolt, bemoaning its lost radicalness and capacity for
scandal. This emphasis allowed him to mark modernism’s inception with exacti-
tude: it had to be 1857, “the year that inaugurated French modernism by dragging
both Madame Bovary and Les Fleurs du Mal through the lawcourts” (612). A hundred
years later such strife was unimaginable. Now “Joyce’s books, which were burned
and censored during his lifetime, have become a happy hunting ground for doc-
toral candidates” (614). Levin’s vindication, however, is unwitting proof of his cause
for sorrow. His hyperbolic responses to some of the most common criticisms ulti-
mately dissolve the tensions that were its greatest strength. Whereas, in Auerbach’s
eyes, modernist experimentation symptomatized an age of knowledge saturation
and impossibility to totalize —this made it “modern” in the first place —Levin bids
farewell to an unrepeatable breed of erudite artists, versed in the other artistic dis-
ciplines as much as their own (627). José Ortega y Gasset considered avant-garde art
“de-humanized”; Levin declares that in fact life itself was becoming inhuman,
while “Joyce, by resorting to metamorphosis and even to mock-apotheosis, was try-
ing to re-humanize his characters” (624). If modernists had been accused of being
“deficient in a sense of values,” Levin hails them as a moral reserve: “to reread Eli-
ot’s ‘Fire Sermon,’ or Kafka’s ‘Parable of the Law,’ or Mann’s farewell to his soldier-

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hero, or Proust’s commemoration of a great writer’s death, or Joyce’s hallucinating

encounter between a sonless father and a fatherless son, is to feel the glow of ethical
insight” (629–30). Turning the old tropes upside down, Levin’s crepuscular gaze
sees them emerge as great humanists in times of catastrophe —while they had
been seen by many more as prophets of doom, if not civilizational gravediggers.
Now that writers as different as Eliot, Kafka, Mann, Proust, or Joyce were brought
together by a “post-modern” perspective, the politics of modernism couldn’t be a
question of this or that particular artist’s allegiances—be it Ezra Pound’s or Filippo
Tommaso Marinetti’s fascist leanings, Pablo Picasso or Bertolt Brecht’s commu-
nism. At the height of the Cold War the realm of culture seemed not just a contin-
uation of politics by other means but a privileged battleground in its own right.
Capitalist development accelerated under liberal democracies in most of Europe
and the Americas. Artistic practices were now measured against a different defini-
tional background, shifting from the unspeakable atrocity of the concentration
camp to a reality seemingly more banal, but perhaps more cunning as well—that
of what German philosopher Theodor Adorno termed “the culture industry.”
Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, published in 1970 shortly after his death, is perhaps the
last great unapologetic vindication of modernism. He channels towards this con-
cept (Modernismus, or its quasi equivalent die Moderne) a wide range of philosophi-
cal discussions about the role and the experience of art in modernity. Increasing
swaths of cultural goods are now produced and distributed following industrial
procedures; in their acquiescence to the commodity form, he saw these as alien-
ated and alienating. A refusal to assimilate —that is, a radical commitment to
autonomy—had to be therefore a defining imperative for modernism. If modernist
difficulty had been historically a key subject of both attacks and vindications,
Adorno went a step further to exclude pleasure altogether from his definition of
the aesthetic experience (13)—for he perceived that a certain form of light plea-
sure lay at the heart of the entertainment industry. The radicalness of many of Ador-
no’s positions, notwithstanding the insightfulness of his diagnoses, appeared at
once untenable or “anachronistic”—much like he said himself of his own refloat-
ing of the old, totalizing genre of the aesthetic treaty (332).
Adorno’s theory may indeed “appear to us today as a ruin of history, mutilated
and damaged by the very conditions of its articulation and genesis: defeat of the
German working class, triumph and subsequent exile of modernism from central
Europe, fascism, Stalinism and the Cold War,” in the words of German critic
Andreas Huyssen (20). He was, however, “one of a very few critics guided by the
conviction that a theory of modern culture must address both mass culture and
high art” (19).
This insight, I will show in the next section, is at the heart of the transformations
of both modernismo and modernism since then. As it was deployed to widely dif-
ferent conditions in each tradition, however, it produced opposite effects on the crit-
ical standing of these concepts, a divergence that was nonetheless paramount to
their contemporary rapprochement.

The Art of Transaction: Modernism/Modernismo and Mass Culture

Highly influential interventions took place in Adorno’s wake, ultimately trans-
forming modernism by making its exclusions a defining feature of the concept.

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German critic Peter Bürger observed that there were conflicting projects among the
experimental literatures of the interwar period. While “modernist artists” indeed
vindicated the artwork’s autonomy, some of the early avant-garde movements were
in fact attempting to destroy it (Bürger 47–54). This proved to be a vastly influential
conceptual distinction, if rarely taken at face value in a taxonomical sense. Modern-
ist experimentation, according to Bürger, tended to take place within the work’s
frame, often aiming to purify its development from “external” elements—
including the audience. Conversely, avant-garde groups like Dada, French surreal-
ism, or Russian futurism—the “historical avant-garde” in his terminology—sought
to overcome the separation that the bourgeois “institution of art,” an inherently
modern phenomenon, interposed between the aesthetic experience and everyday
life. Rather than radicalizing art’s internal logic, they tried to release art’s liberat-
ing power from institutional enclosure. That is why their legacy is not one of “art-
works”—that is, unitary artifacts offering a cohesive experience and susceptible of
trade —as much as one of devices, procedures, reflections, and a remarkable collec-
tion of provocative anecdotes.
In the eyes of Andreas Huyssen, that legacy was to be understood as a memorial
to a defeat, for its attempted targets—the modern institution of art and the
bourgeoisie —remained largely unharmed. He thus proposed to read Adorno’s
Aesthetic Theory as a theory of modernism after the demise of the avant-garde: a vin-
dication of artistic autonomy in view of failed attempts to destroy it (28–34). “The
irony of course,” Huyssen pointed out in his classic After the Great Divide: Modernism,
Mass Culture, Postmodernism (1986), “is that art’s aspirations to autonomy, its uncou-
pling from church and state, became possible only when literature, painting and
music were first organized according to the principles of a market economy. From
its beginnings the autonomy of art has been related dialectically to the commodity
form” (17).
Huyssen observed that Adorno’s categorical indictment of mass culture, paired
with a militant commitment to keeping it sealed off from high art, were defining
features of an important intellectual tradition since the beginning of modernity
(viii). The history of the term “modernism” was itself an important part of that tra-
dition. In this view, it did not stand for the autonomous development of an increas-
ingly self-sufficient trajectory of artistic forms—aimed at preserving a modicum of
human plenitude —but was rather a cultural ideology that “constituted itself
through a conscious strategy of exclusion, an anxiety of contamination by its
other: an increasingly consuming and engulfing mass culture” (vii).
This was indeed an explicit backdrop in many discussions of modernism —
from Riding and Graves’s spurning of the lazy “plain reader” (certainly a reader
of popular fiction) to Greenberg’s praise of the “avant-garde” against the masses’
alienated taste for “kitsch,” or Levin’s lament over the commodification of artistic
transgression. Modernism’s heroic quest for autonomy was often predicated
against an alleged decline in artistic standards, or narrowing of available spaces
for “authentic” experiences in art.
If Adorno’s is a theory of modernism after the demise of the avant-garde, the new
Latin American perspectives on modernismo represent a rereading after the his-
torical crisis of its alleged achievements: literary autonomy and cultural emancipa-
tion. The former proceeds from the decline of modernist values, triggered by the

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purported closure of modernity, which Ángel Rama’s pioneering Rubén Darío y el

modernismo (1970) already hinted at. The latter, in turn, stems from contemporary
questionings of Latin America’s role in global capitalism, advanced by both schol-
arly work (most notably dependency theory) and political activism, given momen-
tum on a continental scale by the Cuban Revolution of 1959. It was, incidentally, in
revolutionary Cuba, during an international conference for the centenary of Rubén
Darío’s birth, in 1967, where Rama first presented some of the ideas leading to his
groundbreaking book (Patiño). Under the surface, however, also lies the contem-
porary literary and market phenomenon known as the “Latin American boom,”
which represented a landmark episode of cultural integration into the world repub-
lic of letters after modernismo itself. This alloy of political and literary promise was
so outstanding that influential thinkers of modernism like Marshall Berman and
Perry Anderson would go on to hail, in the 1980s, recent Latin American novels as a
sort of relay modernism after the alleged decline of “high modernism” in Europe
and the United States (Berman 125; Anderson 109).
As with the concept of modernism, extending from the interwar years back to the
mid-nineteenth century—with Baudelaire and Courbet— Latin American critics
were equally drawn to nuancing the historical break of the avant-garde in the 1920s,
rediscovering and redefining modernismo’s modernity. This entailed a relative dis-
placement of “modernities.” Until the 1970s, modernismo’s achievements were
assessed against the backdrop of a modernity that was either spiritual or formal—
or both: a Western civilizational crisis triggering a new sensibility, thus requiring
new poetic forms as a means of expression. Along these lines, Octavio Paz wrote:
“Positivism is the Spanish American equivalent of the European Enlightenment,
and modernismo was our Romantic reaction” (Paz 168). Critics differed as to how
“original” or “derivative” modernismo had been, but rarely challenged its status as
an act of literary independence.
I would argue that while modernismo was traditionally perceived as a post-
Romanticism that closed the nineteenth century, since the 1970s it has been largely
understood as a proto-avant-garde that opened the twentieth. A new line of
inquiry—ranging from Uruguayan Ángel Rama (Rubén Darío [1970]; “El poeta”
[1977]; Las máscaras [1985]) to Puerto Rican Julio Ramos (1989) and Argentine
Graciela Montaldo (La sensabilidad [1994]; “Guía Rubén Darío” [2013]), among
many others—has been comparatively less concerned with “modernity,” as it
were, than with “modernization.” In other words, they sought to explain the formal
innovations of modernista literature, the novelty of its author figures, and its
unprecedented forms of circulation, with a primary focus not on the influence of
modern ideas but on the transformations— economic, political, social, cultural—
that actually took place in Latin America around the turn of the century. Octavio
Paz is again a useful counterpoint. “The reality of our nations,” he wrote, “was not a
modern one: not industry, democracy, or bourgeoisie, only feudal oligarchies and
militarism” (Paz 91). The modernista feat, in his eyes, was a detachment from mate-
rial reality in order to produce a wholly modern literature, staking a claim to auton-
omy by that very act of will. It is a literature that is new and different from a previous
literature, while reality around it remained fundamentally the same. He may have
felt similarly about the boom writers, as he was to some extent one of them.
The new scholarship, on the other hand, reconsidered the temporal relation to
Europe on the basis of economic integration to an increasingly global capitalist

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economy (Rama, Los poetas; Jitrik). It analyzed the region’s imaginary reconfigura-
tion by looking at the spread of telegraph lines and the development of the crónica —
a very literary journalistic genre copiously practiced by many modernistas—in a
rapidly expanding press that was a key source of income for writers (Real de Azúa;
Rotker; A. González; Ramos). It discussed changes in the social role of literature and
the professionalization of writers with an eye to the growing cities, the expanding
literate audiences, and an unfolding mass culture (Ramos; Montaldo La sensibili-
dad). The resulting Latin American modernity was often described as “unequal”
(Ramos 54) or “semi” (Montaldo, La sensibilidad 24). Colombian critic Rafael
Gutiérrez Girardot, then based in Germany, went a step further in this respect,
claiming there was in fact no complete modernity against which Latin America’s
should be considered lacking: capitalist development in Europe itself, expanding
from metropolis to province through “a complex network of ‘dependences,’” was
no less violent and unequal (33).
Modernismo’s modernity was then not to be measured in textual difference
alone. If modernista texts were new and different, that was to be assessed and
admired less as a measure of “independence,” than as a function of the new rela-
tions that literature was now able to establish and to maintain. Darío’s originality
lied in his having written under the aegis of a new historical configuration, which
he conflictively but also productively incorporated into his literary practice. He was
now less the head of a school of poetry, or the original creator of an influential style,
than a historical subject whose status as poet allowed him to embody in full the
fraught experience of a time of massive transformations. He thus played here a sim-
ilar role to that of Baudelaire in Walter Benjamin’s famous essays on the moderni-
zation of Paris. “Literature at the time,” Montaldo wrote, “was already an exercise in
transactions among a diversity of writings. It is precisely the circulation across those
differences that constitutes the new: an unprecedented positioning between auton-
omy and professionalization, between aesthetization and popularization. To sur-
vive those differences, to colonize them and to territorialize them, was the task of
the modern. And Darío was modern to the highest degree” (Montaldo, “Guía
Rubén Darío” 13). As recently as 2016, an international conference celebrated the
centenary of Rubén Dario’s death under the title “La sutura de los mundos”: “The
Suturing of Worlds.”
Forgoing modernist assumptions to a certain extent, much of this scholarship —
like much contemporary research in the field of modernist studies—reinscribed
literary practice in a heterogenous and contested cultural space. This allowed them
to highlight the “transactions” among diverse and often contradictory demands
that writers were now compelled to endlessly make: those of their artistic materials
and their own discipline, as well as those deriving from different audiences: the
state, institutions, and the market. The claim to “artistic autonomy” itself had to
be understood within that struggle. “Rather than paint them as elite purists seeking
a magic circle for the imagination,” Levenson wrote as he introduced his 1999 Cam-
bridge Companion to Modernism, “we can better see these artists as sharply conscious
of their historical entanglements, their place within an epoch of accelerating social
modernization that was always a challenge to a cultural Modernism” (Levenson 2).
This rapprochement, however, produced opposite effects on the critical stand-
ing of each concept. As Latin American scholars stood opposite a definition of

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modernismo tinged by the avant-garde or militant realism, they had to first “poner
en tela de juicio la descripción del arte modernista como exótico, como literatura
escapista y creación elaborada por el esteta a espaldas de la realidad y con óptica
parisiense,” in Ivan Schulman’s words (73; to challenge the characterization of
modernista art as exotic, as a literature of escapism created by an aesthete who
turns away from reality and with a Parisian perspective). Thus they often started
off by rejecting its alleged “pasatismo” (Rama, “El poeta” 80; passatismo) or “gra-
tuidad” ( Jitrik 2; gratuitousness)—and redefining it in ways that downplayed or
even sidestepped its more reactionary and antidemocratic aspects. Darío, as in Mon-
taldo’s quote, became a hyperconscious cultural agent, committed to reinventing
literature for the age of the masses—as in this oft-quoted line from 1909: “Yo no soy
un poeta para las muchedumbres. Pero sé que indefectiblemente tengo que ir a
ellas” (Darío 10; I am not the kind of poet for the crowds. But I know that I inevitably
have to go towards them). Mexican poet José Emilio Pacheco summed up this
change in attitude, presciently and in tongue-in-cheek fashion, in the final verses
of a poem he wrote for the 1967 conference in Cuba: “Pasaron, pues, cien años: / ya
podemos / perdonar a Darío” (Pacheco 50; “So a hundred years have passed: / we
can now / forgive Darío,” Pacheco 51).
Modernism, on the other hand, synonymous by the 1960s with “modern litera-
ture” as such—“the greatest literary age since the Renaissance” in Maurice Beebe’s
words (1065)—was largely perceived as a collection of universal masterpieces. To
many of its vindicators, these were ultimately the only legitimate works of their
time. Historically linked to the development of critical methods that focused heav-
ily on form, modernism has since undergone extensive critique for its occluding of
the biographical author— one that, paradoxically, contributed to promoting a
mostly white, male, and Euro-American canon (Naremore 27). As it became hege-
monic in cultural institutions and school curricula, modernism’s attempts “to
appropriate the whole of modernity” (Williams 33) were challenged by a diversity
of marginalized groups, as well as by growing swaths of scholars working on less
prestigious cultural forms. In their wake, modernism’s raison d’être as a concept
has been repeatedly described as a reactive formation, be it to the development
of popular literature or mass culture, or to the emergence of women as preferred
producers and consumers of a growing literature for entertainment.
These attacks certainly eroded the term’s former allure. Together with a variety
of responses and reformulations, they pushed modernism into what may be consid-
ered a new epoch. Thus we could periodize modernism’s history by emphasizing
the defining aspects in each period. First, a Literary epoch, until the Second
World War—where it spread largely through little magazines and small publishers.
Second, an Institutional epoch, until the 1980s—as its canon took over museums
and educational curricula. Third and finally, an Academic epoch. Today, modern-
ist studies is a field of research in its own right, with its own magazines, conferences,
book series, and its own Modernist Studies Association founded in 1998.3
As such, this process of relative autonomization is twofold. On the one hand, it is
an effect of the increasing diversity of research in what were formerly literature
departments. Works that were simply high literature, as witnessed precisely by

3 This tripartite division of modernism will be the subject of a separate article.

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their being taught in university classrooms, may coexist now with popular writing,
mass culture, or video games to greatly varying degrees. On the other hand, as I
pointed out earlier, this diversification has made deep inroads in the field of mod-
ernism itself. Latham and Rogers recently proposed it may now be described as “a
history of exclusions” and of the “interactions—hidden or in plain sight—with all
that they attempted to occlude” (10). Modernism, more than ever before, now car-
ries its “other” within itself. Hence the need for the term itself to signify two oppo-
site things at the same time, and the ensuing anxiety: both exclusion and interac-
tion; attempts at invisibilizing and unprecedented visibility; a sort of plebeian
elitism that is unmistakably a function of vastly more complex dynamics, in an
age that we tend to now call “modern” with some reflexive distance —but that is
still, to a large extent, our contemporary.

Conicet / University of Buenos Aires

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