cover image MATERIAL MODERNISM: The Politics of the Page

MATERIAL MODERNISM: The Politics of the Page

George Bornstein, . . Cambridge Univ., $54.95 (198pp) ISBN 978-0-521-66154-6

Examining several often familiar texts, Bornstein, professor of literature at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and an editor of Yeats, interprets them not as discrete events in a canonic continuum, but as material phenomena, as dependent for meaning on physical and historical placement (the "bibliographic code") as on the words from which they are composed (the "linguistic code"). This approach, derived from Bornstein's fellow critic/editor Jerome McGann, can radically alter the reader's view of even such a chestnut as John Keats's "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer." Read in the apparently neutral, value-free context of a Norton anthology, the poem "means" one thing, its relation to the tradition fixed and unwavering. But seen in its first published appearance, in Leigh Hunt's radical newspaper The Examiner, it becomes a ringing demand for cultural autonomy, a working-class youth's assertion that, even though he lacks the elite's knowledge of Greek, he is as much entitled to celebrate Homer. William Butler Yeats, who very deliberately controlled and altered the physical context of his work, offers much to an approach like Bornstein's, whose two essays on the Irish poet reflect his deep editorial immersion. Marianne Moore and James Joyce are also treated in a fruitfully destabilizing fashion. The book's last and most provocative essay examines, through a variety of texts and images, the complex relationship between African- and Irish-Americans, from abolitionist Frederick Douglass's 1845 tour of Ireland to the influence of Irish drama on the Harlem Renaissance. Bornstein continually stresses both the fluidity and hybridity of culture and the necessity of creating a critical approach alive to its flux. That is perhaps the book's greatest strength, the impetus and equipment it gives readers to ignore shopworn interpretations and explore the evidence for themselves. Forbiddingly priced here, it merits a paperback release. (July)