Research

Many accounts of Anglo-American modernist fiction presuppose its postwar termination and the consequent anachronism of its commitment to autonomous aesthetic form—a commitment that is now often understood as a merely sociological matter of taste and, as such, a dissimulation of social reality. My book project, The Market Architecture of Modernist Fiction, challenges these positions.

Building on recent reappraisals of aesthetic autonomy, I demonstrate how the modernist commitment to art’s autonomy can be understood not only in less sociological terms than are conventional but also in more formally rigorous and historically capacious terms. I explore how a modernist principle of aesthetic autonomy emerges in antagonism to fin-de-siècle processes of marketization and persists today within fiction whose circulation is subsumed by the market. I base this expanded periodization of modernist fiction on an analysis of how works can assert the autonomy of their aesthetic meaning in mass-market contexts where this autonomy has not been analyzed as it has been within the market-insulated contexts of canonical modernism.

Taking up key works of Anglo-American fiction whose modernist form has been neglected or misunderstood, I show how these works assert aesthetic autonomy through and against the way they must fashion themselves for mass-market circulation and, in this way, embody a form of realism rooted in irony. What I call the “market architecture” of modernist fiction consists of medium-specific conceptual structures that transform the external, instrumentalizing pressures of market demand into internal, aesthetic problems of self-legislating form. By analyzing the structuring presence of market architecture in forms like popular genre fiction, experimental novels about race, political performance art, and the contemporary sequel novel, I show how cultural problems and projects often deemed antithetical to autonomous art can actually be intrinsic to it.

Part of the project's third chapter is published in nonsite: “Mary Ellen Solt: Concretizing 1968."