Out of Context

The Uses of Modernist Fiction

Michaela Bronstein

Modernist Literature and Culture

Offers a new paradigm for transhistorical approaches to literature
Analyzes counterintuitive but historically grounded connections between familiar modernist authors and later writers
Argues that the politics of literary texts reside as much in their transhistorical afterlives as in their context of production
Offers substantial new readings of major formal questions in modernist fiction including characterization and non-chronological narration
Places the field of modernist studies in historically-grounded dialogue with later twentieth-century writers

Out of Context

The Uses of Modernist Fiction

Michaela Bronstein

Modernist Literature and Culture

Description

How do novels travel through time? How might they endure in a changing world and reach the readers of an unknowable future? Modernist writers were eager to think of their books as reaching audiences they could not yet imagine. In recent years however, scholars of modernism have focused on pinning them down: putting these books in their context and these authors in their place. By looking to the future, scholars fear that looking to the future will make literature disengaged, irresponsible, or apolitical; the worry is that literature cannot escape its own moment without also evading the hard truths of history.

Out of Context suggests an alternative to this scholarship, proposing that literature travels through time not by transcending history, but by adapting to historical change. The chapters of this book each pair a modernist author with a later reader. In each case, this future reader is also a novelist--someone who reads with an eye to form and craft, and who puts what they see to new use in their own novels. James Baldwin adapts Henry James's modes of characterization; Ngugi wa Thiong'o repurposes Joseph Conrad's nonchronological narratives; and Ken Kesey builds on William Faulkner's use of multiple perspectives.

Reading the modernists through these authors' eyes offers a different perspective on them. Literary forms, in this history, do not have intrinsic political meanings; they have a multitude of political uses. Rather than see modernist literary form, in all its fragmentation and complexity, as a source of disruption and doubt, these later authors use modernist forms to distill doubts into conviction. The experiments of modernist fiction stand revealed as tools not of political critique but of political commitment.

Out of Context

The Uses of Modernist Fiction

Michaela Bronstein

Modernist Literature and Culture

Out of Context

The Uses of Modernist Fiction

Michaela Bronstein

Modernist Literature and Culture

Author Information

Michaela Bronstein is Assistant Professor of English at Stanford University.

Out of Context

The Uses of Modernist Fiction

Michaela Bronstein

Modernist Literature and Culture

Reviews and Awards

Shortlisted for the MSA First Book Prize

"In Out of Context, Bronstein compares modern and contemporary novels, focusing on formal literary elements. The introduction and first chapter explore how past authors influence future authors, particularly the ways contemporary authors have adapted modernist experiments. In the chapters that follow, Bronstein pairs authors, showing how literary techniques could be employed in new ways. [...] The brief comparative analyses throughout Out of Context are insightful and beautifully contextualized, showing that literary techniques can be employed by writers in different circumstances for different rhetorical purposes. Summing Up: Highly recommended" -- CHOICE

"Arguing that 'to read transhistorically is not to read ahistorically,' Out of Context offers a revelatory rereading of modernist literary history, one that is sure to cause a vital shift in the study of fiction written in the past two centuries." --Jesse Matz, William P. Rice Professor of English and Literature, Kenyon College

"Out of Context is an ambitious and provocative study that makes a series of important methodological claims about how to read, and in particular about the relation between different moments in literary history, and indeed the relation between literature and history itself." --Michael Gorra, Mary Augusta Jordan Professor of English Language and Literature, Smith College

"Out of Context will be essential reading for anyone concerned with the stakes of reconsidering the political consequences and formal modulations of modernist fiction beyond mid-century. Michaela Bronstein offers a critically bold and timely rationale for examining the transhistorical uses and aspirations of modernist aesthetics." --David James, author of Modernist Futures

"Michaela Bronstein's account of Conrad's impact on America's Faulkner or Kenya's Ngugi wa Thiong'o is the single most compelling account I have read of 'influence' in a lifetime of reading. Intricately conversant with Anglophone writers from many geographies and carrying out tour de force feats of stylistic analysis, the book founds a new method of transhistorical literary studies. Its pages seem to announce the coming of a new school of literary thinking." --Elaine Scarry, Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and General Theory of Value, Harvard University