Review by Choice Review
Quinones argues that we can now see modernism as a specific, if heterogeneous, phenomenon whose various manifestations had at least some defining concerns in common. His subtitle tells us that central to these concerns was a complex concept of time; and indeed, notions of temporality, historicity, continuity, and discontinuity together provide (only a loose) frame that upholds a very wide-ranging and learned, albeit sometimes unfocused, discussion of modernism, ca. 1900-45. Quinones's complex narrative of the development of modernism in three phases touches upon aspects of our conceptions of time, consciousness, and development. This narrative is likely to be the most important and usefully controversial contribution of the study. The first phase begins with the modernist critique of the bourgeois 19th century and shows how critics have viewed it (Thomas Mann's work is central here). This evolves into a counter-Romantic second phase (T.S. Eliot, T.E. Hulme, Joyce's Ulysses), and into a mythopoetic third phase that ironically recapitulates some Romantic tendencies (Finnegans Wake, Four Quartets, Joseph and His Brothers). A rich book whose largest conceptual weakness is its too narrow interpretation of Nietzsche, this volume will be a useful companion to Jeffrey M. Perl's equally interesting The Tradition of Return (CH, Jul '85) and Alan Wilde's indispensable Horizons of Assent (CH, Nov '81). Strongly recommended to four-year colleges and universities.-K. Tololyan, Wesleyan University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
