Introduction

"make it new"

pp. 1-30

in: Jane Goldman, Modernism, 1910–1945, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004

Abstract

The Introduction takes its title from Ezra Pound's famous avant-garde slogan (and the title of his book, of 1934) "Make It New", the founding impetus for the literature of the period this book covers. Chapter I, which in fact constitutes the Introduction, finds an excellent guide to the founding movements of the period, and to their diverse reorientations, in the pages of Nathanael West's cult modernist novel The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931). West's avant-garde guide to the great canonical, avant-garde texts of high modernism (by James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Gertrude Stein, Fyodor Dostoevsky and so on) also enables us to discuss and define the most important critical terms that have emerged in mapping this period: modernism, modernity, the avant-garde, the new, postmodernism, and so on. His novel arms us with an overview of the scope and range of the period. And from its position in the trajectory of modernist and avant-garde aesthetics, roughly mid-way in the period (1931), is projected a discussion that directs us both back to earlier founding avant-garde texts and languages and forward to their later developments and concerns. Our reading of West's novel provides a set of critical terms and questions, then, for proceeding through the period, and through this book.