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The Discourse of Modernism in the Age of Jefferson

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Frank Shuffelton
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Extract

The 18th Century began with a debate between the ancients and the moderns in which the proponents of classicism seemed to enjoy a temporary advantage, but it ended with two revolutions whose victors loudly proclaimed a radical disjunction with the past. The age obviously contains more than one site on which we might locate a discourse of modernism, but the differences between a battle of the books and guillotining a king suggest that we should expect to find more than one kind of modernism. Or better, we might expect to find a discourse of modernism rich with an unrecognized and unresolved problematics that has become somewhat clearer, both to the original speakers and to us, only in the light of subsequent texts and events. In the summer of 1776, for example, many Americans thought that the Declaration of Independence had resolved an ambiguous situation by breaking with the political conventions of the past, but scarcely a decade later they required another text to clarify and constitute relationships among themselves. That Constitution immediately called into play discourse about the possible futures it made possible, and the advent of the French Revolution two years later called for a total reevaluation of the American revolutionary project. Some participants in the national discourse thought the events in France exposed the fallacy of any revolution that sought to go beyond the limits of replacing an unjust regime and aspired to transform human nature and human culture, while others thought the French experience made more explicit and extended the genuine meaning of the American Revolution as a radical transformation of history. The discourse of the Declaration, that of the Constitution, and that of the response to the French Revolution suggest that the origination and establishment of the young United States might be helpfully understood as an exemplary episode of the modernism that transformed the postmedieval world.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 15 , October 1990 , pp. 23 - 37
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

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References

NOTES

1. Peter Ackroyd, for example, locates the emergence of a “classical modernism” in Restoration England and describes its transformation into “the modernism of our own time” in his Notes for a New Culture: An Essay on Modernism (London: Vision Press, 1976), pp. 9–26Google Scholar. Reiss, Timothy J. in The Discourse of Modernism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), pp. 9–11Google Scholar, on the other hand, contends that “modern Western discourse … the ‘analytico-referential’,” became the dominant “discursive class” by the beginning of the 18th Century, “a kind of epistemic development” that is being echoed in our own time. Modern discourse is not the same thing as the discourse of modernism, but the present essay shares with studies as different as these at least the understanding that modernism is most usefully considered not as a specific event or set of events but as a strand of discourse (within the larger fabric of human discourse) concerned with the selfconscious transformation of historical consciousness.

2. Blumenberg, Hans, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Wallace, Robert M. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983), p. 22.Google Scholar

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5. Bradbury, Malcolm and McFarlane, James, eds., Modernism: 1890–1930 (New York: Penguin, 1976), p. 29.Google Scholar

6. Singal, Daniel Joseph, “Towards a Definition of American Modernism,” American Quarterly 39 (Spring 1987): 13.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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9. Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Use and Abuse of History, trans. Collins, Adrian (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1949), p. 5Google Scholar. Paul de Man offers his own translation of Nietzsche in his citations, but it is useful, particularly for nonreaders of German, to consult additional translations in order to recognize the effect of de Man's own choice of diction for his version as well as to consider passages not quoted by de Man. Quotations from this translation cite it simply as Nietzsche; citations to de Man refer to his translations.

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20. Barlow, , Advice, p. 10.Google Scholar

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27. Barlow, , Advice, pp. 14–15, 2.Google Scholar

28. Barlow, , Advice, p. 103.Google Scholar

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35. Jefferson, Thomas, “Declaration,” in Thomas Jefferson: Writings, ed. Peterson, Merrill (New York: Library of America, 1984), p. 19Google Scholar. Women and people of color have rightly protested the historic and pragmatic interpretation of “all men are created equal” to effectively reduce “all men” to “most white males,” but it is the semantically powerful alternative of “all men” equaling “all human beings” that ironically gives force to all attempts to break with racist, sexist hegemonies.

36. Daghistany, Ann and Johnson, J. J., “Romantic Irony, Spatial Form, and Joyce's Ulysses,” in Spatial Form in Narrative, ed. Smitten, Jeffrey R. and Daghistany, Ann (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 50.Google Scholar

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39. Jefferson, , Writings, pp. 963, 890, 1344–46.Google Scholar

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