1. Astadur Eysteinsson, in his book The Concept of Modernism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), offers a wide-ranging survey of the diverse hypotheses that artists, critics, and literary historians have offered about modernism and the related concepts of postmodernism and the avant-garde. Modernism has alternately been seen as a form of cultural decadence and as a renewal sweeping away decadent Victorianism; as continuous with romanticism, aestheticism, or naturalism and as a break with these previous movements; as a reflection of historical conditions and as a flight from them; as a revolutionary culture and as a reactionary one; as the "hegemonic" form of culture and as a marginal ivory-tower culture. These varying conceptions reflect both the ideological commitments of the authors and the more or less unconscious rhetorical structures of historical and critical writing. Hayden White has, in several essays and books, sought to reveal the prefigurative web in which history is enmeshed: Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973); Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978); and The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). See also Paul Veyne, Writing History , trans. Mina Moore-Rinvolucri (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1984).

2. Two recent accounts of France in the interwar years which contribute significantly to a revised picture are Eugen Weber, The Hollow Years: France in the 1930s (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), and Romy Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France Between the Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). The cultural-political interest of this period in Austria has been especially well documented by the architectural historian Manfredo Tafuri in "Austromarxismo e città: 'Des rote Wien,' " Contropiano 2 (1971): 259-311; The Sphere and Labyrinth: Avant-Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s, trans. Pellegrino d'Acierno and Robert Connolly (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987); and (with Francesco dal Co) Modern Architecture 1 and 2, trans. Robert Erich Wolf (Milan: Electa, 1976).

3. Two exceptions are the new, two-volume study by Bonnie Kime Scott, Refiguring Modernism , 1: The Women of 1928 ; 2: Postmodern Feminist Readings of Woolf, West, and Barnes (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995); and in the American context, Walter Kalaidjian, American Culture Between the Wars: Revisionary Modernism and Postmodern Critique (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). There is also a highly suggestive discussion of the later works of key "high" modernists in Bob Perelman, The Trouble with Genius: Reading Pound, Joyce, Stein, and Zukofsky (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

4. In an essay devoted primarily to early modernism, Fredric Jameson has suggested the parallelism of the end of modernism and the restructuring of imperialism as a world system. It is this parallelism that for him suggests that debates around modernism represent more than just arbitrary assignments of historiographic boundaries: "However extrinsic and extraliterary the fact of imperialism may at first seem, there is at least a chronological justification for exploring its influence. . . . But when . . . the parallel also seems to hold at the other end of such chronological series and the end of modernism to coincide with the restructuring of the classical imperialist world system, our curiosity as to possible interrelationships can surely only be sharpened." Jameson, "Modernism and Imperialism," in Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, and Edward W. Said, Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 45.

5. The assumption that this "aging" has already irreversibly affected modernist art underlies Peter Bürger's article "The Decline of Modernism," in The Decline of Modernism , trans. Nicholas Walker (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), 32-47. Though critically directed especially at Theodor Adorno's discussions of modernist music, Bürger's hypothesis of an institutional undermining of modernism could find support in the developments in other media and genres.

6. A view that, for example, Phillip Brian Harper has in part developed in his recent study, Framing the Margins: The Social Logic of Postmodern Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).

7. George Orwell, "Review of Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller," New English Weekly , 14 November 1935; reprinted in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell , 1: An Age Like This , 1920-1940, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), 154-156.

8. George Orwell, "Inside the Whale" (1940), in A Collection of Essays (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), 252.

9. Charles Jencks, "Postmodern vs. Late-Modern," in Zeitgeist in Babel: The Post-Modernist Controversy , ed. Ingeborg Hoesterey (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 4-21.

10. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 305.

11. Fredric Jameson, Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 19.

12. Alan Wilde, Horizons of Assent: Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Ironic Imagination (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 120—121.

13. Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (New York: Methuen, 1987), 12.

14. I take this concept from Oskar Negt's essay on Ernst Bloch, "The Non-Synchronous Heritage and the Problem of Propaganda," New German Critique 9 (1976): 58.

15. Maurice Blanchot calls such writing, which emerges from points of opacity to the narrative exposition of history, "demise writing." Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster , trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 33. For a discussion of heterotopias, see Michel Foucault, "Of Other Spaces," Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 22-27.

16. John Hawkes, "Symposium: Fiction Today," Massachusetts Review 3, no. 4 (1962): 784-788.

17. For an analogous study of French writing of the 1930s and 1940s, see Allan Stoekl, Politics, Writing, Mutilation: The Cases of Bataille, Blanchot, Leiris, and Ponge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985).

18. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama , trans. John Osborne (London: New Left Books, 1977), 176.

19. Walter Benjamin, "Krisis des Romans: Zu Döblins Berlin Alexanderplatz, " in Gesammelte Schriften III, ed. Hella Tiedemann-Bartels (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972), 230-236.

20. André Gide, "Journal of The Counterfeiters, " in The Counterfeiters [French orig. 1927] (New York: Vintage Books, 1951), 416.

21. Peter Nicholls, "Divergences: Modernism, Postmodernism, Jameson and Lyotard," Critical Quarterly 33, no. 3 (1991): 1-18. See also Nicholls's recent book-length study, in which he develops this idea of "divergences" into an account of multiple histories of modernism, that is, of distinct "modernisms": Nicholls, Modernisms: A Literary Guide (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).

22. Jean-François Lyotard, Discours, figure (Paris: Klincksieck, 1971). For English translations, see "The Dream-Work Does Not Think," trans. Mary Lydon, in The Lyotard Reader , ed. Andrew Benjamin (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 19-55; and "The Connivances of Desire with the Figural," in Driftworks (New York: Semiotext(e), 1984), 57-68. A helpful discussion of Lyotard's theory of discourse and the figural appears in Geoffrey Bennington, Lyotard: Writing the Event (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 56-102.

23. On the existence and definition of this mainstream, see Douwe Fokkema and Elrud Ibsch, Modernist Conjectures: A Mainstream in European Literature, :1910:1940 (London: C. Hurst, 1987).

24. For a discussion of the rise of the prose poem as a transgressive form of "counterdiscourse," see the third part of Richard Terdiman, Discourse/Counterdiscourse: The Theory and Practice of Symbolic Resistance in Nineteenth- Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 261-343.

25. Richard Ellmann, Interview with Samuel Beckett, quoted in James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 108.

26. Beckett to MacGreevy, probably June 1930, quoted in Knowlson, Damned to Fame , 121.

27. T. S. Eliot, " Ulysses , Order, and Myth" (1923), in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot , ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 175-178.

28. Beckett, notebook entry, 15 January 1937, quoted in Knowlson, Damned to Fame , 228.

29. Wyndham Lewis, The Childermass (London : John Calder, 1928), 81.

30. Djuna Barnes, Nightwood: The Original Version and Related Drafts [1936, 1937, 1962], ed. Cheryl J. Plumb (Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive Press, 1995), 65.

31. Samuel Beckett, Watt (New York: Grove Press, 1953), 124-125.

32. This process is closely akin to what M. M. Bakhtin, with reference to a general history of genres, called "novelization." Of particular interest here are two central aspects of Bakhtin's account: his emphasis, on the one hand, on the opening of literary forms to contingency and contemporaneity; and, on the other hand, his account of laughter's central role in the process of novelization as the instrument of a "comical operation of dismemberment," reflected both formally and thematicalls,. See Bakhtin, "Epic and Novel," in The Dialogic Imagination , ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 3-40; esp. 22-24. In addition, Bakhtin's relation of Dostoevsky's works to Menippean satire has broad relevance to my characterization of late modernism. See Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics , ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 101-180.

33. C. Barry Chabot, "The Problem of the Postmodern," in Zeitgeist in Babel: The Post-Modernist Controversy , 30.

34. Author's note (1920) to Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes [1911] (London: Penguin Books, 1985), 49-50.

35. Art Berman suggests that "high modernism" as a distinct mode emerges together with a formalist critical discourse to legitimate a particular, hegemonic conception of modernist writing, excluding other possibilities latent in earlier modernist experimentation; see Berman, Preface to Modernism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 6off.

36. Bürger, "The Decline of Modernism," 44.

37. Wyndam Lewis, Men Without Art , ed. Seamus Cooney (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1987), 89. Lewis's emphasis.