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The Institution of Modernism and the Discourse of Culture: Hellenism, Decadence, and Authority from Walter Pater to T

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The Institution of Modernism and the Discourse of Culture: Hellenism, Decadence, and Authority from Walter Pater to T THE INSTITUTION OF MODERNISM AND THE DISCOURSE OF CULTURE: HELLENISM, DECADENCE, AND AUTHORITY FROM WALTER PATER TO T. S ELIOT DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University by John Calvert-Finn, B.A., M.A. * * * * * The Ohio State University 2004 Dissertation Committee: Approved by Professor Mark Conroy, Advisor _______________________ Professor Jon Erickson Advisor Department of English Professor David Riede ABSTRACT This project rethinks the forces that shaped English literary modernism by examining the way writers like Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, T. E. Hulme, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot respond to a crisis of literary authority that emerges from the nineteenth century through the shifting idea of culture. While these writers have been recently studied in terms of the link between literary doctrine and politics, this frame of reference fails to capture the way in which the formulation and reformulation of aesthetic ideas in the early twentieth century is intimately linked to way in which the idea of high culture was complicated by the emergence of the the anthropological culture idea in the nineteenth century. The English moderns discussed here each, in various ways, attempt to exploit the ambiguities of the culture idea in order to reassert the privileged status of the arts. Previously, the authority of European literature had been posited on the basis of Greek ideals as well as religious values. The emergence of anthropology greatly complicated the Victorian understanding of both Christianity and Hellenism, which in turn leaves aesthetics in need of a new form of legitimation. The moderns would look upon the culture thesis of anthropology as both an opportunity and a source of anxiety. On one hand, the idea of culture as “a whole way of life” not only threatens the privileged status of the arts, but also legitimizes a romantic concept through, ironically, the prestige of science. On the other hand, the culture thesis offers the promise of empowering the ii arts and their ability to shape modern civilization. Artist are, as Ezra Pound would proclaim, “the antennae of the race.” The first writers to register these anxieties were late romantic writers themselves. The aestheticism of Walter Pater sought to withdraw from philistine modernity in the name of the cultivation of heightened sensibility only to embrace the culture idea as a means of saving art from subjective imprisonment. Wilde’s Decadence is a response to the idea of civilization as overwrought consciousness and decrepitude. Yet, he will come to see that the animal instincts—a savagery which is the companion of decadent civilization—can only be redressed by seeing culture in terms of the survival of Hellenistic impulses that might provide the basis of a new culture. Both writers anticipate the dilemmas and trajectories that the later English modernists would experience. T. E. Hulme, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot would each seek to make art a means of shaping the collective unconscious. Their desire was to make art a living presence in society at large. The irony for the modernists is that their efforts were to have the opposite effect. Hence, the companion story to these conceptual shifts is the way in which modernist attempts to create an audience for high art ends up being mediated through the professionalization of university criticism. The accumulation of “cultural capital” in institutions of higher learning progressively undermines the legitimacy of criticism and literature outside its purview. The late nineteenth-century writer might take pride in the coterie audience, but the momentum of emerging mass culture at the turn of the century iii led the modernists increasingly to forge their audience through the university. Modernism would win its cultural place, not by speaking from the mass mind as many of them hoped, but by merging with the interests of the academy. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I want to express my deep thanks to my advisor, Professor Mark Conroy, for sharing his deep literary knowledge, and for offering unfailing intellectual support and friendship. I also want to thank my committee members, Professor David Riede whose insight into the problems of nineteenth-century literary culture has enriched my understanding as well as my argument, and Professor Jon Erickson, whose theoretical mind and keen-edged questions have helped me sharpen my own mind. I have had the perfect committee. I also express my gratitude to Professor Anthony Libby who directed my Master’s Thesis and who has taught me much about poetry and aesthetic sensibility. I also thank Professor Ann Hall, Dean of Graduate Studies, and Professor Ron Carstens, Chair of the Humanities Division, both of Ohio Dominican University, for their faith in my teaching abilities that enabled me to bring this project to completion. v VITA April 3, 1961 . .Born – Wooster, Ohio 1985 . B. A. English, The College of Wooster 1989 . M. A. English, The Ohio State University 1985-1995 . Graduate Teaching Assistant Graduate Teaching and Research The Ohio State University 1995- Present . Adjunct Humanities Instructor, Ohio Domincan University FIELDS OF STUDY English Literature Modernism and Twentieth-Century Literature Nineteenth-Century British Literature Critical Theory vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract...............................................................................................................................ii Acknowledgements.............................................................................................................v Vita....................................................................................................................................vi Chapters 1. Introduction............................................................................................................. 1 1.1 Preliminaries .....................................................................................................1 1.2 Institutional Dialectics................................................................................... 19 1.3 Hellenism, Humanism, and Anthropological Culture.................................... 25 1.4 The University, Professionalism, and the Nationalization of Culture ........... 39 1.5 Description ofChapter................................................................................... 48 2. Oxford Hellenism and the Crisis of Culture ......................................................... 54 2.1 The Decline of Theological Humanism......................................................... 54 2.2 The Tyranny of Greece Over Oxford............................................................. 65 2.3 Towards a “Complete Historicism” and Aesthetic Purity ............................. 73 3. Walter Pater and the Modernist Moment............................................................. 78 3.1 Displacing Pater ........................................................................................... 78 3.2 Placing Pater ................................................................................................. 83 3.3 The Shadow of Arnold.................................................................................. 87 3.4 Discriminating the Object...........................................................................101 3.5 Marius and the Funerary Imagination......................................................... 110 3.6 The Pleasures of Decline ............................................................................125 4. Oscar Wilde and the Weapon of Hellenism ........................................................ 130 4.1 The Case of Nietzsche.................................................................................130 4.2 Oscar Wilde and the Changing Fortunes of Philhellenism .........................142 4.3 Dorian Gray and the Failure of the Aesthetic Moment ...............................153 4.4 The Radicalization of Decay ....................................................................... 170 vii 5. The “Turn of the Soul”: Arthur Symons and Rémy de Gourmont......................175 5.1 Erasing Decadence: Effacing Culture ......................................................... 175 5.2 The Vital Sciences....................................................................................... 184 5.3 The Turn of the Soul ...................................................................................190 5.4 Toward Literary Modernism: Rémy de Gourmont and a World in Pieces .198 6. T. E. Hulme and the Making of Modernist Paradigms .......................................208 6.1 A Declining Reputation...............................................................................208 6.2 The Need for Legitimacy ............................................................................ 218 6.3 Classicism or Anarchy................................................................................. 228 6.4 Humanism or Nationalism.......................................................................... 237 6.5 Worringer and Anthropological Aesthetics ................................................ 243 6.6 Culture as Antihumanism ........................................................................... 255 6.7 Conclusion: The Struggle for Cultural Paradigms......................................266 7. Pound Imagining Culture ....................................................................................270 7.1 Paidaia and Professionalism:
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