Reviews for Ethnic Modernism

The average rating for Ethnic Modernism based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-03-10 00:00:00 Jack Larmer Werner Sollors tells the story of Modernism's rise from obscurity to canonicity while arguing for the importance of ethnic identity to American Modernism. Sollors recasts the story of modernism from Joyce, Eliot, and Pound to that of Wright, Yezierska, and di Donota. He writes, "Works of American 'ethnic' prose literature, written by, about, or for persons who perceived themselves, or were perceived by others, as members of ethnic groups, are the central subjects of these pages. Ethnic autobiographies, novels, short stories, and nonfiction works participating in the development of an American literary modernism that would carry the day after World War II" (12). Modernism in Sollors's view heralds the rise of Ethnic American literature. It is through modernism we can understand the twentieth century shift of Ethnic American voices from the periphery to the center of American literature. Sollors places Ethnic American writers into the context of debates over immigration and Americanization. He also examines the ways in which these writers intervened in these debates and the useful of modernist forms for their interventions. He emphasizes the multi-lingualism of ethnic modernism in the context of a long history of multilingual U.S. literary production. Alongside readings of authors like Stein, Roth, Hurston, and Wright, Sollors repeatedly returns to modernism and transportation. He examines competing and colliding visions of the streetcar as sites of modernity and sites of segregation. Such discussions fascinate me as I contemplate my own work on vehicles as means of mobility. Martha J. Cutter has a nice chapter by chapter breakdown in MELUS 34.3

Review # 2 was written on 2011-02-17 00:00:00 Agnieszka Flizik This book reads like a fabulous series of sharp, themed undergraduate lectures on various facets and forms of ethnic modernism. Sollors entwines the stories of famous modernists like Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway with the careers of contemporaneous figures like Mary Antin and Henry Roth. One of the refreshing dimensions of Sollors' literary history is that he refuses to give ideological precedence to the formal innovations of modernism; instead, he gives a direct account of the Cold War creation of a narrative that privileged literary modernism as an inevitable corollary to American democracy and an inherent challenge to totalitarianism. Sollors' writerly voice is clear, witty, empathetic, and insightful. He is astonishing learned and yet never loses the thread of his narrative amidst the impressive array of evidence which he weaves into it. The strength of this book for me was twofold: 1) the clarity and momentum of the stories that it tells about hybrid genres, ethnic experiences and narratives, and shaping moments in literary, political, and cultural history 2) the archival range that these stories reflect. Sollors seems to have read just about everything, and his renderings of Italian-American memoirs, immigrant tales, and magazine short stories draw out recurring tropes and prevalent themes in those works. Sollors sends the scholar jotting down new sources for research bibliographies and working syllabi, and he gives the student reader a kaleidoscopic impression of 20th-century U.S. literature between 1910 and 1950. His chapter juxtaposing and contrasting Wright and Hurston was particularly rich and compelling. I give this four stars instead of five stars because this is more of a general introduction than a taut argument, and that's not a flaw of the book (it tackles the project of laying out a literary history, as this material was originally written for the *Cambridge History of American Literature*) but it also means that it is not quite as exciting to this reader as Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture or Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature