Imagining audiences: American modernism in the age of publicity.

Abstract

Imagining Audiences: American Modernism in the Age of Publicity describes how the deliberate provocations that first advertised modernist work to the American public shaped the cultural authority that accrued to modernists over time. These provocations also shaped modernists' relations to their audiences and modernists' approaches to their work. Looking at the roots of the popular interpretive traditions developed in America's 19<super>th</super>-century exhibition halls, the first chapter outlines the historical conditions that turned questions of fraud and deception into popular entertainment. The forms of public fascination produced by these questions were ultimately identical to the fascination modern publicity created for modernist works in America. A reading of two Henry James short stories in this chapter demonstrates James's prescient understanding of how publicity would affect authors' conception of literature and readers' expectations throughout the 20<super>th</super> century: a literary work, James concludes, is obliged to stage the concealment of what fascinates its readers, but the revelation of this fascinating object is neither possible nor desirable. Any such revelation would mark the work as inauthentic. My second chapter explores America's response to the Armory Show, which the public treated as if it were one of P. T. Barnum's spectacles. Public suspicions about the avant-garde exacerbated existing uncertainties about modernity's effects on the arts, but at the same time, the Show's publicity seemed to herald some future rapprochement between the arts and modernity, not only to critics writing in the press but to figures like Ezra Pound. Without James's self-consciousness, Pound learns from modern publicity and organizes his poems to promote his own consciousness as the locus of modernism's revelatory power. The tension that initially sustained modernism's artist-audience relations had slackened by the 1930s, leaving modernists with only a nebulous conception of their audience. Wallace Stevens was distressed by just how little an idea of audience he had. Paradoxically, he also felt crowded round by a public always clamoring over the radio, and he found this pressure so distressing that he came to cling to the idea that an imaginative distance between writer and reader is a positive condition of art-making.