The Crisis of Liberalism and the Politics of Modernism Janice Ho* University of Colorado at Boulder Abstract This essay gives a brief overview of the different ways in which literary criticism has understood modernism’s response to the crisis of liberalism that occurred in the early 20th century. Beginning with a historical explanation of the crisis and an account of its stakes for modernist art, the essay proceeds to discuss a central debate among critics that had taken place in the 1930s and that was particularly concerned about the ideological values of modernism during such a time of political instability. The essay shows how this early debate continues to frame and inform current criticism on the ‘politics of modernism’, which similarly seeks to analyze modernism’s relationship to the values of liberalism that had been so dominant for most of the 19th century. Focusing subse- quently on contemporary criticism, the essay looks at two major thematic concerns that have shaped modernist studies from the 1980s onwards: first, the issue of how modernist aesthetics subverts forms of liberal subjectivity; and second, the issue of the extremist politics – invariably fascism – that modernist authors have frequently embraced. Both these concerns reflect a sense that modernism is fundamentally antagonistic to the 19th-century heritage of liberalism, imagining alternative models of consciousness from the liberal subject and repudiating the moderation of lib- eral politics. However, this essay concludes with more recent criticism which seeks to rethink modernism’s relationship to liberalism in more positive ways, focusing in particular on studies that examine modernism’s response to the transformation of liberalism from its classical Victorian form to the modern form of liberal democracy. The most obvious social fact of the last forty years is the failure of liberal-capitalist democracy. – W. H. Auden, 1939 The half-century between the Victorian fin-de-sie `cle and the end of the Second World War bore witness to an unprecedented flourishing of literary and artistic experimentation on the one hand, and to unsurpassed political chaos and violence on the other. Such a conjuncture has meant that the movement of modernism was, from the first, indelibly shaped by the turbulent historical events that surrounded it, even if the relationship between aesthetics and politics is never reducible to simple causality. In particular, the instability of the period manifested itself in a deep-seated crisis of liberalism, a political philosophy that had underpinned the governing assumptions of much of 19th-century Europe. The crisis marked a fundamental rupture between an older epoch that accepted the authority of liberal tenets, and a newer one that scrutinized, questioned, and some- times abandoned these tenets for alternative political worldviews. The fraught atmosphere of the early 20th century was thus characterized by a host of different and competing ide- ologies jostling together for hegemonic dominance in an attempt to radically restructure state and society. How did modernist art react to such a crisis of liberalism and to the political volatility of this historical moment? This question has been the subject of intense analysis and debate from the moment of modernism’s inception, and remains an impor- tant issue in modernist studies today: for the attempt to grasp how the modernists reacted L I C 3 7 6 7 B Dispatch: 4.11.10 No. of pages: 19 CE: Nathiya Journal Name Manuscript No. Toc head: 20C PE: Hari Prakash Literature Compass 7 (2010): 1–19, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2010.00767.x ª 2010 The Author Literature Compass ª 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49