Bad form: Modernist criticism and the cultural life of the aesthetic, 1909–1929

Bad Form recasts the practice of literary criticism in the modernist period with particular focus on the work of T.E. Hulme, T.S. Eliot, I.A. Richards, and Rebecca West. Scholars have thought of modernism as an origin point for a twentieth-century literary critical practice that eschews considerations of society and culture to focus on the formal complexity of the literary work. In contrast to these accounts, I see modernist critics as initiating a critical practice that looks beyond questions of aesthetic form to consider how the aesthetic functions within the social. I argue that modernist critics understood the aesthetic within a horizon of intensifying specialization and expertise, seeing aesthetic positions or dispositions as tending to produce new small-scale cultural formations: new class fractions and subdivisions as well as new group cultures based on shared knowledge. The aesthetic, for modernists, was not autonomous but linked always to its social uses and abuses, its ability to provoke or produce solidarity, sentimentality, snobbery, social prestige, or cultural expertise. I argue that Hulme, Eliot, Richards, and West each developed their literary critical methodology through a conception of the aesthetic\u27s social function. In chapters one and two I look at the work of Hulme and Eliot, respectively, to show how they developed a literary critical expertise that offered the aesthetic as a privileged category from which to interpret the modern division of society into smaller group formations. Richards and West, the subjects of chapters three and four, attempted in their critical methodologies to reconcile the literary work with the aesthetic\u27s ability to form distinctions within society. Collectively, these case studies suggest that the discipline of literary criticism, even at its modernist inception, produced sociologies of culture and nascent forms of cultural studies. My genealogy of modernist criticism\u27s bad form suggests that the ideal of a criticism responsive to culture\u27s work in society remains an incomplete modernist project