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INTRODUCTION
brought forth by modernist internationalism take us into the mix of intimate experiences, disappointed expectations, and recalcitrant aspirations that lend immediacy and embodiment to historical reckonings.
Deprovincializing Modernism The subtitle of my study, Modernist Internationalism Beyond Europe, demands some explanation, especially because the version of modernist internationalism I am offering is remarkably different from the European formulation that came to be institutionalized in the 1950s and 1960s. In his introduction to Modernism: An Anthology, Lawrence Rainey recalls several early approaches to accounting for modernism, which constitute possible origin stories for the movement’s incorporation into the academy. Most influential of these early forays was Harry Levin’s 1956 essay “What Was Modernism?,” which proceeded to define the category by populating it with specific writers. Building a canon, which this essay did, was thus key to establishing the definition of modernism, and Levin’s selections and pedagogy played a profound role in shaping modernism’s association with elitism and gatekeeping. To reinforce this point, Rainey recalls a legendary Harvard course taught by Levin entitled simply “Joyce, Proust, and Mann,” in which students were required to read the complete À la recherche, Ulysses, and one or more novels by Thomas Mann, with either Proust or Mann being read in the original language. This syllabus contributed to the formidable image of modernism and to its further definition as a “pan-European and cosmopolitan phenomenon, one promulgated by an international community effectively removed from the contingencies of time and place.” 19 Other early accounts of modernism include that of Graham Hough, who inadvertently suggested Anglo-American modernism’s first period boundaries when he claimed that “the years between 1910 and the Second World War saw a revolution in the literature of the English language.” 20 Though Hough oriented modernism around the relationship of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, Rainey classifies his and Levin’s early definitions of modernism as “neoclassicist.” They conceived of modernism not just as rebelling against romantic and Victorian conceptions of art but also as searching for deep symbolic structures of order that might serve as a refuge from the chaos of contemporary history.