Pound's new criticism

Much of the work of modernist studies during the last 25 years has been directed towards the gradual dismantling of ‘the straw-man modernism’ that featured in the postmodernist, anti-modernist, and historical avant-garde polemics of the 1970s and 1980s. ¹ This ‘modernism’, characterised as formalist and elitist, was to a certain extent a figment of the late twentieth-century philosophies that opposed it, but it found a real-life source in the mid-twentieth-century institutionalisation of the modernist canon: as Cary Nelson has remarked, ‘in a remarkable reversal of the revolutionary strain in modernism, a reversal that is still empowered today, literary theory thereby covertly fused the disjunctive modernist poem with the idealized view of poetry in the genteel tradition’. ² Modernism stood for individualism, democracy, and autonomous culture against the twin targets of totalitarianism and kitsch. And it stood for America: ‘the first thing one wants to say about the ideology of modernism’, writes Fredric Jameson ‘is that it is an American invention, […] a product of the Cold War’. ³