ABSTRACT

Modernism was shaped by many of the same historical developments that redefined the nature of social trust: the 'disembedding' of social relations, the 'crisis of liberalism', the catastrophe of mechanized warfare, the increasing sophistication of advertising and the emergence of a modern insurance industry. Mark C. Taylor's diagnosis of a contemporary 'crisis of confidence' linked to a 'crisis of representation' certainly recalls one of the classic traits of cultural modernism, which is commonly supposed to manifest doubts about mimesis, communication and reference. Literary modernism was shaped in complicated ways by the expansion of system trust and the growing authority of experts. Political life in the United States, in particular, is often said to be traversing a crisis of trust. In the version of George Steiner's crisis of linguistic trust, poetic or artistic language is imagined as self-authenticating, rather than as a token to be accepted on credit.