Friday, April 11th, 2025 – Université Paris-Cité, Bâtiment Olympe-de-Gouges, room 830.
This paper will suggest an institutional account of modernism’s increasing cultural relevance after 1900. Iconic modernists like Woolf, Joyce, Pound or Eliot were embedded in “dense networks” (groups in which everyone has close intellectual-emotional ties to everyone else). Dense networks, I argue, heighten the reflexivity of literary practice, and tend towards validation through peer review rather than the literary marketplace. Whereas earlier peer-oriented literary coteries (like the Weimar-Jena group around Goethe and the Schlegels, or the English Wordsworth-Coleridge circle) relied heavily on patronage and independent wealth, the mid-to-late century print-market extensions provided inverse subsidies that gradually strengthened literary culture’s market-sheltered peer review systems. When modernism’s new platforms (rentier-financed little magazines and the like) created more stable market shelters, this led to the avant-gardization of the literary field’s economies of prestige during the 1920s, elevating modernism’s reflexive experimentalism to the literary center. Modernism’s more lasting institutionalization, finally, needs to be understood in terms of the more sustained turn to academic patronage in the post45 period.
Günter Leypoldt is a Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Heidelberg. He is the author of Literature’s Social Lives: A Socio-Institutional History of Literary Value (forthcoming in 2025), Cultural Authority in the Age of Whitman: A Transatlantic Perspective (2009), and co-editor of Authority and Trust in US Culture and Society (2021) and Reading Practices (2015). His essays appeared in such journals as American Journal of Cultural Sociology, American Literary History, Poetics, Modern Language Quarterly, New Literary History, Critical Quarterly, Contemporary Literature, and Post45.