Terry Eagleton’s Modernism: A Literature in Crisis (2025)

Terry Eagleton’s Modernism: A Literature in Crisis (2025) explores the aesthetic impact of capitalist development in the period 1848 to 1945. 

Below is a review of the insights and ramifications derived from reading each chapter of the text.

Chapter 1: The Time of Modernism

Theme: The temporal and historical conditions that birthed the movement.

10 Insights

 * Terminology Gap: Modernism was a belated label; high modernists rarely called themselves such.

 * Disproportionate Impact: It had a "strikingly disproportionate" impact compared to its "slender social base" of small coteries.

 * Crisis-Driven: It stems from a "historical crisis of immense proportions," specifically WWI, revolution, and economic depression.

 * Three Prerequisites: Per Perry Anderson, it requires an aristocratic tradition of "high" art to rebel against, overlapping historical modes of production, and the proximity of revolution.

 * Polythetic Nature: Modernism has no single "essence" but is a collection of "family resemblances" like shock, dissonance, and fragmentation.

 * Parasitic on Realism: It is "unavoidably parasitic on realism," requiring the norm of the "real" to deviate from it with force.

 * Absent Centres: Many works revolve around a void, such as the "unseen bomb explosion" in The Secret Agent or the "Marabar Caves".

 * Modern vs. Modernity: Modernity is the project of secularization and progress; modernism is often its "antagonist".

 * Colonial Advantage: "Backwardness" in colonial nations often allowed for a "revolutionary leap" into modernism faster than in stable heartlands like Britain.

 * The "Make it New" Paradox: Innovation is either creation ex nihilo or renewal of the old; modernism often confuses the two.

10 Ramifications

 * Institutionalization: Repudiated art eventually became canonical, with Schoenberg in concert halls and Abstract Expressionism in bank lobbies.

 * Death of Future: By the 1940s, the "ambiguity" of technology was gone, replaced by a "routinised, bureaucratised economy".

 * Solitude as Default: Individuals were increasingly reduced to "mere functions of global powers" and "solitude and alienation".

 * Spatialization of Time: As faith in linear history faltered, movement gave way to "montage" and time to "space".

 * Loss of Subjectivity: The human subject "imploded, lacking both a fixed centre and a stable foundation".

 * Obsolescence of the Present: The "Futurist" mindset suggests the present is instantly obsolete.

 * Institutional Inertia: Realism proved so hardy that writers like Kingsley Amis could write as if no cultural crisis had occurred.

 * The Nightmare of History: History became a "nightmare" from which characters (and authors) desperately tried to awaken.

 * False Awakenings: Revolutions, like the Irish one, often resulted in "false awakenings" where older structures persisted.

 * The Perpetual Now: A focus on the "Now" dismantles identity, as "if the self is reborn every second then there is nothing that persists".

Chapter 2: Words and Things

Theme: The crisis of language and the struggle to represent an opaque reality.

10 Insights

 * Language as Commodity: In a commercial society, language becomes "grubby and shop-soiled," losing its truth-bearing capacity.

 * Psychologism: Modernity is the interpretation of the world through the "fluid element of the soul".

 * Mass Culture as Twin: Modernism and mass culture were "twinned at birth," with the former often being a reaction against the latter.

 * Form Over Content: High art distinguished itself by execution; "a Parisian sex worker’s unmade bed" could be art if the style was intense.

 * Artisanal Resistance: Modernist writing was a "throwback to an older, more artisanal mode of production" against the factory-produced popular culture.

 * Reader-as-Laborer: The reader is forced into a "labour of interpretation," becoming a "co-author".

 * The "Room 101" Syndrome: The belief that truth only "flares out" under unbearable pressure or crisis.

 * Writing Degree Zero: A whittling down of language (Beckett, Hemingway) to avoid the "deception" of flowery prose.

 * Estrangement: Art exists to "make the stone stonier" and resurrect the word from automatization.

 * Linguistic Division of Labor: The rise of specialized idioms made a "lingua franca" or common language impossible.

10 Ramifications

 * Social Dysfunctionalism: Art achieved "freedom" from the state/church only by becoming "socially dysfunctional" and marginal.

 * Self-Reflectiveness: Deprived of social function, art turned inward, becoming "about words, painting about paint".

 * The Cult of Style: Style became an "irony," simultaneously "redeeming and repudiating the world".

 * Boredom (Ennui): Everyday life became "barren" and "no longer fit for artistic purpose".

 * Anti-Democratic Bias: The "sourly dismissive attitude to ordinary life" led to a disdain for "railway bookstalls" and football.

 * The Unrepresentable Subject: The subject became an "impenetrable enigma" that slipped through the net of language.

 * Fetishism: The "autonomous work of art" ironically resembles the "commodity as fetish" it seeks to resist.

 * Loss of Authority: Art "denaturalised" itself, admitting it was just one contingent version of reality among many.

 * Fragility of Meaning: Words became "like rotten mushrooms," disintegrating in the mouth of the speaker.

 * The Death of Experience: Constant bombardment of sensations leads to a "death of experience," prefiguring the "end of art".

Chapter 3: The Death of Art

Theme: The revolutionary avant-garde’s attempt to dissolve art into social life.

10 Insights

 * Art as Hammer: The avant-garde viewed art not as a mirror but as a "hammer" to change the world.

 * Productivism: Artists left studios for factories to "harness art to social need," designing clothing and furniture.

 * Dismantling Aura: Vanguards sought to destroy the "halo of mystery" and "secular priesthood" of the artist.

 * Anti-Organic Form: Works were "deliberately non-organic," using montage and collage to show they were "constructs".

 * The Machine Aesthetic: Beauty was found in the "beauty of speed" and "racing cars" rather than museums.

 * Biomechanics: Meyerhold treated actors like "production-line workers," cutting out "superfluous gestures".

 * Subjectivity as Public Property: The private "ego" was seen as obsolete; subjectivity was "taken into public ownership".

 * Profane Illumination: Surrealists sought "extraordinary" mystery in "humdrum objects" like cigarette butts.

 * Phonetic Revolution: Futurists wanted to "rechristen" the world with new words emancipated from the political past.

 * Collective Impersonality: Truth was found in "great anonymous forces" like the unconscious, race, or material conditions.

10 Ramifications

 * Self-Abolition: By trying to dissolve art into life, the avant-garde "liquidated the very category of the aesthetic".

 * Technological Triumphalism: A "callow triumphalism" led some to glorify war as "the only hygiene in the world".

 * Suppression by States: Avant-garde experiment was "sabotaged" by the rise of Stalinism and Nazism.

 * Socialist Realism: The government-forced "Union of Soviet Writers" replaced experiment with dogmatic realism.

 * Dehumanization: Humans were viewed as "functions of social forces, anonymous, collective and interchangeable".

 * Loss of Agency: The "Wise passiveness" of some modernists left "little room for human agency".

 * Art as Propaganda: Even "non-political" art (Abstract Expressionism) was used as Cold War propaganda for the "free world".

 * The Absurd as Weapon: Meaninglessness (Dada) became a "subversive ploy" against repressive military reason.

 * Crisis of Acting: The emphasis shifted from "sincerity" to "skill," from "emotion" to "action".

 * The Failure of the Functional: Many "functional" designs, like Malevich’s cups, were "easy on the eye but a lot harder to drink from".

Chapter 4: Conservative Revolutionaries

Theme: The political paradoxes of the modernist elite.

10 Insights

 * Right-Wing Radicalism: A "radicalism of the right" produced some of the finest literature, often out of contempt for everyday life.

 * The Émigré as Typical: In a world of "displaced peoples," the expatriate artist became the "representative of the human condition".

 * The Search for Order: Displaced writers (Eliot, James) often clung to "hierarchy and authority" more than natives.

 * Nietzschean Influence: Nietzsche provided a "programme for modernism": the death of God, the fictional self, and the spiritual elite.

 * Anti-Foundationalism: Modernism mourned the loss of absolute truth, whereas Nietzsche exulted in it.

 * Cosmopolitan vs. Internationalist: Modernists were "citizens of the world" (adrift); avant-gardists were "citizens of a new world" (solidarity).

 * Modernist Misogyny: Many modernists (Conrad, Lawrence, Stein) held "deeply reactionary" or sexist views.

 * Myth as Organization: Myth was used as a "pragmatic means of organising an amorphous everyday life".

 * The Self as Other: Lawrence’s insight that "we are strangers to ourselves".

 * The Double-Edged Nation State: While modernists disdained borders, the nation state also provided "shelter from the predatory world of global capitalism".

10 Ramifications

 * Fascist Affinities: The "full-bloodedly modernist invention" of fascism celebrated both technology and archaic blood cults.

 * Anti-Democratic Stance: Hardly any major modernist authors—save Joyce and Woolf—were "in any significant sense a democrat".

 * Socialism as Enemy: Many modernists saw socialism as just "more soulless mechanism" and "triumph of the benighted masses".

 * Eugenics: Modernists like Yeats and Benn advocated eugenics to keep the "lower orders" from breeding.

 * The "Plus Anglais" Syndrome: Exiles like James and Eliot became "European in the way that only a non-European could be".

 * Universal Bedrock: The search for "archetypes" promised to cut below national culture to a "universal bedrock".

 * The Self-Born Fantasy: Artists gripped by the "Oedipal fantasy of being self-born," rejecting all dependence.

 * Reification of Form: A focus on form mirrored the very "reification" of the modern world they disliked.

 * Radical Withdrawal: Mallarmé’s "strike against society" was a "withdrawal rather than engagement".

 * Survival of the Problem: Though modernism is a century old, the line between "reason transformed" and "reason spurned" remains a modern dilemma.

Jay

5 February 2026