Diepeveen L. The Difficulties of Modernism

Routledge, 2003. — ISBN: 978-0-415-94069-9."The Difficulties of Modernism" analyzes the work performed by the most commonly noted feature of high modernism: its difficulty. Beginning with a look at the commonplace that in the first decades of the last century difficulty was, as one reader grumbled, “running rampant in literature,” this book examines how difficulty circulated in modern culture. It considers the social and conceptual function of the highly charged reactions against high modernism, from the laughter, to the parodies, to the anger, to the charges that difficult modernism was a hoax.
"The Difficulties of Modernism" argues that in the face of this resistance difficult modernism was a robust and powerful aesthetic, both in its changing how aesthetic culture typically understood pleasure, and its almost effortless exclusion of texts that did not exploit difficulty’s aesthetic. Difficulty allowed modernism to rise, and it was central to how modernism shaped the canon not only of twentieth-century literature, but of the literature and art that preceded and followed it. And it was more than that: with difficulty at its center, modernism reconfigured the interaction between high art and its public: modernism is the moment when knowing how to maneuver through difficult art became the central sign of one’s ability to participate in high culture. This reconfiguration continues to shape high culture.
That the poetry of the first half of this century was too difficult — just as the poetry of the eighteenth century was full of antitheses, that of the metaphysicals full of conceits, that of the Elizabethan dramatists full of rant and quibbles — is a truism that it would be absurd to deny. How our poetry got this way — how romanticism was purified and exaggerated and “corrected” into modernism; how poets carried all possible tendencies to their limits, with more than scientific zeal; how the dramatic monologue, which once had depended for its effect upon being a departure from the norm of poetry, now became in one form.Difficulty as Fashion
Articulating Anxiety: A Theory of Difficulty
Professional Romanticism: Defending Difficulty
Difficulty, Vigor, and Pleasure
Simplicity and the Modern Canon
Conclusion. Modern Difficulty's Inheritance
Notes
Works Cited