Modernism and newness

A thought after an interesting talk by Michael North yesterday on the catchphrase, "Make it new!".
One branch of what will become "modernism" happens when the oppositions between 1) the general and the particular, 2) the abstract and the concrete; 3) the old and the new begin not just to coalesce but to join together under the force of a will to what is in effect a cultural revolution.  Finally these come together for political reasons: the sense that the twentieth century (and the first world war) will mark the decisive failure of progressive democratic humanism. I am thinking here of the modernism invented by Eliot, Pound and Hulme in London 1910-1920 and which will lead to imagism and to Eliotian literary criticism; not to Mallarmean modernism for instance.
Two other elements of this structure are worth noting: it seems to rely on a physiological pyschological extension of Lockean empiricism for which, to put it too crudely, propositional thoughts, which tend to cliche, are generalised reductions of sensations. (That's how the particular and the concrete come together).
And it thinks of the "new" either as an objectiving subtraction from the abstract, the general, the cliche, or as a recombination of particulars (a montage, a constellation).

Coetzee and modernism

Here's a proposal for an essay I have been asked to write. It's a bit vague at the moment, but I hope to use this space to firm it out in the year I have to submit it. I guess it's an attempt to align my current work on modernist literary criticism and on Blanchot to the demands of postcolonialism.

Coetzee and the problem of origination.

At the beginning of modernist theorization of literature, T.S. Eliot found the origins of the individual literary text simultaneously in tradition and in experience, even though the latter had been degraded under enlightened modernity. In “The origin of the work of art,” Martin Heidegger proclaimed that the work’s origin was the work itself, albeit an origin that opened a space for the appearance of Being.  Writing after the Second World War, Maurice Blanchot also thought of the origin as the work itself, but now itself configured as an experience which affirms Being’s absence, and indeed exists in the silence the work and its “essential experience” imposes on the endless flow of meanings.
Between them, these formulations provide not just a path into (conservative) European modernism but also a way into Coetzee’s relation to that modernism. His writing endlessly circulate around the problem of their own origin as posed in terms that are at once experiential and ontological and literary. It is no exaggeration to say that Coetzee’s importance as a writer depends largely on his sense of his barred access to a modernist origin for his writing.
This essay will offer a historicist account of Coetzee’s relation to modernism from this perspective. In analyzing his treatment of his work’s origins, it will draw attention both to his position as a colonial writer, as a practicing literary critic and theorist, and to the particular structuration of the late 20th century global literary field for which he writes.

Fichte and the commercial state

I've been reading Eric Weil's 1951 essay on the French Revolution's intellectual impact on Britain and Germany, published in Essais sur la nature, l'histoire et la politique. I hadn't before realized how important Fichte was as a state theorist. 
According to Weil, Fichte, in his book on the Commercial State, was the first really to theorize the relations between state and society in modern terms , i.e. in terms that look forward to state capitalism (or the welfare state). Influenced by Babeuf's "communism" as much as by Kant, he comes to this against economic internationalism. Indeed, Fichte was a physiocrat and didn't like the way economic activity fails to respect national borders, that's why he posits so early a right to work, a right to education, and understands that the state will be required to manage the market's periodic crises.

Likes (and dislikes)

I've long been fascinated by one author's  unfathomable passion for another. It's the unfathomability that counts: obvious or often-written-about cases (James's admiration for Flaubert or Pope's for Horace for instance) may be important historically but usually aren't fascinating of themselves. (Except sometimes: why did Wordsworth's poems hit the young de Quincey (and Hazlitt too for that matter) with such overwhelming force?  There's a story still to be told there...).
And it doesn't matter much whether the writers in question are obscure or famous.  Why was John Byrom so admiring of Malebranche?  It's an intriguing question, even though these days nobody knows whom John Byrom was. Could the answer be that Malebranche reconfigures the concept of taste in ways which prefigure Le Bos and other later commentators? Probably not. Could it be that he prefigure the Rousseuvian general will? More likely: since that makes sense for Toryism. But it's clearly an insufficient reason.
Some other examples: What exactly did Simone Weil see in Lawrence of Arabia?  Jocelyn Brooke in Aldous Huxley?  Or, another famous case, why exactly did the young T.S. Eliot so admire John Donne?  And, come to that, why did George Eliot and James both hate Stendhal so much?  Why did Forster dismiss James?

It seems to me that answers to such questions would help us understand the force fields which order literary history, i.e. the emotional and ethical dispositions that shape the dispersion of literary styles and tropes across time.

What is literature?

One answer: literature is that use of language in which impersonal propositions can be properly asserted without evidence or reason.