Modernism, Media, and Propaganda: British Narrative from 1900 to 1945 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Modernism, Media, and Propaganda: British Narrative from 1900 to 1945 Rebecca L. Walkowitz Modernism, Media, and Propaganda: British Narrative from 1900 to 1945. Mark Wollaeger . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. Pp. xxv + 335. $35.00 (cloth). As befits a study of propaganda, the subtitle of Mark Wollaeger's intricate book underplays its significance. Modernism, Media, and Propaganda concerns not only the ways that modernist novels and short stories responded to new communication technologies and to the state-sponsored use of those technologies for imperialist and patriotic persuasion. It focuses also on the ways that emergent narrative media such as film competed with fiction to control how early twentieth-century information—distributed faster and more intensively than ever before—would be analyzed and understood. The effort to define and manipulate information, and to find narrative strategies to achieve these effects both in literary fiction and in a range of nonfiction media, is central to Wollaeger's account of modernism's history and modernism's legacy today. Modernism, Media, and Propaganda approaches and holds together its eponymous terms in three principal ways, each of which builds upon and complicates the next. First, it brings to our attention the many, often unnoticed artifacts of propaganda within major works of modernist fiction and film: a military recruitment poster that Leopold Bloom passes in the Dublin streets of Ulysses; the infamous report on "Savage Customs" authored by Kurtz and edited by Marlow in Heart of Darkness; the yellow journalism of William Randolph Hearst shown in the fictional newsreels of Citizen Kane. Second, it observes that the engagement of modernist artists with propaganda was not limited to diegetic representation, nor was their response to propaganda exclusively negative. Wollaeger's chapters tell of modernist writers and filmmakers who created, alongside and separate from their elite works of art, journalistic essays and documentary films which they designed to promote various state-sponsored political causes. We learn of Joseph Conrad's wartime publicity for the Mercantile Navy in 1916, of Ford Madox Ford's anti-German writings conceived for the War Propaganda Bureau, and of Alfred Hitchcock's short films produced for the war effort but released for the first time in 1994. Third, it sees the proximity of modernist art and propaganda in this period not as contradiction, or even as hypocrisy, but rather as the outcome of a new "media environment," in which artists and agents of the state, who were sometimes also artists, looked for new ways to process the scale and quantity of what Ford called the "white spray of facts" (145). Modernism and propaganda thus become, in Wollaeger's view, "interrelated languages of the new information age" (xiii). The debate about art's relationship to propaganda is an old one. But Wollaeger gives it new purchase by stressing the emergence of modern propaganda, with its "techniques of saturation and multiple media channels" (xiii), and by showing how the last century's propaganda outlets served as both a testing ground and a target, a model and a spur, for modernist innovation. Wollaeger's book is part of a strain of "new modernist studies" that has urged us to see how elite artworks were enmeshed in mass culture rather than simply critical of it. More specifically, Wollaeger joins scholars who have focused on the media environments of literary modernism: on the one hand, the older media such as little magazines and publishing houses through which artworks were disseminated and promoted; on the other hand, the new media such as radio and [End Page 193] cinema that accompanied and shaped the production of literature in the period. In the past two years alone, one thinks of Lawrence Rainey's Revisiting the Waste Land, Suzanne Churchill's The Little Magazines and the Renovation of Modern American Poetry, and Aaron Jaffe's Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity in the first group; and Michael North's Camera Works and Todd Avery's Radio Modernism in the second. But Wollaeger's book is also interested in what we might call the other lives of modernists, and in this sense it shares with Melba Cuddy-Keane's Virginia Woolf and the Public Intellectual a belief that the history...