The Metaphysics of Modernism Aesthetic Myth and the Myth of the Aesthetic

Abstract

Abstract The use of myth in modern writers such as Eliot, Joyce, Lawrence, and Yeats has passed into the academic reception of the period in the now derided form of the 1950s ‘myth kitty’; and Marc Manganaro has acutely shown the line of transmission from Frazer, through Eliot, to Northrop Frye as the continuation of a mistaken ethnographic method. I In the world of Anglo-Saxon academic criticism myth has deserved its bad name, while on the larger stage of European thought it has come to be associated with sinister political movements as the Marxist critique in Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlight-enment has won out over the efforts of Thomas Mann and Karl Kerenyi to maintain its progressive and humanistic potential.2 But this familiar story obscures the true significance of modernist myth making, and to that extent of the literature itself, for modernist myth has a liberal and progressive aspect as well as a nostalgic and con servative one. What has been obscured is its philosophical, and through that its critical, import even for the present. I will show this by noting first how some earlier Romantic aspirations towards a philosophical mythopoeia were unwittingly realized in British and American modernism.