The Novel After Film: Modernism and the Decline of Autonomy by Jonathan Foltz

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Novel After Film: Modernism and the Decline of Autonomy by Jonathan Foltz Jordan Brower The Novel After Film: Modernism and the Decline of Autonomy. Jonathan Foltz. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. 304. $65.00 (cloth). Jonathan Foltz's The Novel After Film: Modernism and the Decline of Autonomy joins the post-millennium trend in scholarship intent on nuancing our understanding of modernism's media ecology. As he duly acknowledges in his introduction, that body of writing is too diverse to account for singly (the study cites as influences Mark Goble, Michael North, Laura Marcus, and many others), but Foltz writes most clearly after David Trotter's Cinema and Modernism (2007). There, Trotter announced his dissatisfaction with arguments based on an analogical relation between modernist literary experimentation and filmmaking techniques such as montage editing and camerawork, finding them "at once too loose … and too tight": that is, often ahistorical on the one hand, and positing an insufficiently mediated formal relation on the other.1 Foltz has learned well from Trotter and company. In studying the writings of Virginia Woolf, H.D., Henry Green, and Aldous Huxley, he at once tracks those authors' relations to and reflections on film—which include their involvement in various forms of film criticism, and, in Huxley's case, participation in production—and sensitively reads the formal and stylistic ramifications of those engagements.2 From these "singular correspondences between literature and film" (The Novel After Film, 11), Foltz seeks "to clarify a set of related attitudes toward medial difference, generic identity, and the compromised aesthetics of address that bind these disparate styles together in a common history" (23). The book is thus remarkably ambitious—it tackles the Novel, and Film, and Modernism, and Autonomy—and that high aspiration is the study's great virtue. But by taking on those big words which make us so unhappy and by allowing their augustness to compound and their slipperiness to slicken—even the preposition "After" is purposely ambivalent, suggesting temporal belatedness and a "conflicted relation of indebtedness and disavowal"—that ambition is also the study's principal limitation (5–6). The work of this review will be to give a sense of the challenge and promise of Foltz's book and what they mean for media-oriented studies of modernism going forward. Although he declines to "bind" his analysis to "either a historical or a formal definition of modernism as such," Foltz acknowledges as sources for his sense of that concept the sociology of twentieth-century literature undertaken by scholars ranging from Lawrence Rainey (Institutions of Modernism [1999]) and Mark McGurl (The Novel Art [2001]) to Andrew Goldstone (Fictions of Autonomy [2013]) and Evan Kindley (Poet-Critics and the Administration of Culture [2017]) (24). It is by way of McGurl that Foltz conceives of the modernist novel as the "art-novel," which is conceivably why Henry James hovers over his study—literally, as the provider of its first epigraph, and figuratively as the author perhaps most often associated with the self-conscious effort to refine novelistic technique (5).3 Broader questions aside, Foltz is above all interested [End Page 222] in the way his four chosen authors warp what he calls "novelistic address" along four vectors: character, point of view, omniscience, and irony (10).4 For Foltz, these deformations find their etiologies in his four authors' particular experiences of film. But despite being the common name for the art form of celluloid-based moving images, Foltz's "film" is not "a coherent medium, with concrete and materially identifiable properties or styles that writers might emulate with confidence"; "rather," Foltz goes on to say, "I treat film as a transitive figure through which writers came to articulate modes of writing that the tradition of the novel had disallowed" (The Novel After Film, 9). Foltz's notion of the "transitive figure"—which has presumably been selected for its flexibility—also introduces a tension in his study's conceptual framework. The critic's admiration of the sociological approach to modernism and his attention to writers' unique responses to "film" might make us expect him to build his case from the bottom up, coordinating these individual, socially embedded, culturally...