Reviewed by: Midcentury Suspension: Literature and Feeling in the Wake of World War II by Claire Seiler Kristin Bluemel Midcentury Suspension: Literature and Feeling in the Wake of World War II. Claire Seiler. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2020. Pp. 304. $90.00 (cloth); $30.00 (paper); $29.99 (eBook). Midcentury Suspension: Literature and Feeling in the Wake of World War II is a fiercely intelligent, beautifully argued five-chapter monograph about relations between literature and history at the middle of the twentieth century. In it, Claire Seiler shares her discovery of copious and convincing evidence of a self-consciously midcentury period and a distinctly midcentury literature. That a midcentury period and literature have never before attracted our attention represents "the problem that the midcentury still poses for twentieth-century literary studies" (4). Modernism and its aftereffects are largely to blame for this problem—the problem of obscurity, of invisibility, of documents "partially seen and selectively analyzed" (5). The new modernist studies, for example, has led to a disciplinary "creep" that "allows the assumptions and priorities of historical or institutional modernisms to preclude inquiry into the midcentury and its literary and cultural productions" (35). Seiler invites us to join her theorization of the midcentury as midcentury in part as a response to a fixation upon the word and idea of midcentury recorded in transatlantic print documents from around the year 1950. Delighting in the form of the catalog as well as the unsuspected contents of the archive, Seiler lists instance after obscure instance of midcentury "epochal stocktaking unlike anything seen in a previous era" (13): there's The Antarctic Today: A Mid-Century Survey by the New Zealand Antarctic Society and Aeronautics at Mid-Century (both published 1952); there's the "Mid-Century Register" project of the National Council of Negro Women and The Mid-Century Challenge to American Life of the American Jewish Committee [End Page 893] (1950); there's John Ciardi's Mid-Century American Poets (1950), Robert Richman's The Arts at Mid-Century (1954), and Frances Frost's collection of poems titled simply Mid-Century (1946); the Philosophical Library of New York even put out a Midcentury Reference Library with over fifty volumes treating subjects as diverse as linguistics, psychoanalysis, atomic energy, and tobacco (15–17, 19). To conceive of and read through this newfound midcentury literature (or rather, literature we now will categorize as midcentury), Seiler deploys the powerful heuristic of suspension: "the sense of being between beginnings and endings, lapsed certainties and new potentialities, recent horrors and strange, often opaque futures" (5). Suspension is as elastic as it is abstract a concept; not all suspensions are midcentury ones, of course, but in Seiler's account all midcentury literature is captured by, inhabits, and circulates suspension. Seiler's elegant, extended close readings trace the innumerable ways that suspension saturated the forms of the midcentury Anglo-American imagination, the diction, metaphors, images, rhythms, rhymes, plots, characters, and settings of its key figures' published and unpublished poetry, prose, and plays. We see it in Ralph Ellison's invisible man living an underground half-life, and again in Samuel Beckett's Vladimir and Estragon, waiting, always waiting. We see it in works that feature spying (Elizabeth Bowen's The Heat of the Day [1949]) or that are influenced by strategic bombing (W. H. Auden's The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue [1947]) or sonic targeting (Frank O'Hara's memoir "Lament and Chastisement: A Travelogue of War and Personality" [1948–49]). Seiler shows us how these midcentury works "[suspend] suspense" despite their debts to wartime themes and genres associated with feelings of excitement and catharsis (147). Silences, hesitations, pauses, uncertainties, inconclusiveness, irresolution, and ambiguity proliferate in a climate of anxiety that, with publication of Auden's The Age of Anxiety, is confirmed as the dominant feeling at midcentury. Chapter one of Midcentury Suspension invites us to experiment with Seiler's new way of reading the century from the middle out rather from the beginning through with analysis of Bishop's "At the Fish Houses" in which "The water seems suspended" (57); of "Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance" where we encounter "the specks of...
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