SOURCE: "The Vexations of Modernism: Edmund Wilson's Axel's Castle," in American Scholar, Vol. 57, No. 2, Spring, 1988, pp. 263-72.

In the following essay, Tuttleton focuses on conflict between the radically experimental stylistic innovations of Modernist literature and the conservative, often reactionary, attitudes of Modernist authors.

In "Catching Up with the Avant-Garde," a recent essay in the New York Review, Roger Shattuck—after taking up some eight new books that attempt to define "Modernism"—throws in the lexicographer's towel. At present the task of definition seems beyond us: "There is as much disagreement about the dating and the essential features of modernism as about the existence and nature of a fundamental particle in physics." "Modernism," Shattuck concludes, is "no more than an umbrella or bucket word" that has to do its service for movements as diverse as Impressionism, Aestheticism, Bohemianism, Symbolism, Surrealism, Dadaism, Vorticism, Futurism, the Avant-Garde, and so on. His...