Kennedy, Sinead
(2007)
Marxism After Modernism: Anglo-American Leftist
Theorisations of Modernism in the Later Twentieth Century.
PhD thesis, National University of Ireland Maynooth.
Abstract
This dissertation considers the manner in which a number of key Marxian intellectuals
from the Anglo-American cultural left, including Perry Anderson, Terry Eagleton,
Fredric Jameson, Edward Said, Raymond Williams, Rosalind Krauss and others, have
attempted to make sense of both literary high modernism and the modernist avant-gardes.
The study argues that in the period since the 1960s especially, the Marxian cultural left
has helped to redefine our understanding of modernism in a number of significant ways.
Chapter One considers how key Marxist intellectuals developed the concept of uneven
development to challenge the almost orthodox assumption that modernism was
overwhelmingly associated with metropolitan and urban milieux. Chapter Two examines
how the issue of imperialism moved from the margins of Marxist cultural criticism to the
core of debates about the origins and political character of modernism. The focus of
Chapter Three is the American and European theorisations of the historic and
contemporary avant-gardes. In Chapter Four I consider how Fredric Jameson’s seminal
text on postmodernism challenged Marxists to not only rethink how they understood
postmodernism but also to recondition how they thought about modernism as well.
Finally, Chapter Five concludes by considering the specific instance of Irish modernism.
Marxian engagements with Irish modernists from Joyce to Beckett offer an exemplary
sense of the wider shifts in left-wing responses to modernism over the course of the
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