In The Living Moment: Modernism in a Broken World, the literary critic Jeffrey Hart traces the efforts of a small but influential group of poets and novelists who sought to create a new cultural order following the chaotic aftermath of World War I. Their efforts came together in a new movement whose legacy is still with us today—literary modernism. The cultural fallout of the war—its devastation—was immense. The traditional order of nineteenth-century Europe had been blown to bits. “The First World War inaugurated the manufacture of mass death that the Second brought to a pitiless consummation,” in the words of the historian John Keegan.
In his book, Hart presents a close reading of some of modernism’s seminal literary works, including T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms, and Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus. Literary modernism’s contemporary inheritor, Hart declares, is Marilynne Robinson in her 2006 novel Gilead. These works are defined by a search for order and meaning in an otherwise broken world. Though modernism may have been revolutionary for its time, Hart points out that it was also traditional “in the search for a principle of order that goes back to the pre-Socratics and then to Socrates himself.”
Eliot’s poem “The Waste Land,” with its “cacophonous voices,” is the foundation of literary modernism. The poem, which first appeared in the
