No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920

No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (1981)
By T. J. Jackson Lears

Synopsis: This book explores the origins and effects of American antimodernism - especially its "recoil from an overcivilized modern existence to more intense forms of physical or spiritual experience" (xv). Lears argues that the turn of the century was not marked by democratization and the decline of the elites, "but rather by the reinforcement of elite power in new corporate and bureaucratic forms" (xii). Utilizing Gramsci's notion of hegemony, Lears analyzes books, magazines, private letters, novels, poems, essays, and sermons to build his argument linking antimodernism with the rise of therapeutic culture. He feels that antimodernism was "both more socially and more intellectually important than historians have supposed" (xv), claiming that "the shift from a Protestant to a therapeutic world view, which antimodern sentiments reinforced, marked a key transformation in the cultural hegemony of the dominant classes in America" (xvii). Modernism (lit and art) and antimodernism share common roots in the yearning for authentic experience - physical, emotional, or spiritual (xix). The book is divided into the following sections: 1) Roots of Antimodernism (the increased rationalization and systematic organization of life for maximum productivity leads to an increased feeling of "unreal"-ness; increased focus on time; increased obsession with comfort; crisis of cultural authority; fears of overcivilization; neurasthenia and weightlessness); 2) Arts and Crafts Ideology (regeneration through handicrafts); 3) Martial Ideal (war as antidote to weightlessness; rise of boxing, football, and the "strenuous life"); 4) Medieval Mentalities (increased focus on childhood and fantasy and antirationalism); 5) Catholic Forms (increased interest in Catholic art/ritual); 6) Patriarchy to Nirvana (oscillation between autonomy and dependence; male versus female realm); Henry Adams (epitome of antimodernism, hated efforts to banish irrationality, deeply conflicted). Antimodernists feared a docile and complacent society. "By exalting 'authentic' experience as an end in itself, antimodern impulses reinforced the shift from a Protestant ethos of salvation through self-denial to a therapeutic ideal of self-fulfillment in this world through exuberant health and intense experience" (xvi). The cult of self-fulfillment was easily co-opted by consumer capitalists whose economy worked perfectly via constant generation of new individual wants and desire. In a way then, antimodernism paved the way for these new modes of cultural hegemony. The therapeutic worldview is thus both a symptom and source of the banality of modern culture.

Interesting Specifics:

* Focus on this one for exam * Tons of notes on this book *

Modernity led to "the systematic organization of economic life for maximum productivity and of individual life for maximum personal achievement...the reduction of the world to a disenchanted object to be manipulated by rational technique" (7).

An obsession with comfort and a decrease in pain, along with a focus on time, were key components of modernity. This was also linked to an increased sensitivity to suffering in general (i.e. slavery, animal abuse, etc).

Spencerianism = optimistic faith in progress.

Increased presence of capitalism leads to increased fracturing of the self.

Modern culture = weightlessness [Marx derivative]

"...most varieties of 20th-century militarism - at least in the West - share a common cultural origin in the late-nineteenth-century recoil from a weightless modernity" (98).

"Antimodern vitalists, for whom intense feeling was its own reward, stressed becoming rather than being, eros rather than agape" (162).

Henry Adams, son of John Adams: "Riven by tension between autonomy and dependence, doubt and faith, he rejected efforts to banish irrationality and contradiction in the name of social or personal harmony" (295).

"Under a twentieth-century regime which multiplied wants and sanctioned total gratification, the avant-garde cult of self-fulfillment sometimes only exaggerated the culture it set out to repudiate" (299).

This desire was all too easily usurped, as "intensity of feeling...became a product to be consumed like any other" (300).

"...the vision of a self in endless development is perfectly attuned to an economy based on pointless growth and ceaseless destruction" (307).

Interacts With:

Gramsci's notion of hegemony
Terrible Honesty,