Jonathan Swift
Professor Alter takes the former course: His aforementioned essay opens with the words “Over the past two decades, as the high tide of modernism ebbed and its masters died off. . .” and proceeds without further definition to the author’s reflections upon the ensuing low tide. Professor Graff, on the other hand, borrowing from Professor Howe, makes a useful quick review of the conventions of literary modernism before discussing the mode of fiction which, in his words, “departs not only from realistic conventions but from modernist ones as well.”
It is good that he does, for it is not only postmodernism that lacks definition in our standard reference books. My Oxford English Dictionary attests modernism to 1737 (Jonathan Swift, in a letter to Alexander Pope) and Modernist to 1588, but neither term in the sense we mean. My American Heritage Dictionary (1973) gives as its fourth and last definition of modernism “the theory and practice of modern art,” a definition which does not take us very far into our American Heritage. My Columbia Encyclopedia (1975) discusses modernism only in the theological sense — the reinterpretation of Christian doctrine in the light of modern psychological and scientific discoveries — and follows this with an exemplary entry on el modernismo, a nineteenth-century Spanish literary movement which influenced the “Generation of ’98″ and inspired the ultraísmo of which Jorge Luis Borges was a youthful exponent. Neither my Reader’s Encyclopedia (1950) nor my Reader’s Guide to Literary Terms (1960) enters modernism by any definition whatever, much less postmodernism.