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In A Political Economy of Modernism, Ronald Schleifer examines the political economy of what he calls 'the culture of modernism' by focusing on literature and the arts; intellectual disciplines of post-classical economics; and institutional structures of corporate capitalism and the lower middle-class. In its wide ranging study focused on modernist writers (Dreiser, Hardy, Joyce, Stevens, Woolf, Wells, Wharton, Yeats), modernist artists (Cézanne, Picasso, Stravinsky, Schoenberg), economists (Jevons, Marshall, Veblen), and philosophers (Benjamin, Jakobson, Russell), this book presents an institutional history of cultural modernism in relation to the intellectual history of Enlightenment ethos and the social history of the second Industrial Revolution. It articulates a new method of analysis of the early twentieth century - configuration and modeling - that reveals close connections among its arts, understandings, and social organizations.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface -- Introduction: Science, Cognition, and Culture -- I. NARRATIVE STRUCTURES -- 1. Cognition and Narration: Binary Structures and the Nature of Meaning -- 2. Structures of Meaning: The Logic of Narrative and the Constitution of Literary Genres -- 3. Why Are There Old People? Narration, Natural History, and the Situation of Cognition -- II. CASES OF COGNITION -- 4. Special Cases: Freud, Einstein, and the Dream of Understanding -- 5. Psychoanalysis and Narration: Lacan, Greimas, and the Desire of Cognition -- 6. The Plain Sense of Things: Aging and the Rhetoric of Narration -- III. CULTURAL DISCOURSE -- 7. The Institution of Criticism: Pedagogy, Publishing, and Oppositional Criticism -- Bibliography of Works Cited -- Index