Can Anonymous be the exception? Modernist anonymity and the challenges of literary exceptionalism

Abstract

The article examines the relatively little-known “Anonymous” project launched in Paris by Michael Fraenkel and Walter Lowenfels in 1930 with a view to advancing our understanding of modernist “exceptionalism” as a heterogeneous and malleable cultural construct. It first aims to reassess the project’s political and aesthetic stance by contextualizing it in the contemporary social and artistic debate over anonymity—including its entanglements with discussions of impersonality within and across modernist circles. It takes a close look at poems written by contributors to Anonymous to demonstrate how their authors claimed, disclaimed or reclaimed authorship as a way to reassert cultural and social authority within the culture of the market place. The article further investigates the connection of these experiments with the late 1920s technomodernist “revolution of the word,” so as to emphasize the challenge these writers faced as they tried to avoid the pitfalls of cultural exceptionality.

Keywords

• Anonymous
• modernism
• interwar
• transatlantic exchanges
• impersonality
• poetry