No Accident, Comrade: Chance and Design in Cold War American Narratives by Steven Belletto (review)
depended on the passive consumption of movies by the newly burgeoning urban crowd, Shail proposes that cinema helped modernists move away from a model of engagement with crowd consciousness that depended on crowds powering aesthetic production and focus instead on cinema's model of collectivity. Through a detailed analysis of the publication history of T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" (1922) and Joyce's Ulysses, Shail highlights how Eliot and Joyce left behind the mass market and their attempts to reach large-scale audiences. Their "relationship with the crowd mind" turned instead into "that of influencing an entity perceived solely receptive rather than as the originating point of their own works" (194). True to its interdisciplinary approach, Shail's project works both as an analysis of the institution of cinema in the early twentieth century and as an intervention in the larger critical discussion of literary modernism. This is an ambitious project that aims to locate in cinema a central and motivating element in the emergence of literary modernism, rather than treat cinema as a mere contemporary medium that was tangentially influential to certain writers. Shail's success with this varies from chapter to chapter, but his comprehensive primary research and perceptive close readings are a great and welcome contribution to these debates.