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PREHISTORY OF POSTMODERN AND RELATED TERMS:EVIDENCE FROM THE JSTOR ELECTRONIC JOURNAL

ARCHIVE AND OTHER SOURCES

fred r. shapiro, Yale University

The leading fad and buzzword of contemporary humanistic activity ispostmodern. Inevitably, this word and related terms have become the subjectof their own literature attempting to trace their earliest uses and improveupon their treatment by the Oxford English Dictionary (OED2 1989). Koehler(1977), Bertens (1986), Welsch (1987), and Rose (1991) are the leadingcontributions to the hunt for early evidence.

I present below the oldest citations I have been able to nd forpostmodern, postmodernism, postmodernist as a noun and postmodernist as anadjective. My ndings represent dramatic antedatings of the rst uses in theOED2, and also of the discoveries of previous investigators. The Toynbee,

american speech 76.3 (2001)332

Hudnut, Fitts, Fiedler, Ransom, Smith, and Jarrell citations have alreadybeen unearthed by the abovementioned scholars. I have veried and, asneeded, corrected these citations. The others are my own discoveries.

I do not maintain that all of these usages correspond to currentmeanings of the terms. Indeed, many of them are quite different insignication from todays usage. For example, the 1929 use of post-modernby Lucien V. Alexis occurs in a four-page popular science pamphlet ofwhich only a single copy appears to exist in any library, that residing at theNew Orleans Public Library. The pamphlet is described as Monograph No.1 in a Post-Modern Scientic Thought Series, and an advertisement inthe back for another pamphlet states that the second one is published byPost-Modern Scientic Thought. What precisely Alexis meant by post-modern is now impossible to fathom.

The 1914, 1926, and 1939 quotations that are the earliest evidence forpostmodernism and postmodernist (both as noun and adjective) are drawnfrom religious writings. Here the modernism that is being reacted against is aprogressive, predominantly Catholic theological movement of the earlytwentieth century.

The earliest discovered usage of postmodern or any of its forms inreference to the cultural or artistic realms with which the terms are nowassociated is by William S. Rusk in a 1936 journal article. The Rusk usageand the 1945 Feibleman usage were yielded by a search conducted in theJSTOR electronic journal archive. JSTOR provides electronic access tobackles of leading scholarly journals in many elds. High-resolutionimages of each page are linked to a text le that is completely searchable.JSTOR has substantial chronological depth and has enormous potentialfor uncovering early occurrences of terms from scholarship, science, eco-nomics, politics, philosophy, and education. Previous researches in which Ihave been able to retrieve occurrences of hundreds of important termsantedating the earliest evidence otherwise available are described in Shapiro(1998, 1999a, 1999b, 2000, 2001).

postmodern adj [OED2 1949] 1929 Lucien V Alexis The Thermoelectric For-mula: X Minus Y Equals Z (title page) Monograph No. 1 Post-Modern ScienticThought Series / (advt) The New Physics: Fundamentals in Physics and inChemistry by Lucien V. Alexis . . . Published by Post-Modern Scientic Thought2427 Palmyra St. Galvez 3281 New Orleans, La. 1936 William S Rusk Journalof Higher Education 7: 379 The small volumes of the Renaissance Society ofChicago carry appreciation of modern European art into the post-modernforms of surrealisme and die neue Sachlichkeit and include a rediscovery (sic!) ofSeurat. 1939 Arnold J Toynbee A Study of History 5: 43 Our own Post-

Miscellany 333

Modern Age has been inaugurated by the general war of 191418. 1945James Feibleman Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 5: 315 On the vexedquestion of universals . . . we nd quite naturally that James assumed themodern view, or, may we say, the then post-modern view. May Joseph HudnutArchitectural Record 70 (head) The post-modern house / 75 I shall not imaginefor my future house a romantic owner. . . . No, he shall be a modern owner, apost-modern owner, if such a thing is conceivable.

postmodernism n [OED2 1979] 1914 J M Thompson Hibbert Journal 12:733 (head) Post-modernism / 737 Why Post-Modernism? Not simply be-cause it is something which comes after Modernism, but rather as implyingthat it has some likeness . . . to the school of art which is called Post-Impres-sionism. / 740 Post-Modernism has no scruples about applying to the NewTestament the same theory of inspiration, and the same principles of interpre-tation, as to the Old. 1926 Bernard I Bell Postmodernism and Other Essays54 Modernism has ceased to be modern. We are ready for some sort ofPostmodernism. / 55 Postmodernism will frankly admit the possibility ofmiracles, although not in the sense which denes miracles as an arbitraryviolation of natural law. / 59 Postmodernism will readily and gladly acknowl-edge, what Christianity has always recognized, that for purposes of worship theIncarnation must needs be extended and continued sacramentally. 1942Dudley Fitts Anthology of Contemporary Latin-American Poetry 601 It is no exag-geration to say that his [Enrique Gonzalez Martinezs] sonnet on the Swan . . .is the manifesto of post-Modernism. 1969 Dec Leslie Fiedler Playboy 151Almost all todays readers and writers are aware that we are living through thedeath throes of literary modernism and the birth pangs of postmodernism.

postmodernist n [OED2 1966] 1914 J M Thompson Hibbert Journal 12: 737The Post-Modernist is trying to nd a scheme of forms which shall express thereal and directly felt values of spiritual things, not perverted and obscured bytheir conventional embodiments. 1926 Bernard I Bell Postmodernism andOther Essays 57 To the Postmodernist the Incarnation will ever continue to bea miracle, the central miracle of all. / 63 The Postmodernist looks with moreapproval upon Roman Catholicism than he does upon current Protestantism.1939 Bernard I Bell Religion for Living: A Book for Postmodernists 1941 JohnCrowe Ransom Kenyon Review 3: 378 In the prose conclusion, as in the poeticsequel, Jarrell forbids us to say yet that he is a post-modernist.

postmodernist adj [OED2 1965] 1926 Bernard I Bell Postmodernism and OtherEssays 65 An infallible pope or an infallible heirarchy [sic] seems to hisPostmodernist mind to contradict the technic of Jesus quite as much as aninfallible book or an appeal to his own supposedly infallible brain. 1945Bernard Smith Place, Taste and Tradition: A Study of Australian Art since 1788 245The other division of contemporary realism in Australia is centred inMelbourne, and consists of Noel Counihan, Vladimir Bergner and VictorOConnor. . . . It is evident, then, that they have matured in a post-Modernist

american speech 76.3 (2001)334

world. 1947 Jan 18 Randall Jarrell Nation 76 Lowells poetry . . . is essen-tially a post- or anti-modernist poetry, and as such is certain to be inuential.1957 William J Monahan (title of M.A. thesis, Emory Univ) The Post-Modern-ist Short Story in Venezuela

NOTE

I gratefully acknowledge that the research reported in this paper was supported inpart by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. I would like to expressthanks to Harriet Zuckerman, William G. Bowen, and Alvin B. Kernan of theMellon Foundation and Kevin Guthrie of JSTOR for their instrumental roles infacilitating this grant.

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Bertens, Hans. 1986. The Postmodern Weltanschauung and Its Relation to Mod-ernism: An Introductory Survey. In Approaching Postmodernism, ed. DouweFokkema and Hans Bertens, 951. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Koehler, Michael. 1977. Postmodernismus: Ein begriffsgeschichtlicher ber-blick. Amerikastudien 22: 818.

OED2. The Oxford English Dictionary. 1989. 2d ed. 20 vols. Oxford: Clarendon.Rose, Margaret A. 1991. The Post-Modern and the Post-Industrial. Cambridge: Cam-

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Emergence of hopefully as a Sentence Adverb from the JSTOR Journal Archiveand Other Electronic Resources. American Speech 73: 27996.

. 1999a. Antedating the OED from the JSTOR Electronic Journal Archive.Oxford English Dictionary News, Jan., n.p. Available from http://www.oed.com/public/news/9901_2.htm.

. 1999b. Earlier Computer-Assisted Evidence on the Emergence of hopefullyas a Sentence Adverb. American Speech 74: 43941.

. 2000. Origin of the Term Software: Evidence from the JSTOR ElectronicJournal Archive. IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 22: 6971.

. 2001. Computer-Assisted Evidence for the Antiquity of the Term NativeAmerican. American Speech 76: 11012.

Welsch, Wolfgang. 1987. Unsere postmoderne Moderne. Weinheim: VCH.