THE problems are fragmentation, alienation, sense-making: the shoring up of fragments against our ruins; what to make of a diminished thing. Timothy Reiss and Michel Foucault, indispensable genealogists of the “modern,” have identified the European origins of these crucial twentieth-century concerns in pre-Enlightenment challenges to the medieval world view. Social, scientific, technological, and theological innovations shape new discourses which in turn generate new insights, in a process Henry Adams labelled the “law of acceleration.” One of the earliest Euro-American texts framed in self-consciously modernist terms. The Education of Henry Adams was published in 1909, six years after W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk. Du Bois's absence from most discussions of the central aesthetic, intellectual, and cultural issues raised in Euro-American modernism helps explain both the continuing invisibility of Afro-American modernism as a literary movement and the marginalization or simplification of Langston Hughes's “Montage of a Dream Deferred,” Zora Neale Hurston's Moses, Man of the Mountain, and, crucially, Native Son.

Although most of Adams's insights had been anticipated by Melville, Henry and William James, and Emily Dickinson, the publication of The Education of Henry Adams serves as a convenient marker for the beginning of modernism as a self-conscious element of literary discourse in the United States.