Ezra Pound’s profession of faith in Mussolini’s fascism marks one among many turning points, beginning in the 1920s, in which the poet fashioned himself into a spokesperson for totalitarianism. Literary historians have chronicled Pound’s absorption of unorthodox ideas concerning the economics of “social credit,” anti-Semitic conspiracism, and Italian Fascism’s program for cultural and economic renewal – ideas that strongly appealed to Pound in the devastating aftermath of the First World War, as the destabilizing forces of inflation, unemployment, and global unrest frustrated a tenuous peace. Matthew Feldman’s analysis of more than 1,500 of Pound’s documents from 1933 to 1945 – including eight archival boxes at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book Library, containing transcriptions of broadcasts, leaflets, receipts, and a hodgepodge of notes and drafts, as well as his sizable FBI file, MI-5 correspondence intercepts, and BBC broadcast transcriptions – reveals a remarkably “coherent whole” in Pound’s propagandistic output (Fascist Reference Feldman115). Pound’s “conversion,” Feldman explains, was to a fascistic “secular ‘millenarianism’ constructed culturally and politically, not religiously, as a revolutionary movement centering upon the ‘renaissance’ of a given people (whether perceived nationally, ethnically, culturally, or religiously)” (Fascist Reference Feldmanxi). Although Pound was indicted for treason in absentia in 1943, he was never convicted; upon his return to the US, he pled insanity and was sent to St. Elizabeth’s Government Hospital for the Insane, where he was held until his 1958 release into the custody of his wife (Feldman, “Pound Case” Reference Feldman87–Reference Feldman90). The FBI investigation known as “the Pound case” leading up to his indictment illuminates the central question I pose in this book: What are the psychological, aesthetic, and cultural processes that drive us to pledge ourselves to charismatic individuals and declare ourselves “converts” to a cause?

Manufacturing Dissent examines how Pound and other casualties of literary modernism’s “lost generation” both participated in and resisted individual and collective conversion – be it conversion to a system of belief or in counter-conversionary dissent from dogma. So while this is first and foremost a book about literary modernism, it is also deeply engaged with the psychology of William James (1842–1910), whose revolutionary writings launched what I am calling a “science of belief,” based on his recognition that conversion is far more than a religious experience. James was a crucial figure in the experimental artistic and literary movement now known as “modernism,” a movement that both reflected and wrestled with the psychological dilemmas of rapid technological change and social upheaval. Ever attentive to cultural transformation, James has been rightly accorded recognition as a “public philosopher” and influential modernist intellectual.¹ Even as recent scholars have revitalized our understanding of James’s politics and his philosophical engagements with the social, they nonetheless underscore a conspicuous gap: none have investigated how James’s understanding of the social realm is indebted to his pioneering work as a psychologist.² James’s modernism is directly attributable to the psychology he founded, specifically on his recognition that the self is plastically malleable, aggregate, and distributed.³ Conversion experience, for James, dramatizes this sense of the self as a composite of a broader social realm, what James termed the “one and the many.”

Why conversion? More than any other emotional experience, religious conversion supplies the form and content for the radical empiricist recognition of the interdependence and co-emergence of subjective and objective experience. Furthermore, conversion heralds the dramatization of relations that James would later take up in his Pragmatism (1907). For James, whatever conclusions we might draw about experience are provisional. They are hypotheses that can and likely will change in response to further tests, experiments, and reasonable considerations. “To be radical,” James writes, “an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced. For such a philosophy, the relations that connect experience must themselves be experienced relations, and any kind of relation experienced must be accounted as ‘real’ as anything else in the system.” In short, for James, “real place must be found for every kind of thing experienced, whether term or relation, in the final philosophic arrangement” (ERE 42). Religious experience in all its varieties was of course included in this framework, but James was less interested in the theological content of those experiences than in how religious feelings and beliefs reveal a fundamental attitude and orientation toward experience, along with the deep structures of human thought that form the basis for action. James himself provided the rationale for extending the cognitive patterns he identified in religious experience to a broader public realm as a process of information transmission and social transformation.

Modernist literary experimentation in the first half of the twentieth century, I argue, is indebted to James’s theorization of conversion not just as a commonplace psychological event, but as a cultural process for the transmission of ideas and the shaping of public opinion in and as discourse. James’s own practice of converting his academic work and transmitting it for public consumption is instructive. Revision and re-contextualization are the watchwords of James’s own modernist conversionary practices. He reworked and republished his many popular lectures as essay collections. His professional writings are likewise innovative in form and sensibility, as James performs the interdisciplinary alchemy of marrying seemingly incompatible disciplines. A composite of philosophy, neurology, and religious history, for example, The Varieties of Religious Experience is bursting at the seams with other genres: lively personal anecdotes and quotes from published correspondence and memoir as well as poetry and fiction. Missing, however, from accounts of James’s modernism, and from American literary modernism more broadly, is his central importance as a pioneering philosopher of mind, one who laid the groundwork for a cognitive understanding of the mind-brain as a complex system. This mind-brain is malleably plastic. It is composite and capable of “compounding” with other consciousnesses in public space. It is situationally embedded in larger social contexts, an enactive and affective agent of change and invention. James therefore reconceived religious conversion in much broader ways, as a “general psychological process” of achieving “new birth” in the form of a radical cognitive transformation. In political terms, I suggest, conversion suggests a variety of consent, or willing belief, in an existing paradigm, while counter-conversions open up the possibility for dissent, for resistance, and productive fracture and reconfiguration of existing paradigms. This practice of strategic fragmentation and reuse of other texts underpins a modernist aesthetics dedicated to exposing the materials and methods of conversion.

For James, conversion has meaning far beyond religious history. Conversion, meaning to “turn with” or “turn together,” is the conceptual metaphor James deploys for all manner of sudden psychological transformations, gradual about-faces, and the many labyrinthine “turns” of thought which shape the beliefs that lend purpose to our actions. Importantly, the concept of conversion is what connects James’s discussion of individual consciousness in his pathbreaking work The Principles of Psychology to political matters, especially the psychological dynamics of group behavior expressed in his public pronouncements against US imperialism and the “epidemic” lynching of African Americans, composed while he developed the Gifford Lectures later published as The Varieties of Religious Experience. We witness in James’s work nothing less than the lexicalization of conversion as a cultural process. Understood from the cognitivist point of view, and in terms of metaphor, schema, and target domain, conversion can be represented in the following ways. Conversion accounts for the transformation of schema, or “changing one’s mind,” with target domains having to do with belief, when it comes to individuals, and to public opinion, when it addresses social groups. In the general psychological terms James establishes for this process, “conversion” accounts for the mental process of switching one’s allegiance to another schema, dramatizing the general “turn” that defines conversion itself.⁴

Conversion is a cognitive process of individual and collective transformation that later modernists deploy both thematically and aesthetically in imaginative and experimental literature. American modernism anticipates a relatively recent enactivist account of the mind-brain as embodied, situationally embedded, and extended through human invention, including artistic creation. James’s foundational psychological writings contributed to a modernist conception of the mind-brain as highly “plastic,” or adaptively responsive to the environment, including one’s social context; consciousness, or our sense of awareness, and the environment within which it is embedded, are mutually constituted by their interaction; and it is extended, through aesthetic practices that help readers come to terms with the technological and social complexity of the early twentieth century. In this sense, the individual mind occupies a liminal space within a larger biosocial contact zone, I argue, wherein individual “selves” negotiate their own autonomy and agency within and against systems that foster beliefs and behaviors that can be habitual or automatic.

James’s wariness of the mob and of groupthink in general reinforced his understanding of consciousness as a phenomenon that was not merely internal or private; rather, the interactions between different minds, with their potential for “compounding” individual thoughts into collective beliefs, disclosed the trickier psychosocial dynamics involved in the production and development of group beliefs and behaviors, known collectively as “public opinion.” James’s understanding of a public that is constituted by individuals in a conversionary social process opens up a dynamic new theory of the public sphere, I suggest, in which “the public” is not an identity but a process of both information transfer and social transformation.

Historians of early twentieth-century British and American literary modernism have often portrayed the public sphere as a space that facilitates mass deception. Indeed, the Freudian psychoanalytic model dominates accounts of modernist responses to advertising, propaganda, and mass media.⁵ James’s understanding of conversion as a cognitive process of transformation brings to light an important missing chapter in the relationship of literary modernism to the burgeoning mind sciences in the early twentieth century. These writers, I argue, can be rightly accorded the status of mind scientists because their writing makes the psychodynamics of conversion visible and available for critique; at the same time, their writing stages counter-conversionary disruptive strategies for encouraging reader dissent from rigid, authoritarian perspectives.

The literary modernist mind scientists after James witnessed the First World War and the “manufacture of consent” firsthand in the rise of state-sanctioned propaganda, psychological behaviorism, and social engineering. A century ago, media critic and political philosopher Walter Lippmann coined the phrase “the manufacture of consent” in his analysis of newspaper bias in Liberty and the News (1919). The point he made then, and later elaborated in Public Opinion (1922), was that the sources of objective information upon which an informed electorate depends are shaped by both subjective beliefs and commercial interests. Confronted by a culture of groupthink, crowd contagion, and global fascism, literary modernists deployed a Jamesean variety of civic modernism based upon an ethics of estrangement, in which the internally conflicted “sick soul” is the means of both psychic and civic regeneration. James and an American modernist cohort, I maintain, developed a public-spirited mind science designed to rehabilitate public opinion through fragmented and fractured perspectives, defamiliarizing representational forms, and rigorous self-awareness regarding the materials, modes, and methods of artistic manufacture. Conversion in this context not only captures modernism’s revolutionary spirit of artistic and cultural transformation but corresponds to a cognitive method of transforming thought within a conceptual space, be it an individual mind or public opinion.

Modernism’s “Sick Souls:” Fascism and Other Dangerous Conversions

In the realm of language and modernist aesthetics, conversion accounts for the techniques that authors use in order to invest old ideas with new language and new meanings, to rehabilitate literary expression and, as Pound insisted, “Make it New.” As one of literary modernism’s impresarios, Pound promoted this language of newness as a defining feature of modernist experimentalism. This making of the new was a collective enterprise that not only invented new literary forms in which to reimagine the world, but also brought that new world into being. Conversion, the act of turning thought and language, both reflects and creates the “new,” and as a self-appointed spokesperson and coiner of movements – Imagism and, later, Vorticism – Pound might be understood as one of its chief “pattern-setters.” Rob Wilson’s account of conversion as metanoia, a “grace-drenched change of mind and thought turning the subject away from wrong living and sinfulness toward a pursuit of godliness and the vocation to beatitude” which he identifies with James’s concept of “saintliness” in his Varieties, captures this exhilarating sense of the “new” that is at the heart of an American poetics premised on rebirth (7–8). This portrait of conversion remains incomplete, however, without attention to the “sick soul” that not only represents the “heterogeneous” and “divided” selves in search of resolution within modernist writing, but also productively catalyzes modernist dissent from totalitarian agendas. In the 1920s and 1930s, Pound sought relief from his own soul-sickness in his personal identification with Mussolini as the archetype of the artist figure and pattern-setter for a new global regime.

But Pound was by no means a cultural outlier. What makes Pound’s case both terrifying and instructive is how commonplace conversions like his in fact are, particularly given the dramatic changes that the American media landscape has undergone in the decades since the Second World War. Feldman underscores the important fact that Pound was indicted for treason along with seven other Americans who also produced shortwave propaganda for the Axis powers. Had it not been for lawyer and Pulitzer-prize-winning poet Archibald MacLeish’s timely intervention while serving as wartime Librarian of Congress, Pound could have served a life sentence for treason. MacLeish was also a government-employed propagandist; he directed the Office for War Information on behalf of the Allied campaign (“Pound Case” Reference Feldman85–Reference Feldman87). Far from seeing Pound’s conversion as accidental, either a consequence of naiveté or mental illness, Feldman maintains that Pound’s fascism developed from quite mainstream tendencies. In the aftermath of the First World War, in which the deaths of millions (and many more from a global pandemic) had not achieved the promised liberation or relieved economic and social disparities, millions more around the globe and in Western democracies “converted” to fascism. In The Revolt of the Masses [La Rebelión de las Masas] (1930), Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset anticipated not just Pound’s individual conversion but many millions’ shift toward totalitarianism as a consequence of “intellectual hermetism” (69), a variety of insular thinking that terminates, potentially, in fascism. This mental incapacity, as he saw it, makes it impossible for an individual to recognize his own “insufficiency” by “a comparison of himself with other beings. To compare himself would mean to go out of himself for a moment and to transfer himself to his neighbour” (69). With this diagnosis, Gasset anticipated the demise of democracy in his own country, in which fascism arose out of the refusal to share power with political factions considered “the enemy.” He diagnosed a global symptom that he feared endangered democracy, writing that “In almost all [countries], a homogeneous mass weighs on public authority and crushes down, annihilates every opposing group … It has a deadly hatred of all that is not itself” (69). Violence, he maintained, had achieved a new “prestige” throughout Europe, filling a paucity of dissenting public opinion with “brute force” (127). The “real question,” for Gasset, as he concluded his important analysis of “mass man,” is not whether the “revolutionary” or the “reactionary” possesses the right to rule, but who will take up “a sentiment of submission to something, a consciousness of service and obligation” (188–189) to what he described earlier as “indirect action” upheld in “liberal democracy,” the “political doctrine which has represented the loftiest endeavor towards common life” (76). Not long after Gasset’s The Revolt of the Masses appeared in an anonymous English translation in 1932, civil war broke out in Spain. On April 26, 1937, a sunny market day in the Basque town of Guernica (Basque: Gernika), the Luftwaffe, together with Italian fascists, bombarded the seat of Basque liberation and democratic self-governance. This was psychological warfare at its most reprehensible, for there was no military reason to bomb the village. Rather, Francisco Franco believed that by destroying a potent symbol of democracy, he could undermine Republican resistance to the traditionalist nationalism he wanted to install to combat the “seven enemies of Spain” – “liberalism, democracy, Judaism, the Masons, capitalism, Marxism and separatism” (Van Hensbergen Reference Van Hensbergen227). Like Pound, Franco was similarly “anachronistic” in his desire to return to an earlier, prelapsarian past. Because of that desire to return to a mythic past, thousands of civilians died in Guernica. Inspired by eyewitness accounts published in American newspapers, Pablo Picasso depicted the psychological terror and helplessness of those who fell victim to the fascist onslaught (Van Hensbergen Reference Van Hensbergen3–Reference Van Hensbergen5). Ultimately, Picasso’s rendering of the event became an effective instrument of propaganda – in the best sense of the term – used to awaken complacent observers to the material and psychic violence of totalitarianism.

By the time of his 1945 arrest for treason, Pound had delivered more than 120 radio broadcasts for fascist Italy, as “an American,” in his words, on a mission to “save the Constitution” and warn against “usurers who destroy us.” Pound held to a faith first and foremost in himself, but secondly and more broadly in the artist figure as a heroic individual, a dynamo, and a force for transformation. Pound published, pro bono and avidly, for several fascist organizations, including the British Union of Fascists (BUF) and the Italian Partito Nazionale Fascista (PNF), and, by the time of his first indictment in absentia for treason in 1945, he was on the payroll of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP) – that is the “Nazi” party. His radio broadcasts from the summer of 1940 to spring 1945 earned him roughly 250,000 lire, or $12,500 – a salary that, by today’s standards, represents the equivalent of $185,000 in purchasing power. As Feldman has shown, working as a propagandist was no casual side-gig or misbegotten detour for Pound. His was a full-throated endorsement of the Nazi-Fascist axis, and his broadcasts, along with his poetry, were intended to convert the masses to its ideological point of view (Fascist Reference Feldman107–Reference Feldman108). Even after Pound turned himself in to authorities, and while held for six months at a US detention center near Pisa, he memorialized his faith in Mussolini’s fascist vision by penning The Pisan Cantos – for which he was later awarded the prestigious Bollingen Prize in 1949.

How was it that Pound and so many others found solace in totalitarianism? Here, I follow the path of Pound’s gradual conversion to fascism as well as his career as a fascist propagandist in order to put his transformation into conversation with the major findings of this book: there are identifiable cognitive dynamics that can help us understand conversion in all its salvific and dangerous varieties; there are ways in which artists are uniquely capable of exposing fundamentalist ideas to creative transformation; and, there are artistic methods to fortify democratic citizenship by providing the cognitive resources to resist the lure of binary, monistic, authoritarian, or exclusionary thinking.

Pound’s conversion to fascism, I suggest, is a harbinger of what recent media analysts have described as the present “epistemic crisis” afflicting the global public sphere: the loss of a shared understanding of truth and reality as an essential basis for democratic societies (Benkler et al. Reference Benkler, Faris and Roberts33). Although current political issues are well beyond the scope of this book, the “Pound case” helps underscore some important lines of inquiry for the present investigation of literary modernism and the psychodynamics of conversion, understood in Jamesean terms as a process of gradual or sudden mental transformation, whether expressed as agreement or consensus, or as counter-conversionary dissent, disagreement, and debate that may possibly catalyze still further “turns” in thought.

A feeling of disequilibrium or unease precedes all such transformations, according to James, to which his metaphors of the divided self and the sick soul lent a visual identity. Those figuratively sick souls who survived the First World War and sought to shore up civilization’s ruins were primed for conversionary crisis. Just as Pound found fascism, T. S. Eliot, for example, found the Anglican church. Writes Leon Surette: “Pound had a conversion experience – in 1919 – but it was ideological, not religious” (13). Against that background, the primary interest of this book is the psychological or cognitive process that Pound went through and that a generation of modernists found themselves reckoning with.

That process begins with devotion to a single person or system of belief that then becomes the unifying source of identity. Pound’s fascist conversion, outlined in his Jefferson And/Or Mussolini (1935), began with his research into the Italian “Renaissance man,” poet and freelance soldier, Sigismondo Malatesta (1417–1468) in 1922, the same year that Mussolini marched on Rome and declared the start of a new fascist millennium. Malatesta, the epic hero of what would become the Malatesta Cantos (VIII–XI), suited Pound’s ideal of the gentleman warrior, “the heroic male who could embody both the man of action and the man of sensibility.” Invoking this ideal in Jefferson And/Or Mussolini, Pound would praise both historical figures as great artists, though from a distinctly authoritarian perspective: “The greater the artist the more permanent his creation. And this is a matter of WILL” (16). Indeed, his incipient fascism had already emerged, in 1929, with his worship of art as a regenerative “force,” comparable to physics, with the power to “affect one mass, in its relation … to another mass wholly differing, or in some notable way differing, from the first mass” (LE 21). By 1931, Pound applied this understanding to the role of literature “in the state,” having to do “with the clarity and vigour of ‘any and every’ thought and opinion. It has to do with maintaining the very cleanliness of the tools, the health of the very matter of thought itself.” In his 1934 essay “The Teacher’s Mission,” Pound argues that “[t]he mental life of a nation is not man’s private property. The function of the teaching profession is to maintain the HEALTH OF THE NATIONAL MIND” (LE 59). Moreover, this “national mind” is racially determined, yet always under threat from the contaminating influx of some other racial strain with its own mental qualities and tendencies. In Pound’s view, when one person acts, they act in concert with the national – that is, racial – mind. According to this thinking, individuals are never particular and unique. They are objectified as representatives of a larger group that thinks and acts in concert with a totalizing, a priori metaphysic, like national or racial “destiny.” These ideas conflating race, nation, and biology, as poet Jean Toomer and others argued, had been scientifically discredited well before the Nazi-Fascist axis launched its racial propaganda. Nonetheless, Pound believed. The epic narrative built around a heroic man, a social code, a force acting on the masses, a cleansing and purifying hygiene of race and nation: each of these elements speaks to Pound’s conversionary turn toward totalitarianism in the 1930s.

At the core of this fascist faith is an innate hostility toward the ideals James sought to promote: democratic individualism and an equality of human beings based on the sacred possession of mind. Historian Roger Griffin’s helpful definition of fascism as a uniquely modernist phenomenon is important to adduce here, by way of clarifying terms. Fascism, Griffin writes, is a “revolutionary species of political modernism” whose primary mission is “to combat the allegedly degenerative forces of contemporary history.” The thrust of fascism is future-oriented, seeking nothing less than “the rebirth, or palingenesis, of the nation” (181). In general, fascism seeks to root its regenerative principles in a mythic past that is ethnically and ideologically pure. Institutional and cultural pluralism, individualism, social justice, and liberalism are seen as ideas to be confronted and forcibly eradicated through the mobilization of the masses in revolt against the system. Although our own understanding of the fascist turn in global politics in the 1930s is indelibly marked by our knowledge of the genocidal atrocities perpetrated by fascist regimes, Surette correctly observes that many Europeans were willing to accept “tyranny as the price of saving European civilization from the threat of modernity, that is, secularism, materialism, technology, and egalitarianism” (19). Pound’s gradual conversion to fascism underscores the role that textual “manufacture” – whether as literary experimentation or propagandistic exploitation – plays in “conversion” as an exchange or reversal of perspectives.

According to the Jamesean cognitive model I outline in Chapter 1, conversion takes place along a psychological spectrum. At one extreme, conversion can yield blind commitment to a doctrine, or, more productively, can fracture such monolithic narratives to achieve productive disagreement, or “dissent” from dogmatism. James’s modernism is based directly on the psychology he founded, and specifically on his recognition that the self is malleable (or “plastic”), aggregate, distributed, and capable of mental reform. Yet James’s outspoken critique of US imperialism and the lynching of African Americans reflected his understanding of the dangerous potential of conversion – namely, that revolutions in belief carry a measure of uncertainty and risk, not just to individual believers but to the very fabric of democratic thought. Jamesean conversion therefore dramatizes the processes by which consent is staged from within and from without. The self enacts the drama in the form of an internal dialogue in which one imagines one’s “self” inhabiting a particular temporospatial location, as if fulfilling the role of a protagonist in a work of fiction. Against that background, Henry James’s What Maisie Knew and Harold Frederic’s The Damnation of Theron Ware dramatize the processes through which individuals become plastically transformed under the manipulations of powerful “pattern-setters” of public opinion. By fracturing and fragmenting imperial forms of selfhood, these psychological Bildungsromane inaugurate a reform modernism that registers dissent from the imperial sway of groups, demonstrating the strenuous effort required by individuals to transform oppressive systems from within.

Turning from the 1890s to the “trenches of public opinion” during the First World War and its aftermath, Chapter 2 contends that James’s psychology of conversion was transformed into behaviorist social scientific techniques for shaping public opinion. In response to First World War propaganda campaigns and the emerging science of behaviorist psychology, which downplayed or even denied the existence of “mind” (understood as an agency directed by human cognition and will), American modernists performed the mind in and as writing: as a potentiating agent of mental plasticity to reshape habits, modifiy beliefs and behaviors, and dramatize the strategies by which consent is “manufactured.” An American modernist literary “aesthetics of exposure” sought to arrest habitual thought by exposing the behaviorist strategies of conditioning behavior and regimenting beliefs. The major works examined in this chapter – Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929) and John Dos Passos’s the U.S.A. trilogy (1936) – deploy strategies of dissent, expressed as psychological and textual fracture and fragmentation in order to make state-sponsored propaganda technique visible and available for critique.

If behaviorist psychology fortified propagandistic rituals and militaristic drills to get Americans to think and act in concert, Chapter 3 turns to the Jamesean “sick soul” as an important emblem of modernist dissent. Literary modernism highlights the cognitive underpinnings of the gothic by engaging the counter-conversionary energies that James associated with the sick soul’s awareness of the human potential for evil. Where psychological commentary on the First World War’s aftermath typically concerns “shell-shock,” this chapter flags the period’s equal investment in the cognitively rehabilitative potentialities of modernist “techniques of dissociation” to disrupt dangerous excesses of affect and forestall identification with fascistic beliefs. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) and Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939), demonstrate how the various information streams – song lyrics, social commentary, and newspaper publicity – haunt their protagonists, producing self-estranging varieties of dissociation characteristic of the Jamesean sick soul, wherein soul-sickness indicates both a recognition of and resistance to dehumanizing beliefs.

With the rise of fascism in the 1930s, literary modernists expanded their range of critique of the techniques for converting public opinion. Chapter 4 shifts the focus from institutions promoting disinformation to individual efforts to confront the psychodynamics of conversion as they manifested in various forms of conspiracism. Against the rise of fascism, American literary modernists confronted the psychodynamics of conversion that underlie pernicious forms of conspiracism and racist public discourse. William Faulkner’s Light in August (1932) and Jean Toomer’s unpublished writings on racial psychology, for example, reverse engineer the psychodynamics of racism by putting readers in the uncomfortable position of seeing themselves from the point of view of the other (whether a literary text or another human being). Forcing a kind of self-alienation upon the reader, Faulkner and Toomer provoke disgust toward conspiracism’s self-appointed vigilantes. The paranoid public sphere is thus the diametrical opposite and sinister shadow of the pluralistic public sphere that James theorized. By fracturing and fragmenting the monolith of race, Faulkner and Toomer render epistemological doubt a powerful ally to critical thought.

Chapter 5 argues for recognizing humor as a form of civic engagement and social protest in Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939) and Gertrude Stein’s Mrs. Reynolds, novels that respond to the rise of fascism with complex satire. Despite a common view of Hurston and Stein as either apolitical or reactionary, both authors reveal a keen understanding of conversion’s historical legacy in the justification of imperialism. The point both Hurston and Stein make is that humorous incongruity keeps the mind turning and, in the process, forestalls the “settling” of thought into place and “the fixation of belief” associated with totalitarianism. As outsiders for whom conversion – religious or secular – could mean a form of psychic death, they developed distinctive modes of ironic humor involving self-lacerating and self-satirizing critique.

In Chapters 4 and 5, conversion represents the latent potential for redemptive recognition and resistance to coercive and dogmatic narrative formulas, expressed in the alienating aesthetics of dissent. Where James maintained in his Varieties that “religious geniuses” were the spiritual innovators and great “pattern-setters” for future conversionary experiences, these modernist mind scientists innovated techniques for liberating readers from beliefs that had not only grown habitual, but were dangerously destructive to collective life. These writers understood the incantatory power of names and the role of what today’s media analysts term “network propaganda,” the phenomenon that (dis)information travels more quickly and social change takes place more swiftly when the catalyzing ideas are distributed among a variety of media, all reinforcing and amplifying each other across a range of publics. Drawing on a vast range of sources and examining the “interaction among a diverse and often broad set of discrete sources and narrative bits,” Benkler, Faris, and Roberts have determined that propaganda is inevitably networked in this way. The effects of propaganda (“induced misperceptions, disorientation, and distraction”) that make possible “population-scale changes in attitudes and beliefs,” they write, “come not from a single story or source but from the fact that a wide range of outlets, some controlled by the propagandist, most not, repeat various versions of the propagandist’s communications, adding credibility and improving recall of the false, misleading, or otherwise manipulative narrative in the target population, and disseminating that narrative more widely in that population” (33). It makes a difference that literary modernism was pluralistic from the outset, a collage of literary forms, genres, languages, and cultural systems, while fascism attempts to reduce pluralistic variety to a singular mass, unified by its faith in a supreme doctrine or leader.

No mere financial need drove Pound to espouse conspiracist anti-Semitism or to heap praise on Mussolini and, later, on Hitler. Pound was a true believer, and his propaganda, as much as his predisposition to locate “genuine” culture in a distant, mythic past, provided the indispensable element of habit to reinforce, preserve, and insulate his beliefs. The “essence of fascism,” as Pound would tell his radio listeners, was “NOT to look for help anywhere outside yourself, and your immediate surroundings” (qtd. Feldman, Fascist Reference Feldman134). No other statement of Pound’s is so directly antithetical to James’s insistence on the danger of monistic thought. Contra James’s call to attend to “the depths of worth … [that] lie around you, hid in alien lives” (TT 138–139), Pound shared not just fascism’s blood-and-soil nationalism, but its fixation on establishing an a priori system of order, law, and culture that would eradicate complexity. Be it Jefferson, Mussolini, Hitler, or Confucius, for Pound, only those who could exert “the will toward order” mattered. For him, order meant the fulfillment of a master plan or system.

For James, by contrast, any system, as with an individual’s habits and worldview, is ideally provisional and open to revision – and it is the cultivation of regenerative, provisional conversions to which the “religion of democracy” aspires. James’s philosophy, as with his psychology, is anti-authoritarian. James’s “democratic individualism,” as Stephen Bush terms it, urges against an “uncritical deference to epistemic authorities,” yet also mandates an attitude of “openness,” not just to strangers, but to “new evidence, new information, and new experiences that could challenge our preexisting beliefs, even the most cherished among them” (123). The “fallibilism” – the recognition that one’s beliefs might be wrong – that Bush locates in James’s thought might be understood as the essential cognitive fail-safe built in to James’s radically empiricist worldview.

Perhaps only now are we fully able to understand the profound grief and uncertainty that the trauma of the First World War and the swift succession of the Second World War meant for Pound’s generation. Like all of us, Pound contained warring contradictions and irresolvable complexities. “A major factor contributing to his embitterment and hatred,” observes Surette, “was his belief that all difficulties must yield to bold, simple solutions” (10). And there are a number of compelling reasons for Pound’s conversion, some of which originate with his own temperament, unsuited as it was to self-doubt or self-reflection. The death of his dear friend, the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, at the front in 1915 was a blow from which Pound attempted to recover by publishing the sculptor’s memoirs. Pound’s Cantos, some might argue, represented his attempt to craft a system that might help him come to terms with the overwhelming cognitive complexities presented by a variety of cultural institutions, social transformations, and economic crises – all contributing to the overwhelming “vortex” of global uncertainty with which he and many others attempted to cope. As an artist he sought an answer to the question of how to wrest order from the world’s chaos.

If Pound, in that light, serves as a case study in the mental processes that lead to authoritarian or totalitarian conversions, then an antidote of sorts can be found in the mental practices that William James and his fellow modernist mind scientists advocated as a way of breaking through lies and disinformation. What intellectual or moral strategies do they offer the present as we seek to build a just world for future generations? What can we do differently and better in order to head off the habits of mind that underlie the deterioration of democratic politics, the energization of fascism, and the acceptance of political violence or war? What role can the literature of the past play now in promoting a pluralist ethos, warding off the power of disinformation, and cultivating the cognitive flexibility that is essential to both of those aims?

The American modernists innovated a lexicon of mental plasticity founded on metaphors and narrative structures showcasing how artistic thought transforms cognition and culture. Implicit in each of these aesthetic sensibilities is an understanding of the mind as a selective agency, and an abiding belief that individual and collective minds are neither permanently rigid, nor always mindlessly receptive to dogma, but capable of self-reflection and self-correction. Written discourse, for the modernists, was a worldly vehicle for shaping perception, with specialized “artistic” writing that assumes a central place in both reflecting the worldly and bodily domains of perception. Their estranging methods bring readers face-to-face with their habits of perception so that they might become more self-aware participants in democratic self-governance at the level of public opinion. A broader civic aim among modernists, this book argues, was to fracture the monolith of “public opinion” in order to revitalize democratic thought for the future of human cooperation and survival.