To the Collector Belong the Spoils: Modernism and the Art of Appropriation

By Annie Pfeifer

To the Collector Belong the Spoils rethinks collecting as an artistic, revolutionary, and appropriative modernist practice, which flourishes beyond institutions like museums or archives. Through a constellation of three author-collectors—Henry James, Walter Benjamin, and Carl Einstein—Pfeifer, a professor in the Department of Germanic Languages, examines the relationship between literary modernism and 20th-century practices of collecting objects. From James's paper hoarding to Einstein's mania for African art and Benjamin's obsession with old Russian toys, she shows how these authors' literary techniques of compiling, gleaning, and reassembling constitute a modernist style of collecting, which reimagines the relationship between author and text, source and medium. Placing Benjamin and Einstein in surprising conversation with James sharpens the contours of collecting. To the Collector Belong the Spoils traces the movement's artistic innovation to its preoccupation with appropriating and rewriting the past. Pfeifer shows how these three authors engaged in a form of creative plunder that evokes collecting's long history in the spoils of war and conquest.