In his book, subtitled Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia, John Carey argues that modernist literature and art can be seen as a hostile reaction to the very large reading public created by nineteenth century educational reforms. The polemic may be expressed as follows: The hidden purpose of modernist writing is to exclude the newly literate (or semi-educated) masses and thus safeguard the intellectual's isolation from the multitude.
Among the examples of modernist literature which, according to Carey's thesis, have been deliberately made difficult or obscure in order to make them inaccessible to the "common reader" are, Eliot's The Waste Land, Joyce's Ulysses, and some of the novels of Virginia Woolf are cited.
Thoughts, anyone?