The Concept of Modernism

The Concept of Modernism PDF Author: Astradur Eysteinsson
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501721305
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
The term "modernism" is central to any discussion of twentieth-century literature and critical theory. Astradur Eysteinsson here maintains that the concept of modernism does not emerge directly from the literature it subsumes, but is in fact a product of critical practices relating to nontraditional literature. Intervening in these practices, and correlating them with modernist works and with modern literary theory, Eysteinsson undertakes a comprehensive reexamination of the idea of modernism. Eysteinsson critically explores various manifestations of modernism in a rich array of American, British, and European literature, criticism, and theory. He first examines many modernist paradigms, detecting in them a conflict between modernism's culturally subversive potential and its relatively conservative status as a formalist project. He then considers these paradigms as interpretations-and fabrications-of literary history. Seen in this light, modernism both signals a historical change on the literary scene and implies the context of that change. Laden with the implications of tradition and modernity, modernism fills its major function: that of highlighting and defining the complex relations between history and postrealist literature. Eysteinsson focuses on the ways in which the concept of modernism directs our understanding of literature and literary history and influences our judgment of experimental and postrealist works in literature and art. He discusses in detail the relation of modernism to the key concepts postmodernism, the avant-garde, and realism. Enacting a crisis of subject and reference, modernism is not so much a form of discourse, he asserts, as its interruption-a possible "other" modernity that reveals critical aspects of our social and linguistic experience in Western culture. Comparatists, literary theorists, cultural historians, and others interested in twentieth-century literature and art will profit from this provocative book.

The Concept of Modernism

The Concept of Modernism PDF Author: Astradur Eysteinsson
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501721305
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
The term "modernism" is central to any discussion of twentieth-century literature and critical theory. Astradur Eysteinsson here maintains that the concept of modernism does not emerge directly from the literature it subsumes, but is in fact a product of critical practices relating to nontraditional literature. Intervening in these practices, and correlating them with modernist works and with modern literary theory, Eysteinsson undertakes a comprehensive reexamination of the idea of modernism. Eysteinsson critically explores various manifestations of modernism in a rich array of American, British, and European literature, criticism, and theory. He first examines many modernist paradigms, detecting in them a conflict between modernism's culturally subversive potential and its relatively conservative status as a formalist project. He then considers these paradigms as interpretations-and fabrications-of literary history. Seen in this light, modernism both signals a historical change on the literary scene and implies the context of that change. Laden with the implications of tradition and modernity, modernism fills its major function: that of highlighting and defining the complex relations between history and postrealist literature. Eysteinsson focuses on the ways in which the concept of modernism directs our understanding of literature and literary history and influences our judgment of experimental and postrealist works in literature and art. He discusses in detail the relation of modernism to the key concepts postmodernism, the avant-garde, and realism. Enacting a crisis of subject and reference, modernism is not so much a form of discourse, he asserts, as its interruption-a possible "other" modernity that reveals critical aspects of our social and linguistic experience in Western culture. Comparatists, literary theorists, cultural historians, and others interested in twentieth-century literature and art will profit from this provocative book.

Modernism

Modernism PDF Author: Robin Walz
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317860926
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
Robin Walz’s updated Modernism, now part of the Seminar Studies series, has been updated to include significant primary source material and features to make it more accessible for students returning to, or studying the topic for the first time. The twentieth century was a period of seismic change on a global scale, witnessing two world wars, the rise and fall of communism, the establishment of a global economy, the beginnings of global warming and a complete reversal in the status of women in large parts of the world. The modernist movements of the early twentieth century launched a cultural revolution without which the multi-media-driven world in which we live today would not have been possible. Today modernism is enshrined in art galleries and university courses. Its techniques of abstraction and montage, and its creative impulse to innovate and shock, are the stock-in-trade of commercial advertising, feature films, television and computer-generated graphics. In this concise cultural history, Robin Walz vividly recaptures what was revolutionary about modernism. He shows how an aesthetic concept, arising from a diversity of cultural movements, from Cubism and Bauhaus to Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, and operating in different ways across the fields of art, literature, music, design and architecture, came to turn intellectual and cultural life and assumptions upside down, first in Europe and then around the world. From the nineteenth century origins of modernism to its postmodern legacies, this book will give the reader access to the big picture of modernism as a dynamic historical process and an unfinished project which still speaks to our times.

Modernism: A Very Short Introduction

Modernism: A Very Short Introduction PDF Author: Christopher Butler
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192804413
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 137

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Book Description
A compact introduction to modernism--why it began, what it is, and how it hasshaped virtually all aspects of 20th and 21st century life

Modern Art And Modernism

Modern Art And Modernism PDF Author: Francis Frascina
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429978537
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
Modern Art and Modernism offers firsthand material for the study of issues central to the development of modern art, its theory, and criticism. The history of modern art is not simply a history of works of art, it is also a history of ideas interpretations. The works of critics and theorists have not merely been influential in deciding how modern art is to be seen and understood, they have also influenced the course it has taken. The nature of modern art cannot be understood without some analysis of the concept of Modernism itself.Modern Art and Modernism presents a selection of texts by the major contributors to debate on this subject, from Baudelaire and Zola in the nineteenth century to Greenberg and T. J. Clark in our own times. It offers a balanced section of essays by contributors to the mainstream of Modernist criticism, representative examples of writing on the themes of abstraction and expression in modern art, and a number of important contributions to the discussion of aesthetics and the social role of the artist. Several of these are made available in English translation for the first time, and others are brought together from a wide range of periodicals and specialized collections.This book will provide an invaluable resource for teachers and students of modern art, art history, and aesthetics, as well as for general readers interested in the place of modern art in culture and history.

Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons

Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons PDF Author: Lisa Siraganian
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192639633
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
Winner, Matei Calinescu Prize, Modern Language Association Winner, 2021 Modernist Studies Award, Modernist Studies Association Long before the US Supreme Court announced that corporate persons freely "speak" with money in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), they elaborated the legal fiction of American corporate personhood in Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886). Yet endowing a non-human entity with certain rights exposed a fundamental philosophical question about the possibility of collective intention. That question extended beyond the law and became essential to modern American literature. This volume offers the first multidisciplinary intellectual history of this story of corporate personhood. The possibility that large collective organizations might mean to act like us, like persons, animated a diverse set of American writers, artists, and theorists of the corporation in the first half of the twentieth century, stimulating a revolution of thought on intention. The ambiguous status of corporate intention provoked conflicting theories of meaning—on the relevance (or not) of authorial intention and the interpretation of collective signs or social forms—still debated today. As law struggled with opposing arguments, modernist creative writers and artists grappled with interrelated questions, albeit under different guises and formal procedures. Combining legal analysis of law reviews, treatises, and case law with literary interpretation of short stories, novels, and poems, this volume analyzes legal philosophers including Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Frederic Maitland, Harold Laski, Maurice Wormser, and creative writers such as Theodore Dreiser, Muriel Rukeyser, Gertrude Stein, Charles Reznikoff, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and George Schuyler.

Modernism's History

Modernism's History PDF Author: Bernard Smith
Publisher: UNSW Press
ISBN: 9780868407449
Category : Art, Modern
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
Encompassing movements from post-impressionism to post-modernism, eminent and widely published art historian Bernard Smith has written a sweeping history, a reformulation of art history in the twentieth century.

Modernism on the Nile

Modernism on the Nile PDF Author: Alex Dika Seggerman
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469653052
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Analyzing the modernist art movement that arose in Cairo and Alexandria from the late nineteenth century through the 1960s, Alex Dika Seggerman reveals how the visual arts were part of a multifaceted transnational modernism. While the work of diverse, major Egyptian artists during this era may have appeared to be secular, she argues, it reflected the subtle but essential inflection of Islam, as a faith, history, and lived experience, in the overarching development of Middle Eastern modernity. Challenging typical views of modernism in art history as solely Euro-American, and expanding the conventional periodization of Islamic art history, Seggerman theorizes a "constellational modernism" for the emerging field of global modernism. Rather than seeing modernism in a generalized, hyperconnected network, she finds that art and artists circulated in distinct constellations that encompassed finite local and transnational relations. Such constellations, which could engage visual systems both along and beyond the Nile, from Los Angeles to Delhi, were materialized in visual culture that ranged from oil paintings and sculpture to photography and prints. Based on extensive research in Egypt, Europe, and the United States, this richly illustrated book poses a compelling argument for the importance of Muslim networks to global modernism.

What Ever Happened to Modernism?

What Ever Happened to Modernism? PDF Author: Gabriel Josipovici
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 030016582X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
The quality of today's literary writing arouses the strongest opinions. For novelist and critic Gabriel Josipovici, the contemporary novel in English is profoundly disappointing--a poor relation of its groundbreaking Modernist forebears. This agile and passionate book asks why. Modernism, Josipovici suggests, is only superficially a reaction to industrialization of a revolution in diction and form; essentially, it is art arriving at a consciousness of its own limits and responsibilities. And its origins are to be sought not in 1850 or even 1800, but in the early 1500s, with the crisis of society and perception that also led to the rise of Protestantism. With sophistication and persuasiveness, Josipovici charts some of Modernism's key stages, from Dürer, Rabelais, and Cervantes to the present, bringing together a rich array of artists, musicians, and writers both familiar and unexpected--including Beckett, Borges, Friedrich, Cézanne, Stevens, Robbe-Grillet, Beethoven, and Wordsworth. He concludes with a stinging attack on the current literary scene in Britain and America, which raises questions not only about national taste, but about contemporary culture itself. Gabriel Josipovici has spent a lifetime writing and writing about other writers. This book is a strident call to arms and a tour de force of literary, artistic, and philosophical explication that will stimulate anyone interested in art in the twentieth century and today.

Modernism and British Socialism

Modernism and British Socialism PDF Author: Thomas Linehan
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137264799
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 171

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Book Description
Thomas Linehan offers a fresh perspective on late Victorian and Edwardian socialism by examining the socialist revival of these years from the standpoint of modernism. In so doing, he explores the modernist mission as extending beyond the concerns of the literary and artistic avant-garde to incorporate political and social movements.

Modernism

Modernism PDF Author: Astradur Eysteinsson
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027292043
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1059

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Book Description
The two-volume work Modernism has been awarded the prestigious 2008 MSA Book Prize! Modernism has constituted one of the most prominent fields of literary studies for decades. While it was perhaps temporarily overshadowed by postmodernism, recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in modernism on both sides of the Atlantic. These volumes respond to a need for a collective and multifarious view of literary modernism in various genres, locations, and languages. Asking and responding to a wealth of theoretical, aesthetic, and historical questions, 65 scholars from several countries test the usefulness of the concept of modernism as they probe a variety of contexts, from individual texts to national literatures, from specific critical issues to broad cross-cultural concerns. While the chief emphasis of these volumes is on literary modernism, literature is seen as entering into diverse cultural and social contexts. These range from inter-art conjunctions to philosophical, environmental, urban, and political domains, including issues of race and space, gender and fashion, popular culture and trauma, science and exile, ­all of which have an urgent bearing on the poetics of modernity.