EN 4224
Topics in the 20th Century: Modernism
Modernism
Definitions:
Modern, Modernity, Modernism
The
following dictionary definition is from the Oxford English Dictionary Online:
Modern (adj)
[ad.
late L. modern-us (6th c.), f. modo
just now (on the analogy of hodiernus that is
of to-day, f. 
to-day). Cf. F. moderne,
Sp., Pg., It. moderno, G. modern.]
1. Being at this time; now existing. Obs.
rare.
2. a. Of or pertaining to the present and recent times, as
distinguished from the remote past; pertaining to or originating in the current
age or period. spec. (the)
modern
b. Geol. and Zool.
Belonging to a comparatively recent period in the life-history of the world.
c. Prefixed to the name of a language to form a
designation for that form of the language that is now in use, in contrast to
any earlier form. In recent philology used technically to denote the last of
the three periods into which it is customary to divide the history of living
languages; distinguished from Old and Middle. modern
English: see ENGLISH
n. 1b.
d. Of a
movement in art and architecture, or the works produced by such a movement:
characterized by a departure from or a repudiation of accepted or traditional
styles and values. Cf. ABSTRACT
A. 4d.
[
3. a.
Characteristic of the present and recent times; new-fashioned; not antiquated
or obsolete. In spec. phrases: modern
convenience, an amenity, device, fitting,
etc., such as is usual in a modern house; freq. pl.; cf. MOD. CON.;
modern dance,
a free expressive style of dancing distinct from classical ballet (see quots.); hence modern
dancer, dancing
vbl. n.; modern
jazz, jazz of a type which originated
during and after the war of 1939-45.
1590 SIR J. SMYTH
Disc. Weapons 8b, Without
composing them of diuers sorts of weapons, according
to the moderne vse.
The word modern is not very new. It
comes from the Latin modo, implying now in opposition to the past of a tradition, and it emerged in the
medieval period as a term in the so called battle of the books, in which
traditional values in art and thought were opposed to more contemporary, or
modern, ones. So since this time modern has generally described a state
of affairs characterized by innovation, experimentation and certain kinds of
distancing from the past. The word modernization comes to describe the
swift rise in
Modernism: The word modernism however is used to describe certain trends in art,
writing, criticism and philosophy that have had a powerful influence on the
development and experience of the 20th century.
Conventionally we can date these trends from the last decade of the 19th
century (1890) to about the beginning of the 2nd world war in 1939. So we can provisionally accept that the texts
we are interested in were written within a 50-year period. Modernism is not, of course, a period in
itself (other kinds of art and writing occurred during this time) but it does
describe a wide range of textual phenomena that exerted a profound influence on
the way we all think and experience our world today.
Actually, the further we get from
the period in question, the larger and more wide-ranging it becomes. Soon after the war modernism, it was generally agreed, described a kind of writing
beginning in about 1910 and culminating in the mid-twenties, and it denoted a
very narrow circle of writers, often called the “men of 1914,” including among
them Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis.
Now the canon is considerably broader and, while it pays to be specific
about which trend in modernism we are
referring to in any given context, we have learned to be considerably more flexible
and sophisticated about what modernism means generally.
In the background are great critical
figures of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Karl Marx,
Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud and Ferdinand de Saussure
and Albert Einstein And we cannot
discount the importance of certain 19th century literary and artistic trends as
well, those of impressionism, post-impressionism and symbolism. Modernism describes a resolutely international or transnational set of phenomena involving continental as well as
Anglo-American writers and artists.
Cities become meeting points for migrating groups and
Modernist writers and artists take
great risks with technique in order to define their art against an increasingly
market driven consumer society. The
principles were those of innovation, rejuvenation and experimentation. Thus, the formation into small
self-supporting movements and groups (e.g., surrealism and Dada) can be seen as
ways of standing out against uncomprehending public opinion. However, by the end of the period (i.e. the
late 1930s) the major writers and artists had achieved considerable respect and
command of a lucrative market. Does
modernism lose its edge with maturity?
Do T.S. Eliot and Pablo Picasso lose their right to the title modernist
as they gain universal institutional respect and wealth?
Alternative Beginnings/Significant Dates
(With
links to sites that provide either the text in question or information that is
relevant).
Modernity: It
would be impossible to define modernity precisely and the term remains a highly
contested one. Nonetheless, a number of
momentous shifts in attitude, historical processes and dramatic technological
changes can be observed to have occurred during the period, roughly, between
1500 and 2002. So, when dealing with the
problem of modernity, we are dealing with at least 500 years of social,
historical, cultural and political development.
We must even use the word development
cautiously because we might be led to easily into thinking that this process is
the same as progress, when, as we
shall see there are strong arguments for qualifying modernity’s notion of progress. It has also been observed that the early
stages of these developments were more or less narrowly focused on developments
in
The major
problem—I’ll call it the historicity of
modernity (half the class switches off at horrible phrase made up entirely
of meaningless abstractions) as a short cut—implies the following: we recognize
now that the way we think is largely determined by historically rooted
factors—systems of thinking that we remain unaware of most of the time. Modernity
is the name we use for the system of thinking we inherit after 500 years of
modern development. But the main strand of modernity—an attitude
that is consistent across all the different variants over the last 500 years or
so—constitutes, again in various different ways, the repeated attempt to break
free from the constraints and determinations of established systems of thinking. Modernity is constituted historically as a
series of repeated attempts to escape history.
The most powerful of these attempts would arguably be that of Rene
Descartes, a French philosopher whose contribution to modern thought both
scientific and philosophical has been undoubtedly immense.
1637 (Cogito ergo sum)
Rene Descartes is as
good an example as any of someone who might be said to embody the rather vague
notion of a “spirit of modernity.”
Descartes wanted to start from scratch.
He wanted a point of origin, as it were, a secure starting point for
knowledge. In order to achieve this he
developed a philosophical method, according to which if you can disqualify
every ground of knowledge that is susceptible to doubt then what you have left
will be a point of absolute certainty.
So all traditional knowledge (Greek and Medieval philosophy and
religious thought) obviously fails this test as no established knowledge beyond
doubt actually yet exists. The most
authoritative sources (Aristotle, Aquinas, etc.) disagree with each other. Secondly, my senses can deceive me. If I was to believe my senses then I would
have to accept that the moon was no bigger than a 50 cent coin. And when I dream I experience perceptions
that I could not possibly really perceive.
Thirdly, my memory is frail and vulnerable to deception by the often
damaging effects of my creative imagination, so this must be ruled out as
well. Fourth, language can deceive me
into saying and even thinking things that might possibly be untrue. So what is left? Descartes comes up with the following
statement: cogito ergo sum—Quit with
the Latin will you?—OK, je suis,
j’existe (I am, I exist) in so far as I am
thinking [literally: I think, therefore I am].
There is much of great interest in Descartes’ text but we must leave him
now and move on, so what do we take with us?
He has established that, as long as we can doubt the evidence of our
senses, our memory, our imagination, our knowledge and our language, we at
least have the potential for good sound knowledge. Two things follow from this, which are
central for the development of modernity and, thus, for our understanding of
modernism. First, a general distrust of the senses
(hearing, seeing, feeling, tasting and smelling) provokes an emphasis on thoughts and judgments and an over reliance on principles of reason. Secondly the same distrust provokes the
development of technological means of improvement—prosthetic appliances of all
kinds, from eye glasses and hearing aids in the 18th century, to
prosthetic limbs and a fully fledged virtual reality by the beginning of the 21st
century. Furthermore, because of
Descartes’ wonderful facility with rhetoric—he was easily the equal of his
contemporaries like John Donne and John Milton as far as forceful literary
expression is concerned and his Méditations Métaphysiques (Meditations on First Philosophy) is
often justifiably set on literature courses—his text provides a powerful supporting
argument for the belief that modernity starts from scratch in 1641. It doesn’t, of course. In all kinds of ways we can locate
precedents, precursors, preliminaries and seeds sown for thousands of years
prior to the European 17th century and from all over the globe. But part of modernity’s power (and its power
over us moderns) involves this powerful myth.
1687
1 Newton’s
theory of motion and
2. The
Principia for the complete text)
Shortly after
Descartes had died (in 1650) one of the most influential developments of modernity
got under way in the form of what is now called Newtonian Science. Isaac Newton was born the year after the
publication of Descartes’ Meditations,
so one could justifiably identify him as an heir of an already modern way of
thinking. The Principia (or Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) was published in parts during
the 20 years from 1667-87 and presents what Jacob Bronowski
describes as “a system of the world.”
Modernism: one
of the ways of dealing with not only the vagueness of the term modernism but with the wide variety of
currents, events, texts and attitudes it seems to designate, is to locate what
is arguably a consistently maintained attitude towards modernity. What this means
is that a number of arguments and interventions made against certain aspects of modernity can be said to constitute an
attitude we call modernism. Peter Childs, in his handy Routledge primer, Modernism (recommended and available in
the bookshop), puts it like this:
The
counter argument runs, while the dominance of reason and science has led to
material benefit, modernity has not fostered individual autonomy or profitable
self-knowledge. It has not provided
meaning to the world or to spiritual life, religious or otherwise, perhaps reducing
humans to rational(izing) animals who are
increasingly perceived as more complex and consequently more emotionally,
psychologically and technologically dependent.
Humanity arguably appears without purpose and is instead merely striving
for change and transformation, which produces only momentary satisfaction or
meaning. (17)
Our first
encounter, on this course, with an argument of this kind is with Fyodor
Dostoevsky’s Notes From
Underground. Written in 1864 (two
years before the gigantic Crime and
Punishment) after two visits to
A number
of similarly powerful responses to modernity—from within its very system yet
putting that system under great strain—can be identified in a number of
movements, events and texts that, strictly speaking, precede or predate the
conventional notions of modernism
1840 (“Man
of the Crowd”)
Edgar Allan
Poe’s extraordinary short story, “The Man of the Crowd,” makes an excellent
reference point for this course. You can
download the story from the link and you can, if you feel like it, plug through
my own article on it, which pits it cruelly against Descartes’ Meditations: Out the Window. Poe was a favorite of Dostoevsky and, in his
paradoxical mocking of modern life, you can see why. It is one of the first documents to evoke, with
any clarity, the increasingly perverse emptiness
of modern urban existence. Written at a
crucial time—a time dominated by the very swift, in some cases sudden, explosion of urbanism around the
globe (so global urbanism)—“The Man
of the Crowd” like the underground man, provides a reflection of ourselves that
we don’t probably really want to see. It
was written at a time when instead of urban dwellers constituting a tiny
fraction of the world’s population (as they had done before), they were well on
the way to becoming the majority, a status we have all easily achieved by now
(most of the world’s population are urban dwellers).
1848 (Communist
Manifesto)
Karl Marx
and Friedrich Engels collaborated on (among many other important texts in
political philosophy) the “Manifesto of the Communist Party.” A relatively lyrical piece that has
Shakespeare’s Hamlet as one of its
evident influences, The Manifesto of 1848 provides us with one of the earliest
and clearest statements of the modernist need for a break with the systems and
authorities of the past. Marx’s most
influential argument concerns the way individuals—modern urban individuals
living in conditions of economic capitalism—had become alienated from their own
interests, their senses of being, purpose, value and self. The notion of alienation provides an account of the symptoms that many modernist
writers attempt to account for. The
system of “exchange value” and the fetish of the commodity levels all
previously held distinctions among social relations, threatening to submerge
all individuals into a common morass.
Modernist art and writing, then, could be seen as an attempt to escape
the flattening out of difference represented by the trends of mass
culture—striving instead for something unique that would stress but also redeem
the alienation effect of modern existence.
1857 (Madame
Bovary)
1900 (Interpretation
of Dreams)
1912 (Sinking
of the Titanic)
Crises
Topics:
History:
Duration
The Moment of
Modernism
Tradition
Inheritance and
“Post-Modernism”
Time:
The
unreliability of Dates.
Historical
time-consciousness (apocalypse v. progress)
“Lived
Time” and its expression
Notions
of Change
Technology
and Time
The complex relations between politics, art and culture:
Bourgeois/anti-bourgeois. Bohemians, poets and novelists of the 19th
century
The
Politicisation of the Aesthetic
Communism
and Fascism
Psychoanalysis:
The Void and the Destructive Principle
Issues of Identity and the Other:
Gender:
Construction of
Feminization/feminine
language
Identity:
Man is (as) the Problem?
Vision
and the Primitive
Modes of Critique:
Stylistic
Innovation
Dialectical
Thinking
Influence
of Psychoanalysis
Skepticism/cynicism
Representation
“Let us go then, you and I
When the evening is spread out against
the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a
table.” (T.S. Eliot)
Rhetoric and Language
“Originality” and Interrogation
Creation
of other “Systems”
The
Style and Form of the Modern
Style
over Content
Problematising the difference between perception and representation.
Naturalism,
Symbolism
Prose,
Poetry (and Drama)
Modern art
The Visual
and the Verbal
Point of
View: Authorship and Writing
Narrating
Events
Cultural
Contexts
Visual art
Music
Mass Media
Popular
Culture
Technology
Urbanism: Modernity
and the City
Labour and
Social Production
War
Modernism as Critique
Modernism as critique involves
stretching the concepts of modernity to the extent that they can no longer
hold. On one hand modernism can be seen
as a kind of revelation of crisis. As
European civilization rolls forward blind to its inherent contradictions and
thus to the inevitable catastrophe that faces it, modernism pulls back the
rhetorical reins in a series of more or less violent endeavors to halt the
process. On the other hand, modernism
can be taken as a form of crisis production, a series of rhetorical gestures
that produce the fiction of crisis, a kind of bad faith with no more than
disruptive and ultimately destructive motives.
What complicates matters is the fact that modernism cannot really be
separated from modernity generally.
Modernist discourse is actually one of the trends that characterize
modernity. So whether or not there are the
problems with modernity that modernism variously claims there are, modernism is
itself a very real problem, revealing, at the very least, the otherwise hidden
rhetorical underpinnings of European civilization.
There is no doubt that history
reveals serious problems with European civilization. The various movements and trends that
together make up what we receive from the textbooks as the philosophical Enlightenment of the 18th
Century, each lead in an apparently inevitable way to contradictions, revealed
both in philosophy and in history.
1. ENLIGHTENMENT
2.
CAPITALIST ECONOMICS;
3.
TECHNOLOGICAL PROGRESS AND
INDUSTRIALISATION;
4.
SCIENTIFIC NOTIONS OF TRUTH;
5.
RELIGION.
Modernist literature becomes a kind
of critique of tradition and traditional philosophy
Representation
Modernist forms of representation bear
witness to an acknowledgement of the structured, narrative, constructed nature
of reality (in the traditional sense).
The attempt both to transgress traditional structures and to reconfigure
reality in new forms is typical of most modernist projects.
Spawn of
Fantasies
Silting
the appraisable
Pig
Cupid his rosy snout
Rooting
erotic garbage
“Once upon
a time”
Pulls a
weed white star-topped
Among wild
oats sown in mucous-membrane
Mina Loy “Love Songs”
“April is
the cruelest month” (T. S. Eliot)
Modernity
Rene Descartes: “I think, therefore I am.”
Catchwords:
Empiricism, Freedom, Rationality, Technology, Progress, The Moral Law.
Art is
supposed to imitate life.
Modernism
Art is
supposed to invent new forms of life.
Aesthetic, artistic movements containing some quite diverse trends
appearing in the 19th century and spreading throughout the 20th century.
Friedrich
Nietzsche: “Man is a rope, fastened between animal and superman – a rope over
an abyss.” (Thus Spoke Zarathustra)
Example:
Futurism repudiates the
past, venerates the mechanical, liberates the word from syntax and grammar,
pursues dynamism as opposed to fixity and, in its extreme forms, affirms the necessity
of war and welcomes its coming.
Marinetti and “The
Destruction of Syntax” (1913). Filippo Tommaso Marinetti was born in
Mina
Loy, who had an affair with Marinetti and other futurists later
used futurist principles against the less considered aspects of futurism
itself.
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