Key Content:

• Introduce Module

• Distinguish between concepts of Modernity and Modernism

Reading:
Daniel Joseph Singal, "Modernist Culture in America: Introduction," American Quarterly, 39 (Spring 1987):  5-6.
Web version: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0003-0678%28198721%2939%3A1%3C5%3AMCIAI%3E2.0.CO%3B2-C

Daniel Joseph Singal, "Toward a Definition of American Modernism," American Quarterly, 39 (Spring 1987):  7-26.
Web version: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0003-0678%28198721%2939%3A1%3C7%3ATADOAM%3E2.0.CO%3B2-A
 

I. Introduction

II. Defining Modernity

III. Defining Modernism

The term avant-garde literally means advance guard. In art it is applied to being ahead of the times.

In striving to define modernism perhaps the best we can do is say that while modernism was not the total style of the period, it was the movement that best expressed our modern consciousness through works dealing with the nature of modern experience.

 In many ways this is what modernism is all about: a movement from confidence in a culture to a deep seated distrust of that culture and its artefacts.

Link to Powerpoint

	A/P Ian Gordon	History	American Studies	NUS