In this elegant, highly readable book, Compagnon confronts the postmodern's co-optation of the modern by tracing paradoxical elements in the aesthetic of the new - particularly the aesthetic and moral contradictions built into the enthusiasm for the new - in the "five paradoxes of modernity": the superstition of the new, the religion of the future, the mania for theory, the appeal to mass culture, and the passion for repudiation.
Five Faces of Modernity is a series of semantic and cultural biographies of words that have taken on special significance in the last century and a half or so: modernity, avant-garde, decadence, kitsch, and postmodernism. The concept of modernity--the notion that we, the living, are different and somehow superior to our predecessors and that our civilization is likely to be succeeded by one even superior to ours--is a relatively recent Western invention and one whose time may already have passed, if we believe its postmodern challengers. Calinescu documents the rise of cultural modernity and, in tracing the shifting senses of the five terms under scrutiny, illustrates the intricate value judgments, conflicting orientations, and intellectual paradoxes to which it has given rise. Five Faces of Modernity attempts to do for the foundations of the modernist critical lexicon what earlier terminological studies have done for such complex categories as classicism, baroque, romanticism, realism, or symbolism and thereby fill a gap in literary scholarship. On another, more ambitious level, Calinescu deals at length with the larger issues, dilemmas, ideological tensions, and perplexities brought about by the assertion of modernity.
Rewritten versions of contributions to an international conference held at the University of Antwerp in May 1992. Starting point for the conference was the vagueness of the very terms 'modernism' and 'modernity'. In the first section a group of comparatists address the theoretical and terminological problems of modernism. Practical readings of modernist writers; discussions of different modernist movements; and, the work of critics who have contributed to debates about modernism make up the second section. The third section looks at the problem of modernism from an interartistic and interdisciplinary perspective.
Containing over 750 in-depth entries, this is the most wide-ranging and up-to-date dictionary of critical theory available. This authoritative guide covers the whole range of critical theory, including the Frankfurt school, cultural materialism, cultural studies, gender studies, film studies, literary theory, hermeneutics, historical materialism, and socio-political critical theory. Entries clearly explain complex theoretical discourses such as Marxism, psychoanalysis, structuralism, deconstruction, and postmodernism. There are biographies of hundreds of important figures in the field, with feature entries for those who have heavily influenced areas of the discipline, such as Derrida and Deleuze. This new edition of the dictionary has been updated to extend coverage of diaspora, race and postcolonial theory, including key authors such as C. L. R. James and Paul Gilroy, and of queer and sexuality studies, including notable figures such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Fully revised to keep up to date with this diverse field, this new edition expands the coverage to include entries such as hyperobject and transgender. Entries are fully cross-referenced and many contain further reading suggestions. Covering all aspects of critical theory from globalization and race studies, to queer theory and feminism, this multidisciplinary A-Z is essential for students in the humanities and social sciences.
Berland (humanities, York U., Canada) and Hornstein (art history, York U.) present 22 contributions that attempt to explore the connections between art and money in a world increasingly dominated by the practices and ideologies of market culture. Consisting of both essays and reproductions of art works, the contributions come from Canadian artists, academics, curators, and critics. Among the topics addressed in the essays are the relationship between nationalism and the value of art, a challenge to the universality of aesthetics, the erosion of artistic and educational freedoms, and cultural policy and funding in Canada. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
This vanguard collection of original and in-depth essays explores the intricate interplay of the aesthetic and psychological domains during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and considers the reasons why a common Modernist project took shape when and in the circumstances that it did. These changes occurred precisely when the distinctively modern disciplines of psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis established their "scientific foundations and achieved the forms in which we largely know them today. This volume examines the dense web of connections joining the aesthetic and psychological realms in the modern era, charting historically the emergence of the ongoing modern discussion surrounding such issues as identity-formation, sexuality, and the unconscious. The contributors form a distinguished and diversified group of scholars, who write about a wide range of cultural fields, including philosophy, the novel and poetry, drama, dance, film and photography, as well as medicine, psychology, and the occult sciences.
Modernism arose in a period of accelerating globalization in the late nineteenth century. Modernist writers and artists, while often loyal to their country in times of war, aimed to rise above the national and ideological conflicts of the early twentieth century in service to a cosmopolitan ideal. This Companion explores the international aspects of literary modernism by mapping the history of the movement across Europe and within each country. The essays place the various literary traditions within a social and historical context and set out recent critical debates. Particular attention is given to the urban centers in which modernism developed – from Dublin to Zürich, Barcelona to Warsaw – and to the movements of modernists across national borders. A broad, accessible account of European modernism, this Companion explores what this cosmopolitan movement can teach us about life as a citizen of Europe and of the world.
Joseph Acquisto examines literary writers and critical theoriests who employ theological frameworks, but who divorce those frameworks from questions of belief and thereby remove the doctrine of salvation from their considerations. Acquisto claims that Baudelaire inaugurates a new kind of amodern modernity by canceling the notion of salvation in his writing while also refusing to embrace any of its secular equivalents, such as historical progress or redemption through art. Through a series of "interhistorical" readings that put Baudelaire into dialogue with literary and critical writers from the last 150 years, Acquisto highlights the way both literary and critical approaches attempt to articulate a thir option between theism and atheism that also steers clear of political utopianism and Nietzschean estheticism. In the concluding section, Acquisto expands metaphysical and esthetic concerns to account also for the ethics inherent in the refusal of the logic of salvation, an ethics which emerges from, rather seeking to redeem or cancel, a certain kind of nihilism. -- from back cover.
On Garbage is the first book to examine the detritus of Western culture in full range—not only material waste and ruin, but also residual or "broken" knowledge and the lingering remainders of cultural thought systems.
The Avant-Garde in Interwar England addresses modernism's ties to tradition, commerce, nationalism, and spirituality through an analysis of the assimilation of visual modernism in England between 1910 and 1939. During this period, a debate raged across the nation concerning the purpose of art in society. On one side were the aesthetic formalists, led by members of London's Bloomsbury Group, who thought art was autonomous from everyday life. On the other were England's so-called medieval modernists, many of them from the provincial North, who maintained that art had direct social functions and moral consequences. As Michael T. Saler demonstrates in this fascinating volume, the heated exchange between these two camps would ultimately set the terms for how modern art was perceived by the British public. Histories of English modernism have usually emphasized the seminal role played by the Bloomsbury Group in introducing, celebrating, and defining modernism, but Saler's study instead argues that, during the watershed years between the World Wars, modern art was most often understood in the terms laid out by the medieval modernists. As the name implies, these artists and intellectuals closely associated modernism with the art of the Middle Ages, building on the ideas of John Ruskin, William Morris, and other nineteenth-century romantic medievalists. In their view, modernism was a spiritual, national, and economic movement, a new and different artistic sensibility that was destined to revitalize England's culture as well as its commercial exports when applied to advertising and industrial design. This book, then, concerns the busy intersection of art, trade, and national identity in the early decades of twentieth-century England. Specifically, it explores the life and work of Frank Pick, managing director of the London Underground, whose famous patronage of modern artists, architects, and designers was guided by a desire to unite nineteenth-century arts and crafts with twentieth-century industry and mass culture. As one of the foremost adherents of medieval modernism, Pick converted London's primary public transportation system into the culminating project of the arts and crafts movement. But how should today's readers regard Pick's achievement? What can we say of the legacy of this visionary patron who sought to transform the whole of sprawling London into a post-impressionist work of art? And was medieval modernism itself a movement of pioneers or dreamers? In its bold engagement with such questions, The Avant-Garde in Interwar England will surely appeal to students of modernism, twentieth-century art, the cultural history of England, and urban history.
