Michael Saler

Acknowledgements Introduction Part One: Contexts Chapter One: Living In the Imagination Chapter Two: Delight without Delusion: The New Romance, Spectacular Texts, and Public Spheres Part Two: Cases Chapter Three: Clap If You Believe in Sherlock Holmes: Arthur Conan Doyle and Animistic Reason Chapter Four: From "Virtual Unreality" to Virtual Reality: H.P. Lovecraft and Public Spheres of the Imagination Chapter Five: The Middle Positions of Middle-earth: J.R.R. Tolkien and Fictionalism Envoi Bibliography Index

SPECTERS ARE ONCE AGAIN HAUNTING EUROPE AND AMERICA—as are magicians, mermaids, mesmerists, and a mélange of marvels once thought to have been exorcised by the rational and secular processes of modernity. In recent years, historians from disparate fields have independently challenged the long-standing sociological view that modernity is characterized by “disenchantment.” This view, in its broadest terms, maintains that wonders and marvels have been demystified by science, spirituality has been supplanted by secularism, spontaneity has been replaced by bureaucratization, and the imagination has been subordinated to instrumental reason. In the past decade, however, a new historiographic position, if not consensus, has emerged that presents Western modernity as “enchanted.” The ongoing redefinition of such an established view is of consequence for a variety of reasons, not the least of which has to do with the master narratives underlying the stories that historians choose to tell. As ...

... The "Medieval Modern" Underground: Terminus of the Avant-Garde. Michael Saler. Figures. ...Michael Saler teaches modern European intellectual history at the University of California, Davis. He is working on a book on English medieval modernism. Notes. ...

This chapter argues that there is a variety of secular and conscious strategies for re-enchantment, held together by a common aim of filling a God-shaped void. The discussion also introduces three approaches to affirm the claim and offer a more nuanced understanding of the nature of modernity. The first is to reject the notion that any lingering enchantment within Western culture must of necessity be a relic (the binary approach). The second is to reject the notion that modernity is itself enchanted, unbeknown to its subjects, in a deceptive and dangerous way (the dialectical approach). It is to accept, instead, the fact that modernity embraces seeming contraries, such as rationality and wonder, secularism and faith (antinomial). The third type of enchantment is the modern enchantment par excellence: one which simultaneously enchants and disenchants.

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Many people throughout the world" inhabit" imaginary worlds communally and persistently, parsing Harry Potter and exploring online universes. These activities might seem irresponsibly escapist, but history tells another story. Beginning in the late nineteenth ...

... He argues that the original concept of the garden city as outlined by its progenitor, Ebenezer Howard, was radical, eschewing custom and convention in its vision of a planned city created in the bosom of the healthful countryside, with communal property ownership as well as ...

ABSTRACT Modernism/Modernity 2.1 (1995) 113-144 Few would consider today's London Underground one of the Seven Wonders of the World, but that is how it was appraised by a Danish architect in 1935. He was not alone in his admiration for a transport system that was widely seen as efficient in its operation, progressive in its treatment of employees, and -- perhaps most notable of all -- boldly modernist in its corporate appearance, from the architecture of its buildings to the design of its wastebins. During the interwar period the London Underground was praised for its patronage of modern artists, architects, and designers, as well as for introducing modern art to a wide public. "The art galleries of the People," wrote the art critic for the London Sunday Times, "are not in Bond Street, but are to be found in every [Underground] station." And when the renovated Piccadilly Circus station was reopened in 1928, one reporter declared that it had been "utterly transformed by modern architecture and modern art into a scene that would make the perfect setting for the finale of an opera." (figs. 1 and 2) "Opera" is an apposite term. During the interwar period the London Underground was consciously designed to be a Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk, a union of the arts that would consolidate a public divided by industrialism and materialism, and provide a new source of spirituality in an increasingly secular age. Frank Pick, the executive officer of the Underground who initiated and directed the Underground's design and publicity, certainly admired Wagner. Even more than Wagner, however, Pick admired the two nineteenth-century English proponents of the integration of art and life, John Ruskin and William Morris. Selected elements of Ruskin and Morris's social and aesthetic ideals inspired Pick to transform the Underground into a work of public art. Indeed, the Underground of the interwar period should be considered as the culminating project of the nineteenth-century English arts and crafts movement, a union of the arts designed for the pleasure and the use of the common individual. Pick intended the transport system to match Morris's description of art as "a joy to the maker and the user," and this was an apt description for the Underground during the interwar period. Pick's achievement poses far-reaching questions for what has come to be one of the most widely accepted paradigms in discussing modernism and the avant-garde, Peter Bürger's distinction between a formalist and autotelic "modernism" and a socially engaged "avant-garde" that opposed it during the early twentieth century. For Bürger, the distinctive feature of the avant-garde was its critical practice in which "art was not to be simply destroyed, but transferred to the praxis of life where it would be preserved, albeit in changed form." Implicit within this argument is the notion that the avant-garde, in its aim to change bourgeois society and culture, must exist in tense opposition to the prevailing cultural milieu, and will express this opposition in provocative, if not overtly shocking, ways -- Bürger cites the infamous Fountain by R. Mutt created by Marcel Duchamp in 1917 as a representative avant-garde "work." The efforts of Pick and his numerous associates discussed in this essay corresponded to similar attempts by contemporaneous avant-garde movements on the Continent such as the Berlin Dadaists, French Surrealists, Russian Constructivists, and Italian Futurists to challenge autotelic conceptions of art. The most successful embodiment of the interwar avant-garde's aim to reintegrate art with everyday life (including "mass culture") was not Duchamp's ironic and provocative reinscription of a ready-made urinal into an "artwork," but in fact the "Earthly Paradise" of the London Underground during the 1920s and 1930s. What a transport system might contribute to current debates about modernism and the avant-garde is one subject of this essay. The second aim of this essay is to explore modernism's relationship with the past. Certainly there were modernists who broke with the past in their quest to create new cultural forms that would capture the seemingly unique experience of modernity. But there were also those who perceived connections between the present and the...

We often associate visual modernism with cosmopolitan cities on the Continent, with pride of place going to Paris, Vienna, Prague, Berlin, and Munich. English visual modernism has been studied less frequently—the very phrase “English modernism” sounds like a contradiction in terms—but it too is usually linked to the cosmopolitan center of London, as well as to the notorious postimpressionist exhibitions staged there by Roger Fry in 1910 and 1912. Fry coined the term “postimpressionism” to embrace the disparate styles of Cézanne, Van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso, and others that he introduced to a bewildered and skeptical public. Together with his Bloomsbury colleague Clive Bell, Fry defined the new art in formalist terms, arguing that works of visual art do not represent the world or depict a narrative but, rather, consist of “significant forms” that elicit “aesthetic emotions” from sensitive viewers. The two men deliberately sought to redefine art away from the moral and utilitarian aest...

Since the late nineteenth century, Western intellectuals have tended to depict ‘modernity’ as being incompatible with ‘enchantment’. Thus Max Weber argued that two aspects intrinsic to modernity, rationalization and bureaucratization, were inimical to the magical attitudes toward human existence that characterized medieval and early modern thought. His gloomy image of the ‘iron cage’ of reason echoed the fears of earlier romantics and was to be repeated by later cultural pessimists through the twentieth century. This article recovers a different outlook that emerged during the fin-de-siècle, one that reconciled the rational and secular tenets of modernity with enchantment and that underlies many forms of contemporary cultural practice. The popularity of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes is taken as an exemplary instance of a specifically modern form of enchantment. First, Holmes's own form of rationalism, ‘animistic reason’, offered an alternative to the narrower inst...

... Sword for hire. Autores: Michael Saler; Localización: Times literary supplement, TLS, ISSN 0307-661X, Nº 5364, 2006 , pág. 20. Fundación Dialnet. Acceso de usuarios registrados. Acceso de usuarios registrados Usuario. Contraseña. Entrar. Mi Dialnet. ...

... He argues that the original concept of the garden city as outlined by its progenitor, Ebenezer Howard, was radical, eschewing custom and convention in its vision of a planned city created in the bosom of the healthful countryside, with communal property ownership as well as ...

... The "Medieval Modern" Underground: Terminus of the Avant-Garde. Michael Saler. Figures. ...Michael Saler teaches modern European intellectual history at the University of California, Davis. He is working on a book on English medieval modernism. Notes. ...

We often associate visual modernism with cosmopolitan cities on the Continent, with pride of place going to Paris, Vienna, Prague, Berlin, and Munich. English visual modernism has been studied less frequently—the very phrase “English modernism” sounds like a contradiction in terms—but it too is usually linked to the cosmopolitan center of London, as well as to the notorious postimpressionist exhibitions staged there by Roger Fry in 1910 and 1912. Fry coined the term “postimpressionism” to embrace the disparate styles of Cézanne, Van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso, and others that he introduced to a bewildered and skeptical public. Together with his Bloomsbury colleague Clive Bell, Fry defined the new art in formalist terms, arguing that works of visual art do not represent the world or depict a narrative but, rather, consist of “significant forms” that elicit “aesthetic emotions” from sensitive viewers. The two men deliberately sought to redefine art away from the moral and utilitarian aesthetic promoted by Victorian critics such as John Ruskin and William Morris. Fry and Bell intended to establish art as self-sufficient, independent from social utility or moral concerns. Fry at times expressed ambivalence about this formalist enterprise, but Bell had fewer hesitations in defining modern art as absolutely autonomous: as he stated in Art (1914), “To appreciate a work of art we need bring with us nothing from life, no knowledge of its ideas and affairs, no familiarity with its emotions.