What Is Was Modernism

What Is/Was
Modernism?
Coming to terms with terms
Ache of Modernism
Its stem, ‘Modern’, is a term that, from the latin modo, means ‘current’, and so has a
far wider currency and range of meanings than ‘Modernism’. In the late fifth century,
for example, the Latin modernus referred to the Christian present in opposition to the
Roman past; modern English is distinguished from Middle English…
P. Childs, Modernism, Routledge, The New Critical Idiom, 2000, p. 12
First occasion of usage: Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), to denote
what he called a general and unwelcomed creeping industrial ‘ache of Modernism’.
Childs, p. 13
T. E. Hulme, "A Lecture on Modern Poetry“, read to the Poets Club, 1908
“a standpoint of extreme modernism”
Il faut être absolument moderne,
A. Rimbaud
Modernism: ‘Modernist art is, in most critical usage,
reckoned to be the art of what Harold Rosenburg calls “the
tradition of the new”. It is experimental, formally
complex, elliptical, contains elements of decreation as
well as creation, and tends to associate notions of the
artist’s freedom from realism, materialism, traditional
genre and form, with notions of cultural apocalypse and
disaster. …We can dispute about when it starts (French
symbolism; decadence; the break-up of naturalism)
and whether it has ended…
P. Childs, Modernism, Routledge, The New Critical Idiom,
2000
Timebound/timeless? (both?)
We can regard it as a timebound concept (say 1890 to 1930) or a timeless one
(including Sterne, Donne, Villon, Ronsard).
The best focus remains a body of major writers (James, Conrad, Proust, Mann, Gide,
Kafka, Svevo, Joyce, Musil, Faulkner in fiction; Strindberg, Pirandello, Wedekind,
Brecht in drama; Mallarmé, Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Rilke, Apollinaire, Stevens in
poetry) whose works are aesthetically radical, contain striking technical innovation,
emphasize spatial or “fugal” as opposed to chronological form, tend towards
ironic modes… (Malcolm Bradbury in A Dictionary of Modern Critical Terms, ed.
Roger Fowler).
P. Childs, Modernism, p. 2
The traditional view: a series of NOT
Not realistic (or utterly realistic=stream of consciousness)? But Conrad?
Not traditional?
Not classical?
Not friendly (no preambles)? Responsibility on readers
… a compressed, condensed, complex literature of the city, of industry and
technology, war, machinery and speed, mass markets and communication, of
internationalism, the New Woman, the aesthete, the nihilist and the flâneur.
Childs, p. 3
What is Modernism, then and now?
Definition, part one: modernism is “a crisis in the ability of the arts to
represent reality”
Definition, part two: modernism is a form of critical and artistic engagement
with modernity
Laura Winkiel, Modernism: The Basics, Routledge, 2017

The prevailing definition of modernism that held sway at least until the 1980s
focused on the criterion of difficulty. The canon consisted of experimental forms of
poetry, prose and painting chosen for their difficulty. They are densely allusive,
fragmented and abstract… Winkiel, p. 22
GLOBAL CRISIS, GLOBAL FORMS
Modernism(s)
• can take many forms;
• occurred during an historical period of sweeping political, technological, economic
and social transformations, mainly between 1890–1940, but modernist techniques
have been used before and after this time period;
• is a critical and artistic engagement with modernity, showing both the promises and
dangers of modernity;
• was promoted by means of a worldwide network of noncommercial publishers, little
magazines, reviews, bookstores, salons, cabarets, editors and anthologies;
• is a term that often carries with it the history of imperialism and Western
dominance. Winkiel,
The death toll of European culture?
… the modernist masterpieces “constituted the last literary season of Western
culture. Within a few years European literature gave its utmost and seemed on the
verge of opening new and boundless horizons: instead it died”
Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders, 1983, p. 209
On international flows
White, middle class, male? Can this be rewritten/underwritten?
Modernism marked the regeneration of a tired Western artistic tradition by other

cultures: African, African-American, Asian, Chinese and, more generally, diasporic.
Childs, p. 13
1910
Post-impressionist painting Grafton Galleries London
Manet and the Post-Impressionists (curated by Roger Fry) 1910
“horror,” “madness,” “infection,” “sickness of the soul,” “putrescence,”
●
“pornography,” “anarchy” and “evil.”
… in or about December, 1910, human character changed.

V. Woolf, “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown” 1923
E. Manet,
Un bar aux
Folies-Bergères,
1882
P. Guaguin, Trois Tahitiens (Three
Tahitians), 1899
G. Seurat, Sunday Afternoon on the
Island of La Grand Jatte (1884-86)
E. Munch, The Scream (Skriek),
1893
20 February 1920
F. Marinetti
1-Noi vogliamo cantare l'amor del pericolo, l'abitudine all'energia e
alla temerità.
2-Il coraggio, l'audacia, la ribellione, saranno elementi essenziali della
nostra poesia.
3-La letteratura esaltò fino ad oggi l'immobilità penosa, l'estasi ed il
sonno. Noi vogliamo esaltare il movimento aggressivo, l'insonnia
febbrile, il passo di corsa, il salto mortale, lo schiaffo ed il pugno.
4-Noi affermiamo che la magnificenza del mondo si è arricchita di una
bellezza nuova: la bellezza della velocità.
5-Noi vogliamo inneggiare all'uomo che tiene il volante, la cui asta
attraversa la Terra, lanciata a corsa, essa pure, sul circuito della sua
6-Bisogna che il poeta si prodichi con ardore, sfarzo e magnificenza,
per aumentare l'entusiastico fervore degli elementi primordiali.
7-Non vi è più bellezza se non nella lotta. Nessuna opera che non
abbia un carattere aggressivo può essere un capolavoro.
8-Noi siamo sul patrimonio estremo dei secoli! poiché abbiamo già
creata l'eterna velocità onnipresente.
9-Noi vogliamo glorificare la guerra - sola igiene del mondo - il
militarismo, il patriottismo, il gesto distruttore
10-Noi vogliamo distruggere i musei, le biblioteche, le accademie
d'ogni specie e combattere contro il moralismo, il femminismo e contro
ogni viltà opportunistica o utilitaria
11- Noi canteremo le locomotive dall'ampio petto, il volo scivolante
degli areoplani. E' dall'Italia che lanciamo questo manifesto di violenza
travolgente e incendiaria col quale fondiamo oggi il Futurismo.
Cubism (1907-1914)
P. Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907
(MoMA, NY)
G. Braque,
Paysage à
l'Estaque
1908
Berna,
Kunstmuseum
British take
Imagism
T. E. Hulme
E. Pound, Des Imagistes: An Anthology 1914
To use the language of common speech, but to employ always the exact word, not the
nearly-exact, nor the merely decorative word. A. Lowell, Preface to Some Imagist
Poets (1915)
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
E. Pound, “In a Station of the Metro”, 1913
William Carlos Williams, James Joyce, and H. D., D. H. Lawrence

Image in time (instant)
●
Vorticism
●
BLAST
Edward Wadsworth, Vorticist

Study, 1914
the new Black cities that took shape in the 1920s–40s
in New York City’s Harlem and nationwide in
the early decades of the Great Migration
when millions of African Americans
began to move away from the segregated rural South.
2 issues
●
June 1914 (ed. Wyndham Lewis)
●
July 1915
E. Pound, “Vortex”, Blast 1914
Manifesto
The vortex is the point of maximum energy
●
It represents, in mechanics, the greatest efficiency.
●
We use the words “greatest efficiency” in the precise sense—as they would be
used in a text book of MECHANICS.
For or against mass culture?
Modernist artists kicked against the homogenization required by mass systems. On
the other, they celebrated the new conditions of production, circulation and
consumption engendered by technological change (Harvey 1989:23).
cinema
Edison’s Kinetoscope
1895
Lumière brothers, Cinématographe,

1896

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What Is/Was

Laura Winkiel, Modernism: The Basics, Routledge, 2017

Modernism marked the regeneration of a tired Western artistic tradition by other

“pornography,” “anarchy” and “evil.”

… in or about December, 1910, human character changed.

E. Pound, Des Imagistes: An Anthology 1914

William Carlos Williams, James Joyce, and H. D., D. H. Lawrence

Edward Wadsworth, Vorticist

Lumière brothers, Cinématographe,

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