c









 
 


 
 

M



 


The following dictionary definition is from the Oxford English Dictionary Online:


 

[ad. late L. @
 (6th c.), f. @
just now (on the analogy
of 
 that is of to-day, f. 
to-day). Cf. F. @
, Sp., Pg.,
It. @
 , G.@
.]

ΠBeing at this time; now existing. Ob

.


 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. 3
 
  : London;   :
at Oxford University, the school of Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. In
Historical use commonly applied (in contradistinction to   and @
) to the
time subsequent to the 2 DDLE AGES, and the events, personages, writers, etc. of that
time. So  
  : see - STORY 3b.

Ñ ^ 
and  
Belonging to a comparatively recent period in the life-
history of the world.

 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 O
and 

.   
: see ENGL S- 
1b.



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.
 [Œ
 r 
XI. 69/3 Between this society and one begun some years ago for the
encouragement of modern Art and native artists, there should be no rivalry.] Œ
 R.
MUTHER - 


   I. 10 Because this distinction between the eclectic and
the personal, the derived and the independent, has not yet been carried out with
sufficient strictness..it has hitherto..been found so difficult to discover the
distinctive   of modern art. Œ C. BELL ¦
@ 

   5 Géricault and then Delacroix were the new influences in France;
in England the innovator was Constable. From these points of departure you can trace
the whole glorious history of modern art. ΠH. R.
HITCHCOCK 

r
xvii. 201 There is..little to compare with the unconsciously
µmodern¶ work of those architects who continued the English tradition. Œ
O.
LANCASTER     74 When, shortly after the War, the
Modern Movement..was first brought to public notice it led to a natural and healthy
reaction against the excessive ornament..of the previous generation. Œ
S. W.
CHENEY  

r (rev. ed.) p. v, I have accepted here the broadest traditional
usage of the term µmodern art¶ as covering the course of creative invention since
1800. ΠP. M. BARDI r
xix. 117/1 The flight of refugees from
theNazis..scattered the pioneers of the Modern movement across western Europe
and America. Π| @ 19 June 14/4 r 
   
  , [an exhibition of]
cartoons about modern art at the Tate.


 Characteristic of the present and recent times; new-fashioned; not

antiquated or obsolete. In spec. phrases:     , an amenity,
device, fitting, etc., such as is usual in a modern house; freq. p
;
cf. 2OD. CON.;   , a free expressive style of dancing distinct
from classical ballet (see quots.); hence   ,    vbl.
n.;  , jazz of a type which originated during and after the war of
1939-45.

ΠSIR J. SMYTH  

 p  8b, Without composing them of diuers sorts of
weapons, according to the moderne vse. Œ
BARRET | 
  Gloss.
251 Moderne warre, is the new order of warre vsed in our age. ΠB.
JONSON * p  III. iv, He has so moderne, and facile a veine, Fitting the time, and
catching the court-eare. ΠG. ETHEREGE  
 I. i, !. He thinks himself
the Pattern of modern Gallantry.  . He is indeed the Pattern of modern
Foppery. ŒŒ DE FOE |b "
24 But England, Modern to the last degree
Borrows or makes her own Nobility. Œ
 [see

  s.v. D S- 
10]. Œ
 HOWELLS 


 
(1892)
79 They conjectured..flavours of Tennyson and Browning in his verse, with
a moderner tint from Morris. Œ

 r
@ 24 Jan. 53/1 Perhaps Gray is at
his modernest in the µOde on Vicissitude¶,..if not most modern of all in that final
quatrain of the Elegy which Gray's feeling for unity expunged. Œ

 J. PAYN | 
| # I. 130 A writing on the wall, which, albeit it was not in modern
characters, needed..no interpreter. Œ

 @
^$
26 Jan. 3/2 Against such foes,
men with the modernest artillery and highest explosives are utterly
 powerless. ŒŒ E. L. URLIN  r
%

p. xv, Modern dances..[are]
derived from some primary human instinct, such as Worship, Mimicry, Love, or
War... Modern dancing begins where..the art survives solely on account of the
pleasure it gives to the performer, or to the spectator. Π| @ 6 May 1/6
(Advt.),Superior accommodation in lady's quiet house..all modern
conveniences. ΠJ. MARTIN 

 2 There are as many methods and
systems of modern dancing as there are dancers. b

3By the modern
dance we..imply by a method of negation those types of dancing which are neither
classic nor romantic. ΠE. ST. V. MILLAY    
  I. 15 Peace
and Quiet poured down the sink, In exchange for a houseful of µmodern
conveniences¶. Œ D. GILLESPIE in Shapiro & Hentoff -| & ' xix.
300 No one man or group of men started modern jazz. ΠG. B. L. WILSON  

! 188 

, the term used to designate a variety of styles which are not
founded on the

&(  (i.e. the Classical ballet). b

189Modern Dance
claims to make much use of µnatural movements¶ and it is also a reflexion of a state
of mind. ŒŒ    @ Apr. 12 By the 1950's µmodern¶ jazz, as the more advanced
developments were termed, had to free itself both from esoteric tendencies within
jazz itself and from over-dependence on Western European classical
traditions. Œ
J. WINEARLS 

(ed. 2) 9 The title µModern Dance¶
distinguishes those kinds which have been invented, developed, or adapted from
various sources during the past half-century and which are clearly marked by an
expressive style quite different from that of other forms such as National, Folk,
Musical Comedy or Ballet. b

, Modern Dancers consider that Ballet cannot deal
satisfactorily with all possible dance-subjects.

The word @
 is not very new. It comes from the Latin @
) implying  # 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 @
 has generally described a state of affairs characterized by innovation,
experimentation and certain kinds of distancing from the past. The
word @
 $  comes to describe the swift rise in Europe and America of
powerful tendencies manifesting advances in technology and science, as well as
the development of nation states, democratic political systems and the expansion of
capitalist modes of production. Associated with modernization, of course, are not
only the values of humanism and enlightenment, but also those of colonialism and
European Imperialism as the modernization of the west spreads around the world.

 
 
The word @
 @ 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 @
 @, 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 ³men 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 #  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    or   set of phenomena involving continental as
well as Anglo-American writers and artists. Cities become meeting points for
migrating groups and Vienna in Austria and Paris in France play particularly
important roles for modernist aesthetics. Questions about modernist aesthetics turn
up in urban centers all over the world at different times
« Argentina, Chile, India, Africa, Malaya, China andJapan.

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@
  as they gain universal institutional respect and wealth?

r 
  
M 
3


 

 
   
 





 


 
 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
 p@ cautiously because
we might be led to easily into thinking that this process is the same
as p , 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 Western Europe, spreading only later to the Eastern
Europe, the Americas, India, Africa, Southeast Asia and Asia, with
colonialism and then globalization. We must always remember, however,
that this model of the spread of modernity is a model that belongs to
modernity itself. That is, if we know that modernity begins in the
16th century Europe and gradually spreads around the world then that is
because modernity has put it this way in the form of modern history. In fact
one of the greatest problems when trying to engage with the question of
modernity is that our means of understanding²our assumptions about time,
space, people, individuals, groups, histories, truths, facts, myths,
superstitions and lies²are always to a certain extent determined by the
forces we¶re trying to understand: @
 . Attitudes concerning
consciousness & the unconscious, reason & the irrational, sanity & madness,
right & wrong, law & crime, men & women, etc. have already been directed
for us²decided in advance and to an extent naturalized so these things are
seen to be beyond question²by @
 . More specific issues, like
nationality, democracy, race, class and morality, also rest upon assumptions
that are so deeply embedded that we barely notice that they are assumptions.

The major problem²I¶ll call it the      @
  (half the class
switches off at horrible phrase made up entirely of meaningless abstractions)
as a short cut²implies the following: we recognize now that the way we
think is largely determined by historically rooted factors²systems of
thinking that we remain unaware of most of the time. 
 is the name
we use for the system of thinking we inherit after 500 years
of @
 development. But the main strand of modernity²an attitude that
is consistent across all the different variants over the last 500 years or so²
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 ³spirit 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:    @²Quit with the Latin
will you?²OK, * )*+   (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
modern @. First, a general distrust of the senses (hearing, seeing,
feeling, tasting and smelling) provokes an emphasis
on    and *
@  and an over reliance on principles of
reason. Secondly the same distrust provokes the development of
technological means of improvement²prosthetic 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
rhetoric²he was easily the equal of his contemporaries like John Donne
and John Milton as far as forceful literary expression is concerned and
his (
 ( p ,-
  .     p) is often
justifiably set on literature courses²his 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 Newton¶s   p 
There are two good pages:
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¶ 
 , so one could justifiably identify
him as an heir of an already modern way of
thinking. The   p  (or  @   p / 
   p)
was published in parts during the 20 years from 1667-87 and
presents what Jacob Bronowski describes as ³a system of the
world.´ Newton¶s description subsumes the world under a single set of
laws according to mathematical principles. Modern Science was
revolutionized by Newton¶s method, in which he took mathematics, in its
static Euclidean form, and turned it to a dynamic account of the universe.

 
 
one of the ways of dealing with not only the vagueness of the
term @
 @ 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  


What this means is that a number
of arguments and interventions made   certain aspects of modernity
can be said to constitute an attitude we call  
 . Peter Childs, in his
handy Routledge primer,
 @ (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 / . @0
 
. Written in 1864 (two years
before the gigantic  @
 @ ) after two visits to Western
Europe, during which Dostoevsky had become horrified and fascinated by
the state of Western Civilization. The narrator of / . @
0
 
(³the underground man´) is not a modernist particularly (nor is
Dostoevsky, really) but his position, in (albeit resentfully) accepting the
current wisdom of his age (philosophy, aesthetics, morality and science) and
taking this wisdom to its logical conclusion, provides us with a glimpse of
the absurd and paradoxical grounds of modern life and thought. References
and allusions in /  @0
 
are very wide ranging but some of
the more obvious ones deal with the following issues: Newtonian Science
translated into the world of social relations; Utilitarian moral philosophy;
Romantic Aesthetics; Utopian versions of modern civilization; uses of logic
intended to cut down the vagaries of the human ³freedom of decision.´ In
other words the underground man has come to see that in the world he lives
in his capacity for choice, for individual responsibility, is rendered absurd
and pointless, because rationalism and science have promised to discover a
law for everything. The principle can be summed up in the single phrase,
asserted by the rationalist philosopher, Gottfried Leibniz, ³Nothing is
without reason´ (known ever after as #     ). The
opposition between ³law´ and ³freedom,´ of course, is as old as human
thought itself. But Dostoevsky¶s little book gives us an excellent
paradoxical narrative of the shape this opposition takes in the advanced
stages of modernity.

A number of similarly powerful responses to modernity²from within its

very system yet putting that system under great strain²can be identified in a
number of movements, events and texts that, strictly speaking, precede or
predate the conventional notions of modernism

1840 (³2an of the Crowd´)

Edgar Allan Poe¶s extraordinary short story, ³The 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¶ 
 : 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 @p  of modern urban existence. Written at a crucial
time²a time dominated by the very swift, in some cases 

,
explosion of urbanism around the globe (so  bb @)²³The
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). Britain was at the
forefront of this expansion, with Paris and then Chicago and New
York catching up, so it would be wrong to leave out Delhi and Singapore,
which as colonial urban nodes were developing at a comparable rate at
the same time.

1848 (

 Ma )

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels collaborated on (among many other
important texts in political philosophy) the ³Manifesto of the Communist
Party.´ A relatively lyrical piece that has Shakespeare¶s -@ 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 individuals²modern urban individuals living in
conditions of economic capitalism²had become alienated from their
own interests, their senses of being, purpose, value and self. The notion
of    provides an account of the symptoms that many modernist
writers attempt to account for. The system of ³exchange 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
culture²striving instead for something unique that would stress but also
redeem the alienation effect of modern existence.

1857 (Mada
 B
)
1900 ( p
   D

)
1912 (Sg  h T
c)



Labour 2ovements
Emergence of Feminism
The breaup of Empires
The First World War
The Bolshevi Revolution

 


 :
Duration
The Moment of Modernism
Tradition
Inheritance and ³Post-Modernism´

 
The unreliability of Dates.
Historical time-consciousness (apocalypse v. progress)
³Lived Time´ and its expression
Notions of Change
Technology and Time


 
 

Ñ 





 
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
G 
!
G




" 
Gender: Construction of
Feminization/feminine language
Identity: Man is (as) the Problem?
Vision and the Primitive


!
# 

Stylistic Innovation
Dialectical Thinking
Influence of Psychoanalysis
Skepticism/cynicism

$ 


%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)

$ 


&
'' 










³Originality´ and Interrogation
Creation of other ³Systems´
The Style and Form of the Modern
Style over Content

0Ñ  
'

!! 

Ñ 

  



 


Naturalism, Symbolism
Prose, Poetry (and Drama)
Modern art
The Visual and the Verbal
Point of View: Authorship and Writing
Narrating Events



  
Visual art
Music
Mass Media
Popular Culture
Technology
Urbanism: Modernity and the City
 Labour and Social Production
War

 
 

#


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 "  @ 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


 $ 


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
³Once upon a time´
Pulls a weed white star-topped
Among wild oats sown in mucous-membrane
















































Mina Loy ³Love Songs´


³April is the cruelest month´
(T. S. Eliot)




 


$

(  
³I think, therefore I am.´

Catchwords: Empiricism, Freedom, Rationality, Technology, Progress, The

Moral Law.

Art is supposed to imitate life.




 
 

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: ³Man is a rope, fastened between animal and superman

± a rope over an abyss.´ (|p   )
 c 

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.

2arinetti and
³The Destruction of Syntax´ (1913). Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

was born in Egypt in 1876 the second son of a rich and successful
lawyer,Enrico Marinetti. He had published a literary magazine between
1892 and 1894, while still at college, and in 1898 he published his first work
in what he called the new ³free verse´ style. By 1900 he had decided to
devote himself entirely to Italian and French literature and poetry. He
founded the international magazine   (Poetry) in 1905 and published it
in Milan from 1905 until 1909. Marinetti wanted to liberate poetry and
literature from the constraints of traditional punctuation and syntax and he
used    to launch the idea of free verse.

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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