Andrew's Wiki
Concept Modernism

List of Characteristics (He Didn’t Make Em Up, He Just Quoted Em)

• “Alienation
• Fragmentation
• Break with tradition
• Isolation
• Magnification of subjectivity
• Threat of the void
• Weight of vast numbers and monolithic impersonal institutions
• Hatred of civilization itself” (Fuchs 30)
• “Formal experiment
• Dislocation of conventional syntax
• Radical breaches of decorum
• Disturbances of chronology and spatial order
• Ambiguity
• Polysemy
• Obscurity
• Mythopoetic allusion
• Primitivism
• Irrationalism
• Structuring by symbol and motif rather than narrative or argumentative logic” (Lodge 74)
• Dialectical opposition to tradition
• “Historically explosive” yet autonomous
• Hostile to common sense and to positivism
• Defamiliarization (Russ formalism)
• Opens irrational and pathology up for representation
• Destruction of reason
• Pessimistic
• Separated from outside world
• Consciousness of habitualized modes of living
• Decentering of man
• Ambivalence (both attitudes!) towards Enlightenment values
• Sense of humanism in crisis
  • Anti-humanism in the face of its struggles and unfairness
• Negative reflection of official ideology
• Disruption of “historical attitudes towards language and communication”
• Self-consciousness
  • Points to the social process of generating meaning (113)
  • “Displacement of traditional bourgeois-capitalist subject” (141)
• “Collage effect” (“meeting places of various texts” (151)
• “words, syntactic features, and generic qualities strive to break free from their conventional referential functions” (212)
  • Language “has lost its innocence” and can no longer innocently be used for communication
• Noise as communication
• Search for meaning, not just “meaning” itself
• Its “aesthetic proclivities…seem to go against the very notion of narrativity” (187)
• “blowing open received structures of signification and mediation” (235)
• BASIC CHARACTERISTIC in ALL of modernism: break with tradition

Critique of our Critical Methods

• New Critical methods unfairly block out history and the social
  • Even if artists themselves say they create autonomous art, why should we take their word for it?
  • Modernism not just a cult of form
• Cultural readings (ie, Marxist, identity theory) of modernism
  • Often act like the artwork is some passive reflection of society or the base (not an intervention or an active part in society)
  • Often forget power of tradition (see Williams quote)
• Actually, poststructuralism dovetails quite well with modernism (think Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva)
• Questions our tendency to see modernism as stable body of works
  • Instead says to recognize that we also create the topic through critical procedure in tandem with the historical facts (“dynamic reciprocity” between critics and the works)
  • His definition of modernism more like a field of cultural and aesthetic changes, the selection of which and the significance of which can be detabed
• Classification is a form of pre-judgment and circular evaluation (51)
  • Judgment: you judge by whether they fit the characteristics of the category
  • Circular: you pick the work by the traits, and the traits by the works
• We too often assume that modernism was the dominant mode of literary production during that time period
• Our selection process often means that our interpretations only work on a small scale (see Williams quote)
• We too often only play lip service to Internationalism of modernism and don’t actually read or incorporate Europe or other places
• Feminist critics sometimes assume too-strict demarcation between the genders of writers
• Danger of the blunt and unnuanced Break with Tradition definition of modernism
  • “Literary history becomes a monotonous succession of works that are born in a moment of modernity and then automatically swallowed up by the autonomous discourse and tradition of literature.” (57)
  • Plus, in that case, you forget to see the entire social background against which modernism revolts (not just tradition of literature, but indeed the whole culture they’re pissed at)
  • Here’s a better answer, he says, using a quote he borrows from Hans-Jurgen Schmitt: “establishing the right ties with the literary heritage”
    • It’s about “drawing from” and “deviating from” and being “critically aware” of your background
    • Nietzsche: You have to be critical of the past AND be willing to forget it (history and anti-history, remembering and forgetting)
  • And an even better answer: Literature and history cross, creating a new literary movement.
    • Not only being bored or frustrated or stimulated by past literature, but also cultural changes lead to new literature
• Overuse of Eliot’s “Ulysses, Order, and Myth” will make you think to narrowly about modernism
  • Presents too shallow an idea about myth
  • Too hegemonic in our criticism today
• Don’t see modernism as just a group of talented individuals, with AG as the token admission towards collectivity and group-work
• Don’t use the AG as an excuse to make modernism seem more traditional and less experimental and revolutionary than it really was
  • It’s a trick of literary criticism to say that modernism was Establishment and Familiar
  • If you look at AG works (NOT the manifestoes!) and compare with modernist works, AG works are no more experimental than the modernist ones, and sometimes the modernist ones are more experimental (compare Joyce’s Ulysses with Breton’s Nadja)
  • Don’t forget the challenging, revolutionary nature of modernist works, even the canonized ones
• On the Avant-Garde
  • Don’t see AG as defined by its frequency of group movements
    • Instead, it’s “historical practice”
    • But I think it’s important!
  • Vigorously anti-Burger (go see the page on Burger’s work)
  • Don’t see AG as the ones who are socially and politically progressive, the ones who have Hope for Society and Action, whereas modernists are hopeless: that idea just comes out of a belief of modernism as merely a formal practice
    • We often will see the sociocultural context for AG but not for modernism
    • (My sidenote: Of course, Modernism/Modernity has really helped to solve this problem since 1990)
  • Don’t regard AG as “primarily to be judged as the soil out of which sprouts the richer growth of modernism and its masterpieces” (146)
• Don’t exaggerate the distance between realism and modernism
  • Don’t forget realism kept happening after 1900
• Doesn’t like the supposed difference between normal language and poetic language
  • Says that the genre the work is in determines whether it’s normal or poetic
• Don’t think modernism ignores the social: its relative autonomy isn’t a complete separation

His Definition of Modernism

• Realism as cultural background that modernism can work actively against (ie, it stands in as the norm of linguistic usage)
• Modernism writing against linguistic norms
  • Modernism as an interruption of modern life, not direct reflection of it
  • “In refusing to communicate according to established socio-semiotic contracts, they seem to imply that there are other modes of communication to be looked for, or even some other modernity to be created.” (7)
• Modernism’s relation to modernization
  • “a vehicle of crisis within the ‘progress’ of modernization.” (26)
  • notice the “within” (not outside or next to or parallel to)
• “A mode of modern practice,” not the mode of modern practice (102)
• I’ve carefully put it all together:
  • Modernism is partly a collaboration with, and partly a revolt from, the literary tradition AND the author’s social, cultural, and historical background, including the extra-literary discourses of the time.
• We should consider “semiotic processes in a social context,” rather than “the mode of expression of individual writers” (85)
  • But isn’t that hard to prove?
• “The text registers the various objects of the characters’ world, but in they way they are processed there is little or confused awareness of their temporal or spatial order and their place ina conventional hierarchy of values.” (126)
  • “One of the chief characteristics of modernism” (126) is this: the “elusive significance of mundane objects…the leveling of the relative hierarchy of thoughts and objects” (127)
• Modernists’ rejection of social values and norms shouldn’t be seen as merely destructive and negative; instead, they pretty much always have an alternative system of values in their minds
  • ie, even if implicitly, these works have a new type of value structure in mind, rather than them wanting to destroy all value
• On the Avant-Garde
  • His only real, constructive statement about it: “Their main target, besides the general burden of tradition, is bourgeois life-praxis and conventional language and discourse,” not other artworks (173)
  • Unsatisfactory conclusion: “functional differences” between the two terms; he doesn’t want to say that avant-garde is merely a subset of modernism nor does he want to separate them
    • Some works can be both
    • AG is to some extent the “cutting edge” of modernism, but it’s more than that too
• Agrees with one point Burger makes, although he wants to say this about all modernism, not just AG:
  • “this historical succession of techniques and styles has been transformed into a simultaneity of the radically disparate.” (Burger 63)
  • Chronological succession yields to spatial simultaneity
  • Easiest example off the top of my head is Ulysses’ “Oxen in the Sun” chapter
• “Modernist discourse confronts the bourgeois self with its fragmented, decentered, and altogether damaged image.” (170)
• Modernism “breaks the shackles of normative instrumental rationality” (237)
• In writing like Joyce’s, “words, syntactic features, and generic qualities strive to break free from their conventional referential functions.”
  • Recognition that “writing has lost its innocence”
  • Thus, it’s false to say it genuinely communicates (212)
• Building off Umberto Eco in A Theory of Semiotics, he says to place modernism “at the boundaries of received conventions and ‘those not yet in existence’”
  • Do they ever actually make codes? Eysteinnson says no: “I do not think modernist practices have decisively changed prevalent signification systems of the cultural order.”
  • But don’t worry about that: modernism to be significant HAS to be pushed up against some kind of dominant discourse (219): it only makes sense when it’s an oppositional activity
  • “Can at least hint what it is like not to be caught up in the prevalent sociosymbolic network of meaning.” (220)
  • It just opens up the potentiality for new codes (me: and indeed if it gave any code then it would defeat its own purposes and just become another hegemonic discourse)
• Modernist texts are open forms that multiply meaning and possibility
  • Building off Iser (“overdetermination does not…produce semantic clarity but on the contrary splits the text up into a whole semantic spectrum,” says Iser) and Eco (“the interplay of various codes and subcodes, makes the message (or the text) appear as an empty form to which can be attributed various possible sense,” says Eco) (221)
  • Modernism doesn’t give specific answers, but instead opens up the field for considering a new, non-hegemonic way to communicate
• “The communicative crisis we associate with modernism can be described as an urge to carry out the act of reference without the instrumental function of reference.” (231)
  • Ey says this instead of saying that modernism has no reference (ie the formalist interp he so hates)
• “Dialectical relationship of modernism and realism is of utmost significance,” but make sure not to over-oppose them: they aren’t to be clearly delineated all the time (182)
  • Mann and Flaubert, for example, seem to be both realist and modernist
  • Realism shouldn’t just be a straw man
  • You can’t forget the third term of pop culture, which isn’t just realism
  • Differences between realism and modernism not just a crude matter of style: must reflect the attitude of the text towards the production of meaning (clear? or in crisis? does it disrupt or not the process of meaning making?)
• Modernism, via defamiliarization, does have a social aspect
  • Modernism does not hide from the social, isolated in the lonely playground of formal experimentation
  • Modernism challenges “social and ideological norms” (199)
• Interruption
  • Very much like defamiliarization, he admits
  • “a revolt against perceptual and ideological anesthesia” (203)
  • “a dialectical hesitation, as it were, between sense and non-sense” (238)
• Modernism as Negativity
  • Modernism can only be understood from within a context of realist or rationalist discourse
  • It doesn’t make sense to think about it on its own: it only matters in opposition, as “negativity”
  • “only preserves its significance against the background of the tradition that produces and legitimates that discourse” (205-6)
• Modernism Only As Negativity
  • “It does so without providing a ‘new’ culture; rather, it functions at a second remove from capitalist-bourgeois symbolic order” (208)
  • “remained in a position of potential challenge to the cultural order” (219)
• Modernism as Canceled Realism
  • This is Jameson’s term, and he takes it
• Modernism Doesn’t Claim Holism
  • “It is precisely to elude incorporation into a holistic continuum, reflecting in the organic wholeness of individual works, that modernism manifests itself in nonorganic texts.” (209)
• Modernists texts can “reprocess the messages of the culture industry” by stripping them of their contexts, because they have “disjointed structures”
  • Ideally, then, the reader is stimulated to do so himself/herself (227), thus becoming political tool (228) to tear apart the process whereby hegemonic powers control folks through rhetoric
• Why should modernists focus on language at this moment?
  • “As a historical paradigm, then, modernism is caught between the crisis or even breakdown of modern rational discourse and the attempts of that very discourse to critique its own social or ideological effects and functions.” (240)
  • Modernism wants you to go beyond rational discourse even though it can’t show you an example of such a new discourse
• Modernism, Hero (238)
  • As dialectic between cultural force and formalism
  • It opens up a space for critique and liberates you from rational discourse
  • Shows you link between hegemony and rhetoric, so you can free yourself from those chains

Contradictions of Modernism

• Relation to Chaos
  • Three Different Potential Readings
    • Seems to reflect the chaos of society
    • Seems to order the chaos of society
    • Seems to make chaos out of ordered society
  • Sometimes society has created the chaos, and other times art has
  • My answer: What they’re truly horrified about is the survival of the old order despite the superficial (or even not superficial) evidence that it’s gone
    • The best and the worst of it, in that everything is shaky and yet you aren’t free to do what you want
    • Eysteinnson seems to agree with me: “retreat of social power into subtler and more dispersed, but no less hegemonic, forms” (141)
• Seems to be both subjectivist (ie, expressionism, Surrealism) yet impersonal (Eliot in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” saying that poetry “is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality,” which makes art “depersonalized” and like “the condition of science”)
  • Eysteinnson’s solution: modernism is a revolt against the traditional understanding of subjectivity, whether it seems to be hyper-personal or impersonal
  • Eysteinnson’s solution: the artist has subjective inspiration, but uses formalism to distance self from work (“interplay of spontaneous reactions of subjective faculties and a ‘distancing’ effects caused by elaborate formal mediation” 32)
• Modernist art is the negative of society: it shows the unfortunate social reality that comes with the ideological territory of technological and economic progress
  • Modernism presents “social experience that contradicts the ‘official’ ideology of coherence and progress that is interwoven with technological and capitalist-economic development.” (38)
  • Further claims that to make this cultural negation, you have to “revolt against traditional narrative modes”

Other Folks He Quotes

• Richard Poirier, “The Difficulties of Modernism and the Modernism of Difficulty”
  • “Modernism is associated with being unhappy”
  • “one of its primary purposes is to expose the factitiousness of its own local procedures.” (216)
    • Doing so makes reading more like writing, Poirier asserts

• Trilling, “On the Modern Element in Modern Literature”
  • Modernism incompatible with modern society (ie, brings out human irrationality and subversion society doesn’t like)

• Levenson, A Genealogy of Modernism
  • “Modernism was individualist before it was anti-individualist, anti-traditional before it was traditional, inclined to anarchism before it was inclined to authoritarianism.”
  • A nice chronological layout of what I suspect is probably more of a spatial configuration!

• Auerbach, Mimesis
  • Modernism has “a certain atmosphere of universal doom”

• Foucault, The Order of Things
  • Bourgeois = language taken away from representation and towards utilitarian ends until Mallarme and Nietzsche, at which time “thought was brought back, and violently so, towards language itself”

• Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature
  • Marxist critics too often forget tradition, thinking it “inert,” where it actually is “an actively shaping force”
  • Selective Tradition: our powers of definition require us to make decisions of selection (so our ideas are necessarily narrow at the base)
    • Eysteinnson uses it to say that often, our interpretive frameworks only apply to a few people

• Rene Wellek, Theory of Literature
  • “The period is not an ideal type or an abstract pattern or a series of class concepts, but a time section, dominated by a whole system of norms, which no work of art will realize in its entirety.”
  • Kind of a picking and choosing, mix n match model

• Douwe Fokkema, Literary History, Modernism, and Postmodernism
  • “selection of hypothetical constructions expressing uncertainty and provisionality”

• Kermode, The Sense of an Ending
  • Modernism’s “totalitarian use of form” reflects the “authoritarian society”

• Alice Jardine, Gynesis
  • “To assume that the two sexes and their imaginations can be somehow separated [is incompatible with] the major challenges of modernity’s fiction.”

• Marinetti, 1901 manifesto
  • Goes to museum “just as one goes to the graveyard on All Soul’s Day.”
  • “Admiring an old painting is the same as pouring our sensibility into a funerary urn, instead of hurling it far off, in violent spasms of action and creation.”

• Harry Levin, “What Was Modernism?”
  • Modernists as “the giant race” (implies “bunch of great authors” history)

• Robert Alter, Partial Magic
  • Modernists “retain a residue of belief in the large possibility of capturing reality in fiction”

• Craig Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse”
  • In modernism, “the art object itself can be substituted (metaphorically) for its referent.”
  • ie, that the art doesn’t have a real referent at all
  • This is another one of the too formalizing accounts of modernism

• Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect”
  • “In traditional realist writing, details that are not there for any specific symbolic reason, but simply to serve to naturalize the environment and present the message: this is mundane ‘reality,’ this is ‘life.’” (127)

• Susan Sontag, “Approaching Artaud”
  • “The unintelligible in Finnegans Wake not only is decipherable, with effort, but is meant to be deciphered.” (128)

• Jurgen Habermas
  • For the bourgeois subject, art lets you take in the “quasi-illegal in the material life of bourgeois society,” like “mimetic commerce with nature,” “solidary being with others,” and “happiness of a communicative experience which is not subject to the imperative of means-ends rationality and allows as much scope to the imagination as to the spontaneity of behavior”

• M H Abrams, Glossary of Literary Terms
  • AG: “a small, self-conscious group of artists and authors who undertake, in Ezra Pound’s phrase, to ‘make it new.’”
  • Of course, Eysteinnson hates that! It isn’t based in poetics (ie actual differences) and often leads to making value judgments (ie, they didn’t produce good work but only left the way for modernists to make their new good.)

• Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde
  • On the future for modernists: “The present is valid only by virtue of the potentialities of the future, as the matrix of the future, insofar as it is the forge of history in continual metamorphosis, seen as a permanent spiritual revolution.” (149)

• Charles Russell, Poets, Prophets, and Revolutionaries
  • “in essence, modernists prize order—both aesthetic and political” (160)

• Terry Eagleton, “Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism”
  • Talking about postmodernism, but could be applied to modernism as one of its possible dangers, I would say, “the very autonomy and brute self-identity… is the effect of its thorough integration into an economic system where such autonomy, in the form of the commodity fetish, is the order of the day.” (171)
  • Of course, it could be a mistake to try to import this thesis into a different historical era, but I would say that the danger was lurking already….

• Benjamin, “The Origin of German Tragic Drama” (qtd 211)
  • As a “thinly veiled” theory of modernism
  • Before m’ism, allegories linked substance with essence, the material with the transcendent
    • An artwork would be one of those allegories
  • But now, it’s all ruins: “it is as something incomplete and imperfect that objects stare out from the allegorical structure
    • “false appearance of totality is extinguished”

• Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”
  • “In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it.” (241)

• Fredric Jameson, Fables of Aggression, on Lewis
  • “the rhetorical and instrumental subordination of narrative language to narrative representation can no longer be taken for granted”

• Fredric Jameson, “Reflections in Conclusion”
  • Realism is a healthy corrective for modernism
  • When m’ism has become a “dominant style,” “the habit of fragmentation itself needs to be ‘estranged’ and corrected by a more totalizing way of viewing phenomena.”
  • My question: why see it as chronological succession? Can’t we see it as a spatial simultaneity, in the same text?

• Paul Valery, “Poetry and Abstract Thought”
  • “We understand each other, and ourselves, only thanks to our rapid passage over words”
  • Compare this to the “poetic state,” wherein, “I found myself for a time jolted out of my habitual state of mind”

• Louis Althusser, Essay on ISAs
  • Ideology definition: “represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.”

• Hans Robert Jauss, Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics
  • “must rid itself of the abstract ‘either/or’ of negativity and affirmation and attempt to turn the norm-breaking forms of avant-gardist art into norm-creating achievements of aesthetic experience.” (214)
    • Especially to recover the “communicative efficacy” of the work: modernism should apparently have a message to send after all
  • We certainly don’t have to accept this view!
    • Although it does make the view that m’ism became boringly institutional a little more clear

• Wayne Booth, Rhetoric of Fiction
  • “the most successful reader is one in which the created selves, author and reader, can find complete agreement.” (215)
  • But m’ism is so antagonistic…!

• Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders
  • “the substantial function of literature is to secure consent. To make individuals feel ‘at ease’ in the world they happen to live in, to reconcile them in a pleasant and imperceptible way to its prevailing cultural norms.”
  • ouch!
  • For Eysteinnson’s “modernist writing does not perpetrate…passive reception,” that it at least is an exception to that rule

• Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading
  • More about the unfamiliar than just supporting the known
  • “the reader’s enjoyment begins when he himself becomes productive” and the reader has to “fill in the gaps left by the text itself” (217)
  • reader is “almost exclusively occupied with the search for the connections between the fragments”
  • His Terms: “consistency-building” (the reader tries to create a consistent pattern) versus the “gaps”

• Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double
  • “We are not referring to life as we know it from its surface of fact, but to that fragile, fluctuating center which forms never reach.”
  • But just in case you think he’s going to join hands with Woolf, he continues:
    • “And if there is still one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames.” (232)
  • “To turn against language and its utilitarian, one could say alimentary, sources.”

• Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language
  • “Poetic revolution” of modernism: “departs from the signified and the transcendental ego and makes of what is known as ‘literature’ something other than knowledge: the very place where social code is destroyed and renewed.” (235)
  • Super-cool.

Random Notes

• What forestalls many statements about modernism is an unwillingness to admit that some differences are of intensity, not of type (of quantity, not of quality): what makes modernism different is the amount of self-consciousness involved in a certain method—not just the method alone
• Fate of realism during modernist period?
• My definition of modernism?
• Signification: Foucault in The Order of Things: “in the modern age, literature is that which compensates for (and not that which confirms) the signifying function of language” (77)
• Avant-garde more in Europe than in US or UK
• Defamiliarization as “oscillating between liberation from meaning and an inquiry into the very production of meaning” (115)
• Why should modernists care about the unconscious? It is nonsignifying, so it represents the inexpressible.