Andrew's Wiki
Ideology Modernism

• Modernism refuses to create lasting types, but only makes shadowy figures that are akin to a nightmare, not reality
  • Thus, modernism has shady anti-humanism that is “a glorification in the abnormal”
• “Modernist literature thus replaces concrete typicality with abstract particularity”
  • Though modernist novels do include realist details, they are always there to stand in for some metaphor: for allegorical meaning
  • These concrete details are never themselves, nor do they contribute to a picture of reality
• Modernists focus on the “pathological” rather than the typical
  • Evidence: obsession w/Freud
  • They depict homicidal maniacs and what he calls “mentally-retarded perverts”
• “�modernism leads not only to the destruction of traditional literary forms; it leads to the destruction of literature as such”
• “Innumerable possibilities for man�s development are imaginable, only a small percentage of which will be realized. Modern subjectivism, taking these imagined possibilities for actual complexity of life, oscillates between melancholy and fascination. When the world declines to realize these possibilities, this melancholy becomes tinged with contempt.”
• Realism and modernism: antitheses; but recognizes that the same person could have both of these tendencies at the same time
  • Realism: Shax, Stendhal, Balzac
• What’s modernism? (Kafka, Joyce, Beckett)
  • Formalism: technique becomes “something absolute,” the work itself
    • In modernism, technique is the only “principle governing the narrative pattern and the presentation of character.”
  • Modernism’s Weltenschauung (view of the world): “static and sensational”
    • Atemporal
    • Interior
  • What’s wrong with that?
    • He does see the condition of man RIGHT NOW as a victim of anomie, but that’s an historical product; every individuality, and its significance, is a creation of the context
      • Negation of history
    • Character divorced from action in historical circumstances: no praxis b/c history is divorced from character. You can’t write a book that shows the path to Revolution if your character isn’t presented as a result of history but instead as a timeless representative of humanity
    • More Specifically: the alienated, fragmented subject is the condition of man, so man is ahistorical (Eagleton on Lukacs: “no reality beyond the self” so that the individual and history are screwed up b/c their dialectic isn’t represented). Modernists ACCEPT humans as isolated.
    • “Silent” and “locked up”
  • No clear plot
• What’s realism?
  • “dynamic and developmental”
  • Where style “is rooted in content; it is the specific form of a specific content”
  • Realist has a vast array of literary “devices” (tropes, forms) that he choose for specific ends
  • “hierarchy of significance”
  • not about creating trompe d’oeil (not about total accuracy of the picture): what you should represent is the working of the dialectic in history: struggles and contradictions
• Modernist Subject
  • “reduced to a sequence of unrelated experiential fragments; he is as inexplicable to others as to himself.”
  • Why? B/c not connex to action
  • For Lukacs, the only interesting interior movement is that which leads to a CHOICE
• Modernists like to hover around “potentiality” (possibilities for action in the mind); whereas realism finally chooses one of the possibilities and makes it a reality
  • Modernists: “bad infinity” b/c purely abstract (ie Ulysses)
  • “Abstract potentiality belongs to the realm of subjectivity; whereas concrete potentiality is concerned with the dialectic between the individual�s subjectivity and the objective reality. The literary presentation of the latter thus implies a description of actual persons inhabiting a palpable, identifiable world.”
• The Good Example: Mann’s Lotte in Weimar: Mann is a social animal, Aristotle’s “zoon politikon”

Thanks For the Lukacs Quotes:

• http://othervoices.org/blevee/lukacs.php#Call_40
• http://studiesinfiction.blogspot.com/2006/01/views-on-history-lukcs-synthesis-and.html

Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation

• “a powerful, in many ways brilliant, attack” 88
• modernism is allegorical 88
• says that the best stuff in Lukacs’ essay was really the stuff he quotes from Benjamin, whom we should really be reading
• 89 she appreciates his moralism and sympathy and his unfailing commitment, but really he’s not as sharp as Adorno, Marcuse, etc