An English based appraisal of Modernism and the 21st Century

Abstract

This article gives a brief background to modernist art and literary modernism, considers literary modernisms and the modernist arts in a series of unfolding relations with society and culture in both national and transnational settings, and suggests that modernism should be thought of as an overdetermined, overlapping, and multiply networked range of practices which were always caught up in a dialectical process of affirmation and negation. It examines the interactions among various intellectual traditions, cultures, and genres, and explores the interplay between social, economic, and technological developments and the artistic practices of modernism.

Keywords: modernist art, literary modernism, society, dialectical process, traditions, culture, artistic practices

Introduction

The field of modernist studies has changed enormously over recent years and the aim of this Handbook is to take the measure of this new terrain. A number of factors have contributed to the ongoing redefinition of what we now understand by the term ‘modernism’. The impact of postmodernism has led to a re‐evaluation of the entity supposedly left behind and has resulted in a resurgence of interest in the variety of modernisms and a relative decline in discussion of postmodernism. Challenges to earlier accounts of modernism as a pre‐eminently masculine enterprise (with one or two honorary women writers included at the margins) have been made by feminist scholars who have radically altered the ways in which modernism is now conceived. This is a question not just of including once forgotten (or marginalized) writers, texts, and movements but of rethinking the frames of reference according to which such forgetting, and marginalizing occurred in the first place.

Exactly the same point must be made about the post‐colonial critique of earlier theorizations of modernism, or about the questions addressed to modernism from lesbian or queer perspectives. No less important has been the renewed attention given in recent years to modernism’s transnational configurations (perhaps especially to the geographical criss‐crossings of the international avant‐gardes), which, it is now clear, cannot be restricted primarily to Europe or to the United States. Much of the work done on modernism’s multiple and shifting locations has been interdisciplinary in orientation, drawing on such diverse disciplines as anthropology, architecture, art (p. 2) history, book history, design, film studies, performance and theatre studies, philosophy, photography, and theology. This interdisciplinary points to a key feature of this Handbook: its recognition that no account of modernism can hope to be fully comprehensive, but that any account must register its overdetermined, cross‐disciplinary, international, and institutional affiliations.

Research in modernist studies since the late 1980s has moved away from an earlier emphasis on the aesthetic and towards a more culturally ‘thick’ sense of modernism’s multiple connections to a wide variety of non‐aesthetic practices. This doesn’t mean that the aesthetic, which was championed in different ways by various modernists, as well as by such influential critics as Clement Greenberg and Theodor Adorno, has been bracketed off or jettisoned, but rather that it is no longer assumed to be the principal issue at stake in discussions of modernism and its legacies. No less important is the need to grasp where modernism(s) emerged; how they developed; by what means they were produced, disseminated, and publicized; in what relationship they stood to other artistic and cultural forms, which might be (or might in the past have been) regarded as non‐modernist; which institutions (publishing houses, magazines, newspapers, galleries, museums, educational establishments, etc.) put modernism on view, promoted its claims, and constructed it as a corpus of works, an artistic entity with an identifiable—if not always coherent or unified—identity.