Paradoxy of ModernismIn this lively, personal book, Robert Scholes intervenes in ongoing discussions about modernism in the arts during the crucial half-century from 1895 to 1945. While critics of and apologists for modernism have defined modern art and literature in terms of binary oppositions—high/low, old/new, hard/soft, poetry/rhetoric—Scholes contends that these distinctions are in fact confused and misleading. Such oppositions are instances of “paradoxy”—an apparent clarity that covers real confusion. Closely examining specific literary texts, drawings, critical writings, and memoirs, Scholes seeks to complicate the neat polar oppositions attributed to modernism. He argues for the rehabilitation of works in the middle ground that have been trivialized in previous evaluations, and he fights orthodoxy with such paradoxes as “durable fluff,” “formulaic creativity,” and “iridescent mediocrity.” The book reconsiders major figures like James Joyce while underscoring the value of minor figures and addressing new attention to others rarely studied. It includes twenty-two illustrations of the artworks discussed. Filled with the observations of a personable and witty guide, this is a book that opens up for a reader’s delight the rich cultural terrain of modernism. |
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Page 29
... French Revolution, and in great social changes brought about by urbanization (“the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident”) and by “the rapid ...
... French Revolution, and in great social changes brought about by urbanization (“the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident”) and by “the rapid ...
Page 36
... French, an associate of Shackleton—but the most interesting contribution came from a critic and historian of art then living in Paris: Victor Reynolds. Reynolds argued that people still continue to talk of neo-impressionism and of newer ...
... French, an associate of Shackleton—but the most interesting contribution came from a critic and historian of art then living in Paris: Victor Reynolds. Reynolds argued that people still continue to talk of neo-impressionism and of newer ...
Page 38
... French masters shows the influence of Egyptian or very early Greek work. Austere, unimpassioned, exquisitely simple, it is as far removed in feeling from that of Rodin as is the latter in his turn from the bronze or marble twaddle which ...
... French masters shows the influence of Egyptian or very early Greek work. Austere, unimpassioned, exquisitely simple, it is as far removed in feeling from that of Rodin as is the latter in his turn from the bronze or marble twaddle which ...
Page 52
... French primitives of the Ecole d'Avignon. It is carried through the dark period of the Poussins and Lebruns by Les Frčres le Nain; in the eighteenth century by Chardin; in the nineteenth by Courbet and the Impressionists, and unbroken ...
... French primitives of the Ecole d'Avignon. It is carried through the dark period of the Poussins and Lebruns by Les Frčres le Nain; in the eighteenth century by Chardin; in the nineteenth by Courbet and the Impressionists, and unbroken ...
Page 96
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Contents
1 | |
3 | |
33 | |
Poetry and Rhetoric in the Modernist Montage | 95 |
Hard and Soft Joyce and Others | 120 |
PART II Paradoxes | 141 |
Durable Fluff The Importance of Not Being Earnest | 143 |
Iridescent Mediocrity Dornford Yates and Others | 162 |
Formulaic CreativitySimenons Maigret Novels | 195 |
PART III Doxies | 219 |
Model Artists in ParisHastings Hamnett and Kiki | 221 |
The Aesthete in the Brothel Proust and Others | 257 |
Works Cited | 281 |
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Common terms and phrases
abstract aesthetic Anthony Ludovici artists Beatrice Hastings beauty Berry brothel called chapter characters Clement Greenberg Cubist culture defined definition different difficult discussion Dornford Yates doxy drawing durable fluff effect Eisenstein Eliot emotion English Epstein ernism essay Ezra Pound fiction fictional figures film final find finished first five flat formula French Greenberg Hastings Henri Gaudier-Brzeska Hulme Hulme’s images Joyce Joyce’s Kiki Kiki’s kind kitsch Lady Bracknell literary literature look Ludovici Lukács magazine Maigret mediocrity middlebrow Modernist Modernist critical modes Modigliani montage never Nina Hamnett novel off offered painter painting paradoxy of Modernism Paris passage Picasso play pleasure poem poet poetry Post-Impressionist Pound Proust reader reflection rhetoric role seems sentiment serious Simenon social story T. E. Hulme T. S. Eliot texts things thought tion translation ture turn visual art Walter Sickert Wilde’s Woolf word writers Wyndham Lewis