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. |
From inside the book
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Page ix
... emotional investment in artificial beings . Moving from those ( relatively ) innocent pleasures through various academic modes of studying literature and art , I have regularly run into ways of dividing the texts I enjoyed into those ...
... emotional investment in artificial beings . Moving from those ( relatively ) innocent pleasures through various academic modes of studying literature and art , I have regularly run into ways of dividing the texts I enjoyed into those ...
Page 20
... emotion rather than arousing it . But the di- vide , expressed frequently in terms derived from Tate's influ- ential essay , continued to manifest itself in the critical prose of Eliot himself and all the New Critics . The problem ...
... emotion rather than arousing it . But the di- vide , expressed frequently in terms derived from Tate's influ- ential essay , continued to manifest itself in the critical prose of Eliot himself and all the New Critics . The problem ...
Page 31
... emotions - Wordsworth's greatest poems are driven by that Low emotion , sentimentality , though these feel- ings are controlled by great syntactic and semantic powers . And so are many of the monuments of Modernism , if we can only get ...
... emotions - Wordsworth's greatest poems are driven by that Low emotion , sentimentality , though these feel- ings are controlled by great syntactic and semantic powers . And so are many of the monuments of Modernism , if we can only get ...
Page 47
... emotions which would have been unnatural in the period itself . To illustrate big things by small ones I feel , myself , a repugnance towards the Weltanshauung ( as distinct from the technical part ) of all philosophy since the ...
... emotions which would have been unnatural in the period itself . To illustrate big things by small ones I feel , myself , a repugnance towards the Weltanshauung ( as distinct from the technical part ) of all philosophy since the ...
Page 62
... emotional , having more to do with what is represented and less with how it is represented . And this is the crux of the debate between what we should perhaps think of as the Radical Modernists and the Conservative Modernists , or ...
... emotional , having more to do with what is represented and less with how it is represented . And this is the crux of the debate between what we should perhaps think of as the Radical Modernists and the Conservative Modernists , or ...
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 argue artists Beatrice Hastings beauty Berry brothel called chapter characters Clement Greenberg comedy course Cubist culture discussion Dornford Yates doxy drawing durable fluff Eisenstein Eliot emotion English Epstein ernism essay Ezra Pound fiction formula French Georges Simenon Greenberg Gwendolen Hastings Henri Gaudier-Brzeska High and Low Hulme Hulme's images irony issue Joyce Joyce's Kiki Kiki's kind kitsch Lady Bracknell literary literature London look Ludovici Lukács magazine Marcel mediocrity middlebrow Modernist Modernist critical modes Modigliani montage narrative narrator Neo-Realists never Nina Hamnett painter painting paradoxy of Modernism Paris passage perhaps Picasso play pleasure poem poet poetry Post-Impressionist Pound Proust readers realistic rhetoric scene seems sentiment serious Simenon social story T. E. Hulme T. S. Eliot texts things thought tion translation ture turn Ulysses visual art Walter Sickert Woolf word writers Wyndham Lewis