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
... pleasures that we all derive from 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 ...
... pleasures that we all derive from 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 ...
Page xiii
... pleasure , assuming the risk of paradoxical dis- course myself . The emphasis in Part II , then , will be on pleasurable writ- ers and texts , best described by paradoxical categories - with paradox itself functioning here as a kind of ...
... pleasure , assuming the risk of paradoxical dis- course myself . The emphasis in Part II , then , will be on pleasurable writ- ers and texts , best described by paradoxical categories - with paradox itself functioning here as a kind of ...
Page 6
... pleasure found in these works and was trying to exorcize the demon from his consciousness. But my serious point here is that multiplying the zeroes and inten- sifying the meaninglessness simply will not work. Literary texts cannot be ...
... pleasure found in these works and was trying to exorcize the demon from his consciousness. But my serious point here is that multiplying the zeroes and inten- sifying the meaninglessness simply will not work. Literary texts cannot be ...
Page 8
... pleasures of art without the work . High equals difficult ; Low equals easy . High art offers pain , which the cultivated can transmute , with effort , into pleasure ; Low art offers its pleasures directly . Greenberg com- pares T. S. ...
... pleasures of art without the work . High equals difficult ; Low equals easy . High art offers pain , which the cultivated can transmute , with effort , into pleasure ; Low art offers its pleasures directly . Greenberg com- pares T. S. ...
Page 10
... pleasure we derive from works of art has to do with our recog- nition of formulaic patterns — and this includes music , visual art , and verbal art . This is an important and complex matter that deserves a chapter of its own , which it ...
... pleasure we derive from works of art has to do with our recog- nition of formulaic patterns — and this includes music , visual art , and verbal art . This is an important and complex matter that deserves a chapter of its own , which it ...
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