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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abstract aesthetic Anthony Ludovici argue artists Beatrice Hastings 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 iridescent Joyce Joyce's Kiki Kiki's kind kitsch Lady Bracknell literary literature London look Ludovici Lukács magazine Marcel means mediocrity middlebrow Modern Art Modernist Modernist critical modes Modigliani montage narrator Neo-Realists never Nina Hamnett painter painting paradoxy of Modernism Paris 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 Wilde's Woolf word writers Wyndham Lewis
References to this book
Resisting History: Gender, Modernity, and Authorship in William Faulkner ... Barbara Ladd Limited preview - 2007 |