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This introductory chapter discusses masculinity. It looks at male writers, who slowly found themselves being embroiled in a “battle of the sexes”, which left marks everywhere on the virtually all-male terrain of High Modernism. It also discusses male modernists, who were determined to carve out an aesthetic man's land, and highlights the purpose and content of the book. It describes a century's worth of studies of modernism, and brings up the question of the concept of a masculinist modernism.

This introductory chapter traces a process of cultural transformation that, beginning in the early decades of the twentieth century, led to the rise after World War II of the phenomenon called slapstick modernism. Manifesting itself in literature, (underground) film, and popular music, the rise of slapstick modernism signaled the coalescence in cultural practice of the artistic experimentation associated with high modernism, and the socially disruptive lunacy linked to the comic film genre. However, the concept of slapstick modernism has yet to receive adequate theorization; this is partly due to the insufficiency of the terms initially used to capture the specificity of this new, hybrid cultural entity. Slapstick modernism had no manifesto of the sort that mobilized the various avant-garde ventures of the early decades of the twentieth century.

This chapter illustrates how the concert programming of the Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) embodied an extremely coherent and forceful canonization of twentieth-century high-musical modernism. It explains that IRCAM's resources were channeled into three powerful and legitimizing displacements. These include the interpretation of the musical past, the development of technology and pure science around music, and the assertion of a realm of utopian and scientific thought and theory closely linked to composition.

While the “mainstream” has marked itself off as the jazz style associated with tradition and as the bearers of Monk's legacy into the present, musicians who do not fit into the mainstream mold have found Monk's musical legacy an important point of reference and source of creativity. This chapter looks at a number of countermainstream claims on Monk's legacy, on the line of high modernism, exploring a diverse body of music from players who are not part of the neo-bop movement, but who also do not fit neatly into another particular subgroup. Lacy, Rudd, and Weston are particularly interesting to consider when thinking about the historical implications of Monk's music and its ability to impact jazz over time, because much of their work has dealt with Monk's music. All of this music plays an indispensable role in shaping the impressions of Monk as a historical figure and as a composer-performer.

This chapter concerns the period of high modernism, when expansive ambitions of scientific progress promised new foods from a variety of fantastical sources, including algae grown on sewage, fungi grown on oil, and inedible leaves that could be boiled into protein curd. These projects encapsulated the vision of a cheap, efficient, mass-produced famine treatment that could finally end starvation. Beginning with Leaf Protein Concentrate, which emerged from postwar investigations into food shortage, high modernist hopes soon moved to less appetizing foods made from algae and junk fish, driven by an even more futuristic and top-down vision of life emerging from primordial sources. After this initial burst of enthusiasm came a different high modernist concept: the complete nutritional wonder-product, which was meant to offer a balanced meal in a simple powder or sachet. After generating great interest in aid agencies, this ideology began to go into decline by the early 1970s, limited by expense, complexity, and fundamental impracticality.

This chapter stems from something of a paradigm shift, as it is devoted to the problematic representation of sexuality or the consequences of that representation in the works of the two most important authors of French high modernism, Colette and Proust. Colette's gynocentric writing is shown here to undo the stability of the sign system so that representations and plot take on ambiguous meanings, especially where questions of gender and sexuality are concerned. The novel Chéri, is considered as gender-binding as it produces similar lines to Proust that need no introduction, but still the author manages to present an analysis of two other figures which rewrites fictional prose, wherein the analysis falls from two cases that involves the examination of ethical position and astonishment on the emotional level.

In the immediate aftermath of the Great War, modernist magazines largely relinquished the provocative experiments of early modernism for the consolidation of achievements referred to as high modernism, a consolidation that involved increased specialization within disciplines. This chapter examines the histories of Art and Letters and The Apple (of Beauty and Discord), both products of the transition between these two phases of modernism. Both retain something of early modernism's heterogeneity, yet are also distinctively post-war in their sense of cultural mission.

This chapter focuses on Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret) and his contributions to High Modernism. His work is said to mark a turning point in the development of Western architecture, a radical and self-conscious departure from the artistic legacy of the nineteenth century. Together with Amédée Ozenfant, Le Corbusier proposed purism, a new movement that dismissed the old notion of naturalism in favor of abstraction of objects in painting. Unlike Victorians, he saw no conflict between the work of an artist and an engineer and merged aesthetic and technical considerations. Moreover, while running L’Esprit Nouveau, he challenged the romantic notion of an artist and intellectual and positioned himself as a businessman, a manager in charge of the magazine’s commercial promotion.

The interwar Zagreb journal Zenit (1921–1926) staged experiments with word and image, and included texts in two alphabets and in at least five languages. The small but ambitious group of artists and writers associated with the journal strove to evolve a radical, collective, and ephemeral new form of art. This early Balkan avant-garde sought to turn its double marginalization into an advantage. The essay argues that this deeply self-conscious avant-garde evolved radical notions of “marginal art,” anticipating debates in the Frankfurt school and ongoing today. The ideas of Zenit move beyond the historical avant-garde. This chapter raises broader questions about art practice and the cultural heritage of the twentieth century. The Balkan avant-garde offers an antithesis to the monuments of high modernism. Despite the evident differences, a profound continuity exists with other ongoing cultural debates about marginalization and competition with dominant cultures.

This chapter shows how a cast of young architects and their reform-minded older colleagues strove to save the city by correcting the mistakes of high modernism and imbuing the urban core with humane proportions and highlights. It describes urban ingenuity that meant working within a layered, diverse, and at times chaotic bureaucracy that is laden with jaded and corrupt offices. It also refers to Leipzig's young chief architect Dietmar Fischer, who spearheaded a campaign to reconcile modern methods with historical substance. The chapter discusses preservationists that sought to save architectural relics as landmarks for local identity, such as their own offices in the mid-1970s. It examines financial, material, and labor shortfalls inherent in East Germany's industrialized mass-production economy that helped ensure Fischer's fusion of small-scale Plattenbau to remain a prototype without successors.

This essay analyzes James Joyce's Chamber Music, which was at once renounced and embraced by Joyce, but has its own integrity and aesthetic aims. It considers Chamber Music's intrinsic and historical meaning by focusing on its genesis as well as the context against which it appeared. The goal is to take Chamber Music out of the context of High Modernism and insert it more properly in the time the poetry came into being—the period roughly between 1901 and 1907—and the places that had an impact on its production: Dublin and London. Moving between digital methods and poetic analysis, the essay examines the traditions in which Joyce couches Chamber Music as well as W. B. Yeats's place in its history. It suggests that Joyce and Yeats share feelings about the relationships of art and politics as well as affinities of poetic form.

It is central for international relations to support state- and nation-building; “nation-building” entails forging common national identities, and “state-building” consists of establishing infrastructures to enhance governance. This chapter examines some of the ways that nation-states have been made—through narratives, ideas, and practices as well as through technologies and infrastructures—and how this has been reproduced in Israel/Palestine. Various disciplines were recruited to the service of nation-state building. Cartography helped stake out a territory, history and archaeology were used to make claims on it, and geographers were called on to formulate a new geography of the new homeland. At the same time, the Zionist vision and a Jewish metaculture as well as the quasi-state institutions of the Yishuv contributed to the establishment of the Israeli state. Throughout the 20th century, the high-modernist state used science and technology to take on its people as a state project. Israel exemplifies how the use of science and technology contributed to the belief that a society, its people, and its territories could be known, managed, and improved. Science and technology charted grand new futures for societies, furthering scientific and technical frontiers, expanding the power of states, and leaving behind all those people and lands that were not considered part of the state-building process.