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Prehistory: Modernism, Postmodernism, and Music

Born Georgina

in Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez, and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde

This chapter examines musical modernism in relation to the Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM). It shows that the major characteristics of IRCAM culture are prefigured ... More

This chapter examines musical modernism in relation to the Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM). It shows that the major characteristics of IRCAM culture are prefigured not only by musical modernism, but by significant features of modernist art in general, and suggests that the evolution of musical modernism must be understood within the context of broader cultural-historical forces. The chapter characterizes modernism and postmodernism in music, and considers experimental musical as musical postmodernism.Less

Narration in Modern Cinema

András Bálint Kovács

in Screening Modernism: European Art Cinema, 1950–1980

By far the most spectacular formal characteristic of modern cinema is the way it handles narration and how that relates to storytelling. Modern art cinema's problem regarding narration was summarized ... More

By far the most spectacular formal characteristic of modern cinema is the way it handles narration and how that relates to storytelling. Modern art cinema's problem regarding narration was summarized by Gilles Deleuze. All problems of storytelling stem from the disconnection of human actions from traditional routines or patterns of human relationships. This is what Deleuze refers to as the fundamental “disbelief” in the world, what is commonly referred to as “modern alienation.” Much of the work of mapping modern art cinema's narrative techniques has been done by David Bordwell in his seminal work Narration in the Fiction Film. This chapter explores the problems of the narration of the “modernist art film” in comparison with the “classical art film.” It also discusses the abstract individual and looks at Carl Gustav Jung's description of the “modern soul.” The chapter furthermore looks at Nöel Burch's analysis of the modern film, focusing on his views about the use of chance “in the creation of works with multiple modes of performance.”Less

Introduction

Greg Barnhisel

in Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy

This introductory chapter first discusses the evolution of modernism from its image of rebellion and relentless pursuit of the new during the first half of the twentieth century into a weapon in the ... More

This introductory chapter first discusses the evolution of modernism from its image of rebellion and relentless pursuit of the new during the first half of the twentieth century into a weapon in the so-called “cultural Cold War” in the 1950s. Modernism came to be presented as a pro-Western, pro-“freedom,” and pro-bourgeois movement, evidence of the superiority of the Western way of life over Communism. The chapter then sets out the book's three aims: (i) to use original archival sources to document the diverse projects to disseminate American modernist art and literature abroad, particularly in Europe, in the period 1946—1959; (ii) to identify, synthesize, and analyze the rhetoric surrounding these projects, in particular how it attached seemingly incongruous American values such as freedom and individualism to modernist artworks; and (iii) to suggest that this rhetoric worked to “swerve” public understanding of modernism, deactivating or nullifying its associations with radicalism and antinomianism and making it safe for consumption by American middle-class audiences. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.Less

Continuities and New Voices

Margery Palmer McCulloch

in Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918-1959: Literature, National Identity and Cultural Exchange

This chapter discusses the changes brought to modernist art as a result of the First and Second World Wars, one of which was the contribution of the women writers who became popular during the ... More

This chapter discusses the changes brought to modernist art as a result of the First and Second World Wars, one of which was the contribution of the women writers who became popular during the interwar years. Another change was the emergence of new poets and writers in the 1940s and 1950s. The chapter notes that not all of these new poets can be considered as modernist writers, and that the Scottish modernists of the post-1918 period have forever changed the course of Scottish literature.Less

Introduction

Sydney Janet Kaplan

in Circulating Genius: John Middleton Murry, Katherine Mansfield and D. H. Lawrence

The introduction describes the author's process of discovering the ultimate shape and focus of the book with its emphasis on circularity. It describes Murry's career before meeting Lawrence and ... More

The introduction describes the author's process of discovering the ultimate shape and focus of the book with its emphasis on circularity. It describes Murry's career before meeting Lawrence and Mansfield, and his first encounters with modernist art in Paris. It sets forth the theoretical issues of confessionalism, the dynamics of influence, the concept of genius, and the problem of modernist impersonality.Less

The Expanding Arts of the Interwar Period

Gennifer Weisenfeld

in Since Meiji: Perspectives on the Japanese Visual Arts, 1868-2000

This chapter examines how the arts flourished in Japan during the interwar period. It first considers a range of Japanese artists who began forming local avant-gardist associations at the beginning ... More

This chapter examines how the arts flourished in Japan during the interwar period. It first considers a range of Japanese artists who began forming local avant-gardist associations at the beginning of the 1920s, with particular emphasis on Mavo and its impact on the contemporary art establishment as well as the art criticism of the period. It then discusses the growth of artistic endeavors, led by Mavo artists, following the Great Kantō Earthquake that struck Tokyo in 1923. It then turns to the Third Section Plastic Arts Association, or Sanka, and its activities in the art world, along with the rise of the proletarian arts movement whose members included artists sympathetic to socialism. It also looks at the emergence of commercial art as a field of artistic practice that explicitly put aesthetics in the service of commerce. Finally, it describes the modernist art of a group of commercial designers and photographers called Nippon Kōbō (Japan Studio).Less

The Sacred Suburban Sites of Jewish Metropolitan Urbanism

lila corwin berman

in Metropolitan Jews: Politics, Race, and Religion in Postwar Detroit

Throughout the United States, Conservative and Reform rabbis were some of the most ardent Jewish supporters of integration and urban equality, yet they also led synagogues away from newly integrated ... More

Throughout the United States, Conservative and Reform rabbis were some of the most ardent Jewish supporters of integration and urban equality, yet they also led synagogues away from newly integrated urban neighborhoods and into all white, privileged suburban enclaves. With attention to the architectural shifts that accompanied synagogues’ moves from city to suburb, this chapter argues that rabbis and other synagogue leaders found in architectural modernism a persuasive form for expressing metropolitan urbanism. Enmeshed in urban congregations’ decisions to rebuild their sacred sites in suburbs was a set of tensions that Jews expressed about the terms of their privilege and their connections to cities. Indisputably, monumental suburban synagogue buildings paid visible homage to Jewish socioeconomic privilege—this has been the reigning interpretation of the postwar boom in suburban synagogue building. But the buildings also participated in the process through which Jews reinvented their relationships to cities. In the deliberations that went into constructing these new edifices, Jews continued to reposition themselves within the framework of metropolitan urbanism, asserting a gulf between city space and their new suburban landscape while still connecting themselves to a host of spiritual, cultural, aesthetic, and political ideals framed by their self-perception as an urban people.Less

Surface Forms: Photography and Gertrude Stein’s Contact History of Modernism

Cara L. Lewis

in Dynamic Form: How Intermediality Made Modernism

This chapter investigates how Gertrude Stein plays with the Künstlerroman. In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), she offers her own assessment of the position of the artist in a saturated ... More

This chapter investigates how Gertrude Stein plays with the Künstlerroman. In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), she offers her own assessment of the position of the artist in a saturated media marketplace. Reading The Autobiography alongside Stein's other work, the chapter examines Stein's deployment of photographic illustrations, tropes, and techniques as a crucial strategy in her attempt to picture the history of modernism and to secure her spot within it. In particular, The Autobiography's underexamined photographs show how an ostensibly formless form—the surface—becomes the instrument of Stein's experimental history, as she skims across major developments in modernist and avant-garde art and literature and touches on as many famous figures as possible. In this way, while earlier chapters discuss the forms that populate modernist texts or the formal theories that purport to elucidate them, the chapter turns to the forms taken by modernism itself, which takes shape in the “contact zone” of The Autobiography.Less

‘Ephemeral Bibelots’ in the 1890s

Brad Evans

in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Volume II: North America 1894-1960

This chapter discusses the short-lived vogue for bibelots in the 1890s that were international in scope, impressive in numbers, and programmatically dedicated to the fragmented and ephemeral ... More

This chapter discusses the short-lived vogue for bibelots in the 1890s that were international in scope, impressive in numbers, and programmatically dedicated to the fragmented and ephemeral relations of art to art. It argues that the bibelots were fully invested in the counter-move of making changing fashions the mechanism of aesthetic appreciation and provocation. Unlike the major literary journals of the period, they functioned not as conduits for the distribution of enduring art, but as provocations around which groups of readers might recognize and share the associative experience. Indeed, their aesthetic proclivities might well be thought of in terms of the ‘projective fantasy’ now associated with camp — the self-indulgently guilty belief that, when appreciating some campy thing, someone else appreciates it in the same guilty way. They involved not merely the what of form but the how of style, initiating a new way of ‘being artistic’ that was located not merely in art objects but in the relations between them, not on the page but in the intermediary gaps between iterations.Less

Invent(st)ory: The Contributors and Their Readies

Craig J. Saper

in Readies for Bob Brown's Machine: A Critical Facsimile Edition

A detailed discussion of each contributor and their readies introducing new details about some of the most obscure contributors and new insights from some of the better known contributors. Taken as a ... More

A detailed discussion of each contributor and their readies introducing new details about some of the most obscure contributors and new insights from some of the better known contributors. Taken as a whole, this chapter is a history of modernism and modernist writers, artists, journalists, poets, radicals and others.Less

Psyche's Labyrinth, 1919–1941

in Knossos & the Prophets of Modernism

This chapter concentrates on the interwar period, looking at Arthur Evans's work in relation to modernist art, literature, and psychoanalysis, taking as its central motif his reconstruction of the ... More

This chapter concentrates on the interwar period, looking at Arthur Evans's work in relation to modernist art, literature, and psychoanalysis, taking as its central motif his reconstruction of the cult of the butterfly soul. In the immediate aftermath of the Great War, ancient Crete was recreated in the image of a decadent civilization devoured by its own weakness. By the time the bombs were raining down on London, Crete had become the archetype of a lost pacifist paradise. Sigmund Freud's prophetic 1939 meditation on the roots of anti-Semitism is considered. Evans's excavations at Knossos made their first mark on Hilda Doolittle's work. Doolittle's archaeological literalism invoked an even more esoteric range of archetypes and essences. By declaring that Knossos showed the truth in myth, Evans emphasized yet again the fairytale quality of his legacy.Less

The Anatomy of Tyranny

Gene H. Bell-Villada

in García Márquez: The Man and His Work

García Márquez's inspiration for writing The Autumn of the Patriarch came from the fall of the eight-year dictatorship of General Marcos Pérez Jiménez and was further boosted when he was assigned to ... More

García Márquez's inspiration for writing The Autumn of the Patriarch came from the fall of the eight-year dictatorship of General Marcos Pérez Jiménez and was further boosted when he was assigned to cover events in Cuba during its revolution. Patriarch and Solitude do not mostly overlap except for one phrase lifted exactly from Solitude and the six lawyers dressed in black. The setting of Patriarch also differs from Solitude wherein the whole country is depicted with mostly places and scenes found in the Caribbean. One very important difference between García Márquez's two novels is their approach to readers. Where Solitude is a relatively easy read, Patriarch requires the reader to be equipped with concepts of modernist art and familiar with procedures of interior monologue, nonlinear form, and concentrated prose.Less