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COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group, COPYRIGHT 2005 Thomson Gale, a part of The Thomson Corporation
Modernism
Modernism is a highly complex cultural phenomenon which has generated a variety of differing opinions and an immense critical literature. The notion of the "modern" has undergone various semantic shifts and definitions, mainly due to the sensibility of each age, yet the word has always retained a particular pertinence in characterizing a feeling of novelty, of change and historical evolution. For American expatriate writer Gertrude Stein Modernism was a sort of "inevitable art," the only "composition" appropriate to the new disposition of time and space in which people lived in the early part of the twentieth century. However it is defined, it is clear that Modernism was an extraordinary combination of often contradictory aspects: the futuristic and the nihilistic, the revolutionary and the conservative, the naturalistic and the symbolistic, the romantic and the classical. It was a celebration of a technological age, the so-called "Age of the Machine" and a condemnation of it, a faithful acceptance of any new, exciting cultural expression and the excuse for fearful and anxious reactions in face of it. The term has often included many artistic movements which originated mostly in Europe (Impressionism, Expressionism, Futurism, Cubism, Symbolism, Imagism etc.), but soon became truly international, often sharing a tendency towards abstraction and a refusal of realism. The Modernist tendency expressed itself as anti-representationalism in painting, free verse in poetry, stream-of-consciousness narrative in the novel, just to make a few examples. Most critics agree that the peak of the Modernist period was the first quarter of the twentieth century, but some place it as early as the 1890s, as did Frank Kermode in a famous study aptly entitled The Sense of an Ending.
One cannot date exactly the beginning of "modern" culture in America, but surely it was decried in quite exalted terms as early as 1871, in Walt Whitman's prophetic Democratic Vistas : "America demands a poetry that is bold, modern, and all-surrounding and kosmical, as she is herself. It must in no respect ignore science and the modern. It must bend its vision toward the future, more than the past." "Science and the modern" were firmly linked in Whitman's forward-looking vision in a union that expressed the post-Civil War optimism of American civilization. Surprisingly,...
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