Modernism, as conventionally understood, was an early 20th- century movement that affected all the arts; it simultaneously broke with tradition and drew self-consciously on tradition. The great modernist figures include Picasso and Francis Bacon in painting and Stravinsky and Schoenberg in music, all of whom figure in Mr. Josipovici's account. But his main concern is with literature: Proust, Kafka, Beckett, Wallace Stevens and Thomas Mann, among a host of others. Mr. Josipovici, it should be said, is a champion of Modernism. He sees it as a valuable tradition in its own right, one that is not merely endangered but virtually extinct, especially in the smug, ultra-Philistine realm of contemporary British fiction.Share
Confitemini Domino
1 week ago
3 comments:
I would say that the word 'Iconoclasts' sums up the mentality of the 20th Century particularly in literature.
When Samuel Beckett died in 1989, my boyfriend said that his death equalled the death of modernism. Perhaps that was true in literature. John Cage died a few years later, though, and in my opinion takes the mantle of the Last Modernist.
I know of the worldview Modernism.
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