| Title | : | Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890-1930 |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0140138323 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780140138320 |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 688 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1978 |
Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890-1930 Reviews
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History
Any reader of literary fiction from the last 120 years will sooner or later encounter the distinction between Modernism and Post-Modernism.
My teenage years coincided with the 1970's. During this period I became a consumer and advocate of Modernism, whether or not I could define it.
No sooner had I embraced it, than I started to encounter Post-Modernism, initially via art and architecture, and then later via literature.
I first bought and read this book in the early 1980's.
It served two functions for me. One was to define this thing called Modernism, two was to determine how the new movement called Post-Modernism fitted into the tradition of Modernism.
The book still influences my understanding of contemporary literature.
The Scenario of Chaos
The key essay is "The Name and Nature of Modernism".
It sets a context of "cultural seismology".
It maps shifts and displacements of sensibility that occur in art, literature and thought.
The editors, Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, define three orders of magnitude:
1. fashion (which can be measured in decades);
2. style and sensibility (which can be measured in centuries); and
3. overwhelming dislocations, cataclysmic upheavals of culture, fundamental convulsions of the creative human spirit that...question entire civilisations or cultures, and stimulate frenzied rebuilding.
Modernism falls into the third category.
The editors describe it as multiple or promiscuous in style.
Gertrude Stein describes it as "the only composition appropriate to the new composition in which we live, the new dispositions of space and time."
The editors describe Modernism in terms of a movement towards "sophistication and mannerism, towards introversion, technical display, internal self-scepticism".
Frank Kermode describes it in terms of a radical remaking of form, "the tendency to bring it closer to chaos, so bringing it to a sense of formal desperation".
It responds to "the scenario of our chaos".
It is the art "consequent on the dis-establishing of communal reality and conventional notions of causality, on the destruction of traditional notions of the wholeness of individual character, on the linguistic chaos that ensues when public notions of language have been discredited and when all realities have become subjective fictions".
Modernism is the art that this age demands, a solution for those who see in the modern human condition a "crisis of reality, an apocalypse of cultural community".
Post- Modernism
The editors suggest that Modernism is not a movement that can be considered in terms of decades or centuries. It is more profound than that.
Yet shortly after its advent, it has been confronted by Post-Modernism.
Literature, having innovated, wants to innovate even more.
Frank Kermode sees Post-Modernism as a continuation of Modernism, at most a blood cousin.
Other critics believe that it is something new and substantively different.
Post Modernism is no longer a style, but a "post-cultural action, a politics":
"The avant-garde has entered the streets, and become instinctive or radical behavior; and we are in a new stylistic age, in which that enterprise of humanism and civilisation Modernism attempted desperately to reinstate by its subversions of form is over.
"Anarchism and revolutionary subjectivism predominate; the uniqueness of the work vanishes; the cults of impersonality and pure form are done; art is either action, outrage or play."
On the other hand, the advocates of Modernism argue that Post-Modernism is just one of "an abundance of versions of Modernism".
I am in the latter camp.
I see Modernism as a challenge to traditional forms of culture.
This challenge survives and continues.
I don't see Post-Modernism as anything but a continuation of the challenge.
None of the talk about "encyclopaedic novels" or "systems novels" takes us any further than the initial challenge to traditional forms of culture. -
Modernism is a slippery one to get a definitive description on. I read it from the beginning, and also jumped ahead into certain areas and had a closer look at authors like Thomas Mann and J. K. Huysmans.
I don't know where or how to write a critical review of this book. These guys know their stuff.
I've now finished this book. It has been an education. Very informative, although I skipped one section, 'The Lyric Poetry of Modernism' which is too esoteric for me. I had a cursory glance over 'Modernist Drama' which I don't know much about, but I focused on the sections I am more interested in, covering 'The Modernist Novel', which includes 'The Introverted Novel', 'The Theme of Consciousness: Thomas Mann', 'Svevo, Joyce, and Modernist Time', 'The Janus-faced Novel: Conrad, Musil, Kafka, Mann'. 'The Symbolist Novel: Huysmans to Malraux'. 'The City of Russian Modernist Fiction'. and 'The Language of Modernist Fiction: Metaphor and Metonymy'. This last one on Metaphor and Metonymy was really informative. I love learning about the structure of writing, the form, not just detail. Very interesting, the analysing the structure of Gertrude Stein's work, who's own work is structural in style.
The other areas covered in the book are Literary Movements. A Geography of Modernism looks at the interrelation and comparisons between cities. Berlin, Vienna, Prague, Russia, Chicago and New York, Paris, and London. All happening between 1890 and 1930.
One subject I learnt more about in more depth was the powerful influence which Symbolism had on Surrealism.
Twenty scholars contributed to this collection of essays. All a pleasure to read, laying out these deep subjects very clearly for someone like me who is not an academic to understand. What gets me is the realisation of how imperative to society and civilisation are the places and people that are the custodians of deep understanding in the humanities and the value of literature in a world becoming increasingly commercial and shallow and fast. -
A collection of essays which veers from the fascinating, well-written and insightful to the dull, tortuous and sophomoric. There are seven sections: 'modernism' as a term; the intellectual and cultural background of modernist literature; the cities in which modernism grew; literary movements; poetry; novel; drama. The first two were pretty good. The others are spotty, and often very repetitive: it might have been better to have more focussed essays, like the one on Thomas Mann, rather than split, say, Ezra Pound between 'London,' 'Imagism and Vorticism,' 'The Modernist Lyric,' 'The Crisis of Language' etc etc... Often the essayists reach for comparisons to the visual arts, which makes sense, but since there are no illustrations it will only be helpful to people who already understand modernism is the visual arts. Easily the most irritating feature of this book, though, is the tendency of some of the essayists to make insanely partisan judgments, particularly about dadaism and surrealism: this was published in the '70s, when political radicalism was really all about a 'change of vision' rather than, say, politics, which meant that professors and poets were the best people to thus radicalize the world. Blurgh. Definitely read the essays 'the modernist lyric,' 'poems and fictions,' 'the introverted novel,' 'the theme of consciousness' and 'modernist drama' though.
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one of the landmark studies of modernism. the amount of scholarship collected in here is near unimaginable. I would think with today's academic climate it would be tough to put out a collection like this. totally indispensable for anyone interested in 'modernism' and associated movements.
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While I did not read the whole of this large book, I did read extensive portions of it. It contains some very deep and magnificent discussions of certain critical aspects of literary Modernism, and was very valuable. It is not an introductory book. And, as a collection of essays by different writers, there were quite a few sections that I felt could be skipped. That said, well worth the time and effort.
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The book is a collection of essays attempting to map out literary modernism, understood as a creative reaction to the changing conditions of the late XIXth century. The book is very long, which allows it to come as close as it gets to fulfilling the goal -shared by many other contenders- of mapping out the movement, in its different phases (naturalism, symbolism, avant-garde, high-modernist...), its national variations (mostly anglo-american, french and german, with some considerations of russia and scandinavia, but very little on spain, italy, or the many eastern european groups) but also in its impacts and sources on society at large.
And this is where the book stands out: many of the essays might be said -by a sympathetic reader- to be "dated" : relents of anti-communist histrionics, and condescendant attitudes to minor genres or avant-garde movements impair the overviews proposed, but the number of high quality studies, in particular those written by the two editors McFarlane and Bradbury, absolve all other failures:
The essay on "the mind of modernism" (dealing with the entanglement of early psychology and literary techniques) itself would be worth buying the book, inasmuch as its rigorous theorizing and wide-ranging reading and yet focused analysis might well make it one of the best texts I have read on this matter.
On the whole, although this is certainly not an "introduction", in that the book is long and in some essays can be very technical, drawing on linguistics and narratology, it provides a very well rounded overview of the subject for someone who has already the necessary groundings in literary theory.
One might point out that the intertwining of theory and modernism is such that having those groundings without having much of the knowledge carried in this book is rather unlikely: yet the international approach chosen by the editors ensure that everyone will likely discover something -whether it be a theory of modernist drama, the reason why 70s critics disliked expressionism, or the links between Chekov and the futurists. -
fine, i didn't read the whole thing. but i can tell you that the chapters i did read... just told me some things i already knew, other which i didn't but could not find it useful at the moment, and some very scattered fragments that were actually helpful. it still incredibly eurocentric and believes that by discussing "russian literature" it's going outside the box--but it is a good starting point alongside
The Oxford English Literary History: The Modern Movement: 1910-1940: 1910-1940 - The Modern Movement v. 10 -
very comprehensive guide to modernism, quite happy to have invested money and time into it. there is a lot of stuff to come back to, and much to consider at each turn. should serve me well both with current essay and ideas to come, from ideas that it sparked. good purchase.
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Fascinating and informative, but I had to skim through a few chapters due to how dense they were.
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I believe this is the second book I've read about Modernism and needless to say, most of what's written flew over my head but I did also find myself revisiting various ideas that I had encountered (but perhaps forgotten). This guide to European Literature takes the form of a collection of essays that offers a bewildering breadth of topics, ranging from the historical and geographical context of Modernism to genre-specific discussions of poetry, prose fiction, and drama. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane did a tremendous job in weaving together these disparate essays into a coherent and cohesive whole, and the end result is a stunning presentation of Modernism in all its glory and complexities.
My preliminary introduction to the world of Modernism was a Coursera course offered by Wesleyan University entitled "The Modern and the Post-Modern", and in that course, Modernism was defined as principally the search for 'the really real', in other words, the Truth. Having read up about Modern Art, Modern Classical Music, and Modern Literature, I believe the former two are pretty well-explained by that definition. Post-impressionism and subsequent developments until the 60s/70s were concerned with representing the truth (whatever that meant to the artist), whether it is in Cezanne's manipulation of perspective or Picasso's reduction of reality to two-dimensional forms, whether it is in Matisse's explorations of the flatness of the canvas or Pollock's attempts at manifesting the subconscious. Similarly, in classical music, Schoenberg's experimentation with atonality was perceived as a quest for truth, even if the truth is 'ugly'; this reminds me of Gustav Klimt's Nuda Veritas, the allegorical figure who will show bourgeois society the truth and nothing but the truth. So far, for the visual arts and classical music, the sentiment behind Modernism seems to be pretty clear-cut.
But the picture isn't as simple for Modern Literature. Did Modern writers search for 'the really real'? To a certain extent, yes, because Modernism was part of a reaction against Naturalism, the prevailing literary style of the 19th century. But beyond that, the unifying search for truth does not seem that relevant in discussing Modernist poetry, prose, or drama. Each writer within each movement within each genre dealt with other societal themes (such as the sense of impending doom) as well as its own linguistic form (such as prose writers attempts at bringing metaphor and metonymy together in a form that is predisposed to metonymy). At this juncture, I am reminded of something I read in a similar book; Modernism was a reaction to a set of crises, namely the crisis of representation, liberalism, and rationality.
I shall stop here and not try to distil any of the dense ideas packed in this book, instead hoping that what I have read will somehow stick with me and be reinforced the next time I read about Modernism, which I'm sure will be very soon.
(In my opinion, the Cambridge Introduction to Modernism serves as a better introductory textbook to Modernism which presents its main theses in a more emphatic manner whereas this Guide is better for a relatively well-read student or scholar.)
Anyway, Modernism is so fascinating and I long to savour it in its entirety. -
A selection of critical writings of various aspects of the modernist movement. This collection goes beyond English/American modernism to embrace its Continental roots and manifestations, and I felt it was skewed toward the latter. The thematic divisions of the chapters made finding something interesting easy and made the book feel organised: there is a section for geography (London vs New York vs Berlin), specific movements (Futurists and Vorticists and Dadaists), lyric poetry, novels (Symbolist, Joycean, Consciousness and Time) and drama.
Its heavily academic nature sometimes made reading a tad dry. It's definitely not something one can expect to sit down with in one day, and I preferred selecting topics that interested me and finding out more about them. If you're looking for familiar English modernists like Virginia Woolf or Ezra Pound (as I was) you're bound to only find a few disappointing references rather than a whole passage or chapter, given the scope and focus of this collection. If you're looking to take in a 'landscape' view of the movement as a whole, or to view writers such as Mann, Brecht, Kafka and Huysmans through a modernist lens which groups them together, this book is for you. -
Before reading this book, I wasn't quite as aware of Henrik Ibsen as the origin-point of European modernism, nor was I aware that in Strindberg's later years Swedenborg replaced Nietzsche as the main inspiration for his Surrealistic dramas. All in all, this volume served to reinforce my opinion that D.H. Lawrence and Marcel Proust are the greatest European novelists, while Faulkner and Hemingway (preceded by Gertrude Stein) are the most significant writers of American novels. What's next for literature to conquer as an enterprise of engagement? In today's world of visual entertainment which is inseparable from traffic in the business of commodities, reality is someplace that, as John Barth expresses it, where it's nice for a visit but, honestly, you don't wish to live there. Three stars.
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A very fine introduction.
Read some of the essays (up to and including the one on Russian Modernism).
Will return later! -
The bible on Modernism.
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Admittedly, I did not read the entire book, but only the parts that most directly connected to what I'm currently studying. But what I read was quite good. This book is so big and the essays are prone to overlap, repeating information (the essay "Modernist Drama: Wedekind to Brecht" repeats several points about German Expressionism already made in the essay specifically about that), but it still is a useful book, especially if you read it more topically rather than straight through. While much work on Modernism has been done since this book was first published in the 70s, this anthology still seems a valuable contribution to Modernism and the different movements contained therein. I'll get to the rest of the book another time.
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A must read if you are looking for in depth knowledge on modernism in literature. I can understand that some reviewers found the overlap between contributions boring or superfluous. But the different contexts and problems they are discussing makes overlap illuminating. It's what the Germans call a 'Fundgrube'.
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I'll happily admit I didn't read all of these essays too - only the ones I needed. I might have to return to this collection one day and read it in full - but as for now this collection has been a great help for my dissertation.
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A great collection of critical essays on all things modernist.
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Didn't actually finish it, got half way through--it became very boring and repetitive.
