Five Faces of Modernity
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
|
" Now, there is an urgent need for experiment in criticism of a new kind, which will consist largely in a logical and dialectical study of the terms used…. In literary criticism we are constantly using terms which we cannot define, and defining other things by them. We are constantly using terms which have an intension and an extension which do not quite fit: theoretically they ought to be made to fit; but if they cannot, then some other way must be found of dealing with them so that we may know at every moment what we mean. --T. S. Eliot, "Experiment in Criticism" (1929) " |
|
Related e |
|
Featured: |
Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (1987) by Romanian literary critic Matei Călinescu. It is a revised edition of Faces of Modernity (1977).
From the publisher:
- Five Faces of Modernity is a series of semantic and cultural biographies of words that have taken on special significance in the last century and a half or so: modernity, avant-garde, decadence, kitsch, and postmodernism. The concept of modernity—the notion that we, the living, are different and somehow superior to our predecessors and that our civilization is likely to be succeeded by one even superior to ours—is a relatively recent Western invention and one whose time may already have passed, if we believe its postmodern challengers. Calinescu documents the rise of cultural modernity and, in tracing the shifting senses of the five terms under scrutiny, illustrates the intricate value judgments, conflicting orientations, and intellectual paradoxes to which it has given rise.
- Five Faces of Modernity attempts to do for the foundations of the modernist critical lexicon what earlier terminological studies have done for such complex categories as classicism, baroque, romanticism, realism, or symbolism and thereby fill a gap in literary scholarship. On another, more ambitious level, Calinescu deals at length with the larger issues, dilemmas, ideological tensions, and perplexities brought about by the assertion of modernity.
Incipit:
- "It is always hard to date with precision the appearance of a concept, and all the more so when the concept under scrutiny has been throughout its history as controversial and complex as "modernity."
Modernism
Modern Dwarfs on the Shoulders of Ancient Giants
The Problem of Time: Three Eras of Western History
It is We Who Are the Ancients
Comparing the Moderns to the Ancients
From Modern to Gothic to Romantic to Modern
The Two Modernities
Baudelaire and the Paradox of Aesthetic Modernity
Modernity, the Death of God, and Utopia
Literary and Other Modernisms
Comparing the Moderns to the Contemporaries
Avant-garde
From Modernity to the Avant-Garde
The "Avant-Garde" Metaphor in the Renaissance: A Rhetorical Figure
The Romantic "Avant-Garde": From Politics to the Politics of Culture
Some Mid-Nineteenth-Century Writers and the Avant-Garde
Two Avant-Gardes: Attractions and Repulsions
Avant-Garde and Aesthetic Extremism
The Crisis of Avant-Garde's Concept in the 1960s
Avant-Garde, Dehumanization and the End of Ideology
Avant-Garde and Postmodernism
Intellectualism, Anarchism, and Stasis
Decadence
Versions of Decadence
From "Decadence" to "Style of Decadence"
The Decadent Euphoria
Nietzsche on "Decadence" and "Modernity"
The Concept of Decadence in Marxist Criticism
Il Decadentismo
Kitsch
Kitsch and Modernity
Kitsch, Camp, and High Art
Etymology, Contexts of Usage, and the "Law of Aesthetic Inadequacy"
Kitsch and Romanticism
Bad Taste, Ideology, and Hedonism
Some Stylistic Considerations
Kitsch and Cultural Industrialization
The "Kitsch-Man"
Postmodernism
A New Face of Modernity
Epistemology and Hermeneutics: From Modernity to Postmodernity
The Silence of the Avant-Garde
The Novelty of the Past: The View from Architecture
Critiques of Postmodernism
Literary Postmodernism: The Shaping of a Corpus
Postmodernist Devices and Their Significance
Conclusion
External links
Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Five Faces of Modernity" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.
