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“The Name and Nature of Modernism”

Malcolm Bradbury and James Macfarlane

‘The modern age’

 The twentieth century brought us a new art- the ‘modern art’

 The modern age is historicist.
 It is apocalyptic and crisis centred.

Modernism is a radical break with the past

 There have been revolutions in the history of art before.

 But the present revolution (modernism) is not so much a revolution. It is not a turning over or turning
back.
 It is a break up, a devolution, a dissolution. It is catastrophic.

 Modernism abandoned the aim of five centuries of European effort Modernism was that much a
radical change. It altogether discarded the ideas continued by the previous five centuries.

The separation between the modern age and its immediate past is of a higher degree than the break or
separation between any other movement and its past

 The separation between the modern age and the age of Jane Austen is wider than the one between the
Antiquity and the Dark Ages
 The modern poetry is a greater novelty.
 There exists the Great Divide between modernism and its past.

There is no unanimity about the nature of modernism. Critics and thinkers have different opinions
regarding the nature of modernism

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Modernity is a new consciousness.

 It is a fresh condition of the human mind.

 Modern art has explored and sometimes reacted against this condition.

Modernism proposed, “We are not the derivatives of the past but our surrounding conditions”

The name of modernism is clear. But its nature is not.

The term ‘modernism’ has been used to cover up a variety of movements

 Those movements include, impressionism, Post-impressionism, Cubism, Expressionism, Futurism,

Symbolism, Imagism, Vorticism etc.

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The quality of abstraction and the attitude to reality in modernism

 There is a quality of abstraction and highly conscious artifice within modernism.

 Modernism takes us beyond familiar reality, breaking away from familiar functions of language and
conventions of form.
 Modernism has become a communal style in architecture, film and graphics

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Modernism is an era of high aesthetic self-consciousness and non-representationalism

 Modern art turns from realism and humanist representation towards style, technique and spatial
form in pursuit of deeper penetration of life.

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Modernism is a movement towards sophistication and mannerism, towards introversion and technical
display and internal self-scepticism.
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 Stream of consciousness narrative is one of its technical features.

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Modernism is the point at which the idea of the radical arts and innovating arts reaches the stage of
formal crisis.

 In this stage, the structure and organisation of myth collapse.

 This collapse is not formal alone.
 This is a crisis of culture itself.

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The factors that shape modernism

 Modernism is the art consequent on Heisenberg’s Uncertainty principle.

 Destruction of civilisation and reason in the first world war
 Modern literature is the literature of the technology
 Dis-establishing of communal reality
 Destruction of the traditional notions of the wholeness of individual character
 Linguistic chaos
 Modernism is the art of modernization

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Modernism corresponds to the crisis of reality in modern human condition

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The Paradox surrounding modernism

 On one hand, modernism is an arcane and private art.

 On the other hand, specialism and experimentation in modernism have social functions.

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Modernism is a revolutionary movement

 It is a radical break with the artistic past.

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Modernism contains highly aesthetic response.

 Yet it is more than an aesthetic event.

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Modernism is a search for style

 Modernism is less a style than a search for style in a highly individualistic sense.

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The aspects of modernism:

 Its use of anti-form

 Its use of the hard, witty image
 Its sense of anguish
 Its dependence on ‘adversary culture’

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Modernism was an international movement

 Modernism reached its peak in various countries in various times

 The term ‘modernism’ is synonymous with internationalism.
 The term is internationally recognizable at sight without translation

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There is no general agreement regarding the inaugural year of modernism

 There are different opinions regarding the inaugural year of modernism. Some say it’s 1900.
 There are others who point to the years 1910 or 1910 or 1924.
 There is an argument when modernism began

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The inaugural year of modernism, the year of its ending, its causes, its character are topics of debate.
There is no general agreement about such things.

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Neo- modernism or Post-modernism?

 Frank Kermode calls the end of modernism as Neo- Modernism

 Some critics call it as post-modernism

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The argument about modernism adds to the abundance of the versions of post-modernism

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Modernism is a historical evolution coupled with a notion of crisis and a notion of culmination.

 For Anglo- American, that culmination falls in the first part of the twentieth century, within which
are two peaks, years preceding the world war and the years succeeding it

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There is Germanic modernism

 The literary world of Germany was sickened and surfeited by the term.
 Germanic modernism has its origins in the 1880s.
 Declined in the early part of the twentieth century.
 Anglo-American modernism and Germanic modernism are perceived as different from each other.
But there are certain commonalities.

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The idea of modernism is bound up with consciousness of disorder, despair and anarchy

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Modernism is subject to extreme semantic confusion

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Modernism was a compound of certain opposing tendencies

 It is a compound of the nihilistic and the futuristic.

 It is a compound of the conservative and the revolutionary.

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 It is a compound of the naturalistic and the symbolic.

 It is a compound of the romantic and the classical.

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Modernism was a celebration of the technological age. At the same time, it condemned technology.

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Some critics see modernism as a resurgence of romanticism

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Modernism is characterised by fragmentation and discontinuity

This is a brief outline of the original essay, with no input from materials available online. You are
advised to read the original one and all the available materials for better clarity and more points.

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