9783039116904 Intro 002.Pdf

Introduction In the heyday of postmodernism, everything seemed perfectly clear: ‘modernism’ was just an outdated literary orthodoxy, essentially based on the canonization of a handful of authors that had long since become classic and on the assumption that the ‘great divide’ between the ascetic thrust of elitist high culture and the superficial promesse de bonheur held by the buoyant universe of popular culture should in no way be crossed. Based as it was, in its first formulations, on a critique of functionalist architecture, such a simple perspective made it fairly easy to discount the achievements of modernism as having been enclosed within a set of normative rules that had far too long weighed upon and drastically repressed alternative aesthetic possibilities. The next step could not but be to celebrate the new postmodernist paradigm as having opened up the gates of free experimentation with non-canonical discourses and allowed for the unbounded aesthetic eclecticism epitomized e.g. by carnivalesque practices of collage and pastiche. In this light, the assumption that modernism was dead and definitely a thing of the past went most of the time unchallenged – in fact, as noted in the 1980s by Charles Newman writing on ‘the post-modern aura,’ the main rhetorical strategy of the postmodernist critique was based on ‘the argument of death,’ a type of argument that has neither a rational core nor is intent on demonstration, but, instead, rests solely on the apodictic proclamation of the opponent’s death. This, as may easily be noted, was precisely the kind of argument put forward by the historical avant-gardes of the beginning of the twentieth century in their uncompromising pronouncements of the New – something that might in itself have raised the suspicion that the purported unidimensionality of modernism could well be just the effect of a polemic construction and by no means an adequate characterization. Indeed, the main vector of definition put forward by Jean-François Lyotard in his seminal essay La condition postmoderne – postmodernity as the explicit abandonment of all universal metanarratives – applies in equal manner to modernist discourse. Thus, it comes as no surprise that Introduction the essay ends up defining postmodernism as being not the end of modernism, but its beginning, and that some of the literary references – like Robert Musil – invoked by Lyotard in favor of his argument are themselves central references in the modernist canon. That the unified perspective developed by Western art would be nothing else but ‘a machine to destroy reality’ (Pawel Florensky), or that modernism would have brought about an ‘emancipation of dissonance’ (Werner Hofmann) intent on exposing any convention of totality and harmony, these indeed represent vital tenets of a definition of modernism as a self-critique of modernity that are fully congruent with the epistemological concerns governing the postmodern critique. Paradoxically, this critique not only did not end up in a definitive crystallization of a concept of modernism as simply some kind of historically circumscribed artistic period, but, instead, it presented opportunities for reconceptualization that have been fully taken advantage of by modernist studies in the last two decades. One major aspect of such a reconceptualization has been the increased recognition of the sheer diversity and plurality encompassed by what we call modernism. What emerged in the first half of the twentieth century as a fairly well-contained Western (if not heavily Anglo-American) literary/ artistic phenomenon has recently been amply and variously reconcep- tualized as far more spacious and diverse, and subjected accordingly to various kinds of translocal and transtemporal revisions. This goes hand in hand with the abandonment of the pathos – and the violence – of definition. Indeed, the more minimalist the definition the more possibilities it provides of maximizing its field of application and of allowing for the recognition not just of the obvious transnational nature of modernism, but of the specificities of particular, often mutually conflicting contexts that lie far beyond hitherto accepted, conventional borders. What has to be asked is whether a common frame of reference applies – one that to our view is aptly synthesized in the notion of an ‘emancipation of dissonance,’ with all its profound aesthetic, cultural, ideological implications. A notion that after all is clearly implied in what is arguably the most minimalist of all definitions, Fernando Pessoa’s aphoristically ironic suggestion in the Book of Disquietude: ‘To escape rules and to say useless things summarizes well the essentially modern attitude.’ Translocal Modernisms: International Perspectives is a collection of essays by international scholars from both sides of the Atlantic, addressing anew two old and two newer questions about the concept of modernism. The two old ones – What is modernism? What was modernism? – have been asked many times in the past fifty years, and have not so far met with any conclusive answers. Predictably, they never will, since evolving scholarship goes on forcing the concept to shift, whether regarding time, space, subject matter, approach or style. The two newer questions – What will modernism be? Why modernisms? – suggest the historicity and fragility of the concept and problematize its original formulation and contextualization. The work collected in this volume explores the many facets of modernism in a variety of essays dealing with and putting in question the Western literary tradition in many of its transcontinental encounters. Criticism of ‘high modernism’ is put in perspective by discussions of German ‘reactionary modernism,’ American ‘social modernism,’ mid- twentieth century ‘Baudelairean modernity’ and unprecedented expan- sions of the concepts of modernity and modernism themselves. Engaging in dialogue with the newest geographical and transnational enlargements of the concept in time and space (from the ‘Middle Passage’ to emergent cultures of the twenty-first century, from Europe to America, Africa and Asia), Translocal Modernisms covers a wide range of literary, artistic, cultural, and social fields and perspectives. .

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