Atdtda22: [42.1i] Modern poetry, 607

[Mark Kohut]

I am reading, have just dipped into, a new book. Peter Gay's
Modernism.  
 
He agrees with this of Jameson's:" its increased subjectification and introspective psychologization"
actually finding a new 'first' modernist writer under this lens , a Frenchman named Duhamel. Minor but very modern in his judgment.
 
Writing well enough on a TRP influence, T. S. Eliot and interestingly on another writer evidently put into AtD, Marinetti. 
 
He, however, thinks that a thrust against the established art, the established society, the bourgeoisie [subject of Gay's most-famous
multi-volume history] is a defining condition of modernism. So it is deeply "political' in that sense
if not in Jameson's. 
 
Just FYI as "deep background".

Mark
 
 
 
 


 
----- Original Message ----
From: David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com>
To: Paul Nightingale <isread at btinternet.com>
Cc: pynchon-l at waste.org
Sent: Tuesday, November 13, 2007 10:24:14 AM
Subject: Re: Atdtda22: [42.1i] Modern poetry, 607

There is no doubt in my mind that we are in a "period" in which
modernism is being reconsidered in a very favorable light, and
postmodernism has lost its fun.  At least this is true in
architecture.  Postmodern architecture has been out of favor now for
about 15 years, and architects today look back on it with a sense of
embarrassment:  It was too jokey, self-indulgent, lacking in rigour,
full of bad plagiarism... the list of its fault goes on and on.  And
very little of its product is thought will endure.

It's difficult to draw parallels between the arts of a "period," but
if we were to give a name to the one architecture is now exploring, I
would call it neo-modernism; essentially a revival of modernism, which
hadn't even been "dead" for more than 40 years anyway.  Neo-modernism
hasn't the messianic overtones of its fore bearer, so I guess in
Jame's context it is not as imperialistic.  Neo-modern architecture
does share modernism's love of technology, abstraction, materiality
(as opposed to PoMo's theatricality)...

In a sense, neo-modernism is still post-modernism, but instead of
being a reaction against the hidebound aspect of modernism, is is a
reaction against the frivolous aspects of post-modernism, and a
reframing of modernism in a more positive (but less ideological)
light.

David Morris

On Nov 12, 2007 11:43 PM, Paul Nightingale <isread at btinternet.com> wrote:
> [607.26-27] I'm not much for modern poetry, but I know codes when I see them
>
> The modernist text announces itself as text; it refuses to hide, even when resisting interpretation. Cf. the opening to Ch7 ('Modernism and Imperialism') of Jameson's The Modernist Papers:
>
> This is a time in which, at least in part owing to what is called postmodernism, there seems to be renewed interest in finding out what modernism really was, and in rethinking that now historical phenomenon in new ways, which are not those we have inherited from the participants and the players, (152)
>
> That "renewed interest in finding out what modernism really was" is as good a description as any of Pynchon's novel.
>
> Jameson continues:
>
> For the emphasis on form and formal innovation and modification implies that our privileged texts and objects of study here will be those that scarcely evoke imperialism as such at all; that seem to have no specifically political content in the first place; that offer purely stylistic or linguistic peculiarities for analysis. One of the most commonly held stereotypes about the modern has of course in general been that of its apolitical character, its turn inward and away from the social materials associated with realism, its increased subjectification and introspective psychologization, and, not least, its aestheticism and its ideological commitment to the supreme value of a now autonomous Art as such. None of these characterizations strikes me as adequate or persuasive any longer; they are part of the baggage of an older modernist ideology which any contemporary theory of the modern will wish to scrutinize and to dismantle. (153)


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