What Ever Happened to Modernism?

[Dave Monroe]

What Ever Happened to Modernism?
* Gabriel Josipovici


The quality of today’s literary writing arouses the strongest
opinions. For novelist and critic Gabriel Josipovici, the contemporary
novel in English is profoundly disappointing—a poor relation of its
groundbreaking Modernist forebears. This agile and passionate book
asks why.

Modernism, Josipovici suggests, is only superficially a reaction to
industrialization or a revolution in diction and form; essentially, it
is art coming to consciousness of its own limits and responsibilities.
And its origins are to be sought not in 1850 or 1800, but in the early
1500s, with the crisis of society and perception that also led to the
rise of Protestantism. With sophistication and persuasiveness,
Josipovici charts some of Modernism’s key stages, from Dürer,
Rabelais, and Cervantes to the present, bringing together a rich array
of artists, musicians, and writers both familiar and
unexpected—including Beckett, Borges, Friedrich, Cézanne, Stevens,
Robbe-Grillet, Beethoven, and Wordsworth. He concludes with a stinging
attack on the current literary scene in Britain and America, which
raises questions about not only national taste, but contemporary
culture itself.

[...]

http://yalepress.yale.edu/Yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=9780300165777

Gabriel Josipovici

http://www.gabrieljosipovici.org/