Once more: 1922 - Rethinking Modernity

[matthew cissell]

Let me try again.

Hello all,

       It seems Dallas ALice didn't like the Stack, oh well to each his/her
own. But maybe i can recommend something less techy.

    I've just finished "Reading 1922" by Michael North and I think it
deserves some mention. This work of intellectual history reads far beyond
the Greatest Hits of 1922 and proposes a new look at that Year. North's
work makes a serious counter-statement to Andreas Huyssen's "After the
great Divide" and thus also to Linda Hutcheon's work.

   "The common opposition of an ironic, aestheticized modernism to mass
culture thus depends on a prior generalization about mass culture that
seriously oversimplifies it." (p208)

   "The inversely seductive notion that we happen to live in a time of
unique historical crisis has lost much of its hold as the years roll on and
the postmodern itself seems in need of a successor movement. This relative
lull in the excitement of our own moment offers several opportunities, not
the least of which is the opportunity to disabuse the present of its notion
of historical uniqueness, which is often nothing more than the desire to
sneak away from history altogether"

  Oh, and in comparing "One of Ours" by Cathar to Hemingways Harold Krebs
she states that Claude, the protagonist of OoO, is "restless and
discontented" and that he "is paralysed by the pointlessness of an exchange
economy stripped of its religious justifications." Claude is "Lost in a
purely instrumental world, a world  in which people have become mechanical
and dead objects have acquired a perverse power."  This could describe
Benny Profane. We see  Weberian disenchantment of a rationalized world,
automata and those damned inanimate objects . Cathar was criticized as
being what Hemingway et al were rebelling against; she was the old and they
the new. Thanks to North we see it a bit differently.

Good bang for the buck.
ciao
mc
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