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What Ever Happened to Modernism?
Contributor(s): Josipovici, Gabriel (Author)
ISBN: 030017800X     ISBN-13: 9780300178005
Publisher: Yale University Press
OUR PRICE:   $30.69  
Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats
Published: October 2011
Qty:
Additional Information
BISAC Categories:
- Literary Criticism | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh
- Literary Criticism | European - General
- Literary Criticism | Books & Reading
Dewey: 809.911
Physical Information: 0.69" H x 5.56" W x 8.49" (0.64 lbs) 224 pages
Themes:
- Cultural Region - British Isles
 
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc.
Publisher Description:

A personal, penetrating, and polemical account of what Modernism is and how contemporary literature has failed it

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 D rer, Rabelais, and Cervantes to the present, bringing together a rich array of artists, musicians, and writers both familiar and unexpected--including Beckett, Borges, Friedrich, C zanne, 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.

Gabriel Josipovici has spent a lifetime writing, and writing about other writers. What Ever Happened to Modernism? is a strident call to arms, and a tour de force of literary, artistic, and philosophical explication that will stimulate anyone interested in art in the twentieth century and today.