Modernism And Mass Politics

"In the first two decades of the twentieth century, a new phenomenon swept politics: the masses. Groups that had struggled as marginal parts of the political system - particularly workers and women - suddenly exploded into vast and seemingly unstoppable movements." "A whole subgenre of sociological-political treatises purporting to analyze the mass mind emerged all over Europe, particularly in England. All these texts drew heavily on the theories put forth in The Crowd, written in 1895 by the French writer Gustave Le Bon and translated into English in 1897. Le Bon developed the idea that when a crowd forms, a whole new kind of mentality, hovering on the borderline of unconsciousness, replaces the conscious personalities of individuals. His descriptions should seem uncanny to literary critics, because they sound as if he were describing modernist literary techniques, such as the focus on images and the "stream of consciousness." Equally important was Georges Sorel's Reflections on Violence (1906), which sought to turn Le Bon's theories into a methodology for producing mass movements by invoking the importance of myth to theories of the mass mind." "Examining in detail the surprising similarities between modernist literature and contemporary theories of the crowd, this work upsets many critical commonplaces concerning the character of literary modernism. Through careful reading of major works of the novelists Joyce and Woolf (traditionally viewed as politically leftist) and the poets Eliot and Yeats (traditionally viewed as politically to the right), it shows that many modernist literary forms in all these authors emerged out of efforts to write in the idiom of the crowd mind. Modernism was not a rejection of mass culture, but rather an effort to produce a mass culture, perhaps for the first time - to produce a culture distinctive to the twentieth century, which Le Bon called "The Era of the Crowd.""--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Examining in detail the surprising similarities between modernist literature and contemporary theories of the crowd, this work shows that many modernist literary forms emerged out of efforts to write in the idiom of the crowd mind.

Between 1890 and 1950 modernist art and culture set out to challenge century-old notions of the individual and the community, culture and politics, morality and freedom, placing into question the very foundations of Western civilization. The essays in this volume present a novel assessment of various manifestations of modernism in Germany and Scandinavia by posing the question of its critical and political impact beyond traditional polarities such as right vs. left, illiberalism vs. Enlightenment, apolitical vs. engaged. In drawing on a wide range of disciplinary perspectives, including literary studies, art history, film and visual studies, urban studies, musicology, political theory, and the history of science and technology, the essays in this volume reexamine modernism's bold inquiry into areas such as the relation of art to technology and mass politics, the limits of liberal democracy, the reconceptualization of urban spaces, and the realignment of traditional art forms following the rise of new media such as film. The volume's contributors share a belief in the timeliness of modernism's critical impulse for a contemporary age confronted with ethical and political dilemmas that the modernists first articulated and to which they attempted to respond.

In the thirty years after World War II, American intellectual and artistic life changed as dramatically as did the rest of society. Gone were the rebellious lions of modernism—Joyce, Picasso, Stravinsky—and nearing exhaustion were those who took up their mantle as abstract expressionism gave way to pop art, and the barren formalism associated with the so-called high modernists wilted before the hothouse cultural brew of the 1960s. According to conventional thinking, it was around this time that postmodernism with its characteristic skepticism and relativism was born. In Late Modernism, historian Robert Genter remaps the landscape of American modernism in the early decades of the Cold War, tracing the combative debate among artists, writers, and intellectuals over the nature of the aesthetic form in an age of mass politics and mass culture. Dispensing with traditional narratives that present this moment as marking the exhaustion of modernism, Genter argues instead that the 1950s were the apogee of the movement, as American practitioners—abstract expressionists, Beat poets, formalist critics, color-field painters, and critical theorists, among others—debated the relationship between form and content, tradition and innovation, aesthetics and politics. In this compelling work of intellectual and cultural history Genter presents an invigorated tradition of late modernism, centered on the work of Kenneth Burke, Ralph Ellison, C. Wright Mills, David Riesman, Jasper Johns, Norman Brown, and James Baldwin, a tradition that overcame the conservative and reactionary politics of competing modernist practitioners and paved the way for the postmodern turn of the 1960s.

Considered to be the founding father of British cultural theory, Williams was concerned throughout his life to apply a materialist and socialist analysis to all forms of culture, defined generously and inclusively as "structures of feeling." In this major work, Williams applies himself to the problem of modernism. Rejecting stereotypes and simplifications, he is especially preoccupied with the ambivalent relationship between revolutionary socialist politics and the artistic avant-garde. Judiciously assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the modernist project, Williams shifts the framework of discussion from merely formal analysis of artistic techniques to one which grounds these cultural expressions in particular social formations. Animating the whole book is the question which Williams poses and brings us significantly closer to answering: namely, what does it mean to develop a cultural analysis that goes "beyond the modern" and yet avoids the trap of postmodernism's "new conformism"?

A compact introduction to modernism--why it began, what it is, and how it hasshaped virtually all aspects of 20th and 21st century life

Stephen Eric Bronner reads the artistic and intellectual achievements of the modernist project's leading figures against larger social, political, and cultural trends and follows the rise of a flawed yet salient effort at liberation and its clash with modernity. Exploring both the political responsibility of the artist and the manipulation of authorial intention, Bronner reconfigures the modernist movement for contemporary progressive purposes and offers insight into the problems still complicating cultural politics. He ultimately reasserts the political dimension of developments often understood in purely aesthetic terms and confronts the self-indulgence and political irresponsibility of certain so-called modernists today.

A mural renaissance swept the United States in the 1930s, propelled by the New Deal Federal Art Project and the popularity of Mexican muralism. Perhaps nowhere more than in New York City, murals became a crucial site for the development of abstract painting Artists such as Stuart Davis, Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, and Lee Krasner created ambitious works for the Williamsburg Housing Project, Floyd Bennett Field Airport, and the 1939 World’s Fair. Modernism for the Masses examines the public murals (realized and unrealized) of these and other abstract painters and the aesthetic controversy, political influence, and ideological warfare that surrounded them. Jody Patterson transforms standard narratives of modernism by reasserting the significance of the 1930s and explores the reasons for the omission of the mural’s history from chronicles of American art. Beautifully illustrated with the artists’ murals and little-known archival photographs, this book recovers the radical idea that modernist art was a vital part of everyday life.