Modernization, Modernity, and
Modernisms
HUM 2052: Civilization II
Spring 2014
Dr. Perdigao
March 17-19, 2014
Redefining the “Modern”
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Twentieth century not the first to use the term but changes in this period
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“There is, nonetheless, a particular stamp to the twentieth-century’s idea of
modernity: it is not so much comparative as interrogative, and it inquires how we
know what we know, rather than merely rejecting previous modes of thought
(which it also did). Employing the tools of reason and scientific investigation,
uncovering more and more complex structures of the natural universe, it also
confronted the possibility that ‘knowledge’ was not fixed or stable and that
much of what we think we know reflects the questions we ask and the methods
we use to obtain answers. Modernity in the twentieth century is not merely an
opposition of new and old perspectives, but a philosophical interrogation of
what it means to have a perspective at all. For writers and artists, this
interrogation brought new insights as well as further questions about the means
of expression available for representing them.” (1621)
Faith and Reason?
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Changes in the sciences: chemistry (atomic theory, the periodic table of
elements); physics (unified field theory); and astronomy—resulting in making
“the universe more rational and, hence, predictable” (1621).
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Positivism and “its faith in rational solutions” (1622)
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Nietzsche’s emphasis on the individual rather than on society, his Übermensch,
the “superhuman being who refuses to be bound by the prevailing social
paradigms of nationalism, Christianity, faith in science, loyalty to the state, or
bourgeois civilized comfort” (1622)
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Freud’s focus on the “irrational and the rational levels of their existence” (1623),
like Dostoevsky
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Cultural parochialism as “the belief that there is only one correct view of the
world (one’s own),” a notion that becomes problematic with changes in travel
and move toward globalization (1624)
Masking
http://www.moma.org/collection/conservation/demoiselles/index.html
Picasso’s Demoiselles D’Avignon (1907)
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Exhibited in 1916, popularity by 1920s
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Often referred to as the “first painting of the twentieth century,” it “fractures
this organizational model [“the Renaissance concept of a unified spatial
perspective”], breaking up images (and human figures) into a complex
arrangement of planes and geometric shapes” (Norton insert).
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“they had faces like grotesque masks” (Conrad 1642)
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Paul Gauguin “renounced not only impressionism but also the entire Western
notion that a painter should reproduce the physical world as it actually appears”
(Perry insert, Chapter 36)
Example of Primitivism
http://www.moma.org/collection/details.php?theme_id=10176
http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=79766
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As scandal, rejecting mores of middle class, attempt to paint “fourth dimension”
New Perspectives
http://www-camil.music.uiuc.edu/Projects/EAM/Dadaism.html
Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (1913)
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example of Dadaism, experimentation with collage, cubism, fragmentation
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Corollary in writing linked to Surrealist experiments, high modernism: “Dream
writing, automatic writing, riddle games, interruption and collage” (1625)
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Surrealist techniques of collage, metamorphosis, and blurring of dream and
reality (1625)
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Leads to postmodernist play
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Rejected by Cubist exhibition Salon des Indépendants, exhibits at Armory
Show in NYC in 1913
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Stop motion photography
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At Philadelphia Museum of Art
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http://www.philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/51449.html
Breaking from the Past
http://www.consideration.org/art/dali.html
Dali’s Exploding Raphaelesque Head (1951)
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as example of Surrealism and new conceptions of art and form
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“the high modernist quest for more profound insight and inclusive vision does
not so much break with the past as it continues an idealist Western tradition
reaching back to Homer and the Bible. In contrast, postmodernist writers
created a network of allusions, interruptions, contradictions, and blurred
reference as if to disorient a reader who seeks to reduce human events to one
demonstrated meaning” (1625).
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http://www.nationalgalleries.org/collection/artists-az/D/3035/artistName/Salvador%20Dal%C3%AD/recordId/8726
Modernisms, Modernity
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Existentialism in the 1940s and 1950s :
a “philosophic attempt to recover clear vision—and a basis for action—in a
confused and meaningless world” (1624)
Western literature after World War II:
“different ethnic, sexual, and cultural identities, both depicted as subject matter
and embodied in narrative perspective” (1626)
Split inheritances, loyalties:
“Postcolonial societies struggled with a mixed heritage of indigenous and
colonial traditions, debating whether to reject (with difficulty) the colonizer’s
language and culture or to develop and control the rich hybridity of existing
cultural consciousness” (1626)
Audre Lorde’s statement that “The master’s tools will never dismantle the
master’s house”
Postcolonial as evidencing a “profusion of styles and perspectives” (1626)