LITERARY AND OTHER MODERNISMS

Word "modernism" not used until Quarrel - eighteenth century
Last decades of nineteenth century - rehabilitate "modernism" Modernism gained wider acceptance and legitimacy only after the 1920s [69]
El modernismo in early 1890s in Latin America - cultural independence
Theological debate on "modernism" at turn of century in Roman Catholic church [78]
Modernizing tendency within Catholic world
challenged basic tenets of Catholicism, encouraged by Leo XIII
officially suppressed by Pius X - harsh condemnation of modernism
In Italy "modernismo" has pejorative meaning -
suggests Marinetti and other futurists
modernism as caricature of modernity
English-speaking use of word -
1919 magazine - progress, revolutionary change, and socialism
1927 Modernist Poetry- willful deviation from accepted poetic tradition - mention difficulty it presents to the average reader. "The divorce of advanced contemporary poetry from the common-sense standards of ordinary intelligence." [83]
Distinguish between genuine modernism and the vulgar meaning of modernism - modern- ness, a keeping-up in poetry with the pace of civilization and intellectual history. [84]
Modernism as antitraditional tyranny
True modernism is faith in the immediate

During the last century enormous increase in use of modern, modernity, and modernism
Early twentieth century modern and contemporary separated
Use as "period terms"
1. Always imply a value judgement
Romantic from modern languages (not Latin)
Barrueco - irregular pearl
2. Refer to particular segment of history
retain old meaning - classical good, romantique = decadent
3. Describe a type, which may have been more frequent in a certain historical period
Become less polemical
Part of a global view of cultural history - process of continually renewed clashes between two recurrent and opposing types
Opposition between modern and contemporary [88]
Stephen Spender, Struggle of the Modern (1963)
Modern art is that in which the artist reflects awareness of an unprecedented modern situation in its form and idiom. The quality which I call modern shows in the realized sensibility of style and form more than in subject matter. .. I would not call Tennyson, Ruskin, Carlyle moderns... They had the Voltairean "I"....The Voltairean "I" of Shaw, Wells, and the others, acts upon events. The "modern" "I" of Rimbaud, Joyce, Proust, Eliot's Prufrock is acted upon by them. The Voltairean "I" has the characteristics--rationalism, progressive politics, etc.--of the world the writer attempts to influence, whereas the modern"I" through receptiveness, suffering, passivitiy, transforms the world to which it is exposed....The Voltairean egoists are contemporaries without being, from an aesthetic or literary point of view, moderns. What they write is rationalist, sociological, political and responsible. The writing of the moderns is the art of observers conscious of the action of the conditions observed upon their sensibility. Their critical awareness includes ironic self-criticism."
"The modern tends to see life as a whole and hence in modern conditions to condemn it as a whole."
Spender uses contemporary to refer to the other modernity, the modernity of reason and progress, which produced realism "and against which aesthetic modernity has reacted with increasing itensity every since the first decades of the nineteenth century.
In the last half century, the heritage of modernism and the most extreme manifestations of the avant-garde have gained "official" recognition.
See taming of aesthetic and subversive modernity in the teaching of modern literature
Matthew Arnold, a cultural traditionalist for whom the role of religion was to be taken over by culture, enlarged the scope of modernity's concept to comprise whatever was rationally valid... [91]
Uses word modern to mean the contemporary of other critics
Querelle des anciens et des moderns now replaced by a quarrel between the moderns and the contemporaries.

THE IDEA OF MODERNITY