Lecture
Modernism — a movement in twentieth-century art characterized by a break with the preceding historical experience of artistic creation, a striving to establish new, non-traditional principles in art, continuous renewal of artistic forms, and also by a conventionality (schematization, abstraction) of style. The modernist paradigm was one of the leading paradigms in Western civilization in the first half of the twentieth century; in the second half of the century it was subjected to extensive criticism. At the turn of the century realism began to lose ground, proving insufficiently expressive for depicting a turbulent, ever-changing reality. Modernism came to take its place.
Modernism as a new movement in art arose at the turn of the century. In France – Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud. In Scandinavia – Maeterlinck. In England – Oscar Wilde. In Lithuania – Čiurlionis, Sruoga. Later, among the greatest modernist writers, the names of Kafka, Faulkner, and Nabokov shone forth.
Modernism is divided into a great number of currents, but all of them are united by a search for new forms and by a view of humanity's place in the world. Modernist literature is, for the most part, cosmopolitan, and usually expresses a sense of being lost within an urban environment. The very essence of modernism, born between the world wars in a society exhausted by the ideas of the past, is cosmopolitan. The writers working in this period experimented with forms, methods, devices, and techniques in order to give the world a new sound, yet their themes remained eternal. Most often this was the problem of the individual's solitude in this multicolored world, the mismatch between his own pace and the pace of the surrounding reality.
It is modernism, unlike all the movements that preceded it, that focuses its attention on the human being, on his inner essence, discarding external trappings or altering them so that they merely underscore the central idea. Critics speak of modernist literature as a rather gloomy phenomenon, but this impression arises chiefly because the reader views the world presented by the author through the prism of the latter's own perception, colored by disillusionment and by an eternal search for the meaning of existence.
From a historical point of view, modernism is closely bound up with the emergence of new regimes. Most often this concerns the rise of fascism and communism, and the turning of classic writers to them for new ideas. For this reason, a writer's body of work can sometimes be divided into two periods – one of fascination with politics and one of disillusionment with it. And yet most modernists are apolitical, the only rule governing them being their own imagination and worldview.
Modernism (from the French moderne – modern, newest) – a movement in art and literature opposed to realism and characterized by a striving toward non-traditional forms and toward conventionality of style. The main features of modernism:
1) disbelief in the rationality of the world order (the real world is hostile to man, full of coarseness and cruelty, and man within it is weak and helpless), a denial of historical progress and an affirmation of the absurdity of existence;
2) an exceptional interest in the individual outside of his social affiliation – lonely, alien to the world, a plaything in the hands of the world's elemental forces;
3) a myth-making method of perceiving and explaining the world (the world is unknowable, and every artist has the right to create his own picture of the world, which will constitute an aesthetic victory over world chaos);
4) the worship of art as the supreme value in life (a rejection of the traditional principle that «art serves the people». Art must not serve; rather, it is society that must serve it. The artist is permitted everything, for he adorns life with his creations).
Acmeism (from the Greek akme — «the highest degree, summit, flowering, blossoming time») — a literary movement opposed to Symbolism that arose at the beginning of the twentieth century in Russia. The Acmeists proclaimed materiality, the concreteness of subject matter and imagery, and precision of the word.
The formation of Acmeism is closely bound up with the activity of the «Poets' Guild», whose central figures were the organizers of Acmeism N. S. Gumilyov, A. Akhmatova (who served as its secretary and an active participant), and S. M. Gorodetsky.
Futurism (Latin futurum — future) — the general name for the avant-garde artistic movements of the 1910s to the early 1920s, above all in Italy and Russia. In Russia, the first Futurists were the Burliuk brothers, painters. David Burliuk was the founder, on his own estate, of the Futurist colony «Hylaea». He succeeded in rallying around himself the most varied, vivid, utterly distinctive personalities. Mayakovsky, Khlebnikov, Kruchyonykh, Benedikt Livshits, and Elena Guro are the best-known names. In the first manifesto, «A Slap in the Face of Public Taste», came the call: «Throw Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, etc., etc. overboard from the Ship of Modernity». But this call is softened by the statement below: «He who does not forget his first love will never know his last». Yet even such idols as Alexander Blok did not escape the accusation that «all they need is a dacha by the river». One way or another, Futurism gave poetry three geniuses: Mayakovsky, Khlebnikov, and Pasternak — not to mention a sea of talents: Khabias, Kamensky, Shklovsky, Zdanevich, Kruchyonykh.
Symbolism (French Symbolisme) — one of the major movements in art (in literature, music, and painting), which arose in France in the 1870s–80s and reached its fullest development at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, above all in France itself, in Belgium, and in Russia. The Symbolists radically changed not only various forms of art but the very attitude toward it. Their experimental character, their striving for innovation, their cosmopolitanism, and the broad range of their influences became a model for most modern art movements. The Symbolists made use of symbols, understatement, allusion, mystery, and enigma. The predominant mood captured by the Symbolists was pessimism, verging on despair. Everything «natural» appeared merely as «appearance», devoid of independent artistic significance.
in Russia — Valery Bryusov, Alexander Blok, Fyodor Sologub, Andrei Bely, Konstantin Balmont, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Zinaida Gippius, Dmitry Merezhkovsky, and many others.
At present one can already speak of postmodernism as an established artistic style with its own typological features.
The use of ready-made forms — a foundational feature of such art. The origin of these ready-made forms is of no fundamental importance: from utilitarian household objects thrown into the trash or bought in a shop, to masterpieces of world art (whether Paleolithic or late avant-garde, it makes no difference). A situation of artistic borrowing extending as far as the simulation of borrowing, remakes, reinterpretation, patchwork and reproduction, the continuation of classic works in one's own words, joined at the end of the 1980s–90s by a «new sentimentality» added to these characteristic traits — such is the content of the art of the postmodern era.
In essence, postmodernism turns to the ready-made, the past, that which has already taken place, in order to compensate for a deficiency in its own content. Postmodernism displays an extreme traditionalism of its own and sets itself against the non-traditional art of the avant-garde. «The artist of our day is not a producer but an appropriator… since the time of Duchamp we have known that the contemporary artist does not produce, but selects, combines, transfers, and places in a new location… Cultural innovation today is carried out as the adaptation of cultural tradition to new circumstances of life, new technologies of presentation and distribution, or new stereotypes of perception» (B. Groys).
Postmodernism, on the whole, does not acknowledge pathos; it ironizes over the surrounding world or over itself, thereby saving itself from banality and justifying its own inherent secondariness.
Irony — another typological feature of postmodern culture. Opposed to the avant-garde's orientation toward novelty is the aspiration to incorporate the whole of world artistic experience into contemporary art by means of ironic quotation. The ability to freely manipulate any ready-made forms, as well as the artistic styles of the past, in an ironic key, and the turning to timeless subjects and eternal themes – until recently unthinkable in avant-garde art – allows attention to be focused on their anomalous condition in the contemporary world. A resemblance is noted between postmodernism and not only mass culture and kitsch. Far more well-founded is the noticeable repetition, within postmodernism, of the experiment of Socialist Realism, which proved the fruitfulness of drawing on and synthesizing the experience of the best of world artistic tradition. Thus postmodernism inherits from Socialist Realism a syntheticity, or syncretism, as a typological feature.
The critique of postmodernism is total in character (despite the fact that postmodernism denies any totality) and belongs both to the champions of contemporary art and to its opponents. The death of postmodernism has already been announced (such provocative pronouncements, following R. Barthes's proclamation of the «death of the author», are gradually becoming a well-worn cliché); postmodernism has been characterized as a «second hand» culture.
1.decanonization of all canons and all official conventions, an ironic reassessment of values;2.the blurring of rigid binary oppositions; a fondness for the technique of bricolage, or the citational combination of the incompatible;3.a rejection of the traditional «I», the effacement of personality, an emphasis on the multiplicity of the «I»;4.hybridization, the mutant transformation of genres, generating new forms;5.carnivalization as a recognition of the immanence of laughter, of the «merry relativity» of things, as participation in the wild disorder of life;6.metalinguistic play, play into the text, play with the text, play with the reader, .play with the supertext, the theatricalization of the text;7. the playful mastering of Chaos;8.intertextuality, reliance on the whole history of human culture and its reinterpretation; a pluralism of cultural languages, .9.of models, of styles, used as equals;10. an orientation toward a multiplicity of interpretations of the text;11.the principle of reader co-creation, the creation of a new type of reader;
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