SOURCE: Freedman, Ralph. “Refractory Visions: The Contours of Literary Expressionism.” Contemporary Literature 10, no. 1 (winter 1969): 54-74.

In the following essay, Freedman discusses the Expressionist technique of blurring the contours of ordinary objects in order to explore the relationship between human consciousness and the real world.

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If it is at all true that artists express the needs and values of their culture, it follows that they also reflect its impasse. In our time, they have sought to isolate this crucial recognition by distorting the world around them—their own features, and ours, as well as those “classical” forms we still intuitively accept as our standards. We want to determine what these modern distortions mean in our cultural history—whether they suggest a height of artistic power, as most of us now think, or whether, as the old term “decadence” implies, they are symptoms of decline. These are odd questions...