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SOURCE: "What Was Modernism?" in Hudson Review, Vol. 31, No. 1, Spring, 1978, pp. 19-33.
In the following essay, Adams enumerates reasons for the inadequacy of "Modernism" as a critical-historical term.
"The past serves only as a means of knowing the present. But the present eludes me. What, after all, is the present?"
—Henri Foçillon, quoted by George Kubler: The Shape of Time
Since the ironic reservations and self-questioning cautions that surround the topic of "the modern" are potentially infinite, it's best to start with a blunt and vigorous citation from Mrs. Woolf, who tells us flatly that on or about December, 1910, human nature changed radically. I think she's right. Within five years either way of that date a great sequence of new and different works appeared in Western culture, striking the tonic chords of modernism. Ten years before that fulcrum of December, 1910, modernism is not yet; ten years after...
This section contains 6,039 words (approx. 21 pages at 300 words per page) |
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