The Case for Modernism

The Wall Street Journal has a great review of What Ever Happened to Modernism?, the new critical work out by Gabriel Josipovici. The review makes a great case for two things–that modernism never ended, and that we need it today–two things I very much agree with.

Here’s a little bit of that argument:

In Mr. Josipovici’s view, Modernism is something at once vast and intimate, encompassing “nothing less than life itself.” Modernism isn’t a style, he says, but “the coming into awareness by art of its precarious status and responsibilities.” Even more portentously, Modernism is a kind of anguished repudiation—”a response to the simplifications of the self and of life that Protestantism and the Enlightenment brought with them.” Its intimacy lies in the stubborn effort, especially on the part of Modernist novelists, to render those little hesitations, those sieges of doubt, those a nxious questionings that beset us even as we attempt to construct some credible narrative of our lives. The true Modernist narrative always involves a disrupted momentum.

The rest of the review is here.

And since I’m reading Adorno right now–an apostle of modernism if ever there was one–here’s a quote I found relevant: “Art really only exists as long as it is impossible by virtue of the order which it transcends.”

We have two of Josipovici’s books under review at The Quarterly Conversation: Goldberg: Variations (review here) and Two Novels: After & Making Mistakes (review here)

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