Modernization, Modernity, and Modernisms

1. Modernization, Modernity, and Modernisms HUM 2052: Civilization II Spring 2011 Dr. Perdigao March 23-25, 2011

2. Redefining the “Modern” • Twentieth century not the first to use the term but changes in this period • “There is, nonetheless, a particular stamp to the twentieth-century’s idea of modernity: it is not so much comparative as interrogative, and it inquires how we know what we know, rather than merely rejecting previous modes of thought (which it also did). Employing the tools of reason and scientific investigation, uncovering more and more complex structures of the natural universe, it also confronted the possibility that ‘knowledge’ was not fixed or stable and that much of what we think we know reflects the questions we ask and the methods we use to obtain answers. Modernity in the twentieth century is not merely an opposition of new and old perspectives, but a philosophical interrogation of what it means to have a perspective at all. For writers and artists, this interrogation brought new insights as well as further questions about the means of expression available for representing them.” (1621)

3. Faith and Reason? • Changes in the sciences: chemistry (atomic theory, the periodic table of elements); physics (unified field theory); and astronomy—resulting in making “the universe more rational and, hence, predictable” (1621). • Positivism and “its faith in rational solutions” (1622) • Nietzsche’s emphasis on the individual rather than on society, his Übermensch, the “superhuman being who refuses to be bound by the prevailing social paradigms of nationalism, Christianity, faith in science, loyalty to the state, or bourgeois civilized comfort” (1622) • Freud’s focus on the “irrational and the rational levels of their existence” (1623), like Dostoevsky • Cultural parochialism as “the belief that there is only one correct view of the world (one’s own),” a notion that becomes problematic with changes in travel and move toward globalization (1624)

4. Masking http://www.moma.org/collection/conservation/demoiselles/index.html

5. Picasso’s Demoiselles D’Avignon (1907) • Exhibited in 1916, popularity by 1920s • Often referred to as the “first painting of the twentieth century,” it “fractures this organizational model [“the Renaissance concept of a unified spatial perspective”], breaking up images (and human figures) into a complex arrangement of planes and geometric shapes” (Norton insert). • “they had faces like grotesque masks” (Conrad 1642) • Paul Gauguin “renounced not only impressionism but also the entire Western notion that a painter should reproduce the physical world as it actually appears” (Perry insert, Chapter 36) • Example of Primitivism • http://www.moma.org/collection/details.php?theme_id=10176 • http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=79766 • As scandal, rejecting mores of middle class, attempt to paint “fourth dimension”

6. New Perspectives http://www-camil.music.uiuc.edu/Projects/EAM/Dadaism.html

7. Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (1913) • example of Dadaism, experimentation with collage, cubism, fragmentation • Corollary in writing linked to Surrealist experiments, high modernism: “Dream writing, automatic writing, riddle games, interruption and collage” (1625) • Surrealist techniques of collage, metamorphosis, and blurring of dream and reality (1625) • Leads to postmodernist play • Rejected by Cubist exhibition Salon des Indépendants, exhibits at Armory Show in NYC in 1913 • Stop motion photography • At Philadelphia Museum of Art • http://www.philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/51449.html

8. Breaking from the Past http://www.consideration.org/art/dali.html

9. Dali’s Exploding Raphaelesque Head (1951) • as example of Surrealism and new conceptions of art and form • “the high modernist quest for more profound insight and inclusive vision does not so much break with the past as it continues an idealist Western tradition reaching back to Homer and the Bible. In contrast, postmodernist writers created a network of allusions, interruptions, contradictions, and blurred reference as if to disorient a reader who seeks to reduce human events to one demonstrated meaning” (1625). • http://www.nationalgalleries.org/collection/online_az/4:322/result/0/8726?initial=D&artistId=3035&artistName=Salvador%20Dal%C3%AD&submit=1

10. Modernisms, Modernity • Existentialism in the 1940s and 1950s : a “philosophic attempt to recover clear vision—and a basis for action—in a confused and meaningless world” (1624) • Western literature after World War II: “different ethnic, sexual, and cultural identities, both depicted as subject matter and embodied in narrative perspective” (1626) • Split inheritances, loyalties: “Postcolonial societies struggled with a mixed heritage of indigenous and colonial traditions, debating whether to reject (with difficulty) the colonizer’s language and culture or to develop and control the rich hybridity of existing cultural consciousness” (1626) • Audre Lorde’s statement that “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” • Postcolonial as evidencing a “profusion of styles and perspectives” (1626)