Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The great revolution of the early twentieth century designated by the term modernism – a term that refers not only to a period (roughly 1900–30) but to an ethos – remains, at the beginning of our own century, incomplete and open to the future: modernism , it is now widely understood, is not yet finished, its momentum having been deferred by two world wars and the Cold War so that many of its principles are only now being brought to fruition. But the recognition that we are still modernists has been slow in coming, for in the decades following the Second World War, the common wisdom was that the modernism of the early century was tainted by its racism, sexism, and elitism – its retrograde politics, and “purist” aestheticism. Modernist “genius theory” was mocked by critics of both left and right, as was the purported faith in modernist autonomy and the primacy of poetic form. But from the vantage point of the new century, the rejection of modernism no longer makes much sense. True, as many of the authors in this collection demonstrate, modernist poems, novels, plays, and films reflect attitudes toward race, class, and gender that now strike us as unacceptable. As Frank Kermode argued, in his early critique The Sense of an Ending (1967), the system building and use of explanatory myth characteristic of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Wyndham Lewis led to “totalitarian theories ... log in or subscribe to read full text