What Ever Happened to Modernism?
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"'This short, fierce book is clearly very personal... Nevertheless, I enjoyed the sinuousness and vigour of Josipovici's arguments.' (Sam Leith, Sunday Times) 'What can't be faulted is the plaintive logic running through this book. In cultural terms, we live in deeply conservative times... Yet can anyone, now, name the successful middlebrow writer of 1922 or 1915? Of course not. That alone should give Josipovici comfort.' (Tom McCarthy, The Guardian) 'Josipovici's erudite and intelligent polemic raises more questions than it answers - always a good thing.' (Tom McCarthy, Daily Telegraph) 'Now in his seventies, he is formidably cultivated... Not that he condescends. Josipovici carries his learning lightly and the meditations on Modernism which make up the body of the book are instructive and accessible... This is a book... one can't help rather enjoying.' (John Sutherland, Literary Review) '... a welcome intervention in the long debate about the difference between art and entertainment.' (James Purdon, The Observer) 'His book is similarly eloquent, besides being, in its task of charting modernism's uniqueness, ingenious, unexpected, astute and insightful. It's also - because of its passion and intelligence - readable, in a way a modernist would approve of...' (Amit Chaudhuri, The Independent) 'Entertaining as his assault is, this is a more challenging and ambitious book than simply a jeremiad on the contemporary cultural climate.' (Ronan McDonald, The London Magazine)"
Product Description
The quality of today's literary writing arouses the strongest opinions. For novelist and critic Gabriel Josipovici, the contemporary novel in English is profoundly disappointing - a poor relation of its groundbreaking Modernist forebears. This agile and passionate book asks why. Modernism, Josipovici suggests, is only superficially a reaction to industrialization or a revolution in diction and form; essentially, it is art coming to consciousness of its own limits and responsibilities. And its origins are to be sought not in 1850 or 1800, but in the early 1500s, with the crisis of society and perception that also led to the rise of Protestantism. With sophistication and persuasiveness, Josipovici charts some of Modernism's key stages, from Durer, Rabelais, and Cervantes to the present, bringing together a rich array of artists, musicians, and writers both familiar and unexpected - including Beckett, Borges, Friedrich, Cezanne, Stevens, Robbe-Grillet, Beethoven, and Wordsworth. He concludes with a stinging attack on the current literary scene in Britain and America, which raises questions about not only national taste, but contemporary culture itself.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Kindle Edition
First off, I haven't finished reading this book, yet... BUT...
I'm going to write this review now... out of sheer excitement, frankly...
I've been trying to understand why the books I really "connect" with were all written a long time ago (Beckett, Woolf, Mansfield etc.) and the contemporary English novel (with its parochial concerns and insipid language) leaves me disappointed and so, very, very bored (except for A L Kennedy and Ballard... and maybe, just maybe, a couple more).
From the first quote in this book, I think I got the seed of an answer. The point is that the great works of Modernism were not an attempt to shock genteel, bourgeois society. Neither were they written by overly sensitive writers, obsessed with subjectivity, who spent far too long navel-gazing... They had a real and valid concern about their engagement with the world. This book looks like it'll construct a decent argument of how we pick up where Modernism left off, without descending into post-modernism, or even worse, the dull, dull writing that, each year, Booker judges serve up as the cream of English writing.
If you've ever been disappointed by contemporary writing and want to experience the excitement you felt when you first read The Trial or Nausea or The Waves, you HAVE to read this book.
Last thing, the fact that there are so many other positive reviews (press and from other amazon readers) makes me think I'm not alone in my frustrations... that, at least, is something :)
I'm going to write this review now... out of sheer excitement, frankly...
I've been trying to understand why the books I really "connect" with were all written a long time ago (Beckett, Woolf, Mansfield etc.) and the contemporary English novel (with its parochial concerns and insipid language) leaves me disappointed and so, very, very bored (except for A L Kennedy and Ballard... and maybe, just maybe, a couple more).
From the first quote in this book, I think I got the seed of an answer. The point is that the great works of Modernism were not an attempt to shock genteel, bourgeois society. Neither were they written by overly sensitive writers, obsessed with subjectivity, who spent far too long navel-gazing... They had a real and valid concern about their engagement with the world. This book looks like it'll construct a decent argument of how we pick up where Modernism left off, without descending into post-modernism, or even worse, the dull, dull writing that, each year, Booker judges serve up as the cream of English writing.
If you've ever been disappointed by contemporary writing and want to experience the excitement you felt when you first read The Trial or Nausea or The Waves, you HAVE to read this book.
Last thing, the fact that there are so many other positive reviews (press and from other amazon readers) makes me think I'm not alone in my frustrations... that, at least, is something :)
9 of 13 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
For Gabriel Josipovici modernism is a state of anxiety due to not being able to go on using language in the way it was used by Balzac and Dickens. He endorses Barthes' remark that `to be modern is to know that which is not possible anymore'. He identifies with Hugo von Hofmannnsthal whose whole body puts him on guard against each word. Josipovici claims the pre-modern novel confuses possibility and actuality by producing the impression in the reader that he or she understands something when the writer who cares for reality should be making the reader grasp the distance that separates us from others. For Josipovici modernism relieves anxiety with the detached gaze; and ushers in post-modern inter-textuality and difference.
He recognises that Wordsworth rejected pre-modern genres but his discussion of Wordsworth is perverse because it ignores Wordsworth's participation in, rather detachment from, events. In an attempt to appropriate `A Slumber did my Spirit seal ...' he claims that Wordsworth's slumber enables the poet to grasp who Lucy is. But the poem represents a waking and a turn in Wordsworth's perspective that cannot be accommodated by either pre-modern authorship, or modern detachment.
Josipovici admires Claude Simon, Cezanne and Picasso because, unlike the `passé simple' of pre-modern art there are multiple elements and no one element, e.g. background or foreground, is more important than another. Josipovici says the depth/movement of multiple voices that is lacking in monologue can be found in Eliot's The Waste Land and Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. Josipovici recognises that they have moved from resemblance/illustration/mediation to the ceaseless play of meaning. But what he means by play is the detachment of the flâneur. Simon, Cezanne and Picasso were not participants; they found life in detached spectacles.
An alternative to be the flâneur of the nouveau roman is an author who feels and responds to the power of events. There will be those who feel that Josipovici's omission of any comment on writers such as D H Lawrence is a sign that he is less interested in the play of meaning than in a celebration of his heroes.
He recognises that Wordsworth rejected pre-modern genres but his discussion of Wordsworth is perverse because it ignores Wordsworth's participation in, rather detachment from, events. In an attempt to appropriate `A Slumber did my Spirit seal ...' he claims that Wordsworth's slumber enables the poet to grasp who Lucy is. But the poem represents a waking and a turn in Wordsworth's perspective that cannot be accommodated by either pre-modern authorship, or modern detachment.
Josipovici admires Claude Simon, Cezanne and Picasso because, unlike the `passé simple' of pre-modern art there are multiple elements and no one element, e.g. background or foreground, is more important than another. Josipovici says the depth/movement of multiple voices that is lacking in monologue can be found in Eliot's The Waste Land and Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. Josipovici recognises that they have moved from resemblance/illustration/mediation to the ceaseless play of meaning. But what he means by play is the detachment of the flâneur. Simon, Cezanne and Picasso were not participants; they found life in detached spectacles.
An alternative to be the flâneur of the nouveau roman is an author who feels and responds to the power of events. There will be those who feel that Josipovici's omission of any comment on writers such as D H Lawrence is a sign that he is less interested in the play of meaning than in a celebration of his heroes.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
To me this book was a breath of fresh air, which I bought after reading short extracts from it in " The Irish Times ". I could never understand how Ian McEwan, a hero of mine in 1976 with " First Love, Last Rites ", had descended into a writing form that is so smug, self-satisfied and ' middle-England ', that I had come to the point that trying to read him was so depressing I had to give up, after the research-heavy, detail-obsessed, self-referential " Atonement ", which seemed to me to be two separate books stuck together with the most tenuous of links. I couldn't understand how his popularity had appeared to increase in inverse relation to the quality of his writing, and Josipovici's book for the first time articulated my doubts.
Not least about " What Ever Happened To Modernism " is the enjoyment of reading the petty. petulant and sometimes spiteful reviews it has generated from the island-nation minds resentful of the opinions of some jumped-up foreigner to the prize-winning pride of their contemporary literature.
That isn't the main focus of the book, though, and it covers such an interesting range of artists, many of whom I knew little or nothing about, that it is an education in itself. After reading Josipovici for the first time - and he's worth reading repeatedly - I went on to read, among others, Marcel Proust's " A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu ", the most rewarding reading experience of my life.
Not least about " What Ever Happened To Modernism " is the enjoyment of reading the petty. petulant and sometimes spiteful reviews it has generated from the island-nation minds resentful of the opinions of some jumped-up foreigner to the prize-winning pride of their contemporary literature.
That isn't the main focus of the book, though, and it covers such an interesting range of artists, many of whom I knew little or nothing about, that it is an education in itself. After reading Josipovici for the first time - and he's worth reading repeatedly - I went on to read, among others, Marcel Proust's " A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu ", the most rewarding reading experience of my life.
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