Page 147 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

DICTIONARY OF CULTURAL STUDIES

make himself and his world, even at the cost of a deal with the devil. Just as Faust
was a troubled, destructive and tragic figure so the poverty and squalor of industrial
cities, two destructive world wars, death camps and the threat of global annihilation
124 mark the culture of moderns. On a more optimistic note, another crucial figure of
modernism is the flâneur who walks the anonymous spaces of the modern city
experiencing the aesthetic pleasures of shops, displays, images and persons.
The concept of modernism also refers to the aesthetic forms associated with
artistic movements dating from the nineteenth century. Key modernist figures
include Joyce, Wolff, Kafka and Eliot in literature along with Picasso, Kandinsky and
Miro in painting. While it would be better to talk of modernisms rather than
modernism, general themes of artistic modernism include:

• Aesthetic self-consciousness.
• An interest in language and questions of representation.
• A rejection of realism in favour of an exploration of the uncertain character of
the ‘real’.
• A jettisoning of linear narrative structures in favour of montage and
simultaneity.
• An emphasis on the value of aesthetic experience drawn from romanticism.
• An acceptance of the idea of depth and universal mytho-poetic meaning.
• The exploration and exploitation of fragmentation.
• The value and role of avant-garde high culture.

Modernism rejects the idea that it is possible to adequately represent the ‘real’ so
that representation is not an act of mimesis or copying but an aesthetic expression
or conventionalized construction of the ‘real’. In the context of an uncertain and
changing world, modernist literature saw its task as finding the means of expression
with which to capture the ‘deep reality’ of cultural life. Hence the concern with the
place of form, and particularly language, in constructing meaning. This is
manifested in the experimental approach to aesthetic style characteristic of
modernist work that seeks to express depth through fragmentation. Modernists
have been interested in practices that reveal their own techniques and allow for
reflection upon the processes of signification. If any one style can be said to
encapsulate modernism it is the use of montage. That is, the selection and
assemblage of shots or representations to form a composite of jutaxposed ideas and
images that are not ‘held together’ by realist notions of time and motivation.
Joyce’s Ulysses is regarded as archetypal of high modernist novels because of its
stream of consciousness, non-realist, narrative style. In doing so, Joyce attempts to
represent the real in new ways using language to capture the fragmented character
of the self. Yet, while Joyce would have agreed with Nietzsche that ‘God is dead’,
and that there can be no cosmic universals, there is nevertheless a sense in his work
that Art can draw on, and re-configure, universal mythic-poetic meanings. Thus, a
day in the life of one Dubliner is framed in terms of the universalist Ulysses of Greek
myth. For their supporters, such as Adorno, the modernist works of Kafka, Beckett
and Schoenberg are amongst the most radical of art forms. In particular, it is the