20th/21st Century Humanities and Technology Class Assignment Folder.

Abstract

The term modernism is typically used as a label for the period of Western aesthetics between 1890 and 1930. It is associated with a radical break with 19th-century aesthetics and morality, and with the celebration of "newness" as an abstract ideal and virtue. Nevertheless although one can identify broad, unifying trends within modernist expression, it is impossible to come up with a tidy definition of modernism, whose diversity is acknowledged and explored by most critics today. The term covers movements or tendencies in literature and the visual arts as diverse as cubism, dadaism, expressionism, imagism, surrealism, and symbolism, all of which sought to develop novel forms and means of artistic expression with the aim to shatter traditional views of art and life. By employing aesthetic principles like irrationalism, fragmentation, multiperspectivity, and "primitivism," modernism defies classical norms of beauty, chronology, and verisimilitude. Much modernist art is self-reflexive, drawing attention to the constructedness of artistic representation and deliberately frustrating the reader's or viewer's desire for aesthetic truthfulness and reliability. The paper covers different aspects that are covered in the book The Humanistic Tradition, Book 6: Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Global Perspective.

Table of Contents

Abstract1

Paper One3

Modern Poem3

Paper Two4

Paper Three6

Figure 34.2 Max Ernst6

Figure 34.3 George Grosz8

Paper Four9

Abstract Expressionists Figure 35.9 Mark Rothko9

Paper Five11

Cultural Events Malaysia11

Closing Statement15

Works Cited16

The Humanistic Tradition, Book 6: Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Global Perspective

Paper One

Modern Poem

There is a music brewing slowly,

Distant songs in the mist

As dawn breaks episodically

Across the world

And drops into the void

Between our dreams.

Clocks turn in slow motion

And seconds sludge

As we pace,

Maybe our hearts are in unison,

Maybe we're just destined to drift,

Maybe our moments sit stolen,

High on a mountain somewhere. (Gloria, 3-6).

Paper Two

It might fairly be said that current research in the field of modernist studies continues to be preoccupied with extending the discipline's boundaries. But to put it this way is immediately to beg any number of questions, for the expansionist metaphor scarcely does justice to the many ways in which what is (or has been) meant by modernism is being challenged at present. Revisions of the canon seek to bring various ignored, neglected, or suppressed texts and writers into the orbit of modernism, thereby expanding its domain, but most such revisions are no less concerned to challenge the intellectual assumptions that led to this exclusion in the first place. For most critics it isn't simply a matter of arguing that particular authors or works should all along have been considered 'modernist' as it is a question of exposing the hegemonic paradigms that produced, and continue to produce, the accounts of modernism that structure our understandings of it (Gloria, pp.14). To be sure, a lot of research is devoted to the discovery and/or recovery of unknown and/or forgotten writing, and some of the books under review here perform these empirical tasks valuably, but several of the monographs published in 2005 extend the field in another way: by considering modernism in relation to traditions and practices that have hitherto received scant attention, they ...