Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-garde, Decadence, Kitsch, PostmodernismFive Faces of Modernity is a series of semantic and cultural biographies of words that have taken on special significance in the last century and a half or so: modernity, avant-garde, decadence, kitsch, and postmodernism. The concept of modernity—the notion that we, the living, are different and somehow superior to our predecessors and that our civilization is likely to be succeeded by one even superior to ours—is a relatively recent Western invention and one whose time may already have passed, if we believe its postmodern challengers. Calinescu documents the rise of cultural modernity and, in tracing the shifting senses of the five terms under scrutiny, illustrates the intricate value judgments, conflicting orientations, and intellectual paradoxes to which it has given rise. Five Faces of Modernity attempts to do for the foundations of the modernist critical lexicon what earlier terminological studies have done for such complex categories as classicism, baroque, romanticism, realism, or symbolism and thereby fill a gap in literary scholarship. On another, more ambitious level, Calinescu deals at length with the larger issues, dilemmas, ideological tensions, and perplexities brought about by the assertion of modernity. |
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Contents
Introduction | 3 |
THE IDEA OF MODERNITY | 13 |
Three Eras of Western History | 19 |
Comparing the Moderns to the Ancients | 26 |
From Modern to Gothic to Romantic to Modern | 35 |
The Two Modernities | 41 |
Modernity the Death of God and Utopia | 58 |
Literary and Other Modernisms | 68 |
Nietzsche on Decadence and Modernity | 178 |
The Concept of Decadence in Marxist Criticism | 195 |
Decadentismo | 211 |
KITSCH | 223 |
Kitsch Camp and High Art | 229 |
Kitsch and Romanticism | 237 |
Some Stylistic Considerations | 249 |
Kitsch and Cultural Industrialization | 255 |
Comparing the Moderns to the Contemporaries | 86 |
From Modernity to the AvantGarde | 95 |
Some MidNineteenthCentury Writers and the AvantGarde | 108 |
AvantGarde and Aesthetic Extremism | 116 |
AvantGarde Dehumanization and the End of Ideology | 125 |
AvantGarde and Postmodernism | 132 |
Intellectualism Anarchism and Stasis | 144 |
Versions of Decadence | 151 |
From Decadence to Style of Decadence | 157 |
The Decadent Euphoria | 171 |
A New Face of Modernity | 265 |
The Silence of the AvantGarde | 275 |
Critiques of Postmodernism | 288 |
The Shaping of a Corpus | 296 |
Postmodernist Devices and Their Significance | 302 |
Conclusion | 310 |
| 365 | |
| 387 | |
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Common terms and phrases
Adorno aesthetic ancients antiquity appears artistic attitude avant bad taste Baudelaire Baudelaire's beauty become bourgeois Bourget cadence characterized Christian Clement Greenberg consciousness contemporary context crisis criticism critique decadentism decadentismo dialectical discussion distinction essay essential fact France Frankfurt School French garde German Hermann Broch Hispanic Hugo Ibid idea of modernity ideal ideology Ihab Hassan imagination implied intellectual kitsch Leslie Fiedler literary literature Marx Marxist mass culture means metaphor modernismo modernist Modernist Poetry moral movement nature Nietzsche Nietzsche's nineteenth century Nisard notion Oeuvres original paradox Paris passage past period philosophical poet poetic poetry political postmodernism postmodernist Press progress question radical rejection Renaissance ressentiment revolutionary romantic romanticism sense social socialist realism society specifically Stendhal style term avant-garde terminological Theophile Gautier theory thought tion tradition trans Umberto Eco University utopian Victor Hugo Wagner Western whole word writes York
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Bibliographic information
| Title | Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism |
| Authors | Matei Calinescu, Professor Matei Calinescu |
| Edition | reprint, revised |
| Publisher | Duke University Press, 1987 |
| ISBN | 0822307677, 9780822307679 |
| Length | 395 pages |
| Subjects | › Architecture / Reference Philosophy / Aesthetics |
| Export Citation | BiBTeX EndNote RefMan |