Friday, March 27, 2009

Modernism & the Impossible Present

A student last term sent me this useful poetic definition of Modernism:
"[M]odernism is the struggle of the future to free itself from the clinging hands of a dying past"- from "Modernism as a World-Wide Movement." A. Eustace Haydon, The Journal of Religion, January 1925.
You will notice the support this lends to my repeated thesis in lecture about Modernism's troubled position vis à vis the temporal present -- yet one more concept that analogises to shell-shock.

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