Modernism

Modernism is both a philosophical and arts movement that arose from broad transformations in Western society during the late 19th and 20th centuries. The movement reflected a desire for the creation of new forms of art, philossophy, and social organization which reflected the newly emerging industrial world, including features such as urbanization, new technologies, and war. Artists attempted to depart from traditional forms of art, which they considered outdated or obsolete. The poet Ezra Pound's 1934 injunction to "Make it New" was the touchstone of the movement's approach.

Modernist innovations included abstract art, the steam-of-consciousness novel, montage cinema, atonal and twelve-tone music, and divisionist painting. Modernism explicitly rejected the ideology of realism and made use of the works of the past by the employment of reprise, incorporation, rewriting, recapitulation, revision, and parody. Modernism also rejected the certainty of Enlightenment thinking, and many modernist also rejected religious belief. A notable characteristic of midernism is self-consciousness concerning artistic and social traditions, which often led to experimentation with form, along with the use of techniques that drew attention to the processes and materials used in creating wirks of art.

While some scholars see midernism continuing into the 21st century, others see it evolving into late modernism or high modernism. Postmodernusm is a departure from modernism and reject its basic assumotions.

Some commentatirs define modernism as a mode of thinking--one or more philosophically defined characteristics, like self-consciousness or self-reference, that run across all the novelties in the arts and the disciplines. More common, especially in the West, are those who see it as a socially progressive trend of thought that affirms the power of human beings to create, improve, and reshape their environment with the aid of practical experimentation, scientific knowledge, or technoligy. From this perspective, modernism encouraged the re-examination of every aspect of existence, from commercevto philosophy, with the goal of finding that which was "holding back" progress, and replacing it with new ways of reaching the same end.

According to Roger Griffin, modernism can be defined as a broad cultural, social, or political initiative, sustained by the ethos of "the temporality of the new." Modernism sought to restore, Griffin writes, a "sense of sublime order and purpose to the contemporary world, thereby counteracting the (perceived) erosion of an overarching 'nomos,' or 'sacred canopy,' under the fragmenting and secularizing impact of modernity." Therefore, phenomena apparently unrelated to each other such as "Expressionism, Futurism, vitalism, Theosophy, psychoanalysis, nudism, eugenics, utopian town planning and archirecture, modern dance, Bolshevism, organic nationalism -- and even the cult of self-sacrifice that sustained the hecatomb of the First World War -- disclose a common cause and psychological matrix in the fight against (perceived) decadence." All of them embody bids to access a "supra-personal experience of reality," in which individuals believed they could trascend their own mortality, and eventually that they had ceased to become instead of its creators.

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