Towards a Definition of American Modernism
Towards a Definition of American Modernism
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走向美国现代主义的定义
DOI：
10.2307/2712627
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发表时间：
1987
影响因子：
0.7
通讯作者：
D. J. Singal
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
D. J. Singal
大约在1910年12月，人性发生了变化。弗吉尼亚·伍尔夫在一份声明中宣称，几乎所有后来的现代主义作家都觉得有必要引用这句话。虽然追溯现代主义文化起源的历史学家对伍尔夫·S确切的日期选择存在争议，但他们越来越一致地认为，在世纪之交的某个时候，欧洲和美国的知识分子开始经历一场深刻的情感转变，这将导致艺术创造力的爆炸，改变道德价值观，并最终重塑整个西方社会的生活行为。彼得·盖伊报道说，现代主义“彻底改变了绘画、雕塑和音乐；舞蹈、小说和戏剧；建筑、诗歌和思想。它对未知领域的冒险从高雅文化的高雅领域渗透到思维、感觉和观看的一般方式。”事实上，尽管越来越多的证据表明，一种新的“后现代主义”情感最近已经出现，但许多作家会争辩说，现代主义本身从第一次世界大战后到现在一直是20世纪美国的主导文化。我虽然对于什么是现代主义文化肯定没有共识，但对于什么不是现代主义文化，似乎确实有越来越多的共识。也许最常见的误解是将其等同于“现代化”的做法，这是一个源于马克斯·韦伯的概念，至今仍在许多社会科学家中流行。简而言之，现代主义应该被恰当地视为一种文化--一种相关的思想、信仰、价值观和感知模式的星座--它产生于19世纪中后期，大约从1900年开始对大西洋两岸的艺术和思想产生了强大的影响。相比之下，现代化指的是社会和经济发展的过程，包括工业、技术、城市化和官僚机构的兴起，这可以追溯到17世纪。这两个重要的历史现象之间的关系极其复杂，现代主义的兴起在一定程度上是对现代化的胜利的相反反应，特别是它的规范
"ON OR ABOUT DECEMBER 1910, HUMAN CHARACTER CHANGED." SO DECLARED Virginia Woolf in a statement that virtually all subsequent writers on Modernism have felt obliged to quote. Though historians tracing the origins of Modernist culture have quarreled with Woolf s exact choice of date, they have increasingly come to agree that sometime around the turn of the century the intelligentsia in Europe and America began to experience a profound shift in sensibility that would lead to an explosion of creativity in the arts, transform moral values, and in time reshape the conduct of life throughout Western society. Modernism, Peter Gay reports, "utterly changed painting, sculpture, and music; the dance, the novel, and the drama; architecture, poetry, and thought. And its ventures into unknown territory percolated from the rarefied regions of high culture to general ways of thinking, feeling, and seeing." Indeed, notwithstanding the growing evidence that a new sensibility of "postmodernism" has recently made its appearance, many writers would contend that Modernism itself has served as the dominant culture of twentieth-century America from the period just after the First World War up to the present. I Although there is assuredly no consensus on exactly what Modernist culture is, there does seem to be a growing accord on what it is not. Perhaps the commonest misconception is the practice of equating it with "modernization," a concept emanating from Max Weber and still fashionable among many social scientists. Put simply, Modernism should properly be seen as a culture-a constellation of related ideas, beliefs, values, and modes of perception-that came into existence during the mid to late nineteenth century, and that has had a powerful influence on art and thought on both sides of the Atlantic since roughly 1900. Modernization, by contrast, denotes a process of social and economic development, involving the rise of industry, technology, urbanization, and bureaucratic institutions, that can be traced back as far as the seventeenth century. The relationship between these two important historical phenomena is exceedingly complex, with Modernism arising in part as a counterresponse to the triumph of modernization, especially its norms of