| Description |
xii, 395 pages ; 22 cm |
| Contents |
The Idea of Modernity -- Modern Dwarfs on the Shoulders of Ancient Giants -- The Problem of Time: Three Eras of Western History -- It Is We Who Are the Ancients -- Comparing the Moderns to the Ancients -- From Modern to Gothic to Romantic to Modern -- The Two Modernities -- Baudelaire and the Paradoxes of Aesthetic Modernity -- Modernity, the Death of God, and Utopia -- Literary and Other Modernisms -- Comparing the Modern to the Contemporaries -- The Idea of the Avant-Garde -- From Modernity to the Avant-Grade -- The "Avant-Garde" Metaphor in the Renaissance: A Rhetorical Figure -- The Romantic "Avant-Grade": From Politics to the Politics of Culture -- Some Mid-Nineteenth-Century Writers and the Avant-Grade -- Two Avant-Grades: Attractions and Repulsion -- Avant-Grade and Aesthetic Extermism -- the Crisis of Avant-Grade's Concept in the 1960s -- Avant-Grade, Dehumanization, and the End if Ideology -- Avant-Grade and Postmoderism -- Intellectualism, Anarchism, and Stasis -- The Idea of Decadence -- From "Decadence" to "Style of Decadence" -- The Decadent Euphoria -- Nietzsche on " Decadence" and "Modernity" -- The Concept of Decadence in Marxist Criticism -- Il Decadentismo -- Kitsch -- Kitsch and Modernity -- Kitsch, Camp, and High Art -- Etymology, Contexts of Usage, and the " Law of Aesthetic Inadquacy" -- Kitsch and Romanticism -- Bad Taste, Ideology, and Hedonism -- Some Stylistic Consideration -- The "Kitsch-Man" -- On Postmodernism (1986) -- A New Fave of Modernity -- Epistemology and Hermeneutics: From Modernity to Postmodernity -- The Silence of the Avant-Grade -- The Novelty of the Past: The View from Architecture -- Critiques of Postmodernism -- Literary Postmodernism: The Shaping of a Corpus -- Postmodernist Devices and Their Significance -- Conclusion |
| Summary |
Five 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 |
| Analysis |
Avant-garde (Aesthetics) |
|
Decadence in literature |
|
Kitsch |
|
Modernism (Aesthetics) |
|
Avant-garde (Aesthetics) |
|
Decadence in literature |
|
Kitsch |
|
Modernism (Aesthetics) |
| Notes |
Revised edition of: Faces of modernity / Matei Calinescu. c1977 |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (pages 365-385) and index |
| Subject |
Avant-garde (Aesthetics)
|
|
Decadence in literature.
|
|
Kitsch.
|
|
Modernism (Aesthetics)
|
|
Postmodernism.
|
| Author |
Călinescu, Matei.
Faces of modernity
|
|
C�alinescu, Matei.
Faces of modernity
|
| LC no. |
86032756 |
| ISBN |
082230726X |
|
0822307677 paperback |
|
9780822307266 |
|
9780822307679 paperback |
|
