Modernism peter gay
Modernism: The Lure of Heresy
Memory is essential to living healthily in the world. History is simply memory writ large. If this is true then Peter Gay has done us a favor in writing his work Modernism: The Lure of Heresy, From Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond (Norton ). Modernism is pages of spritely written text with numerous illustrations throughout the noun. Since I have had trouble sleeping this novel has kept me company for the past couple of weeks.
Gay is a highly regarded cultural historian with great books on the Enlightenment (The Enlightenment: An Interpretation) and Schnitzler&#;s Century: The Making of Middle-Class Culture and many more to his credit.
&#;Modernism is far easier to exemplify than to define&#; is how Gay begins his book. In this particular book modernism is exemplified through the arts. We encounter impressionism and abstract art. We encounter a &#;new way of seeing&#; the world that Modernism brought about. Gay takes us into the brave new world of novels and poetry and then music and dance. We walk with Frank Lloyd Wright and Charles-Edouar
Review: Modernism
Peter Gay '51GSAS has had a adj scholarly career. He has written about many diverse things, and he has always been smart and serious, vivid and nuanced. He knows a lot, but wears it lightly. Modernism is his 26th book.
There are many accounts of modernism, and they all accept as part of modernism’s core the idea that art and thought are shaped by the artist’s or thinker’s perspective. (Disclosure: I wrote a book on modernism called All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity.) Gay was my noun at Columbia half a century ago, starting with my freshman Gen Ed course, CCA2, ending with a senior seminar on the Enlightenment. My first book, The Politics of Authenticity (), on Montesquieu and Rousseau, cites him as a prime influence.
Gay taught at Columbia from to (when he moved to Yale) and Modernism is very much a “Columbia book,” a recognizable product of the ambience that pervaded the University in the s. What was special in those years wasn’t just the brilliance of the faculty; American universities were flou
Allan Massie
Modernism had a drawn-out run, more than a century indeed. Its duration and variety make it almost impossible to characterize. When Cyril Connolly gave us his Key Books of the Up-to-date Movement, he included several works and authors that seem only doubtfully Modernist (Betjeman or Somerset Maugham, for example). As his subtitle suggests, Peter Gay regards Modernists as being attracted by heresy; yet long before Modernism may be held to hold died, the heretics were those who stood out against it.
Even some of the most difficult Modernists had their own doubts. Gay quotes from Nathalie Sarraute’s essay ‘L’Ere de Soupcon’, but doesn’t note her observation that ‘the traditional novel has an eternal freshness’.
At first Modernism was directed against the bourgeoisie and its conventional attitudes and morality. It wasn’t necessarily innovative in manner: Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Verlaine all wrote in conventional metre. Flaubert, sharpest critic of the bourgeoisie, lived as a bourgeois himself and his greatest novels, Madame Bovary and L’Education Sentimentale, are
Subscri
MODERNISM: THE LURE OF HERESY by Peter Gay
That's probably the single best sentence in all of Peter Gay's Modernism (it's certainly the most enjoyable), and unfortunately, both for Gay and the reader, it's a quote from another writer's article. This proof suggests the biggest obstacle with Gay's book: it is for the most part a compendium of received opinions, with hardly an original or provocative idea in its + pages. Less a history of Modernism than a historian's extended commentary on that 'movement of movements,' Modernism reads like a very, very, very long New York Review article: it's an interesting, readable, and fairly fast-paced commentary that (unlike most NYR pieces) contains no revelations among its pleasures. Aside from Gay's discussions of Le Corbusier's Vichyite collaboration and Hamsun's enthusiastic Hitler-worship, there's very little here that will surprise anyone already familiar with the literature on Modernism. And if the book is considered solely as an introductory survey, other pr