We are still sorting out whatever happened in Modernism - particularly as more and most "lost" figures are being rediscovered - and it is difficult to believe that its moment is over, that we are not simply in a late (or later) phase. Many of its radical and once-shocking innovations (collage, abstraction, improvisation, free verse) have become so absorbed in the culture that they are now standard practice in kindergartens. But the most typical artworks of so-called postmodernism - installations, pastiche, "language" poetry - when stripped of their critical theory scaffolding aren't all that different from those produced a hundred years ago. They have merely shifted out of the various facets of Modernism - irony - into a dominant mode.
-- Eliot Weinberger, "Who Made It New?"- NYRB, June 23, 2011
Pictured: An old kindergarten classroom
4 comments:
I often wonder what everyone imagines is meant by "poetry should be at least as well written as prose."
I often wonder what Ezra Pound, or rather Ford Madox Ford, meant by it. Or what London in the 1910s was like to have prompted the idea!
While we're wondering, am I wrong to think that in that review EW took the Josipovici book much more seriously than Josipovici himself did?
http://www.accessmylibrary.com/article-1G1-18106157/returning-bloom-john-ashbery.html
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