Gabriel Josipovici
Kulturos barai
Kulturos barai
Eurozine
Modernism and Romanticism
Gabriel Josipovici
The article is a translation of a chapter from Josipovici's book on literary criticism entitled The World and the Book. The author makes an attempt to analyze the issues of Modernism in arts, its genesis, peculiarities and relationship with Romanticism. At the turn of the 20th century something definitely happened to all arts. Despite obvious differences, a number of artists, such as Proust, Joyce, Picasso, Klee, Schönberg and Stravinsky, did similar things. Modernism is treated as a revolutionary movement in arts, which cannot be understood as an isolated phenomenon. It must be viewed as a reaction against the decadent Romanticism which flourished in Europe at the turn of the 19th century. In order to understand what modern artists were aiming at and dealing with, it is necessary to perceive the hidden assumptions and implications of Romanticism. The chapter is geared to the following concluding statement: art does not feed us information, neither does it open the door to some higher realm of existence. But it opens our eyes by shocking us out of habit and indicating that a work of art is an independent object and an irreducible phenomenon in its own right.