Toward a Definition of Modernism Essay -- Modernism Opera Literature E

Toward a Definition of contemporaneousnessLawrence B. Gamaches article Toward a Definition of Modernism encapsulates in its title the challenges critics meet in their attempts to formulate a perspicuous theoretical modernist model, though the quintessential modernist works even at the conviction of this 1987 article are over sixty years old. Indeed, the sheer takings of scholarly books and articles that discuss or contribute to the debate surrounding the explanation of modernism indicates the extent to which modernism is a term whose only non-contentious consensus is that it its heart is fraught with ambiguity. Susan Stanford Friedmans contribution to the debate summarizes the theoretical crises thusAs terms in an evolving scholarly discourse, modern, modernity, and modernism constitute a particular Tower of Babel, a cacophony of categories that become increasingly useless the much inconsistently they are used. We can regard them as a mimicry of critical discourse in which everyone keeps talking at the same epoch in a language without common meanings. When terms mean radically different or contradictory things to people, then their use appears to threaten the throw away of scholarship/teaching altogether. (497)Cacophony aside, because at that place are some artists, though disparate in style and genre, who persistently make it into the debate, and who are universally regarded as modernist, such as T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Picasso, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, or Frank Lloyd Wright, there must be a unifying or underlying prescript that is essentially modernist.Notably, however, the sister arts drama and opera are slay from the genres represented by the quintessential modernist works of the artists above. (Although Picasso designed opera ... ... custom 2nd Ed. Ed. David Richter. Boston Bedford, 1998. 1127-1141. Mathey, Francois. The Impressionists. Trans. Jean Steinberg. New York Praeger, 1961. Puchner, Martin. Modernism and Anti-theatricality An Afte rward. Modern fun 44.3 (2001) 355-361. Schonberg, Harold C. The Lives of the Great Composers. 1970. London Futura, 1982. Stolba, K Marie. The Development of Western Music A History 2nd Ed. Wisconsin Brown and Benchmark, 1994. Trammell Skaggs, Carmen. Modernitys Revision of the leap Daughter The Salome Narrative of Wilde and Strauss. College Literature 29.3 (2002) 124-139. Yeats, William Butler. My First Meeting with Oscar Wilde. The Trembling of the Veil, in Autobiography. New York Macmillan, 1916. 79-85. Rpt. in Oscar Wilde A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Richard Ellman. New island of Jersey Prentice, 1969. 9-15.