'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.
Five Faces of Modernity attempts to do for the foundations of the modernist critical lexicon what earlier terminological studies have done for such complex categories as classicism, baroque, romanticism, realism, or symbolism and thereby fill a gap in literary scholarship. On another, more ambitious level, Calinescu deals at length with the larger issues, dilemmas, ideological tensions, and perplexities brought about by the assertion of modernity.' - from publisher's website.
Includes a critical bibliography and an index.
Onsite
English
1987
422
9780822307679
1
monograph
Preface to the Second Edition
Introduction
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 Moderns to the Contemporaries
The Idea of the Avant-Garde
From Modernity to the Avant-Garde
The 'Avant-Garde' Metaphor in the Renaissance: A Rhetorical Figure
The Romantic 'Avant-Garde': From Politics to the Politics of Culture
Some Mid-Nineteenth-Century Writers and the Avant-Garde
Two Avant-Gardes: Attractions and Repulsions
Avant-Garde and Aesthetic Extremism
The Crisis of Avant-Garde's Concept in the 1960s
Avant-Garde, Dehumanization, and the End of Ideology
Avant-Garde and Postmodernism
Intellectualism, Anarchism, and Stasis
The Idea of Decadence
Versions 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 Inadequacy'
Kitsch and Romanticism
Bad Taste, Ideology, and Hedonism
Some Stylistic Considerations
Kitsch and Cultural Industrialization
The 'Kitsch-Man'
On Postmodernism (1986)
A New Face of Modernity
Epistemology and Hermeneutics: From Modernity to Postmodernity
The Silence of the Avant-Garde
The Novelty of the Past: The View from Architecture
Critiques of Postmodernism
Literary Postmodernism: The Shaping of a Corpus
Postmodernist Devices and Their Significance
Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism
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