The End of the Modernist Era in Arts and Academia

Beyond Romanticism

In The End of the Modernist Era in Arts and Academia, Bruce Fleming explores the continued legacy of modernism as it plays out in today’s cultural and academic institutions. He argues that the creative potential and intellectual excitement of youthful modernism has morphed into an exhausted and anti-human philosophy kept on life-support in our universities.

Modernism began around the early 1900s with the rejection of the Romantic love of tumultuous events brought to dramatic conclusions by strong personalities on dark and stormy nights. Modernism was born when interest diminished in extraordinary and hence unrepresentative individuals, and increased in abstractions about people considered as if far away. Because individuals were primarily considered constituent parts of patterns, there was a shift from the things represented to the process of representation, and to words and works considered as if they were the fundamental building blocks of the world.

This is the perspective of artists and scholars, so modernism was and is a movement of artists and, later, scholars with universities and museums as its home territory. Now, in the 21st century, we are in the last phase of this turn to abstraction: the ‘heads-I-win-tails-you-lose’ insistence of special interest groups that we must change our words, not the world. Action by individuals is not what is demanded, just the utterance of specific words. In this last phase of modernism we have finally thrown away the key to what Fredric Jameson called ‘the prison-house of language’. Yet its walls are only words, and we can simply walk through them to the world outside.

Rejecting Romanticism

Romanticism was coloured in such vivid hues that it frequently turned lurid and overheated. Modernism, by contrast, is cool and grey. Initially it was steel grey glinting with the energy of discovery, but now, in its declining years, it has become merely mousy. Modernism in its early years had its own austere beauty, but gradually its oomph escaped and now it is a deflated balloon, still held aloft in classrooms, journals, and conferences.

But think of the power of youthful Modernism! The shock of the new in Picasso, Braque, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Malevich, Goncharova, Proust, Gertrude Stein, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Robert Musil. Those were the days! Amaze at the progression in painting as Mondrian’s outlines of everyday objects grow stronger until they become right-angled black lines and blocks of color! Follow as Kandinsky’s stained-glass-like fairytale landscapes and Murnau paintings turn into explosions of colour with only an echo of objects! Admire the development of literary theory as a stand-alone discipline: Victor Shklovsky and the other Russians, the Anglo-American New Criticism, Structuralism, Semiotics, Jacques Derrida and then Michel Foucault, then the power of this theory as it replaces reading the literary works themselves, now called ‘texts,’ in countless college classrooms!