The Aura of Modernism

Abstract

Marjorie Perloff's wide-ranging essay reflects on the fate of Modernism in the twentieth century. She focuses in particular on claims that it was either elitist and authoritarian, and thus politically reactionary, or was caught up in processes of capitalist commodification, and therefore unable to resist the very alienation it diagnosed. In the period that ran from the 1960s to the early 1990s Modernism was typically seen as a failed project, which was compromised by its complicity with the bourgeois institution of art and by the reification of its art-works, seen now as the dead exhibits of a once resonant cultural moment. But it has become apparent that those who trumpeted the death of Modernism were premature with their obituary notices. Perloff traces some of the major shifts in recent critical work, and her essay questions earlier claims about Modernism's reactionary politics, anti-populism, and rejection of the everyday. She also draws attention to the non-academic interest in Modernism that is rife on the internet, where, in fulfilment of Benjamin's prophecy, the distinction between artist and public has broken down and the “pleasure of the text” takes precedence over concerns with ideology. Perloff suggests that although genres such as poems, paintings, and novels have to some extent been displaced by “differential text”, Modernism's established artefacts continue to “stay news” and to exert their strange auratic power.