Towards a Definition of American Modernism

Abstract

ON OR ABOUT DECEMBER 1910, HUMAN CHARACTER CHANGED. SO DECLARED Virginia Woolf in a statement that virtually all subsequent writers on Modernism have felt obliged to quote. Though historians tracing the origins of Modernist culture have quarreled with Woolf s exact choice of date, they have increasingly come to agree that sometime around the turn of the century the intelligentsia in Europe and America began to experience a profound shift in sensibility that would lead to an explosion of creativity in the arts, transform moral values, and in time reshape the conduct of life throughout Western society. Modernism, Peter Gay reports, utterly changed painting, sculpture, and music; the dance, the novel, and the drama; architecture, poetry, and thought. And its ventures into unknown territory percolated from the rarefied regions of high culture to general ways of thinking, feeling, and seeing. Indeed, notwithstanding the growing evidence that a new sensibility of postmodernism has recently made its appearance, many writers would contend that Modernism itself has served as the dominant culture of twentieth-century America from the period just after the First World War up to the present. I Although there is assuredly no consensus on exactly what Modernist culture is, there does seem to be a growing accord on what it is not. Perhaps the commonest misconception is the practice of equating it with a concept emanating from Max Weber and still fashionable among many social scientists. Put simply, Modernism should properly be seen as a culture-a constellation of related ideas, beliefs, values, and modes of perception-that came into existence during the mid to late nineteenth century, and that has had a powerful influence on art and thought on both sides of the Atlantic since roughly 1900. Modernization, by contrast, denotes a process of social and economic development, involving the rise of industry, technology, urbanization, and bureaucratic institutions, that can be traced back as far as the seventeenth century. The relationship between these two important historical phenomena is exceedingly complex, with Modernism arising in part as a counterresponse to the triumph of modernization, especially its norms of