Modernism

Arguably, no word maps the kind of cultural shifts in language that Raymond Williams (1976, 1983b) was documenting better than modernism. At its simplest, this is because of its roots in the word modern. Inevitably, what is modern at one time eventually becomes dated and of its time. So from the first recorded use of that root word in 1500, to the appearance of the word modernism itself in 1737, to the fin de siècle, it was a shifting signifier, referring to the current present of any given period rather than a specific historical moment or movement (Shorter Oxford English Dictionary). There have been, then, many modernisms, at some level all suggesting “a sense of forward-looking contemporaneity” (Wilk 2006). Toward the end of the nineteenth century, however, a new set of understandings started to come into play, and eventually the meaning of modernism became more fixed. It is now widely used to refer to a movement that was particularly active across Europe (including pre- and postrevolutionary Russia) and North America from the late nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century. This movement embraced all the arts and resulted in practitioners, critics, and philosophers turning away from classical and traditional forms, styles, and modes of expression and creativity. Their aims were far from cohesive, and the word embraces both those groups who were pessimistic about a technologized future and those who saw science and technology as capable of realizing utopia for all. Nevertheless, together they comprise a “movement towards sophistication and mannerism, towards introversion, technical display, internal self-skepticism, [which] has often been taken as a common base for a definition of Modernism” (Bradbury and MacFarlane 1976, 26). Most avant-garde artistic movements from this period display many features of modernism and so are included in this discussion.