Abstract

"Modernism" is arguably the most important concept used in "mapping" and analyzing the development of twentieth-century literature. This study examines modernism as a concept of literary criticism, theory, and history. It thus not only enters the ongoing controversy over modernism, but does so by inquiring into the concept itself and its formation in critical and theoretical discourse. For the concept by no means emanates directly from the literature it subsumes; it is very much a product of critical practices and their approaches to non-traditional or postrealist literature. ;Chapter One constitutes a critical exploration of various modernist paradigms, most of which prove to be ill at ease between modernism's culturally subversive potential and its relative autonomy as an aesthetic-formalist project. ;Chapter Two proceeds to observe modernist paradigms as interpretations of literary history. Modernism signals an historical change on the literary scene and implies a context of that change. In this context, laden with notions of tradition and modernity, the concept of modernism acquires its full significance: that of highlighting and "naming" the complex relations between postrealist literature and history in the broader sense. ;This understanding of modernism calls for a scrutiny of it in conjunction with two concepts which are often used to recast modernism as an essentially conservative enterprise. Chapter Three asks what concepts of modernism are posited, explicitly or implicitly, by various theories of postmodernism. Similarly, the much-debated relation of modernism and the avant-garde forms the basis of my inquiry in Chapter Four. ;The final chapter situates modernism in opposition to the multi-faceted concept of realism, whose relevance helps explain why any deliberation of modernism belongs within a broad cultural framework where modernism is to be seen not just as an aesthetic, but as a semiotic and historical "praxis." It is not so much a form of discourse, however, as an interruption of discourse. By enacting a crisis of subject and reference, modernism strives to become the "other" modernity, holding forth the "negativity" of our normative experience as creatures of communication and subjects of the Western socio-symbolic order