Abstract
Innocence the child is and forgetting, a beginning anew, a play, a self- propelling wheel, a first movement, a sacred Yea-saying. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1885)1 The very fact of modernism raises the question of whether cultural renewal is any longer possible at all. This is a paradox of large dimensions, for modernism identifies itself with renewal, and transforms transition into a constant state. Die Brücke, the bridge to tomorrow celebrated by various avant-gardes, is also a bridge into the unknown, or rather the never-to-be-known. David Weir, Decadence and the Making of Modernism (1996)2
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Notes
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. A New Translation by Graham Parkes (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), p. 24.
David Weir, Decadence and the Making of Modernism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1996), p. 203.
Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (1957) (London: Granada, 1970), p. 274.
Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending. Studies in the Theory of Fiction (1967) (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 12.
Jürgen Habermas, Theorie und Praxis. Sozialphilosophische Studien (Neuwied/Berlin: Luchterhand, 1963), p. 294.
Cited in Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols. Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967), p. 94.
Maurice Bloch, Prey into Hunter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 3.
Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields and Metaphors. Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), pp. 237–8.
Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations (London: Fontana, 1992), pp. 245–55.
Ronald Schleifer, Modernism and Time. The Logic of Abundance in Literature, Science, and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 10–11.
Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring (1989) (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), p. 257.
Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time. Modernity and the Avant-Garde (London: Verso, 1995), p. 142.
Patrick Waldberg, Surrealism (London: Thames and Hudson, 1965), p. 41.
Richard Sonn, Anarchism and Cultural Politics in Fin de Siácle France (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), p. 263.
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© 2007 Roger Griffin
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Griffin, R. (2007). A Primordialist Definition of Modernism. In: Modernism and Fascism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230596122_5
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