MODERNISM IS STILL US

J. W. Burrow, The Crisis of Reason: European Thought, 1848-1914 (The Yale Intellectual History of the West) (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2000) (Modernism "genuine novelty is marked . . . by its wholesale refusal to present novelty in the guise of revival and therefore its renunciation of the comforts and inspirations of the past. The renunciation was not absolute . . . but it was comprehensive enough and it was itself a novelty. In the century and a half before 1900, to go back no earlier, innovation in the arts and radical rejections of the dominant conventions had characteristically taken the form of revivals." Id. at 236."One thing the [First World War] had been widely expected to produce was a new cultural epoch. Yet though, as a collective experience, it was far more shattering, more apocalyptic, than could have been imagined, it did not. [] But essentially, with some modifications in its expressive languages, the post-war avant-garde was still recognizably the pre-war one. In a sense the latter is still ours. Experiment has become the norm. [] Post-modernism in literature, for all the critical volubility expended on it, looks more like a gloss on Modernism than its historical grave-digger. Modernism is our tradition." Id. at 252- 253.).