Five Paradoxes of Modernity

Early in the nineteenth century Hegel pronounced that the greatness of art was past and that art was at an end. Is it this end, Antoine Compagnon asks, that we are now witnessing, almost two centuries later? Or is the present postmodern moment a result of the failure of doctrines to "explain" art, that is, to give it an "end" and to construe its history as "progress"? Is the postmodern the cutting edge of the modern or a breaking away from it? In this elegant, highly readable book, Compagnon confronts the postmodern's co-optation of the modern by tracing paradoxical elements in the aesthetic of the new - particularly the aesthetic and moral contradictions built into the enthusiasm for the new - in the "five paradoxes of modernity": the superstition of the new, the religion of the future, the mania for theory, the appeal to mass culture, and the passion for repudiation. Beginning with the writings of Nietzsche and Baudelaire, Compagnon considers Manet's Dejeuner sur l'herbe and Olympia, Apollinaire's calligrams, Duchamp's readymades, Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, and Warhol's silkscreens, in addition to the writings of Kandinsky, Mondrian, Venturi, and Calinescu, The analysis and clarification continues with discussions of conformism and nonconformism, modernity versus the avant-garde, the distinction between the aesthetic and political avant-garde, theoretical terrorism, the movement of the center of art from Paris to New York after 1945, and the modern's incorporation of popular culture to "purify [art] of its conventions." These insightful discussions illuminate the works of major American and European architects, critics, novelists, painters, and poets who emblematize each of the five paradoxes of modernity. Compagnon, a French citizen and an American scholar, offers an expansive and invaluable perspective on the divergent meanings of the modern and the postmodern on both sides of the Atlantic.

Huang Chun-ming began publishing his work in the literary supplement to the United Daily News (Lianhe bao) and in the literary magazine You shi wenyi as part of the "native soil" movement.

Howard Goldblatt is professor of Chinese literature at the University of Colorado, Boulder and the translator of numerous books, including Rose, Rose I Love You by Wang Chen-ho and, with Sylvia Li-chun Lin, Chu T'ien-wen's Notes of a Desolate Man, chosen "Translation of the Year" (1999) by the American Literary Translators Association.