The Contemporaneity of Modernism

At a juncture in which art and culture are saturated with the forces of commodification, this book argues that problems, forms, and positions that defined modernism are relevant to the condition of contemporary art and culture. Essays revise our understanding of what modernism was in its earlier instantiations, and account for the current moment, addressing the problems raised by modernism’s afterlives and reverberations in the 20th and 21st centuries. The book considers literature, sociology, philosophy, visual art, music, architecture, digital culture, television, and other media to make a case for what happens to literature, art, and culture in the wake of the exhaustion of postmodernism.