Modernism Today

What is it about?

Modernism Today is not only a scholarly attempt to revise, as well as expand, the many shifting definitions of Modernism, but also a strong testimony to the transnational quality inherent within Modernism as an aesthetic and intellectual movement that thrives on the cross-fertilisation of ideas in different spatial, temporal and cultural contexts. In “What Modernism Was and Is: By Way of an Introduction”, Sascha Bru and Dirk de Geest offer a succinct overview of the past, present and even prospective trends in Modernist studies, charting and re-charting the critical and physical terrains which tend to be overlooked by scholars of Modernism. Central Europe’s shifting national borders and multicultural interrelationships form cases in point: “the rediscovery of that Other Europe, that is Central Europe, is slowly beginning to manifest the importance of notions like ‘transnational’ precisely by pointing at the capital importance of national differences and the cultural exchanges between them” (6). Jacqueline Bel, in “Intellectual Scepticism versus Avant-Garde Bragging: Modernism in Dutch Literature”, leads readers into the mellow jazz-resounding world of Dutch Modernism, in which the notion of “Modernism” has been interrogated and, at times, dismissed as obsolete as it fails to capture (if the use of this verb is possible at all) the sense of the just-now “newness” of modernity. The author of this review was also fascinated to learn that avant-gardism, in the case of the Netherlands, where the term was introduced only in 1984, is truly “a literary-historical construction” (77).

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Why is it important?

Modernism Today is not only a scholarly attempt to revise, as well as expand, the many shifting definitions of Modernism, but also a strong testimony to the transnational quality inherent within Modernism as an aesthetic and intellectual movement that thrives on the cross-fertilisation of ideas in different spatial, temporal and cultural contexts. In “What Modernism Was and Is: By Way of an Introduction”, Sascha Bru and Dirk de Geest offer a succinct overview of the past, present and even prospective trends in Modernist studies, charting and re-charting the critical and physical terrains which tend to be overlooked by scholars of Modernism. Central Europe’s shifting national borders and multicultural interrelationships form cases in point: “the rediscovery of that Other Europe, that is Central Europe, is slowly beginning to manifest the importance of notions like ‘transnational’ precisely by pointing at the capital importance of national differences and the cultural exchanges between them” (6). Jacqueline Bel, in “Intellectual Scepticism versus Avant-Garde Bragging: Modernism in Dutch Literature”, leads readers into the mellow jazz-resounding world of Dutch Modernism, in which the notion of “Modernism” has been interrogated and, at times, dismissed as obsolete as it fails to capture (if the use of this verb is possible at all) the sense of the just-now “newness” of modernity. The author of this review was also fascinated to learn that avant-gardism, in the case of the Netherlands, where the term was introduced only in 1984, is truly “a literary-historical construction” (77).

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