User:DeRossitt/What Ever Happened to Modernism?

What Ever Happened to Modernism? is a 2010 book by literary critic Gabriel Josipovici.

Overview
1. My Whole Body Puts Me on Guard

We should try to see modernism from within.

2. The Oracles are Silent

Don't view it as a period, view it as a coming into awareness. A response to the disenchantment of the world. Disappearance of the numinous from everyday life.

3. What Shall We Have to Drink in These Deserts?

4. Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom

5. I Hear the Murmur and the Murmuring Sound

6. It's a Quick Death, God Help Us All

7. The Marquise Went Out At Five

8. The Universe for the First Time Bereft of Sign Posts

9. The Mutilated Body Was Thrown Back Into the Sea

10. Fernande Has Left With a Futurist

11. A Clown, Perhaps, But an Aspiring Clown

12. I Would Prefer Not To

13. The Imitation of an Action

14. It Took Talent to Lead Art That Far Astray

15. Stories of Modernism

Reception
Amit Chaudhuri, reviewing the book in The Independent, found that the book convincingly makes the case that "[w]hat needs to be restored to modernism ... is its radicalism, and a case made for how that radicalism speaks to us today." Chaudhuri characterized the book as "a personal mapping of what modernism means to Josipovici, and what makes it both difficult and irreplaceable in his eyes. As he said recently, and eloquently, in the New Statesman: 'Modernism will always be with us.. for it is not primarily a revolution in diction... but is art coming to consciousness of its limitations and responsibilities.'"

James Purdon, writing in The Guardian, offered that Josipovici "argues, rightly, that modernism in the arts must be considered not simply a period or a style, but a deeply rooted response to crises of truth, authority and originality that stretch back to Cervantes and beyond." Purdon went on to conclude that "the book itself is a welcome intervention in the long debate about the difference between art and entertainment, although it's a shame that Josipovici is not always as lucid or precise as one could wish."

Eric Ormsby reviewed the book for Wall Street Journal. He summed up the book's success as follows: "Mr. Josipovici does not provide a simple, broadly applicable definition of Modernism—it would be hard to do in any case—but he does something better. He takes Modernism out of its traditionally limited time-frame and sets it within a long historical arc that begins in the 16th century.... For Mr. Josipovici, Modernism is ultimately an ethical proposition, and a stern one at that."

Michael Sayeau, reviewing What Ever Happened to Modernism? in The New Statesman, called it "a sustained examination of what was modernist about what happened in the art and culture of the past several centuries than ... an approach to the question of what happened to modernism and why it seems to have disappeared in recent years."

Sayeau concluded that Josipovici's work harkens back to classic works of twentieth-century criticism: "In its range and approach, therefore, What Ever Happened to Modernism? is more reminiscent of one of those classic works of literary criticism—Erich Auerbach's Mimesis comes to mind—than the jargon-ridden obscurantism of most academic monographs in literary studies today. Even though the publicity Josipovici has received has centred on his polemical response to the practices of the present-day crop of English novelists, the interest of his book lies in the way it rethinks the stakes of literary criticism and academic writing."

Brian Dillon, writing in The Irish Times, focused on Josipovici's criticism of contemporary British novelists in the last chapter of his book. Dillon said that

"Josipovici is surely right to deplore the liberal humanist dullardry of Ian McEwan and Julian Barnes, as also to despair at the excessively craft-loving, Beckett-loathing Martin Amis. When he reads these novelists, he says, he is left “feeling that I and the world have been made smaller and meaner”. Nor do critics escape; he takes well-merited aim at the likes of John Carey, whose The Intellectuals and the Masses and (worse) What Good Are the Arts? have set the current standard in proud Anglo philistinism... What is less clear is quite why Josipovici cares so much about these people as to devote the whole of his penultimate chapter to disparaging them. What Ever Happened to Modernism? arrives at a moment when it seems the modernist inheritance and the possibility of an avant-garde are once more on the agenda for relatively mainstream fiction writers. Josipovici makes some hasty comments about the experimental art and fiction that came after high modernism, but it would have been instructive to read him on such diverse authors as WG Sebald, Lydia Davis and David Foster Wallace."

Peter Aspden, reviewing What Ever Happened to Modernism? in The Financial Times quipped that "Gabriel Josipovici, a research professor at the University of Sussex, is disenchanted with the absence of disenchantment with the world." Aspden said the book is a "slim and occasionally inelegant work, and it partly convinces. The author is sound in his eclectic and learned exposition of the beginnings of modernism, tracing its roots back to the 16th century."

Eliot Weinberger gave a negative appraisal of the book in The New York Review of Books. Weinberger complained that "What Ever Happened to Modernism? is barely about whatever happened to Modernism. The presumed—and presumably decadent—present day implied by the title is dispatched in only a few pages: Modernism is in a bad way because some British “realist” novelists whom Josipovici dislikes are wildly overpraised and win prizes; Adam Thirlwell, the British novelist, misunderstands the nature of reality in Modernism; British literary [his italics] festivals feature television stars; and—a bizarre grievance—British chain bookstores are now offering three books for the price of two."

Robert Murray Davis, writing in World Literature Today, saw Josipovici's work as a professor reflected in the book's pages: "What Ever Happened to Modernism? owes a great deal to the lecture hall, where apt summaries of others' positions blend with rhetorical questions based on clear but sometimes undefended premises, stylistic flourishes often sound more like writing about wine than about literature, attacks on other writers and critics turn out to be more exhilarating than illuminating, and prejudices harden into agendas."

Tim Black, writing in the Spiked Review of Books, was sympathetic to Josipovici's complaints about contemporary British novelists. "This is why Josipovici attacks today’s authors. Everything is too easy: their worlds are too believable; their fiction too unproblematic. Such is the ease with which McEwan or Amis discern meaning within the world, it is as if Modernism never happened."