This book identifies the—now moribund—Modernist spirit of the twentieth century, with its "make it new" attitude in the arts, and its tendency towards abstraction and the scientific process, as the impetus behind the academic structures of universities and museums, together with the development of discrete scholarly disciplines such as literary theory, sociology, and art history based on quasi-scientific principles. Arguing that the Modernist project is approaching exhaustion and that the insights that it has left to yield are approaching triviality, it explores the Modernist links between the arts and academic pursuits of the West—and their relationship with street protests—in the long twentieth century, considering what might follow this Modernist era. An examination of the broad cultural and intellectual—and now political—trends of our age, and their decline, The End of the Modernist Era in Arts and Academia will appeal to scholars and students of social theory, philosophy, literary studies, and cultural studies.
Part I: What Hath Modernism Wrought?
1. Beyond Romanticism
2. Movements
3. Why Modernism?
4. Academia
5. Museums
Part II: Abstraction
6. Explanation
7. Science Envy
8. Offended? You Win!
9. Life After Modernism
Part III: The Spectrum of Disciplines
10. Personal and Impersonal
11. Fundamental Rules
12. Verifiability
Part IV: Words in the World
13. Form Follows Function
14. The Cloud
15. Circumstances
16. What Is the Self?
Biography
Bruce Fleming is Professor of English at the US Naval Academy. He is the author of Running is Life: Transcending the Crisis of Modernity, Modernism and Its Discontents: Philosophical Problems of Twentieth-Century Literary Theory, Why Liberals and Conservatives Clash: A View from Annapolis, and What Literary Studies Could Be, and What It Is, among other works.
