Modernism and mimesis

This book offers a bold new view of the way in which modernist fiction, painting, music, and poetry are interlinked. Dowden shows that modernism, contrary to a longstanding view, did not turn away from mimesis. Rather, modernism operates according to a deepened understanding of what mimesis is and how it works, which in turn occasions a fresh look at other related dimensions of the modernist achievement. Modernism is neither "difficult" nor elitist. Instead, it trends toward simplicity, directness, and common culture. Dowden argues that naïveté rather than highbrow sophistication was for the modernists a key artistic principle. He demonstrates that modernism, far from glorifying subjective creativity, directs itself toward healing the split between subject and object. Mimesis closes this gap by resolving representation into play and festivity.

Intro -- Acknowledgments -- Contents -- List of Figures -- 1 Uneasy Modernism -- Encountering the Real -- Art as a Way of Knowing the World -- The Question of Ethics -- Modernism and Reënchantment -- Mimesis -- 2 Novelistic Style and the Disappearance of Breakfast -- 1922, Joyce and Kafka -- The Question of Stylelessness -- 1947, Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus -- Love and Death -- Love and Art -- Form and Experience -- Taking Back Joyce and Proust -- Direct Expression -- Art as Festive Experience -- 3 Painting the World Picture -- Chekhov's Dogs and Marc's Horses -- The Romantic Impasse

Nature and Mimesis -- The Animal as Other -- The Subjective Point of View: Duchamp's Peepshow -- Spirit and Aura -- 4 Music as Natural Magic -- Taking Back Beethoven's Ninth -- Musical Mimesis -- Gadamer, Mimesis, Modernism -- Schoenberg: Contemplating Nature Comprehensively -- Cruel Modernism -- Stravinsky or Schoenberg? -- Music and Architecture dans le vrai -- 5 The Gift of Babel -- Universality vs. Difficulty -- Poetry and Common Culture -- Translation and Common Culture -- A Home in the Unhomely -- Benjamin, Poetry, and Pure Language -- The Tower of Babel -- Image Credits -- References