History of a Shiver: The Sublime Impudence of Modernism
Jed Rasula
Abstract
This book addresses modernism as an expanding historical force generated by the nineteenth-century fascination with music, as all the arts sought renewal by a kind of aesthetic miscegenation. Richard Wagner’s concepts of the Gesamtkunstwerk and “endless melody” were of paramount historical consequence in elevating music to a universal aesthetic standard, spawning Wagnerism as first among modern isms. Modernism promoted interaction among the arts, with each art aspiring to produce the effects of another artistic medium. In pursuit of this expansive initiative, modernism tacitly adhered to a key ... More
This book addresses modernism as an expanding historical force generated by the nineteenth-century fascination with music, as all the arts sought renewal by a kind of aesthetic miscegenation. Richard Wagner’s concepts of the Gesamtkunstwerk and “endless melody” were of paramount historical consequence in elevating music to a universal aesthetic standard, spawning Wagnerism as first among modern isms. Modernism promoted interaction among the arts, with each art aspiring to produce the effects of another artistic medium. In pursuit of this expansive initiative, modernism tacitly adhered to a key precept of German romanticism, namely, that modern art must be the work and the theory of the work at once. Artworks were infused with a premonitory shiver, a synesthetic yearning, as if each painting, literary text, or musical composition might herald an unprecedented domain of human enterprise—auguring some cultural equivalent of the fourth dimension. In order to survey this momentous interplay among arts, this book ranges from literature, music, and painting to theatre, cinema, dance, photography, and civic pageantry.
Keywords:
modernism,
music,
Richard Wagner,
German romanticism,
fourth dimension,
endless melody,
synesthesia
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2016 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199396290 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: March 2016 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199396290.001.0001 |
