From: "T Murphy" <tmorpheme-AT-hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: hating the modern
Date: Sun, 28 May 2000 17:39:57 PDT



I am curious. How does fascism date back to the nineteenth century? 
Certainly as a mass movement fascism is a early twentieth century 
phenomenon.

By the way, Yeats dabbled with fascism as a species of Irish nationalism. 
and rejected it on these grounds from what I recall.

I would agree that Hitler is not an anti-modernist for the usual Walter 
Benjamin reasons: "The current amazement that the things we are experiencing 
are 'still' possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. The 
amazement is not the beginnning of knowledge--unless it is the knowledge 
that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable."


Terry
Yonsei University
Seoul, Korea

>From: Everdell-AT-aol.com
>Reply-To: modernism-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
>To: modernism-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
>Subject: Re: hating the modern
>Date: Sun, 28 May 2000 08:12:48 EDT
>
>(Test message number 2.  Has anyone received something like this from the
>list before?)
>
>In a message dated 5/24/00 10:19:48 PM, shelleah-AT-ix.netcom.com writes:
>
><<what an opportunity to explore what makes Yeats a modernist! Tis not only
>his politics>>
>
>An opportunity, yes.  But 'tis not, I think his politics at all.  One of 
>the
>reactions to my attempt to define Modernism that most fascinated me was the
>view that I was wrong to call Hitler an anti-Modernist.  Yeats dabbled with
>fascism as well as Irish nationalism, but does either interest make him a
>modernist?  I really think that politics gets us nowhere in the attempt to
>define Modernism, since all the political theories at large in the 20th
>century date back at least to the 19th century.  And I think "modernity,"
>which for historians must be thought of as beginning 500 years ago, is even
>less useful.  As for "modern" in general people in our business really have 
>a
>responsibility either to fix the adjective chronologically, or to face an
>ever-receding horizon.  The word is 6th-century Latin (modus hodiernus)
>meaning "the style of today."  "Modernism" must be, I think, a term for a
>cultural era, especially high culture, not independent of economics, but 
>not
>dictated by it either.  Where Yeats is most a Modernist, I'd say, is in his
>diction, which (like the language of Pound, Eliot and Frost and 
>predecessors
>whom Yeats admired like Laforgue and Symons) grows steadily away from "high
>poetic" and toward the rhythms of ordinary speech.  There is also modernism
>in his occasional transitionless juxtaposition of tones of voice.  Yeats 
>said
>so himself now and then.
>
>But then, as a historian I can be presumed to have a guild interest in
>periodization.
>
>-Bill Everdell, Brooklyn

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