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209-478: Postmodernism is a term used to refer to a variety of artistic, cultural, and philosophical movements that claim to mark a break from modernism . They have in common the conviction that it is no longer possible to rely upon previous ways of depicting the world. Still, there is disagreement among experts about its more precise meaning even within narrow contexts. The term began to acquire its current range of meanings in literary criticism and architectural theory during

418-554: A dime store area of New York's Lower East Side , where he blurred the line between art and commerce by producing and selling brightly painted plaster replicas of hamburgers and cans of soda, dresses, underwear, and other everyday objects: "Museum in b[ourgeois] concept equals store in mine". Oldenburg was one of the most recognizable sculptors identified with postmodernism, a group that included Jeff Koons , Eva Hesse , Louise Bourgeois , Anish Kapoor , Damien Hirst , Rachel Whiteread , and Richard Serra . Postmodern theater emerged as

627-723: A higher power and meaning in the world. Modernism often yearns for a romantic or metaphysical centre, but later finds its collapse. This distinction between modernism and romanticism extends to their respective treatments of 'symbol'. The romantics at times see an essential relation (the 'ground') between the symbol (or the 'vehicle', in I.A. Richards 's terms) and its 'tenor' (its meaning)—for example in Coleridge's description of nature as 'that eternal language which thy God / Utters'. But while some romantics may have perceived nature and its symbols as God's language, for other romantic theorists it remains inscrutable. As Goethe (not himself

836-567: A mystical approach to suggest a non-rational sense of meaning. For these reasons, modernist metaphors may be unnatural, as for instance in T.S. Eliot's description of an evening 'spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table'. Similarly, for many later modernist poets nature is unnaturalized and at times mechanized, as for example in Stephen Oliver's image of the moon busily 'hoisting' itself into consciousness. Modernism developed out of Romanticism's revolt against

1045-425: A 2011 museum exhibition, Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970–1990 : "Anything could be mixed and matched – or mashed up, as is said today – and anything was fair game for inspiration.” The composer Jonathan Kramer has written that avant-garde musical compositions (which some would consider modernist rather than postmodernist) "defy more than seduce the listener, and they extend by potentially unsettling means

1254-681: A Circle ), which he later called the first abstract painting. In 1912, Metzinger and Gleizes wrote the first (and only) major Cubist manifesto, Du "Cubisme" , published in time for the Salon de la Section d'Or , the largest Cubist exhibition to date. In 1912 Metzinger painted and exhibited his enchanting La Femme au Cheval (Woman with a Horse) and Danseuse au Café ( Dancer in a Café ) . Albert Gleizes painted and exhibited his Les Baigneuses (The Bathers) and his monumental Le Dépiquage des Moissons ( Harvest Threshing ). This work, along with La Ville de Paris ( City of Paris ) by Robert Delaunay ,

1463-553: A Postmodern Literature . According to scholar David Herwitz, American writers such as John Barth (who had controversially declared that the novel was "exhausted" as a genre), Donald Barthelme , and Thomas Pynchon responded in various ways to the stylistic innovations of Finnegans Wake and the late work of Samuel Beckett . Postmodern literature often calls attention to issues regarding its own complicated connection to reality. The postmodern novel plays with language, twisted plots, multiple narrators, and unresolved endings, unsettling

1672-400: A better way could be found to remove the seed. Eli Whitney responded to the challenge by inventing the inexpensive cotton gin . A man using a cotton gin could remove seed from as much upland cotton in one day as would previously have taken two months to process, working at the rate of one pound of cotton per day. These advances were capitalised on by entrepreneurs , of whom the best known

1881-400: A catalyst for many of the subsequent intellectual debates around the term. By the 1990s, postmodernism had become increasingly identified with critical and philosophical discourse directly about postmodernity or the postmodern idiom itself. No longer centered on any particular art or even the arts in general, it instead turned to address the more general problems posed to society in general by

2090-409: A conservative position. Some even argue that Modernism in literature and art functioned to sustain an elite culture that excluded the majority of the population. Surrealism , which originated in the early 1920s, came to be regarded by the public as the most extreme form of modernism, or "the avant-garde of modernism". The word "surrealist" was coined by Guillaume Apollinaire and first appeared in

2299-520: A cottage industry under the putting-out system . Occasionally, the work was done in the workshop of a master weaver. Under the putting-out system, home-based workers produced under contract to merchant sellers, who often supplied the raw materials. In the off-season, the women, typically farmers' wives, did the spinning and the men did the weaving. Using the spinning wheel , it took anywhere from four to eight spinners to supply one handloom weaver. The flying shuttle , patented in 1733 by John Kay —with

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2508-567: A critique of modern philosophy with roots discernible in Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger 's critique of metaphysics . Although few themselves relied upon the term, they became known to many as postmodern theorists. And, while their ideas exerted a great influence on debates about the postmodern, they themselves did not intervene or attempt to provide their own definitions of the postmodern. Modernism Modernism

2717-518: A departure from French Impressionism . Similarly, the first citation given by the Oxford English Dictionary is dated to 1916, describing Gus Mager as "one of the few 'post' modern painters whose style is convincing". Episcopal priest and cultural commentator J. M. Thompson, in a 1914 article, uses the term to describe changes in attitudes and beliefs in the critique of religion, writing, "the raison d'être of Post-Modernism

2926-604: A detailed account of the term. Economic historians and authors such as Mendels, Pomeranz , and Kridte argue that proto-industrialisation in parts of Europe, the Muslim world , Mughal India , and China created the social and economic conditions that led to the Industrial Revolution, thus causing the Great Divergence . Some historians, such as John Clapham and Nicholas Crafts , have argued that

3135-401: A direct means of accessing a higher reality. Modernism often rejects 19th-century realism when the latter is understood as focusing on the embodiment of meaning within a naturalistic representation. Instead, some modernists aim at a more 'real' realism, one that is uncentered. For instance, Picasso's 1907 Proto-Cubist painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon does not present its subjects from

3344-662: A global trading empire with colonies in North America and the Caribbean. Britain had major military and political hegemony on the Indian subcontinent ; particularly with the proto-industrialised Mughal Bengal , through the activities of the East India Company . The development of trade and the rise of business were among the major causes of the Industrial Revolution. Developments in law also facilitated

3553-489: A legal system that supported business; and financial capital available to invest. Once industrialisation began in Great Britain, new factors can be added: the eagerness of British entrepreneurs to export industrial expertise and the willingness to import the process. Britain met the criteria and industrialized starting in the 18th century, and then it exported the process to western Europe (especially Belgium, France, and

3762-425: A line from W. B. Yeats : "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold" (in ' The Second Coming '). Modernists often search for a metaphysical 'centre' but experience its collapse. ( Postmodernism , by way of contrast, celebrates that collapse, exposing the failure of metaphysics, such as Jacques Derrida 's deconstruction of metaphysical claims.) Philosophically, the collapse of metaphysics can be traced back to

3971-536: A matter of dispute. Various authors place its beginnings in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. In the mid-1970s, the American sociologist Daniel Bell provided a general account of the postmodern as an effectively nihilistic response to modernism's alleged assault on the Protestant work ethic and its rejection of what he upheld as traditional values. The ideals of modernity, per his diagnosis, were degraded to

4180-421: A mechanised industry. Other inventors increased the efficiency of the individual steps of spinning (carding, twisting and spinning, and rolling) so that the supply of yarn increased greatly. Steam power was then applied to drive textile machinery. Manchester acquired the nickname Cottonopolis during the early 19th century owing to its sprawl of textile factories. Although mechanisation dramatically decreased

4389-726: A more even thickness. The technology was developed with the help of John Wyatt of Birmingham . Paul and Wyatt opened a mill in Birmingham which used their rolling machine powered by a donkey. In 1743, a factory opened in Northampton with 50 spindles on each of five of Paul and Wyatt's machines. This operated until about 1764. A similar mill was built by Daniel Bourn in Leominster , but this burnt down. Both Lewis Paul and Daniel Bourn patented carding machines in 1748. Based on two sets of rollers that travelled at different speeds, it

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4598-471: A new literary form. Also in the arts, the term was first used in 1949 to describe a dissatisfaction with the modernist architectural movement known as the International Style . Although these early uses anticipate some of the concerns of the debate in the second part of the 20th century, there is little direct continuity in the discussion. Just when the new discussion begins, however, is also

4807-534: A new proliferation of cultures and forms. It is during this period that it also came to be associated with postcolonialism and identity politics . Around this time, postmodernism also began to be conceived in popular culture as a general "philosophical disposition" associated with a loose sort of relativism . In this sense, the term also started to appear as a "casual term of abuse" in non-academic contexts. Others identified it as an aesthetic "lifestyle" of eclecticism and playful self-irony. Postmodernism encompasses

5016-406: A number of subsequent improvements including an important one in 1747—doubled the output of a weaver, worsening the imbalance between spinning and weaving. It became widely used around Lancashire after 1760 when John's son, Robert , invented the dropbox, which facilitated changing thread colors. Lewis Paul patented the roller spinning frame and the flyer-and- bobbin system for drawing wool to

5225-682: A political dimension. One manifestation of postmodernism in fashion explored alternatives to conventional concepts of elegance. Rei Kawakubo ’s Spring/Summer 1997 collection featured "dresses asymmetrically padded with goose down, creating bumps in unexpected areas of the body". Issey Miyake ’s 1985 dreadlocks hat "offered an immediate, yet impermanent, ' multi-culti ' fashion experience". Vivienne Westwood took "an extremely polyglot approach", from early work with copies of 1950s clothes, to exploration of historic modes and cultural influences: her first runway show, "Pirate", merged British history, 18th- and 19th-century dress, and African textile design, with

5434-506: A prime example of postmodernism. The setting is a future dystopia where "replicants", enhanced android workers nearly indistinguishable from humans, are hunted down when they escape from their jobs. The film blurs boundaries between genres and cultures, and fuses disparate styles and periods: futuristic visuals "mingle with drab 1940s clothes and offices, punk rock hairstyles, pop Egyptian styles and oriental culture." The blending of film noir and science-fiction into tech noir illustrates

5643-519: A rap and ethnic music soundtrack. Postmodern film aims to subvert the mainstream conventions of narrative structure and characterization , and to test the audience's suspension of disbelief . Typically, such films also break down the cultural divide between high and low art and often upend typical portrayals of gender , race , class , genre , and time with the goal of creating something that does not abide by traditional narrative expression. Certain key characteristics are used to separate

5852-419: A reaction against modernist theater. Most postmodern productions are centered on highlighting the fallibility of definite truth, instead encouraging the audience to reach their own individual understanding. Essentially, thus, postmodern theater raises questions rather than attempting to supply answers. In the 1970s, a disparate group of French theorists – often grouped together as "poststructuralists" – developed

6061-410: A reverberatory furnace, coal or coke could be used as fuel. The puddling process continued to be used until the late 19th century when iron was being displaced by mild steel. Because puddling required human skill in sensing the iron globs, it was never successfully mechanised. Rolling was an important part of the puddling process because the grooved rollers expelled most of the molten slag and consolidated

6270-522: A revolutionary culture that included political revolution. In Russia after the 1917 Revolution , there was indeed initially a burgeoning of avant-garde cultural activity, which included Russian Futurism . However, others rejected conventional politics as well as artistic conventions, believing that a revolution of political consciousness had greater importance than a change in political structures. But many modernists saw themselves as apolitical. Others, such as T. S. Eliot , rejected mass popular culture from

6479-442: A romantic) said, ‘the idea [or meaning] remains eternally and infinitely active and inaccessible in the image’. This was extended in modernist theory which, drawing on its symbolist precursors, often emphasizes the inscrutability and failure of symbol and metaphor. For example, Wallace Stevens seeks and fails to find meaning in nature, even if he at times seems to sense such a meaning. As such, symbolists and modernists at times adopt

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6688-438: A simple, wooden framed machine that only cost about £6 for a 40-spindle model in 1792 and was used mainly by home spinners. The jenny produced a lightly twisted yarn only suitable for weft, not warp. The spinning frame or water frame was developed by Richard Arkwright who, along with two partners, patented it in 1769. The design was partly based on a spinning machine built by Kay, who was hired by Arkwright. For each spindle

6897-490: A single point of view, instead presenting a flat, two-dimensional picture plane . The Poet of 1911 is similarly decentered, presenting the body from multiple points of view. As the Peggy Guggenheim Collection comments, "Picasso presents multiple views of each object, as if he had moved around it, and synthesizes them into a single compound image." Modernism, with its sense that "things fall apart,"

7106-513: A society interact and live together ". The modernist movement emerged during the late 19th century in response to significant changes in Western culture , including secularization and the growing influence of science. It is characterized by a self-conscious rejection of tradition and the search for newer means of cultural expression . Modernism was influenced by widespread technological innovation , industrialization, and urbanization, as well as

7315-406: A struggle with the sense of nature's significance, falling under two headings: poems in which the speaker denies that nature has meaning, only for nature to loom up by the end of the poem; and poems in which the speaker claims nature has meaning, only for that meaning to collapse by the end of the poem. Modernism often rejects nineteenth century realism , if the latter is understood as focusing on

7524-427: A tonal center. A primary influence that led to Cubism was the representation of three-dimensional form in the late works of Paul Cézanne , which were displayed in a retrospective at the 1907 Salon d'Automne . In Cubist artwork, objects are analyzed, broken up, and reassembled in an abstract form; instead of depicting objects from one viewpoint, the artist depicts the subject from a multitude of viewpoints to represent

7733-625: A variety of cotton cloth, some of exceptionally fine quality. Cotton was a difficult raw material for Europe to obtain before it was grown on colonial plantations in the Americas. The early Spanish explorers found Native Americans growing unknown species of excellent quality cotton: sea island cotton ( Gossypium barbadense ) and upland green seeded cotton Gossypium hirsutum . Sea island cotton grew in tropical areas and on barrier islands of Georgia and South Carolina but did poorly inland. Sea island cotton began being exported from Barbados in

7942-425: A way for knowledge to explain that which was as yet unknown, came the first wave of modernist works in the opening decade of the 20th century. Although their authors considered them to be extensions of existing trends in art, these works broke the implicit understanding the general public had of art: that artists were the interpreters and representatives of bourgeois culture and ideas. These "modernist" landmarks include

8151-548: A weight. The weights kept the twist from backing up before the rollers. The bottom rollers were wood and metal, with fluting along the length. The water frame was able to produce a hard, medium-count thread suitable for warp, finally allowing 100% cotton cloth to be made in Britain. Arkwright and his partners used water power at a factory in Cromford , Derbyshire in 1771, giving the invention its name. Samuel Crompton invented

8360-600: A wide range of artistic movements and styles. In visual arts, pop art , conceptual art , feminist art , video art , minimalism , and neo-expressionism are among the approaches recognized as postmodern. The label extends to diverse musical genres and artists: John Cage , Madonna , and punk rock all meet postmodern definitions. Literature, film, architecture, theater, fashion, dance, and many other creative disciplines saw postmodern expression. As an example, Andy Warhol 's pop art across multiple mediums challenged traditional distinctions between high and low culture, and blurred

8569-456: Is "diffuse, fragmentary, [and] multi-dimensional". Critics have described it as "an exasperating term" and claim that its indefinability is "a truism". Put otherwise, postmodernism is "several things at once". It has no single definition, and the term does not name any single unified phenomenon, but rather many diverse phenomena: "postmodernisms rather than one postmodernism". Although postmodernisms are generally united in their effort to transcend

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8778-430: Is Arkwright. He is credited with a list of inventions, but these were actually developed by such people as Kay and Thomas Highs ; Arkwright nurtured the inventors, patented the ideas, financed the initiatives, and protected the machines. He created the cotton mill which brought the production processes together in a factory, and he developed the use of power—first horsepower and then water power—which made cotton manufacture

8987-575: Is a bore". The term "postmodern dance" is most strongly associated with the Judson Dance Theater located in New York's Greenwich Village during the 1960s and 1970s. Arguably its most important principle is taken from the composer John Cage 's efforts to break down the distinction between art and life. The Judson dancers "[stripped] dance of its theatrical conventions such as virtuoso technique, fanciful costumes, complex storylines, and

9196-425: Is among the first skyscrapers in the world. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe 's Seagram Building in New York (1956–1958) is often regarded as the pinnacle of this modernist high-rise architecture. Many aspects of modernist design persist within the mainstream of contemporary architecture , though previous dogmatism has given way to a more playful use of decoration, historical quotation, and spatial drama. In 1913—which

9405-788: Is another modernist movement. In 1909, the Parisian newspaper Le Figaro published F. T. Marinetti 's first manifesto. Soon afterward, a group of painters ( Giacomo Balla , Umberto Boccioni , Carlo Carrà , Luigi Russolo , and Gino Severini ) co-signed the Futurist Manifesto . Modeled on Marx and Engels ' famous " Communist Manifesto " (1848), such manifestos put forward ideas that were meant to provoke and to gather followers. However, arguments in favor of geometric or purely abstract painting were, at this time, largely confined to "little magazines" which had only tiny circulations. Modernist primitivism and pessimism were controversial, and

9614-510: Is closely linked with the writings of critic-turned-architect Charles Jencks , beginning with lectures in the early 1970s and his essay "The Rise of Post-Modern Architecture" from 1975. His magnum opus , however, is the book The Language of Post-Modern Architecture , first published in 1977, and since running to seven editions (in which he famously wrote: "Modern architecture died in St. Louis, Missouri, on 15 July 1972 at 3:32 p.m. (or thereabouts) when

9823-537: Is highly regarded for his humorous short stories that he published in magazines in the 1930s and 1940s, most often in The New Yorker , which are considered to be the first examples of surrealist humor in America. Modern ideas in art also began to appear more frequently in commercials and logos, an early example of which, from 1916, is the famous London Underground logo designed by Edward Johnston . One of

10032-483: Is often presented as an early example of a writer using the stream-of-consciousness technique , but Robert Humphrey comments that Proust "is concerned only with the reminiscent aspect of consciousness" and that he "was deliberately recapturing the past for the purpose of communicating; hence he did not write a stream-of-consciousness novel." Stream of consciousness was an important modernist literary innovation, and it has been suggested that Arthur Schnitzler (1862–1931)

10241-461: Is often seen as the apotheosis of Romanticism. As August Wilhelm Schlegel, an early German Romantic, described it, while Romanticism searches for metaphysical truths about character, nature, higher power , and meaning in the world, modernism, although yearning for such a metaphysical center, only finds its collapse. In the context of the Industrial Revolution (~1760–1840), influential innovations included steam-powered industrialization , especially

10450-459: Is similarly decentred, presenting the body from multiple points of view. As the Peggy Guggenheim Collection website puts it, 'Picasso presents multiple views of each object, as if he had moved around it, and synthesizes them into a single compound image'. Modernism, with its sense that 'things fall apart,' can be seen as the apotheosis of romanticism , if romanticism is the (often frustrated) quest for metaphysical truths about character, nature,

10659-467: Is the Swiss Army knife of critical concepts. It’s definitionally overloaded, and it can do almost any job you need done." From an opposing perspective, media theorist Dick Hebdige criticized the vagueness of the term, enumerating a long list of otherwise unrelated concepts that people have designated as postmodernism, from "the décor of a room" or "a 'scratch' video", to fear of nuclear armageddon and

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10868-512: Is to escape from the double-mindedness of modernism by being thorough in its criticism by extending it to religion as well as theology, to Catholic feeling as well as to Catholic tradition". In 1926, Bernard Iddings Bell , president of St. Stephen's College and also an Episcopal priest, published Postmodernism and Other Essays , which marks the first use of the term to describe an historical period following modernity. The essay criticizes lingering socio-cultural norms, attitudes, and practices of

11077-503: The Enlightenment . It is also critical of a purported cultural shift away from traditional Christian beliefs. The term "postmodernity" was first used in an academic historical context as a general concept for a movement by Arnold J. Toynbee in a 1939 essay, which states that "Our own Post-Modern Age has been inaugurated by the general war of 1914–1918". In 1942, the literary critic and author H. R. Hays describes postmodernism as

11286-537: The Hecatomb of the First World War — disclose a common cause and psychological matrix in the fight against (perceived) decadence ." All of them embody bids to access a "supra-personal experience of reality" in which individuals believed they could transcend their mortality and eventually that they would cease to be victims of history to instead become its creators. Literary modernism is often summed up in

11495-516: The Renaissance up to the middle of the 19th century, underpinned by the logic of perspective and an attempt to reproduce an illusion of visible reality. The arts of cultures other than the European had become accessible and showed alternative ways of describing visual experience to the artist. By the end of the 19th century, many artists felt a need to create a new kind of art that encompassed

11704-488: The avant-garde of various arts and disciplines. It is also often perceived, especially in the West, as a socially progressive movement that affirms the power of human beings to create, improve, and reshape their environment with the aid of practical experimentation, scientific knowledge, or technology. From this perspective, modernism encourages the re-examination of every aspect of existence. Modernists analyze topics to find

11913-617: The capitalist system and that workers are anything but free led to the formulation of Marxist theory . Art historians have suggested various dates as starting points for modernism. Historian William Everdell argued that modernism began in the 1870s when metaphorical (or ontological ) continuity began to yield to the discrete with mathematician Richard Dedekind 's (1831–1916) Dedekind cut and Ludwig Boltzmann 's (1844–1906) statistical thermodynamics . Everdell also believed modernism in painting began in 1885–1886 with post-Impressionist artist Georges Seurat 's development of Divisionism ,

12122-653: The electrical telegraph , widely introduced in the 1840s and 1850s in the United Kingdom and the United States, were not powerful enough to drive high rates of economic growth. Rapid economic growth began to reoccur after 1870, springing from a new group of innovations in what has been called the Second Industrial Revolution . These included new steel-making processes , mass production , assembly lines , electrical grid systems,

12331-407: The modernist movement . Even here, however, there continued to be disagreement about such basic issues as whether postmodernism is a break with modernism, a renewal and intensification of modernism, or even, both at once, a rejection and a radicalization of its historical predecessor. While discussions in the 1970s were dominated by literary criticism, these were supplanted by architectural theory in

12540-658: The neoclassicism of the 1920s (as represented most famously by T. S. Eliot and Igor Stravinsky —which rejected popular solutions to modern problems), the rise of fascism , the Great Depression , and the march to war helped to radicalize a generation. Bertolt Brecht , W. H. Auden , André Breton , Louis Aragon , and the philosophers Antonio Gramsci and Walter Benjamin are perhaps the most famous exemplars of this modernist form of Marxism. There were, however, also modernists explicitly of 'the right', including Salvador Dalí , Wyndham Lewis , T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound ,

12749-488: The spinning mule in 1779, so called because it is a hybrid of Arkwright's water frame and James Hargreaves 's spinning jenny in the same way that a mule is the product of crossbreeding a female horse with a male donkey . Crompton's mule was able to produce finer thread than hand spinning and at a lower cost. Mule-spun thread was of suitable strength to be used as a warp and finally allowed Britain to produce highly competitive yarn in large quantities. Realising that

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12958-686: The " stream of consciousness " technique, such as Dorothy Richardson , James Joyce , and Virginia Woolf (1882–1941). Also important in Bergson's philosophy was the idea of élan vital , the life force, which "brings about the creative evolution of everything." His philosophy also placed a high value on intuition , though without rejecting the importance of the intellect. Important literary precursors of modernism included esteemed writers such as Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881), whose novels include Crime and Punishment (1866) and The Brothers Karamazov (1880); Walt Whitman (1819–1892), who published

13167-470: The " will to power " ( Wille zur macht ), were of central importance: "Nietzsche often identified life itself with 'will to power', that is, with an instinct for growth and durability." Henri Bergson (1859–1941), on the other hand, emphasized the difference between scientific, clock time and the direct, subjective human experience of time. His work on time and consciousness "had a great influence on 20th-century novelists" especially those modernists who used

13376-614: The "dots" used to paint A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte . On the other hand, visual art critic Clement Greenberg called German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) "the first real modernist", although he also wrote, "What can be safely called modernism emerged in the middle of the last century—and rather locally, in France, with Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) in literature and Manet in painting, and perhaps with Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880), too, in prose fiction. (It

13585-467: The "implosion of meaning", and stated that anything that could signify all of those things was "a buzzword". All this notwithstanding, scholar Hans Bertens offers the following: If there is a common denominator to all these postmodernisms, it is that of a crisis in representation: a deeply felt loss of faith in our ability to represent the real, in the widest sense. No matter whether they are aesthestic [sic], epistemological, moral, or political in nature,

13794-493: The "increasingly shapeless" character of contemporary society. In the 1970s, this changed again, largely under the influence of the literary critic Ihab Hassan 's large-scale survey of works that he said could no longer be called modern. Taking the Black Mountain poets an exemplary instance of the new postmodern type, Hassan celebrates its Nietzschean playfulness and cheerfully anarchic spirit, which he sets off against

14003-439: The (perceived) erosion of an overarching ' nomos ', or 'sacred canopy', under the fragmenting and secularizing impact of modernity". Therefore, phenomena apparently unrelated to each other such as " Expressionism , Futurism , Vitalism , Theosophy , Psychoanalysis , Nudism , Eugenics , Utopian town planning and architecture, modern dance , Bolshevism , Organic Nationalism — and even the cult of self-sacrifice that sustained

14212-441: The 1650s. Upland green seeded cotton grew well on inland areas of the southern U.S. but was not economical because of the difficulty of removing seed, a problem solved by the cotton gin . A strain of cotton seed brought from Mexico to Natchez, Mississippi , in 1806 became the parent genetic material for over 90% of world cotton production today; it produced bolls that were three to four times faster to pick. The Age of Discovery

14421-478: The 1860s, two approaches in the arts and letters developed separately in France. The first was Impressionism, a school of painting that initially focused on work done not in studios, but outdoors ( en plein air ). Impressionist paintings attempted to convey that human beings do not see objects, but instead see light itself. The school gathered adherents despite internal divisions among its leading practitioners and became increasingly influential. Initially rejected from

14630-467: The 1920s and 1930s were Bertolt Brecht and Federico García Lorca . D. H. Lawrence 's Lady Chatterley's Lover was privately published in 1928, while another important landmark for the history of the modern novel came with the publication of William Faulkner 's The Sound and the Fury in 1929. In the 1930s, in addition to further major works by Faulkner, Samuel Beckett published his first major work,

14839-743: The 1920s until the 1950s. While modernist poetry in English is often viewed as an American phenomenon, with leading exponents including Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore , William Carlos Williams , H.D. , and Louis Zukofsky , there were important British modernist poets, including David Jones , Hugh MacDiarmid , Basil Bunting , and W. H. Auden . European modernist poets include Federico García Lorca , Anna Akhmatova , Constantine Cavafy , and Paul Valéry . The modernist movement continued during this period in Soviet Russia . In 1930 composer Dimitri Shostakovich 's (1906–1975) opera The Nose

15048-659: The 1930s. Between 1930 and 1932 composer Arnold Schoenberg worked on Moses und Aron , one of the first operas to make use of the twelve-tone technique, Pablo Picasso painted in 1937 Guernica , his cubist condemnation of fascism , while in 1939 James Joyce pushed the boundaries of the modern novel further with Finnegans Wake . Also by 1930 modernism began to influence mainstream culture, so that, for example, The New Yorker magazine began publishing work, influenced by modernism, by young writers and humorists like Dorothy Parker , Robert Benchley , E. B. White , S. J. Perelman , and James Thurber , amongst others. Perelman

15257-679: The 1950s. Their stance against modernist poetry – and Olson's Heideggerian orientation – were influential in the identification of postmodernism as a polemical position opposed to the rationalist values championed by the Enlightenment project. During the 1960s, this affirmative use gave way to a pejorative use by the New Left , who used it to describe a waning commitment among youth to the political ideals socialism and communism . The literary critic Irving Howe , for instance, denounced postmodern literature for being content to merely reflect, rather than actively attempt to refashion, what he saw as

15466-575: The 1950s–1960s. In opposition to modernism's alleged self-seriousness, postmodernism is characterized by its playful use of eclectic styles and performative irony , among other features. Critics claim it supplants moral, political, and aesthetic ideals with mere style and spectacle. In the 1990s, "postmodernism" came to denote a general – and, in general, celebratory – response to cultural pluralism . Proponents align themselves with feminism , multiculturalism , and postcolonialism . Building upon poststructural theory, postmodern thought defined itself by

15675-464: The 1980s. Some of these conversations made use of French poststructuralist thought, but only after these innovations and critical discourse in the arts did postmodernism emerge as a philosophical term in its own right. According to Hans Bertens and Perry Anderson , the Black Mountain poets Charles Olson and Robert Creeley first introduced the term "postmodern" in its current sense during

15884-623: The 19th century. Arguments arose that the values of the artist and those of society were not merely different, but in fact oftentimes opposed, and that society's current values were antithetical to further progress; therefore, civilization could not move forward in its present form. Early in the century, the philosopher Schopenhauer (1788–1860) ( The World as Will and Representation , 1819/20) called into question previous optimism. His ideas had an important influence on later thinkers, including Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). Similarly, Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) and Nietzsche both later rejected

16093-459: The British magazine, "Design". A characteristic of postmodern graphic design is that "retro, techno, punk, grunge, beach, parody, and pastiche were all conspicuous trends. Each had its own sites and venues, detractors and advocates." In 1971, the American literary theorist Ihab Hassan made "postmodernism" popular in literary studies with his influential book, The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward

16302-485: The Dutch author Menno ter Braak and others. Significant modernist literary works continued to be created in the 1920s and 1930s, including further novels by Marcel Proust , Virginia Woolf , Robert Musil , and Dorothy Richardson . The American modernist dramatist Eugene O'Neill 's career began in 1914, but his major works appeared in the 1920s, 1930s and early 1940s. Two other significant modernist dramatists writing in

16511-712: The German Nazarenes ). The Pre-Raphaelites foreshadowed Manet (1832–1883), with whom modernist painting most definitely begins. They acted on a dissatisfaction with painting as practiced in their time, holding that its realism wasn't truthful enough." Two of the most significant thinkers of the mid-19th century were biologist Charles Darwin (1809–1882), author of On the Origin of Species through Natural Selection (1859), and political scientist Karl Marx (1818–1883), author of Das Kapital (1867). Despite coming from different fields, both of their theories threatened

16720-615: The German states) in the early 19th century. The United States copied the British model in the early 19th century, and Japan copied the Western European models in the late 19th century. The commencement of the Industrial Revolution is closely linked to a small number of innovations, beginning in the second half of the 18th century. By the 1830s, the following gains had been made in important technologies: In 1750, Britain imported 2.5 million pounds of raw cotton, most of which

16929-549: The Hope of Women was the first fully Expressionist work for the theater, which opened on 4 July 1909 in Vienna . The extreme simplification of characters to mythic types , choral effects, declamatory dialogue and heightened intensity would become characteristic of later Expressionist plays. The first full-length Expressionist play was The Son by Walter Hasenclever, which was published in 1914 and first performed in 1916. Futurism

17138-501: The Impressionist Claude Monet had already been innovative in his use of perspective. In 1907, as Picasso was painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon , Oskar Kokoschka was writing Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen ( Murderer, Hope of Women ), the first Expressionist play (produced with scandal in 1909), and Arnold Schoenberg was composing his String Quartet No.2 in F sharp minor (1908), his first composition without

17347-496: The Indian industry. Bar iron was the commodity form of iron used as the raw material for making hardware goods such as nails, wire, hinges, horseshoes, wagon tires, chains, etc., as well as structural shapes. A small amount of bar iron was converted into steel. Cast iron was used for pots, stoves, and other items where its brittleness was tolerable. Most cast iron was refined and converted to bar iron, with substantial losses. Bar iron

17556-425: The Industrial Revolution began in Britain in the 1780s and was not fully felt until the 1830s or 1840s, while T. S. Ashton held that it occurred roughly between 1760 and 1830. Rapid adoption of mechanized textiles spinning occurred in Britain in the 1780s, and high rates of growth in steam power and iron production occurred after 1800. Mechanised textile production spread from Great Britain to continental Europe and

17765-492: The Industrial Revolution spread to continental Europe and the United States , from around 1760 to about 1820–1840. This transition included going from hand production methods to machines ; new chemical manufacturing and iron production processes; the increasing use of water power and steam power ; the development of machine tools ; and the rise of the mechanised factory system . Output greatly increased, and

17974-577: The Scottish inventor James Beaumont Neilson in 1828, was the most important development of the 19th century for saving energy in making pig iron. By using preheated combustion air, the amount of fuel to make a unit of pig iron was reduced at first by between one-third using coke or two-thirds using coal; the efficiency gains continued as the technology improved. Hot blast also raised the operating temperature of furnaces, increasing their capacity. Using less coal or coke meant introducing fewer impurities into

18183-558: The Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–1776), who argued that we never actually perceive one event causing another. We only experience the ' constant conjunction ' of events, and do not perceive a metaphysical 'cause'. Similarly, Hume argued that we never know the self as object, only the self as subject, and we are thus blind to our true natures. Moreover, if we only 'know' through sensory experience—such as sight, touch and feeling—then we cannot 'know' and neither can we make metaphysical claims. Thus, modernism can be driven emotionally by

18392-575: The United States in the early 19th century, with important centres of textiles, iron and coal emerging in Belgium and the United States and later textiles in France. An economic recession occurred from the late 1830s to the early 1840s when the adoption of the Industrial Revolution's early innovations, such as mechanised spinning and weaving, slowed as their markets matured; and despite the increasing adoption of locomotives, steamboats and steamships, and hot blast iron smelting . New technologies such as

18601-493: The Western world. The Industrial Revolution , urbanization , secularization , technological advances , two world wars , and globalization deeply disrupted the social order. Modernism emerged in the late 1800s, seeking to redefine fundamental truths and values through a radical rethinking of traditional ideas and forms across many fields. Postmodernism emerged in the mid-20th century with a skeptical perspective that questioned

18810-529: The Working Class in England in 1844 spoke of "an industrial revolution, a revolution which at the same time changed the whole of civil society". Although Engels wrote his book in the 1840s, it was not translated into English until the late 19th century, and his expression did not enter everyday language until then. Credit for popularising the term may be given to Arnold Toynbee , whose 1881 lectures gave

19019-572: The atonal ending of Arnold Schoenberg 's Second String Quartet in 1908, the Expressionist paintings of Wassily Kandinsky starting in 1903, and culminating with his first abstract painting and the founding of the Blue Rider group in Munich in 1911, and the rise of fauvism and the inventions of Cubism from the studios of Henri Matisse , Pablo Picasso , Georges Braque , and others, in

19228-525: The city, including King's Cross station (1852) and Paddington Station (1854). These technological advances spread abroad, leading to later structures such as the Brooklyn Bridge (1883) and the Eiffel Tower (1889), the latter of which broke all previous limitations on how tall man-made objects could be. While such engineering feats radically altered the 19th-century urban environment and

19437-471: The coal do not migrate into the metal. This technology was applied to lead from 1678 and to copper from 1687. It was also applied to iron foundry work in the 1690s, but in this case the reverberatory furnace was known as an air furnace. (The foundry cupola is a different, and later, innovation.) Coke pig iron was hardly used to produce wrought iron until 1755–56, when Darby's son Abraham Darby II built furnaces at Horsehay and Ketley where low sulfur coal

19646-409: The coke pig iron he made was not suitable for making wrought iron and was used mostly for the production of cast iron goods, such as pots and kettles. He had the advantage over his rivals in that his pots, cast by his patented process, were thinner and cheaper than theirs. In 1750, coke had generally replaced charcoal in the smelting of copper and lead and was in widespread use in glass production. In

19855-467: The column of materials (iron ore, fuel, slag) flowing down the blast furnace more porous and did not crush in the much taller furnaces of the late 19th century. As cast iron became cheaper and widely available, it began being a structural material for bridges and buildings. A famous early example is the Iron Bridge built in 1778 with cast iron produced by Abraham Darby III. However, most cast iron

20064-532: The coming of the Great War of 1914–1918 (World War I) and the Russian Revolution of 1917, the world was drastically changed, and doubt was cast on the beliefs and institutions of the past. The failure of the previous status quo seemed self-evident to a generation that had seen millions die fighting over scraps of earth: before 1914, it had been argued that no one would fight such a war, since the cost

20273-433: The concept of absolute originality — the idea of "creation from nothingness" — upheld in the 19th century by both realism and Romanticism , replacing it with techniques of collage , reprise , incorporation, rewriting, recapitulation , revision, and parody. Another feature of modernism was reflexivity about artistic and social convention, which led to experimentation highlighting how works of art are made as well as

20482-478: The connection to feminism explicit, but went so far as to claim feminism for postmodernism wholesale, a broad claim resisted by even many sympathetic feminists such as Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson. Although postmodern criticism and thought drew on philosophical ideas from early on, "postmodernism" was only introduced to the expressly philosophical lexicon by Jean-François Lyotard in his 1979 The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge . This work served as

20691-461: The conventional idea of the novel as faithfully reflecting the world. In Postmodernist Fiction (1987), Brian McHale details the shift from modernism to postmodernism, arguing that postmodern works developed out of modernism, moving from concern with what is there (" ontological dominant") to concern with how we can know it's there (" epistemological dominant"). McHale's "What Was Postmodernism?" (2007) follows Raymond Federman 's lead in now using

20900-495: The cost of cotton cloth, by the mid-19th century machine-woven cloth still could not equal the quality of hand-woven Indian cloth, in part because of the fineness of thread made possible by the type of cotton used in India, which allowed high thread counts. However, the high productivity of British textile manufacturing allowed coarser grades of British cloth to undersell hand-spun and woven fabric in low-wage India, eventually destroying

21109-487: The cotton textile industry in Britain was 2.6% in 1760, 17% in 1801, and 22.4% in 1831. Value added by the British woollen industry was 14.1% in 1801. Cotton factories in Britain numbered approximately 900 in 1797. In 1760, approximately one-third of cotton cloth manufactured in Britain was exported, rising to two-thirds by 1800. In 1781, cotton spun amounted to 5.1 million pounds, which increased to 56 million pounds by 1800. In 1800, less than 0.1% of world cotton cloth

21318-427: The country. Steam engines made the use of higher-pressure and volume blast practical; however, the leather used in bellows was expensive to replace. In 1757, ironmaster John Wilkinson patented a hydraulic powered blowing engine for blast furnaces. The blowing cylinder for blast furnaces was introduced in 1760 and the first blowing cylinder made of cast iron is believed to be the one used at Carrington in 1768 that

21527-425: The cultural and geopolitical shifts that occurred after World War I . Artistic movements and techniques associated with modernism include abstract art , literary stream-of-consciousness , cinematic montage , musical atonality and twelve-tonality , modernist architecture , and urban planning . Modernism took a critical stance towards the Enlightenment concept of rationalism . The movement also rejected

21736-746: The cultural institution as a whole is through its relationship to realism and the dominant conventions of representation." More explicitly: the Expressionists rejected the ideology of realism. There was a concentrated Expressionist movement in early 20th-century German theater, of which Georg Kaiser and Ernst Toller were the most famous playwrights. Other notable Expressionist dramatists included Reinhard Sorge , Walter Hasenclever , Hans Henny Jahnn , and Arnolt Bronnen . They looked back to Swedish playwright August Strindberg and German actor and dramatist Frank Wedekind as precursors of their dramaturgical experiments. Oskar Kokoschka 's Murderer,

21945-497: The daily lives of people, the human experience of time itself was altered with the development of the electric telegraph in 1837, as well as the adoption of " standard time " by British railway companies from 1845, a concept which would be adopted throughout the rest of the world over the next fifty years. Despite continuing technological advances, the ideas that history and civilization were inherently progressive and that such advances were always good came under increasing attack in

22154-527: The dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously." However, the relationship of modernism with tradition was complex, as literary scholar Peter Child's indicates: "There were paradoxical if not opposed trends towards revolutionary and reactionary positions, fear of the new and delight at the disappearance of the old, nihilism and fanatical enthusiasm, creativity, and despair." An example of how modernist art can apply older traditions while also incorporating new techniques can be found within

22363-624: The deconstruction of both cinema and genre. The film can also be seen as an example of major studios using the "mystique and cachet of the term 'postmodern' as a sales pitch", resulting in Hollywood movies that "demonstrate all the postmodern characteristics". From another perspective, "critical responses to Blade Runner fall on either side of a modern/postmodern line" – critical analysis from "modernist" and "postmodernist" approaches produce entirely different interpretations. Early mention of postmodernism as an element of graphic design appeared in

22572-552: The desire for metaphysical truths, while understanding their impossibility. Some modernist novels, for instance, feature characters like Marlow in Heart of Darkness or Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby who believe that they have encountered some great truth about nature or character, truths that the novels themselves treat ironically while offering more mundane explanations. Similarly, many poems of Wallace Stevens convey

22781-618: The development of railways starting in Britain in the 1830s, and the subsequent advancements in physics, engineering, and architecture they led to. A major 19th-century engineering achievement was the Crystal Palace , the huge cast-iron and plate-glass exhibition hall built for the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London. Glass and iron were used in a similar monumental style in the construction of major railway terminals throughout

22990-642: The economic and social changes occurred gradually and that the term revolution is a misnomer. This is still a subject of debate among some historians. Six factors facilitated industrialisation: high levels of agricultural productivity, such as that reflected in the British Agricultural Revolution , to provide excess manpower and food; a pool of managerial and entrepreneurial skills; available ports, rivers, canals, and roads to cheaply move raw materials and outputs; natural resources such as coal, iron, and waterfalls; political stability and

23199-570: The effects of the Industrial Revolution and bourgeois values. Literary scholar Gerald Graff , argues that, "The ground motive of modernism was criticism of the 19th-century bourgeois social order and its world view; the modernists, carrying the torch of Romanticism." While J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851), one of the most notable landscape painters of the 19th century, was a member of the Romantic movement , his pioneering work in

23408-407: The embodiment of meaning within a naturalistic representation. At the same time, some modernists aim at a more 'real' realism, one that is uncentered. Picasso's proto-cubist painting, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon of 1907 (see picture above), does not present its subjects from a single point of view (that of a single viewer), but instead presents a flat, two-dimensional picture plane . 'The Poet' of 1911

23617-688: The entry for "Industry": "The idea of a new social order based on major industrial change was clear in Southey and Owen , between 1811 and 1818, and was implicit as early as Blake in the early 1790s and Wordsworth at the turn of the [19th] century." The term Industrial Revolution applied to technological change was becoming more common by the late 1830s, as in Jérôme-Adolphe Blanqui 's description in 1837 of la révolution industrielle . Friedrich Engels in The Condition of

23826-402: The established order. Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection undermined religious certainty and the idea of human uniqueness ; in particular, the notion that human beings are driven by the same impulses as "lower animals" proved to be difficult to reconcile with the idea of an ennobling spirituality . Meanwhile, Marx's arguments that there are fundamental contradictions within

24035-465: The expiration of the Arkwright patent would greatly increase the supply of spun cotton and lead to a shortage of weavers, Edmund Cartwright developed a vertical power loom which he patented in 1785. In 1776, he patented a two-man operated loom. Cartwright's loom design had several flaws, the most serious being thread breakage. Samuel Horrocks patented a fairly successful loom in 1813. Horock's loom

24244-478: The face of the senseless slaughter, described in works such as Erich Maria Remarque 's novel All Quiet on the Western Front (1929). Therefore, modernism's view of reality, which had been a minority taste before the war, became more generally accepted in the 1920s. In literature and visual art, some modernists sought to defy expectations mainly to make their art more vivid or to force the audience to take

24453-528: The first highly mechanised factory was John Lombe 's water-powered silk mill at Derby , operational by 1721. Lombe learned silk thread manufacturing by taking a job in Italy and acting as an industrial spy; however, because the Italian silk industry guarded its secrets closely, the state of the industry at that time is unknown. Although Lombe's factory was technically successful, the supply of raw silk from Italy

24662-400: The first successful cylinder for a Boulton and Watt steam engine in 1776, he was given an exclusive contract for providing cylinders. After Watt developed a rotary steam engine in 1782, they were widely applied to blowing, hammering, rolling and slitting. The solutions to the sulfur problem were the addition of sufficient limestone to the furnace to force sulfur into the slag as well as

24871-461: The founding of the Society of Incoherent Arts. The theories of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), Krafft-Ebing and other sexologists were influential in the early days of modernism. Freud's first major work was Studies on Hysteria (with Josef Breuer , 1895). Central to Freud's thinking is the idea "of the primacy of the unconscious mind in mental life", so that all subjective reality was based on

25080-444: The fundamental changes taking place in technology, science and philosophy. The sources from which individual artists drew their theoretical arguments were diverse and reflected the social and intellectual preoccupations in all areas of Western culture at that time. Wassily Kandinsky , Piet Mondrian , and Kazimir Malevich all believed in redefining art as the arrangement of pure color. The use of photography, which had rendered much of

25289-401: The high seriousness of modernism. (Yet, from another perspective, Friedrich Nietzsche 's attack on Western philosophy and Martin Heidegger 's critique of metaphysics posed deep theoretical problems not necessarily a cause for aesthetic celebration. Their further influence on the conversation about postmodernism, however, would be largely mediated by French poststructuralism .) If literature

25498-650: The horse, so modernist design should reject the old styles and structures inherited from Ancient Greece or the Middle Ages . Following this machine aesthetic , modernist designers typically rejected decorative motifs in design, preferring to emphasize the materials used and pure geometrical forms. The skyscraper is the archetypal modernist building, and the Wainwright Building , a 10-story office building completed in 1891 in St. Louis, Missouri , United States,

25707-510: The idea that reality could be understood through a purely objective lens, a rejection that had a significant influence on the development of existentialism and nihilism . Around 1850, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (a group of English poets, painters, and art critics) began to challenge the dominant trends of industrial Victorian England in "opposition to technical skill without inspiration." They were influenced by

25916-464: The infamous Pruitt–Igoe scheme, or rather several of its slab blocks, were given the final coup de grâce by dynamite."). Jencks makes the point that postmodernism (like modernism) varies for each field of art, and that for architecture it is not just a reaction to modernism but what he terms double coding : "Double Coding: the combination of Modern techniques with something else (usually traditional building) in order for architecture to communicate with

26125-426: The interactions between basic drives and instincts, through which the outside world was perceived. Freud's description of subjective states involved an unconscious mind full of primal impulses, and counterbalancing self-imposed restrictions derived from social values. The works of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) were another major precursor of modernism, with a philosophy in which psychological drives, specifically

26334-517: The iron industries during the Industrial Revolution was the replacement of wood and other bio-fuels with coal ; for a given amount of heat, mining coal required much less labour than cutting wood and converting it to charcoal , and coal was much more abundant than wood, supplies of which were becoming scarce before the enormous increase in iron production that took place in the late 18th century. In 1709, Abraham Darby made progress using coke to fuel his blast furnaces at Coalbrookdale . However,

26543-456: The large-scale manufacture of machine tools, and the use of increasingly advanced machinery in steam-powered factories. The earliest recorded use of the term "Industrial Revolution" was in July 1799 by French envoy Louis-Guillaume Otto , announcing that France had entered the race to industrialise. In his 1976 book Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society , Raymond Williams states in

26752-544: The late 1970s and ’80s." Media theorist Dick Hebdige , examining the " Road to Nowhere " (1985) music video, said the group "draw eclectically on a wide range of visual and aural sources to create a distinctive pastiche or hybrid 'house style' which they have used since their formation in the mid-1970s deliberately to stretch received (industrial) definitions of what rock/pop/video/Art/ performance/audience are", calling them "a properly postmodernist band." According to lead vocalist/guitarist/songwriter David Byrne , commenting for

26961-519: The late-20th century, avant-garde academics labelled American singer Madonna as the "personification of the postmodern" because "the postmodern condition is characterized by fragmentation, de-differentiation, pastiche, retrospection and anti-foundationalism", which they argued Madonna embodied. Christian writer Graham Cray also said that "Madonna is perhaps the most visible example of what is called post-modernism", and Martin Amis described her as "perhaps

27170-415: The level of consumer choice. This research project, however, was not taken up in a significant way by others until the mid-1980s when the work of Jean Baudrillard and Fredric Jameson , building upon art and literary criticism, reintroduced the term to sociology. Discussion about the postmodern in the second part of the 20th century was most articulate in areas with a large body of critical discourse around

27379-525: The lines between fine art and commercial design. His work, exemplified by the iconic Campbell's Soup Cans series during the 1960s, brought the postmodernist sensibility to mainstream attention. Criticism of postmodernist movements in the arts include objections to departure from beauty, the reliance on language for the art to have meaning, a lack of coherence or comprehensibility, deviation from clear structure, and consistent use of dark and negative themes. Scholarship regarding postmodernism and architecture

27588-429: The local context of the built environment. He presented this as in opposition to the "authoritarian style" of International Modernism. In the 1970s, postmodern criticism increasingly came to incorporate poststructuralist theory, particularly the deconstructive approach to texts most strongly associated with Jacques Derrida , who attempted to demonstrate that the whole foundationalist approach to language and knowledge

27797-489: The mainstream in the first decade of the 20th century was still inclined towards a faith in progress and liberal optimism. Abstract artists, taking as their examples the Impressionists, as well as Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) and Edvard Munch (1863–1944), began with the assumption that color and shape , not the depiction of the natural world, formed the essential characteristics of art. Western art had been, from

28006-467: The mass of hot wrought iron. Rolling was 15 times faster at this than a trip hammer . A different use of rolling, which was done at lower temperatures than that for expelling slag, was in the production of iron sheets, and later structural shapes such as beams, angles, and rails. The puddling process was improved in 1818 by Baldwyn Rogers, who replaced some of the sand lining on the reverberatory furnace bottom with iron oxide . In 1838 John Hall patented

28215-482: The material from which they are created. Debate about the timeline of modernism continues, with some scholars arguing that it evolved into late modernism or high modernism . Postmodernism , meanwhile, rejects many of the principles of modernism. Modernism was a cultural movement that impacted the arts as well as the broader Zeitgeist . It is commonly described as a system of thought and behavior marked by self-consciousness or self-reference , prevalent within

28424-401: The modern capitalist economy, while the Industrial Revolution began an era of per-capita economic growth in capitalist economies. Economic historians agree that the onset of the Industrial Revolution is the most important event in human history since the domestication of animals and plants. The precise start and end of the Industrial Revolution is still debated among historians, as is

28633-540: The most important commercial show of the time, the government-sponsored Paris Salon , the Impressionists organized yearly group exhibitions in commercial venues during the 1870s and 1880s, timing them to coincide with the official Salon. In 1863, the Salon des Refusés , created by Emperor Napoleon III , displayed all of the paintings rejected by the Paris Salon. While most were in standard styles, but by inferior artists,

28842-405: The most important effect of the Industrial Revolution was that the standard of living for the general population in the Western world began to increase consistently for the first time in history, although others have said that it did not begin to improve meaningfully until the late 19th and 20th centuries. GDP per capita was broadly stable before the Industrial Revolution and the emergence of

29051-400: The most postmodern personage on the planet". She was also suggested by literary critic Olivier Sécardin to epitomise postmodernism. Sculptor Claes Oldenberg , at the forefront of the pop art movement, declared in 1961: "I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical … I am for an art that embroils itself with everyday crap and still comes out on top." That year, he opened The Store in

29260-502: The most visible changes of this period was the adoption of new technologies into the daily lives of ordinary people in Western Europe and North America. Electricity, the telephone, the radio, the automobile—and the need to work with them, repair them and live with them—created social change. The kind of disruptive moment that only a few knew in the 1880s became a common occurrence. For example, the speed of communication reserved for

29469-428: The music of the composer Arnold Schoenberg . On the one hand, he rejected traditional tonal harmony , the hierarchical system of organizing works of music that had guided musical composition for at least a century and a half. Schoenberg believed he had discovered a wholly new way of organizing sound based on the use of twelve-note rows . Yet, while this was indeed a wholly new technique, its origins can be traced back to

29678-456: The nature of reality. They argued that since each viewer interprets art through their own subjective perspective, it can never convey the ultimate metaphysical truth that the Romantics sought. Nonetheless, the modernists did not completely reject the idea of art as a means of understanding the world. To them, it was a tool for challenging and disrupting the viewer's point of view, rather than as

29887-412: The notion of universal truths and reshaped modernist approaches by embracing the complexity and contradictions of modern life. The term "postmodernism" first appeared in print in 1870, but it only began to enter circulation with its current range of meanings in the 1950s—60s. The term "postmodern" was first used in 1870 by the artist John Watkins Chapman, who described "a Postmodern style of painting" as

30096-409: The novel Murphy (1938). Then in 1939 James Joyce's Finnegans Wake appeared. This is written in a largely idiosyncratic language , consisting of a mixture of standard English lexical items and neologistic multilingual puns and portmanteau words, which attempts to recreate the experience of sleep and dreams. In poetry T. S. Eliot, E. E. Cummings , and Wallace Stevens were writing from

30305-553: The novelist Franz Kafka , poet Gottfried Benn , and novelist Alfred Döblin were simultaneously the most vociferous anti-Expressionists. What, however, can be said, is that it was a movement that developed in the early 20th century mainly in Germany in reaction to the dehumanizing effect of industrialization and the growth of cities, and that "one of the central means by which Expressionism identifies itself as an avant-garde movement, and by which it marks its distance to traditions and

30514-480: The number of cotton goods consumed in Western Europe was minor until the early 19th century. By 1600, Flemish refugees began weaving cotton cloth in English towns where cottage spinning and weaving of wool and linen was well established. They were left alone by the guilds who did not consider cotton a threat. Earlier European attempts at cotton spinning and weaving were in 12th-century Italy and 15th-century southern Germany, but these industries eventually ended when

30723-423: The ones they believe to be holding back progress , replacing them with new ways of reaching the same end. According to historian Roger Griffin , modernism can be defined as a broad cultural, social, or political initiative sustained by the ethos of "the temporality of the new". Griffin believed that modernism aspired to restore a "sense of sublime order and purpose to the contemporary world, thereby counteracting

30932-476: The pace of economic and social changes . According to Cambridge historian Leigh Shaw-Taylor, Britain was already industrialising in the 17th century, and "Our database shows that a groundswell of enterprise and productivity transformed the economy in the 17th century, laying the foundations for the world's first industrial economy. Britain was already a nation of makers by the year 1700" and "the history of Britain needs to be rewritten". Eric Hobsbawm held that

31141-408: The past tense when discussing postmodernism. Others argue that postmodernism in literature utilizes compositional and semantic practices such as inclusivity, intentional indiscrimination, nonselection, and "logical impossibility." Music critic Andy Cush described Talking Heads as "New York art-punks" whose "blend of nervy postmodernism and undeniable groove made them one of the defining rock bands of

31350-480: The perceived limits of modernism, "modernism" also means different things to different critics in various arts. Further, there are outliers on even this basic stance; for instance, literary critic William Spanos conceives postmodernism, not in period terms, but in terms of a certain kind of literary imagination so that pre-modern texts such as Euripides ' Orestes or Cervantes ' Don Quixote count as postmodern. According to scholar Louis Menand , "Postmodernism

31559-434: The poetry collection Leaves of Grass (1855–1891); and August Strindberg (1849–1912), especially his later plays, including the trilogy To Damascus 1898–1901, A Dream Play (1902) and The Ghost Sonata (1907). Henry James has also been suggested as a significant precursor to modernism in works as early as The Portrait of a Lady (1881). Out of the collision of ideals derived from Romanticism and an attempt to find

31768-404: The postmodern from modernist cinema and traditional narrative film. One is an extensive use of homage or pastiche , imitating the style or character of other artistic works. A second is meta-reference or self-reference, highlighting the relation of the image to other images in media and not to any kind of external reality. Viewers are reminded that the film itself is only a film, perhaps through

31977-491: The preface to his play Les Mamelles de Tirésias , which was written in 1903 and first performed in 1917. Major surrealists include Paul Éluard , Robert Desnos , Max Ernst , Hans Arp , Antonin Artaud , Raymond Queneau , Joan Miró , and Marcel Duchamp . By 1930, modernism had won a place in the political and artistic establishment, although by this time modernism itself had changed. Modernism continued to evolve during

32186-480: The prevailing narratives of beauty and objectivity common to Modernism. Author on postmodernism, Dominic Strinati, has noted, it is also important "to include in this category the so-called ' art rock ' musical innovations and mixing of styles associated with groups like Talking Heads , and performers like Laurie Anderson , together with the self-conscious 'reinvention of disco ' by the Pet Shop Boys ". In

32395-525: The priority of suggestion and evocation over direct description and explicit analogy," and were especially interested in "the musical properties of language." Cabaret , which gave birth to so many of the arts of modernism, including the immediate precursors of film, may be said to have begun in France in 1881 with the opening of the Black Cat in Montmartre , the beginning of the ironic monologue, and

32604-434: The products of consumer culture " kitsch ", because their design aimed simply to have maximum appeal, with any difficult features removed. For Greenberg, modernism thus formed a reaction against the development of such examples of modern consumer culture as commercial popular music , Hollywood , and advertising. Greenberg associated this with the revolutionary rejection of capitalism. Some modernists saw themselves as part of

32813-410: The public and a concerned minority, usually other architects." In their book, "Revisiting Postmodernism", Terry Farrell and Adam Furman argue that postmodernism brought a more joyous and sensual experience to the culture, particularly in architecture. For instance, in response to the modernist slogan of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe that "less is more", the postmodernist Robert Venturi rejoined that "less

33022-498: The rejection of any single, foundational historical narrative. This called into question the legitimacy of the Enlightenment account of progress and rationality. Critics allege that its premises lead to a nihilistic form of relativism . In this sense, it has become a term of abuse in popular culture. "Postmodernism" is "a highly contested term", referring to "a particularly unstable concept", that "names many different kinds of cultural objects and phenomena in many different ways". It

33231-430: The representational function of visual art obsolete, strongly affected this aspect of modernism. Modernist architects and designers, such as Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier , believed that new technology rendered old styles of building obsolete. Le Corbusier thought that buildings should function as "machines for living in", analogous to cars, which he saw as machines for traveling in. Just as cars had replaced

33440-544: The representations that we used to rely on can no longer be taken for granted. In practical terms, postmodernisms share an attitude of skepticism towards grand explanations and established ways of doing things. In art, literature, and architecture, this attitude blurs boundaries between styles and genres, and encourages freely mixing elements, challenging traditional distinctions like high art versus popular art . In science, it emphasizes multiple ways of seeing things, and how our cultural and personal backgrounds shape how we see

33649-446: The result was an unprecedented rise in population and the rate of population growth . The textile industry was the first to use modern production methods, and textiles became the dominant industry in terms of employment, value of output, and capital invested. Many of the technological and architectural innovations were of British origin. By the mid-18th century, Britain was the world's leading commercial nation, controlling

33858-607: The revolution, such as courts ruling in favour of property rights . An entrepreneurial spirit and consumer revolution helped drive industrialisation in Britain, which after 1800, was emulated in Belgium, the United States, and France. The Industrial Revolution marked a major turning point in history, comparable only to humanity's adoption of agriculture with respect to material advancement. The Industrial Revolution influenced in some way almost every aspect of daily life. In particular, average income and population began to exhibit unprecedented sustained growth. Some economists have said

34067-436: The rise of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s, there were subsequent Expressionist works. Expressionism is notoriously difficult to define, in part because it "overlapped with other major 'isms' of the modernist period: with Futurism , Vorticism , Cubism, Surrealism and Dada ." Richard Murphy also comments: "[The] search for an all-inclusive definition is problematic to the extent that the most challenging Expressionists," such as

34276-418: The slag from almost 50% to around 8%. Puddling became widely used after 1800. Up to that time, British iron manufacturers had used considerable amounts of iron imported from Sweden and Russia to supplement domestic supplies. Because of the increased British production, imports began to decline in 1785, and by the 1790s Britain eliminated imports and became a net exporter of bar iron. Hot blast , patented by

34485-457: The smelting and refining of iron, coal and coke produced inferior iron to that made with charcoal because of the coal's sulfur content. Low sulfur coals were known, but they still contained harmful amounts. Conversion of coal to coke only slightly reduces the sulfur content. A minority of coals are coking. Another factor limiting the iron industry before the Industrial Revolution was the scarcity of water power to power blast bellows. This limitation

34694-463: The stock brokers of 1890 became part of family life, at least in middle class North America. Associated with urbanization and changing social mores also came smaller families and changed relationships between parents and their children. Another strong influence at this time was Marxism . After the generally primitivistic/irrationalism aspect of pre-World War I modernism (which for many modernists precluded any attachment to merely political solutions) and

34903-481: The study of light, color, and atmosphere "anticipated the French Impressionists " and therefore modernism "in breaking down conventional formulas of representation; though unlike them, he believed that his works should always express significant historical, mythological, literary, or other narrative themes." However, the modernists were critical of the Romantics' belief that art serves as a window into

35112-604: The subject in a greater context. Cubism was brought to the attention of the general public for the first time in 1911 at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris (held 21 April – 13 June). Jean Metzinger , Albert Gleizes , Henri Le Fauconnier , Robert Delaunay , Fernand Léger and Roger de La Fresnaye were shown together in Room 41, provoking a 'scandal' out of which Cubism emerged and spread throughout Paris and beyond. Also in 1911, Kandinsky painted Bild mit Kreis ( Picture with

35321-528: The supply of cotton was cut off. The Moors in Spain grew, spun, and wove cotton beginning around the 10th century. British cloth could not compete with Indian cloth because India's labour cost was approximately one-fifth to one-sixth that of Britain's. In 1700 and 1721, the British government passed Calico Acts to protect the domestic woollen and linen industries from the increasing amounts of cotton fabric imported from India. The demand for heavier fabric

35530-424: The term "Expressionism" did not firmly establish itself until 1913. Though initially mainly a German artistic movement, most predominant in painting, poetry and the theatre between 1910 and 1930, most precursors of the movement were not German. Furthermore, there have been Expressionist writers of prose fiction, as well as non-German speaking Expressionist writers, and, while the movement had declined in Germany with

35739-459: The traditional stage [and] drew on everyday movements (sitting, walking, kneeling, and other gestures) to create their pieces, often performing them in ordinary spaces." This was developed in particular by the American dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham , Cage's partner. In the 1980s and 1990s, dance began to incorporate other typically postmodern features such as the mixing of genres, challenging high–low cultural distinctions, and incorporating

35948-582: The trouble to question their own preconceptions. This aspect of modernism has often seemed a reaction to consumer culture , which developed in Europe and North America in the late 19th century. Whereas most manufacturers try to make products that will be marketable by appealing to preferences and prejudices, high modernists reject such consumerist attitudes to undermine conventional thinking. The art critic Clement Greenberg expounded this theory of modernism in his essay Avant-Garde and Kitsch . Greenberg labeled

36157-464: The use of intertextuality , in which the film's characters reference other works of fiction. A third characteristic is stories that unfold out of chronological order , deconstructing or fragmenting time to emphasize the constructed nature of film. Another common element is a bridging of the gap between highbrow and lowbrow , . Contradictions of all sorts are crucial to postmodernism. Ridley Scott 's Blade Runner (1982) has been widely studied as

36366-415: The use of low sulfur coal. The use of lime or limestone required higher furnace temperatures to form a free-flowing slag. The increased furnace temperature made possible by improved blowing also increased the capacity of blast furnaces and allowed for increased furnace height. In addition to lower cost and greater availability, coke had other important advantages over charcoal in that it was harder and made

36575-406: The use of roasted tap cinder ( iron silicate ) for the furnace bottom, greatly reducing the loss of iron through increased slag caused by a sand lined bottom. The tap cinder also tied up some phosphorus, but this was not understood at the time. Hall's process also used iron scale or rust which reacted with carbon in the molten iron. Hall's process, called wet puddling , reduced losses of iron with

36784-405: The very idea of what music is." In the 1960s, composers such as Terry Riley , Henryk Górecki , Bradley Joseph , John Adams , Steve Reich , Philip Glass , Michael Nyman , and Lou Harrison reacted to the perceived elitism and dissonant sound of atonal academic modernism by producing music with simple textures and relatively consonant harmonies, whilst others, most notably John Cage challenged

36993-410: The water frame used a series of four pairs of rollers, each operating at a successively higher rotating speed, to draw out the fibre which was then twisted by the spindle. The roller spacing was slightly longer than the fibre length. Too close a spacing caused the fibres to break while too distant a spacing caused uneven thread. The top rollers were leather-covered and loading on the rollers was applied by

37202-473: The work of Manet attracted attention and opened commercial doors to the movement. The second French school was symbolism , which literary historians see beginning with Charles Baudelaire and including the later poets Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) with Une Saison en Enfer ( A Season in Hell , 1873), Paul Verlaine (1844–1896), Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898), and Paul Valéry (1871–1945). The symbolists "stressed

37411-401: The work of earlier composers such as Franz Liszt , Richard Wagner , Gustav Mahler , Richard Strauss , and Max Reger . In the world of art, in the first decade of the 20th century, young painters such as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse caused much controversy and attracted great criticism with their rejection of traditional perspective as the means of structuring paintings, though

37620-571: The world, making it impossible to be completely objective . In philosophy, education, history, politics, and many other fields, it encourages critical re-examination of established institutions and social norms, embracing diversity and breaking down disciplinary boundaries. Though these ideas weren't strictly new, postmodernism amplified them, using an often playful, at times deeply critical, attitude of pervasive skepticism to turn them into defining features. Two broad cultural movements, modernism and postmodernism, emerged in response to profound changes in

37829-578: The writings of the art critic John Ruskin (1819–1900), who had strong feelings about the role of art in helping to improve the lives of the urban working classes in the rapidly expanding industrial cities of Britain. Art critic Clement Greenberg described the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood as proto-modernists: "There the proto-modernists were, of all people, the Pre-Raphaelites (and even before them, as proto-proto-modernists,

38038-443: The years between 1900 and 1910. An important aspect of modernism is how it relates to tradition through its adoption of techniques like reprise, incorporation, rewriting, recapitulation, revision, and parody in new forms. T. S. Eliot made significant comments on the relation of the artist to tradition, including: "[W]e shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of [a poet's] work, may be those in which

38247-505: Was 7,800 tons and coke cast iron was 250,000 tons. In 1750, the UK imported 31,200 tons of bar iron and either refined from cast iron or directly produced 18,800 tons of bar iron using charcoal and 100 tons using coke. In 1796, the UK was making 125,000 tons of bar iron with coke and 6,400 tons with charcoal; imports were 38,000 tons and exports were 24,600 tons. In 1806 the UK did not import bar iron but exported 31,500 tons. A major change in

38456-407: Was a means of decarburizing molten pig iron by slow oxidation in a reverberatory furnace by manually stirring it with a long rod. The decarburized iron, having a higher melting point than cast iron, was raked into globs by the puddler. When the glob was large enough, the puddler would remove it. Puddling was backbreaking and extremely hot work. Few puddlers lived to be 40. Because puddling was done in

38665-413: Was a while later, and not so locally, that modernism appeared in music and architecture)." The poet Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal ( The Flowers of Evil ) and the author Flaubert's Madame Bovary were both published in 1857. Baudelaire's essay " The Painter of Modern Life " (1863) inspired young artists to break away from tradition and innovate new ways of portraying their world in art. Beginning in

38874-408: Was an early 20th-century movement in literature, visual arts, and music that emphasized experimentation, abstraction , and subjective experience. Philosophy, politics, architecture, and social issues were all aspects of this movement. Modernism centered around beliefs in a "growing alienation " from prevailing " morality , optimism , and convention " and a desire to change how " human beings in

39083-417: Was at the center of the discussion in the 1970s, architecture was at the center in the 1980s. The architectural theorist Charles Jencks , in particular, connected the artistic avant-garde to social change in a way that captured attention outside of academia. Jenckes, much influenced by the American architect Robert Venturi , celebrated a plurality of forms and encourages participation and active engagement with

39292-606: Was available (and not far from Coalbrookdale). These furnaces were equipped with water-powered bellows, the water being pumped by Newcomen steam engines . The Newcomen engines were not attached directly to the blowing cylinders because the engines alone could not produce a steady air blast. Abraham Darby III installed similar steam-pumped, water-powered blowing cylinders at the Dale Company when he took control in 1768. The Dale Company used several Newcomen engines to drain its mines and made parts for engines which it sold throughout

39501-414: Was converted to wrought iron. Conversion of cast iron had long been done in a finery forge . An improved refining process known as potting and stamping was developed, but this was superseded by Henry Cort 's puddling process. Cort developed two significant iron manufacturing processes: rolling in 1783 and puddling in 1784. Puddling produced a structural grade iron at a relatively low cost. Puddling

39710-566: Was cut off to eliminate competition. In order to promote manufacturing, the Crown paid for models of Lombe's machinery which were exhibited in the Tower of London . Parts of India, China, Central America, South America, and the Middle East have a long history of hand manufacturing cotton textiles, which became a major industry sometime after 1000 AD. In tropical and subtropical regions where it

39919-403: Was designed by John Smeaton . Cast iron cylinders for use with a piston were difficult to manufacture; the cylinders had to be free of holes and had to be machined smooth and straight to remove any warping. James Watt had great difficulty trying to have a cylinder made for his first steam engine. In 1774 Wilkinson invented a precision boring machine for boring cylinders. After Wilkinson bored

40128-673: Was first performed in 1935. Like Shostakovich, other composers faced difficulties in this period. Industrial Revolution The Industrial Revolution , sometimes divided into the First Industrial Revolution and Second Industrial Revolution , was a period of global transition of the human economy towards more widespread, efficient and stable manufacturing processes that succeeded the Agricultural Revolution . Beginning in Great Britain ,

40337-544: Was followed by a period of colonialism beginning around the 16th century. Following the discovery of a trade route to India around southern Africa by the Portuguese, the British founded the East India Company , along with smaller companies of different nationalities which established trading posts and employed agents to engage in trade throughout the Indian Ocean region. One of the largest segments of this trade

40546-569: Was grown, most was grown by small farmers alongside their food crops and was spun and woven in households, largely for domestic consumption. In the 15th century, China began to require households to pay part of their taxes in cotton cloth. By the 17th century, almost all Chinese wore cotton clothing. Almost everywhere cotton cloth could be used as a medium of exchange . In India, a significant amount of cotton textiles were manufactured for distant markets, often produced by professional weavers. Some merchants also owned small weaving workshops. India produced

40755-479: Was improved by Richard Roberts in 1822, and these were produced in large numbers by Roberts, Hill & Co. Roberts was additionally a maker of high-quality machine tools and a pioneer in the use of jigs and gauges for precision workshop measurement. The demand for cotton presented an opportunity to planters in the Southern United States, who thought upland cotton would be a profitable crop if

40964-660: Was in cotton textiles, which were purchased in India and sold in Southeast Asia , including the Indonesian archipelago where spices were purchased for sale to Southeast Asia and Europe. By the mid-1760s, cloth was over three-quarters of the East India Company's exports. Indian textiles were in demand in the North Atlantic region of Europe where previously only wool and linen were available; however,

41173-400: Was later used in the first cotton spinning mill . In 1764, in the village of Stanhill, Lancashire, James Hargreaves invented the spinning jenny , which he patented in 1770. It was the first practical spinning frame with multiple spindles. The jenny worked in a similar manner to the spinning wheel, by first clamping down on the fibres, then by drawing them out, followed by twisting. It was

41382-437: Was made by the bloomery process, which was the predominant iron smelting process until the late 18th century. In the UK in 1720, there were 20,500 tons of cast iron produced with charcoal and 400 tons with coke. In 1750 charcoal iron production was 24,500 and coke iron was 2,500 tons. In 1788, the production of charcoal cast iron was 14,000 tons while coke iron production was 54,000 tons. In 1806, charcoal cast iron production

41591-419: Was met by a domestic industry based around Lancashire that produced fustian , a cloth with flax warp and cotton weft . Flax was used for the warp because wheel-spun cotton did not have sufficient strength, but the resulting blend was not as soft as 100% cotton and was more difficult to sew. On the eve of the Industrial Revolution, spinning and weaving were done in households, for domestic consumption, and as

41800-413: Was overcome by the steam engine. Use of coal in iron smelting started somewhat before the Industrial Revolution, based on innovations by Clement Clerke and others from 1678, using coal reverberatory furnaces known as cupolas. These were operated by the flames playing on the ore and charcoal or coke mixture, reducing the oxide to metal. This has the advantage that impurities (such as sulphur ash) in

42009-759: Was premiered, in which he uses a montage of different styles, including folk music , popular song and atonality. Among his influences was Alban Berg 's (1885–1935) opera Wozzeck (1925), which "had made a tremendous impression on Shostakovich when it was staged in Leningrad." However, from 1932 socialist realism began to oust modernism in the Soviet Union, and in 1936 Shostakovich was attacked and forced to withdraw his 4th Symphony. Alban Berg wrote another significant, though incomplete, modernist opera, Lulu , which premiered in 1937. Berg's Violin Concerto

42218-425: Was produced on machinery invented in Britain. In 1788, there were 50,000 spindles in Britain, rising to 7 million over the next 30 years. The earliest European attempts at mechanised spinning were with wool; however, wool spinning proved more difficult to mechanise than cotton. Productivity improvement in wool spinning during the Industrial Revolution was significant but far less than that of cotton. Arguably

42427-686: Was spun and woven by the cottage industry in Lancashire . The work was done by hand in workers' homes or occasionally in master weavers' shops. Wages in Lancashire were about six times those in India in 1770 when overall productivity in Britain was about three times higher than in India. In 1787, raw cotton consumption was 22 million pounds, most of which was cleaned, carded, and spun on machines. The British textile industry used 52 million pounds of cotton in 1800, which increased to 588 million pounds in 1850. The share of value added by

42636-428: Was still "progressive", it increasingly saw traditional forms and social arrangements as hindering progress and recast the artist as a revolutionary, engaged in overthrowing rather than enlightening society. Also in 1913, a less violent event occurred in France with the publication of the first volume of Marcel Proust 's important novel sequence À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–1927) ( In Search of Lost Time ). This

42845-540: Was the first to make full use of it in his short story "Leutnant Gustl" ("None but the brave") (1900). Dorothy Richardson was the first English writer to use it, in the early volumes of her novel sequence Pilgrimage (1915–1967). Other modernist novelists that are associated with the use of this narrative technique include James Joyce in Ulysses (1922) and Italo Svevo in La coscienza di Zeno (1923). However, with

43054-771: Was the largest and most ambitious Cubist painting undertaken during the pre-war Cubist period. In 1905, a group of four German artists, led by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner , formed Die Brücke (The Bridge) in the city of Dresden . This was arguably the founding organization for the German Expressionist movement, though they did not use the word itself. A few years later, in 1911, a like-minded group of young artists formed Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) in Munich. The name came from Wassily Kandinsky 's Der Blaue Reiter painting of 1903. Among their members were Kandinsky , Franz Marc , Paul Klee , and August Macke . However,

43263-711: Was the year of philosopher Edmund Husserl 's Ideas , physicist Niels Bohr 's quantized atom, Ezra Pound 's founding of imagism , the Armory Show in New York, and in Saint Petersburg the "first futurist opera", Mikhail Matyushin 's Victory over the Sun —another Russian composer, Igor Stravinsky , composed The Rite of Spring , a ballet that depicts human sacrifice and has a musical score full of dissonance and primitive rhythm. This caused an uproar on its first performance in Paris. At this time, though modernism

43472-454: Was too high. The birth of a machine age, which had made major changes in the conditions of daily life in the 19th century had now radically changed the nature of warfare. The traumatic nature of recent experience altered basic assumptions, and a realistic depiction of life in the arts seemed inadequate when faced with the fantastically surreal nature of trench warfare . The view that mankind was making steady moral progress now seemed ridiculous in

43681-514: Was untenable and misguided. It is during this period that postmodernism came to be particularly equated with a kind of anti-representational self-reflexivity. In the 1980s, some critics began to take an interest in the work of Michel Foucault . This introduced a political concern about social power-relations into discussions about postmodernism. This was also the beginning of the affiliation of postmodernism with feminism and multiculturalism . The art critic Craig Owens , in particular, not only made

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