Modernism: A Very Short Introduction

Citation

Butler, C. (2010). Modernism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press.

Chapter Summary

Context and Argument

Christopher Butler, a professor of English literature at Oxford, wrote this book for the Very Short Introductions series, which gives readers a compact first account of a subject. It is a short book of four chapters. Butler explains how and why modernism began, what it is, and how its aesthetic legacy has shaped the art and literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. He deals with literature, painting, music, dance and theatre together, not as separate histories.

Butler does not define modernism as a single set of ideas with strict boundaries. Instead he identifies a group of techniques that modernist artists used in experimenting with form, such as allusion, myth, stream of consciousness and epiphany, and asks what new ideas drove them. Those ideas concern the self, the unconscious, the machine, history and politics. The book argues that the sense of a modernist movement arose largely from the co-operation and rivalry between artists working in different media.

Chapter 1: The Modernist Work

The first chapter introduces what modernist works have in common and asks why they are often difficult. It starts from T. S. Eliot's argument that poetry must become more comprehensive, allusive and indirect to match the complexity of modern civilisation. Butler uses examples from several arts, including Joyce's Ulysses, Fernand Léger's La Ville and the Brecht and Weill Threepenny Opera. He shows how techniques such as allusion, fragmentation and abstraction ask the audience to take an active part in making sense of the work.

Chapter 2: Modernist Movements and Cultural Tradition

The second chapter turns from individual works to groups and tendencies: movements such as Imagism, Futurism and Dada, and the manifestos with which they announced themselves. Butler considers the idea of the avant-garde and the relation of such movements to cultural tradition, since modernists often claimed to break with the past while also reworking older material. He also discusses what it means for art to "progress". Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis and F. T. Marinetti are among the figures discussed.

Chapter 3: The Modernist Artist

The third chapter looks at the artist and at modernist ideas of the self. It considers how artists such as Picasso, Kandinsky, Woolf and Stravinsky understood their own roles, and what ideas of subjectivity and irrationalism lay behind their work. It takes in the development of Cubism, Woolf's stream-of-consciousness narrative and Stravinsky's music, and it also treats the relation of people and machines. The chapter stresses how techniques and ideas passed between art forms.

Chapter 4: Modernism and Politics

The final chapter takes up the political dimension. Butler considers how modernists responded to the First World War, the rise of totalitarian regimes and the pressures of modern life, and how their positions ranged from active involvement, as with the Futurists, to ambiguity and critique. He uses the work of Brecht and Weill, George Grosz's satirical drawings and Picasso's Guernica as examples, and he discusses Marxist and other critics of modernism.

Key Concepts

Chapter 1: The Modernist Work

• Allusion: the use of references to other works, as in Eliot and Joyce, which makes demands on the reader's knowledge.
• Fragmentation and abstraction: techniques that break up conventional narrative and representation.

Chapter 2: Modernist Movements and Cultural Tradition

• Avant-garde: groups that set out to depart from established art and announce the change in manifestos.
• Progress in art: the question of whether new styles represent an advance.

Chapter 3: The Modernist Artist

• Stream of consciousness: narration that follows the flow of a character's thoughts.
• Subjectivity and irrationalism: modernist interest in the inner self and the unconscious, with Freud as a recurrent reference.

Chapter 4: Modernism and Politics

• Modernism and the political left and right: the range of political positions taken by modernist artists and their critics.
• Art as critique: satire and theatre as political engagement.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• A view across all the arts. A review in the Oxford Times notes that Butler analyses Cubist paintings, The Threepenny Opera and Diaghilev's ballets alongside the novels more often discussed, so the book shows modernism as more than a literary movement.
• Clear summaries. The same review points to the handy summaries at the end of each chapter, which help readers who meet unfamiliar ideas.
• Careful about definition. Butler says at the start that modernism is not a single, centrally defined set of ideas, and then outlines the key techniques and the ideas behind them, so readers are not given a false tidy definition.
• Brevity. The book is short enough to read in a sitting or two, and it covers the main contexts: politics, religion, attitudes to history, philosophy and non-European traditions.

Limitations

• Some dense passages. The Oxford Times reviewer warns that certain phrases about existentialism and the theory of art would come as a shock to a reader with no background.
• Selective by necessity. A book of about a hundred pages and four chapters cannot give a full history, and many writers, regions and movements are mentioned in passing or not at all.
• Less on later developments. The emphasis is on the first half of the twentieth century; postmodernism and contemporary fiction fall outside its scope.

Where It Fits in the Course

This is a brief introduction in the modernism and contemporary literature list, and one that ranges across the arts. It is the book to read first if you want a quick orientation before choosing a longer text. Peter Childs's Modernism in the New Critical Idiom series is a compact critical introduction centred on literature, which explains the term and places modernist writing in its contexts. Pericles Lewis's Cambridge Introduction to Modernism is a readable survey of literature and art in England, Ireland and continental Europe. The Cambridge Companion to Modernism is a collection of essays by specialists on genres, contexts and parallel developments in other arts; use it for detail on a particular topic.

For what came after, Robert Eaglestone's Contemporary Fiction: A Very Short Introduction covers fiction of recent decades, and Linda Hutcheon's A Poetics of Postmodernism is a theoretical study of postmodernism. Both assume a sense of what modernism was, so Butler's book is a sensible starting point.

How to Use This Book

The book is aimed at general readers and undergraduates with no prior study of modernism. Familiarity with a few of the works discussed, such as Eliot's The Waste Land or Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, will help, but the examples are explained.

Read it through in order, because the chapters build from the work to the movement, the artist and the politics. Read Chapter 1 slowly, since its account of techniques is the basis for the rest. Use the end-of-chapter summaries to check understanding, and stop to look up a work whenever Butler discusses it, for example by viewing the painting or listening to the music.

Then move on. Pick one writer or artist from the book and read a primary text alongside a longer critical introduction from the list. For seminar work, compare how Butler's four chapters treat a single work, such as Ulysses or Guernica, from the point of view of technique, movement, artist and politics.