Gabriel Josipovici almost takes on Postmodernism

Eric Ormsby has a great piece in the WSJ on the new book by Gabriel Josipovici titled "What Ever Happened to Modernism?"

In Mr. Josipovici's view, Modernism is something at once vast and intimate, encompassing "nothing less than life itself." Modernism isn't a style, he says, but "the coming into awareness by art of its precarious status and responsibilities." Even more portentously, Modernism is a kind of anguished repudiation—"a response to the simplifications of the self and of life that Protestantism and the Enlightenment brought with them."

This book on its surface is a wonderful and painful plea to reclaim modernism from the rise of the postmodernist culture, but when you dig deeper the bite just isn't there. While it is eloquent and an insightful, it does not draw the blood many of us are looking for.

That said, in the years to come it will be hard to discuss postmodernist literature thumping of modernism without mentioning this book. So read it.

at Amazon