Abstract
The most spectacular displays of modernism are not to be found in a museum of expressionist art or a collection of prose poetry, but in the avant-garde political collaborations that sought to come to terms with a brand new world regarded as unstable or dangerous. Peter Fritzsche, ‘Nazi Modern’ (1996)1 The consideration of fascism and modernism from the perspective of modernity underscores the need for art historians to treat fascism not as an isolated political phenomenon or as an aberration in the modernist march towards abstraction, but as a form of cultural politics in dialectical (or dialogic) relationship to other anti-Enlightenment movements, both left and right.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Peter Fritzsche, ‘Nazi Modern’, Modernism/Modernity 3.1 (1996), p. 12.
Mark Antliff, ‘Fascism, Modernism, and Modernity’, The Art Bulletin 84.1 (March 2002), p. 164.
Stanley Payne, A History of Fascism 1914–45 (London: University College London Press, 1995), pp. 78–9.
David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), p. 278.
Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring (1989) (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), p. 257.
For the primal theological resonance of this palingenetic concept see Catherine Keller, The Face of the Deep. A Theology of Becoming (London: Routledge, 2003).
Quoted in C. Harrison and P. Wood (eds.), Art in Theory 1900–1990 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 244–5.
Virginia Woolf, The Waves (1931) (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 228.
Ernst Jünger, Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis (Berlin: E. G. Mittler and Son, 1929), pp. xi–xv.
Richard Sheppard, ‘German Expressionism’, in Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane (eds.), Modernism 1890–1930 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), p. 289.
Ananda Coomaraswamy, The Dance of Shiva. Fourteen Indian Essays, with an Introduction by Romain Rolland (New York: The Sunwise Turn, 1924), pp. i
Cited in Frances Saunders, Hidden Hands (London: Channel 4, 1995), p. 12.
Arthur Penty, Tradition and Modernism in Politics (London: Sheed and Ward, 1937), p. 183.
Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (eds.), Art in Theory. 1900–1990 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 145.
Isaak Steinberg, In the Workshop of the Revolution (New York: Rinehart, 1953), pp. 44–5.
Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time. Modernity and the Avant-Garde (London: Verso, 1995), p. 142.
Peter Osborne, Philosophy in Cultural Theory (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 58.
Robert Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2004), p. 218.
Michael Mann, Fascists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 13.
Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London: Pinter, 1991), pp. 44–5.
John Passmore, The Philosophy of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 152.
Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (1957) (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), p. 150.
Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence (Cambridge: Polity, 1991), p. 15.
Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending. Studies in the Theory of Fiction (1967) (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 111.
Tony Harrison, The Gaze of the Gorgon (Highgreen Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 1992), p. 72.
Copyright information
© 2007 Roger Griffin
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Griffin, R. (2007). The Rise of Political Modernism 1848–1945. In: Modernism and Fascism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230596122_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230596122_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-4039-8784-6
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-59612-2
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)