Epilogue: Modernist Afterlives

2020 ◽  
pp. 223-240
Author(s):  
Ashley Maher
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Interpersonal Violence ◽  
State Violence ◽  
World War ◽  
Death Drive ◽  
Postwar Literature ◽  
Dystopian Fiction ◽  
Modern Movement

While J.G. Ballard has been treated as a leading postmodernist, his dystopian fiction can best be understood in the mid-century architectural context of Huxley’s and Orwell’s pioneering narratives. Accordingly, the temporality of Ballard’s novels, with their “future that had already taken place, and was now exhausted,” aligns with Ballard’s interest in the ruins of “modernism of the heroic period”: a prewar utopianism irreparably compromised by the concrete and steel martial architecture of World War II. Ballard suggests that the postwar modern movement, rather than simply relying on war energies, produced structures whose very forms channel violence; state violence and interpersonal violence are inseparable. In Ballard’s narratives of buildings that outlive their makers, the new architecture portends extinction rather than new expressions of humanism. Through this architectural death drive, Ballard portrays modernism itself as a haunting presence, hovering over postwar literature as well as the postwar nation.

In the Shadows of Dresden

2013 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 322-357
Author(s):  
Karen J. Weitze
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
New Jersey ◽  
Built Environments ◽  
World War ◽  
Japanese Military ◽  
Art Historians ◽  
Erwin Panofsky ◽  
Walter Gropius ◽  
Modern Movement

In the Shadows of Dresden: Modernism and the War Landscape focuses on British-American test complexes and lithographs devised to understand German and Japanese military targets of World War II. Project sites stretched from England and Scotland to Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Utah, and Florida. Vignettes of Axis-built environments featured only those forms and details that were deemed essential, complemented by the abstracted target maps. Together these models and maps inaugurated a new way of looking at cities and built environments as war landscapes. In this article Karen J. Weitze studies the roles of the participating architects, engineers, artists, and art historians—Marc Peter Jr., John Burchard, Henry Elder, Gerald K. Geerlings, Eric Mendelsohn, Antonin Raymond, Walter Gropius, Konrad Wachsmann, Arthur Korn, Felix James Samuely, E. S. Richter, Paul Zucker, Hans Knoll, Albert Kahn, Ludwig Hilberseimer, George Hartmueller, I. M. Pei, Erwin Panofsky, Paul Frankl, and Kurt Weitzmann—within the setting of the modern movement, and evaluates the historic obscurity of the wartime landscapes against the collective human moment that was Dresden.

Freud's Roman Holiday: Dismembering Civilization and its Discontents

2018 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-164
Author(s):  
Mary Jacobus
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Ancient Rome ◽  
Literary Interpretation ◽  
World War ◽  
Death Drive ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
European Civilization ◽  
Pre World War Ii

Freud's Civilization and its Discontents (1930) reveals the dynamics of dismemberment or death drive within Freud's text and literary interpretation. Freud's main source for his archeological analogy derives from Lanciani, exponent of the destruction of ancient Rome. Lanciani argued that man was responsible for the destruction of Rome: Freud argues that civilization is responsible for man's unhappiness. Freud's archeological sources cannot help but be read by today's readers in the light of the later destruction of European civilization, especially Jewish civilization, during World War II. Freud's pre-World War II text thus manifests a form of Nachträglichkeit or traumatic return of the past in the future.

Slapstick Modernism

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Solomon
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Punk Rock ◽  
Experimental Film ◽  
Literary Modernism ◽  
Late Modernism ◽  
World War ◽  
Postwar Literature ◽  
Charlie Chaplin ◽  
The Face ◽  
Early Century

Slapstick comedy landed like a pie in the face of twentieth-century culture. Pratfalls and nyuk-nyuks percolated alongside literary modernism throughout the 1920s and 1930s before slapstick found explosive expression in postwar literature, experimental film, and popular music. This book charts the origins and evolution of what it calls “slapstick modernism”—a merging of artistic experimentation with the socially disruptive lunacy made by the likes of Charlie Chaplin. Romping through texts, films, and theory, the book embarks on a harum-scarum intellectual odyssey from high modernism to the late modernism of the Beats and Burroughs before a head-on crash into the raw power of punk rock. Throughout, the book shows the links between the experimental writers and silent screen performers of the early century, and explores the potent cultural undertaking that drew inspiration from anarchical comedy after World War II.

Italian Architects and Fascist Politics: An Evaluation of the Rationalist's Role in Regime Building

1980 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 109-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diane Yvonne Ghirardo
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Collective Action ◽  
Political System ◽  
Social Programs ◽  
World War ◽  
Major Power ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Italian Architecture ◽  
Modern Movement

The relationship between the thought and architecture of Italian Rationalists and the new Fascist state is commonly presented as a battle between revolutionary modernism and a reactionary regime. Most historians have ignored the ardent Fascism of the best architects, while others simply avoid the issue altogether and study the buildings as stylistic phenomena. This attitude in part derives from a post-war desire to extricate the best architects and their architecture from a thoroughly discredited political system. Consequently, the architects' own words about their architecture and their ideas about Fascist culture and the purposes for which their state-funded buildings were designed are ignored. Historians acknowledge that the Modern Movement in other European nations encompassed social programs, but Italian architecture of the inter-war period has been strangely exempt from discussion on this level. Despite years of heated polemics and debates during the 20s, Rationalists, traditionalists, and moderates in Italy reached a consensus on political and social objectives. The Fascist state claimed to offer revolutionary social programs, and the various architectural factions merely argued about the appropriate forms within which to house these programs. This article discusses the differences between the various groups of architects, examines the work and writings of some leading Rationalists with particular reference to Fascist notions of hierarchy, order, and collective action, and discusses the ways in which Rationalist architecture celebrated Fascism. It also offers an explanation for the fact that Modern Movement architecture received substantial state support in Italy as it did from no other major power in the decade before World War II.

Between the revisionist and the frontier state: regional variations in state war-propensity

2009 ◽  
Vol 35 (S1) ◽  
pp. 85-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
BENJAMIN MILLER
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
State Violence ◽  
Weak States ◽  
World War ◽  
State Strength ◽  
Foreign Intervention ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
State Regional

AbstractThis article explains variations in state war-propensity. I introduce a new typology of state war-proneness based on four major types of states: revisionist, failed, frontier, and status quo. The major novel contribution of this essay is the argument that the combined effect of variations in the extent of success in state-building (strong or weak states) and nation-building (nationally congruent or incongruent) shapes the level and the type of state violence by producing different categories of states with regard to their war-propensity. Strong states but nationally incongruent generate revisionist states, which initiate aggressive wars. The combination of state strength and national congruence leads to a status quo state. Weakness and incongruence bring about civil wars and foreign intervention in ‘failed’ states. Weakness but congruence produce the ‘frontier state’ with boundary and territorial wars, but also with a reasonable likelihood of evolution of status quo orientation over time. I focus here on key examples of these types of states, especially from two regions: Iraq and Lebanon in a highly war-prone region – the post-World War II Middle East; and Argentina and Brazil in a more peaceful one, at least in the 20th century – South America, although these states experienced quite a number of wars in the 19th century.

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