Volume 9, Number 7 · October 26, 1967
Old Modern
By Frank Kermode
On Modernism: The Prospects for Literature and Freedom
by Louis Kampf
M.I.T. Press, 338 pp., $10.00
New American Review, No. 1
edited by Theodore Solotaroff
New American Library, 288 pp., $.95 (paper)
'New' and 'Modern' are old notions, but in our world the first people who thought of themselves as 'Moderns' did so in order to distinguish themselves from Ancients; thus they established the habit we all have of being extremely conscious of epoch. The growth of this habit is obviously regulated, in some measure, by the rate of technological and economic change; so that the sense of living at a time of transition and being subject to permanent and irreversible forces of change and novelty grows more and more commonplace. Since the Modern implies rapid obsolescence and sharp discontinuities in matters of form and value, anybody who wants to characterize it has to be conscious of the possibility that the descriptive and evaluative techniques at his disposal are decaying as he uses them. Whether this is a real threat or a paper tiger is part of the problem, a problem that is at present attracting much attention. Mr. Kampf is the latest scholar to face it, and he seems particularly aware of the difficulty of standing upright for long enough to take a steady Arnoldian look at it, borne along as he is by the ceaseless tide of change, and bruised by all the theoretical flotsam in its current.
Review, 2297 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |