Word: modern
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...expect, the larger the landmass and hence the population, the faster subsistence technology progressed. The people of the vast Old World invented farming before the people of the smaller (and, at first, thinly populated) New World. And the Aborigines of yet smaller Australia never farmed. As for tiny Tasmania, modern explorers, on contacting the Tasmanians, found them lacking such Australian essentials as fire, bone needles and boomerangs...
...Ulysses is published. So is T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. Some claim it is a hoax, a parody of modernism's obscurantist tendencies. Others see its analogies to Joyce's work. Both are inferentially portraits of a pullulating urban landscape; both wear their classical erudition boldly. Which is to say, both writers embrace modernism's most basic hallmark--self- and cultural awareness--and know exactly what traditions they are undermining. The difference between them may be largely a matter of fastidiousness. Ulysses is finally an affirmation: "I put my arms around him yes and drew him down...
...Things fall apart," Yeats wrote in The Second Coming (in 1921, of course), "the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world." It was the century's earliest epitaph, and is still perhaps its most powerful one. And Yeats had yet to conjure with the metaphors of modern science--the theory of relativity; the uncertainty principle; the looming figure of Freud, pseudo-scientific poet of our subjectivity--let alone with Fascism and Stalinism. Or, possibly most addling to a poet, the rise of industrialized mass culture...
Lost in the bogs of Celtic myth, Yeats--unlike many of his peers in the modernist pantheon--was not much interested in modern design and architecture's streamlining ways. Or in the ability of books and magazines more and more perfectly to replicate artistic icons past and present. Or in the capacity of the movies to create their own time and space, independent of observed reality. We must imagine him, instead, mourning with the great critic Walter Benjamin the destruction of the artwork's "aura" or magic, deriving from its uniqueness, its firm roots in a specific historical place...
...other hand, we also have to admit that in the last third of the century, modernism ran out of steam intellectually even as it gathered near dictatorial cultural power. Take the art world, for example: allied with the museums, the mass media and the marketplace, it began to wield, as early as the '70s, in Hilton Kramer's words, "a pervasive and often cynical authority over the very public it affects to despise." We live now in an age of empty "Sensation" (to borrow the title of the recent Brooklyn Museum of Art show) and debate not the subtleties...