Word: modernism
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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...practiced revivalist can supply a modern translation and make it sound trendy. The 1930 recommendation of "respect for the physical earth" glosses into ecology and environmentalism. "The South can well afford to be backward" may be twisted into relevance as a plea for the "zero-sum society." Agrarianism, in fact, can be defined with glib hindsight as a Southern branch of "neo-conservatism...
That first revolution, which began two centuries ago, created the technology of modern life, but at a high cost in hardship and hunger. Some experts see analogous dangers in the robot revolution. If robots can do men's work faster, better and more cheaply, then what will men do? They will be retrained for other things, the robotmakers answer. But by whom, and for what? Almost 20 years ago, Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano portrayed a future society in which the elite few run the machines while the unemployable majority subsists on handouts in resentful idleness...
...word for forced labor and was invented by Karel Capek and popularized in his "fantastic melodrama" of 1921, R.U.R., which stood for Rossum's Universal Robots. These robots look and behave like people and work twice as hard, but since "God hasn't the least notion of modern engineering," as Rossum's general manager puts it, the robots have been built without such impractical attributes as feeling or a soul. First they do all the world's work, then they wage all the world's wars, then they rebel and destroy their makers...
...said to have occurred during World Wars I and II. Avant-gardism-aggressive, impish, savage and wildly varied-still resounds throughout European and American culture. Jean-Luc Daval's Avant-Garde Art 1914-1939, (Skira-Rizzoli; 223 pages; $85) is a sequel to the author's Modern Art 1884-1914: The Decisive Years. The new work's 75 color reproductions and 270 black-and-white pictures have been chosen to illustrate Daval's brisk chronological text. By dividing his subject into 89 bite-size chapters, he is able to draw fine distinctions among the numerous unruly...
Edward Lear, who died in 1888, is best known to modern readers for his limericks and nonsense verse. But contemporaries knew another side of the man. Lear devoted his early career to producing detailed paintings of birds, and his pictures, collected by Susan Hyman in Edward Lear's Birds (Morrow; 96 pages; $37.95), belong on the same shelf with Audubon's. The line drawings and sketches that accompany them shed new light on the man himself. Many artists have used birds to lampoon their fellow men. The owlish Lear used them to caricature himself...