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the complete review - literary criticism

What Ever Happened
to Modernism ?

by
Gabriel Josipovici

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B : engaging but limited

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "The author is sound in his eclectic and learned exposition of the beginnings of modernism, tracing its roots back to the 16th century. (...) So, the first three-quarters of the book rattle along in pleasing enough fashion (.....) In its final couple of chapters, the book suddenly turns into a polemic, as if an impatient publisher had exhorted the author to provide some juicy Sunday supplement fodder." - Peter Aspden, Financial Times
  
  
• "Interconnectedness is a feature of this book, providing not only one of its central themes but also its discursive method. A typical paragraph will zap us from Dürer to Mann to Flaubert to Dostoevsky in order to make a point about Kierkegaard. It can disorient at times, but the associative or digressive approach is the right one for the task. What I'm not so sure about is the overall "pitch". (...) Adopting the vocabulary of the middlebrow in order to legitimise the vanguard merely robs it of what animates it most." - Tom McCarthy, The Guardian
  
  
• "What needs to be restored to modernism, then, is its radicalism, and a case made for how that radicalism speaks to us today. Whatever Happened to Modernism ? is more a personal mapping of what modernism means to Josipovici, and what makes it both difficult and irreplaceable in his eyes. (...) His book is similarly eloquent, besides being, in its task of charting modernism's uniqueness, ingenious, unexpected, astute and insightful. It's also -- because of its passion and intelligence -- readable, in a way a modernist would approve of, though it disintegrates, very occasionally, into journalese." - Amit Chaudhuri, The Independent
  
  
• "If What Ever Happened to Modernism ? were just a polemic against cultural timidity -- which is how it has been read, not without resentment, by several commentators -- it would not carry quite the charge it does. (...) If there’s a criticism to be made it is that Josipovici sometimes shies from the logical extremity of certain of his subjects" - Brian Dillon, Irish Times
  
  
• "What we have here is less a monograph than a genteel shriek of pain. (...) Mockery aside (for a moment or two), What Ever Happened to Modernism ? tells two stories. Both are well told; both are interesting. (...) Not that he condescends. Josipovici carries his learning lightly and the meditations on Modernism which make up the body of this book are instructive and accessible. But widely as he has read, why has he not, one may ask, engaged at any length with critics who have defended unregenerate 'Englishness'?" - John Sutherland, Literary Review
  
  
• "(A)t once a polemic and a rigorous exposition of certain aspects of modernist practice. Like other such works on this subject, the book is confident and erudite, though often misguided and occasionally bizarre. (...) Apart from his unfortunate caricature of the classic novel, Josipovici informs and disappoints in more or less equal measure. He does beautifully when he juxtaposes old and new, like and unlike, in an effort to get at the core attitudes at the heart of modernism. We are gratified to learn that not only Borges and Ionesco can point the way to the heart of the matter, but also Cervantes and Rabelais. But I must wonder why the focus of the book did not allow for the raising of questions that have been opened up before but never adequately or decisively addressed." - Robert Boyers, The New Republic
  
  
• "In its range and approach, therefore, What Ever Happened to Modernism ? is more reminiscent of one of those classic works of literary criticism -- Erich Auerbach's Mimesis comes to mind -- than the jargon-ridden obscurantism of most academic monographs in literary studies today. Even though the publicity Josipovici has received has centred on his polemical response to the practices of the present-day crop of English novelists, the interest of his book lies in the way it rethinks the stakes of literary criticism and academic writing." - Michael Sayeau, New Statesman
  
  
• "As it is, What Ever Happened to Modernism ? is barely about whatever happened to Modernism. The presumed -- and presumably decadent -- present day implied by the title is dispatched in only a few pages (.....) What Ever Happened to Modernism ? -- the actual book, not the one proposed by the title -- is largely a stringing of short ruminations on the works of favorite writers, artists, and composers. (...) Ultimately, Josipovici’s Modernism is entirely interior, the result of a few ideas and much agony, despair, and self-doubt." - Eliot Weinberger, The New York Review of Books
  
  
• "Headlines aside, the book itself is a welcome intervention in the long debate about the difference between art and entertainment, although it's a shame that Josipovici is not always as lucid or precise as one could wish. (...) Professor Josipovici seems reluctant to answer his own question, other than to hint that it may have crept back to the continent whence it came, shaking its head ruefully at the provincial attitudes of small-minded, beady-eyed Britain." - James Purdon, The Observer
  
  
• "Gabriel Josipovici, an academic from Sussex, has written what might have been quite a good account of modernism. It is rather blotted, however, by his noisy conviction that much of what preceded modernism and almost all of what followed its high period was awful rubbish. (...) And he writes extraordinarily badly, with a tin ear for cadence." - Philip Hensher, The Telegraph
  
  
• "Mr. Josipovici does not provide a simple, broadly applicable definition of Modernism -- it would be hard to do in any case -- but he does something better. He takes Modernism out of its traditionally limited time-frame and sets it within a long historical arc that begins in the 16th century. By the use of apt and often brilliant quotations from a wide range of authors -- from Homer to Irène Némirovsky -- he allows the contours of his subject to emerge. This approach does more justice to the complexity of Modernism than any capsule account could provide. (...) Mr. Josipovici has a gift for sweeping the reader along, but even so, reservations arise." - Eric Ormsby, Wall Street Journal

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       Rather than wonder What Ever Happened to Modernism ? Gabriel Josipovici spends most of the space in this book explaining how he sees Modernism, and what he values in it -- though a running theme is the failure of (most) English writers (and especially the popular contemporary lot) to properly adopt it. While not presenting a clear-cut definition of Modernism, Josipovici does offer an appealing literary-historical excursion suggesting how and why it came to the fore.
       For Josipovici, what he sees as the crisis of the absence of limits is the determining factor:

It was much easier to find one's own limits when there were external limits in place, precisely those limits which began to be called into question in the Renaissance and the Reformation and which had been abolished once and for all, in principle at least, by the French Revolution. In the modern world necessity seems too often a form of imprisonment rather than release

what is at issue is reality itself, what it is and how an art which of necessity renounces all claim to contact with the transcendent can relate to it, and, if it cannot, what possible reason it can have for existing.

- M.A.Orthofer, 2 November 2010

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Links:

• Yale University Press publicity page
• Profile in The Jewish Chronicle
• Q & A at berfrois

• The Arts Fuse
• The Guardian
• The Independent
• Irish Times
• The Millions
• The New Republic
• New Statesman
• New York Journal of Books
• The Observer
• This Space
• 3:AM

• Official site

• See Index of Literary Essays

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About the Author:

       Author Gabriel Josipovici was born in 1940.

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