The Difficulties of ModernismIn The Difficulties of Modernism, Leonard Diepeveen examines how difficulty became central to our encounters with modern literature and culture. Literary modernism's first readers often complained that difficulty was running rampant in literature, that art had become a plague of unintelligibility. Diepeveen argues that the simultaneous appearance of modernism and discussion about difficulty was not coincidental-difficulty allowed modernism to rise to the status of high art, and it was fundamental to how modernism shaped the canon not only of twentieth-century literature, but of the literature that preceded it. He argues that modernism can be best understood as the moment when knowing how to maneuver through difficult art became the central sign of one's ability to participate in high culture. |
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aesthetic anthology anxiety argued argument articulated artists asserted audience central century claim common reader complexity conceptual metaphors contemporary Critical Heritage Vol culty defense diffi difficult art difficult modernism difficult text difficult writing discussion Donne edited emotional ernism Esslin example experience Ezra Pound F. R. Leavis Finnegans Wake Frost and Cather Gertrude Stein high culture high modern high modernism's idea intellectual J. C. Squire James Joyce Joyce's Kegan Paul kind language literary literature London Louis Untermeyer Marianne Moore meaning modern canon modern difficulty Modern Poetry modern readers modernism's apologists modernism's difficulty modernism's skeptics modernist Monroe moral noted obscurity pleasure poem poets professionalism professionalist published quoted reactions reading Reggie Renoir responses Review Robert Frost Routledge and Kegan Sarett sense simple simplicity social Squire surface T. S. Eliot things Tilted Arc tion twentieth twentieth-century typical Ulysses understanding Untermeyer Verse visceral Waste Land William York