#modernism

It is when death is rendered graphically, is televised so to speak, that you sense an eerie separation between your condition and yourself. A network of symbols has been introduced, an entire awesome technology wrested from the gods. It makes you feel like a stranger in your own dying. ↗

— Don DeLillo

#postmodernism #death

My definition of modernism took a while to develop. ↗

— Peter Gay

#develop #modernism #took #while

The earlier, the more fun. Why put it off? It’s the atomic age! ↗

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#modernism #sex #age

Too Clear, too clean. The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was "digitization" which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh. Film, photography, music: dead. "An aesthetic holocaust! ↗

— Jennifer Egan

#artists #digitalization #modernism #art

In the pragmatist, streetwise climate of advanced postmodern capitalism, with its scepticism of big pictures and grand narratives, its hard-nosed disenchantment with the metaphysical, 'life' is one among a whole series of discredited totalities. We are invited to think small rather than big – ironically, at just the point when some of those out to destroy Western civilization are doing exactly the opposite. In the conflict between Western capitalism and radical Islam, a paucity of belief squares up to an excess of it. The West finds itself faced with a full-blooded metaphysical onslaught at just the historical point that it has, so to speak, philosophically disarmed. As far as belief goes, postmodernism prefers to travel light: it has beliefs, to be sure, but it does not have faith. ↗

— Terry Eagleton

#belief #capitalism #faith #grand-narratives #islam

But re-reading Voss also demonstrates again that although White wasn't 'a nice man', and indeed was—perhaps rightly—scathingly dismissive of my and other Australian writers' work and origins unless they were his friends, he was a genius, and Voss one of the finest works of the modernist era and of the past century. ↗

— Thomas Keneally

#australian-literature #friendship #literature #modernism #nastiness

The radical hermeneutic of suspicion that characterizes all of post-modernity is essentially nihilistic, denying the very possibility of creative or healing love. In the cross and resurrection of Jesus we find the answer: the God who made the world is revealed in terms of a self-giving love that no hermeneutic of suspicion can ever touch, in a Self that found itself by giving itself away, in a Story that was never manipulative but always healing and recreating, and in a Reality that can truly be known, indeed to know which is to discover a new dimension of knowledge, the dimension of loving and being loved. ↗

— N.T. Wright

#jesus #postmodernism #the-cross #love

The best way to measure the loss of intellectual sophistication - this "nerdification," to put it bluntly - is in the growing disappearance of sarcasm, as mechanic minds take insults a bit too literally. ↗

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#intellectual-sophistication #internet #irony #nerd #nerdery

A "modern" man has nothing to add to modernism, if only because he has nothing to oppose it with. The well-adapted drop off the dead limb of time like lice. ↗

— Elias Canetti

#because #dead #drop #lice #like

The arts generally have had to recognize Modernism - how should poetry escape? ↗

— John C. Ransom

#escape #generally #had #how #modernism