Wednesday, August 03, 2005

Modernism

Just finished Max Paddison's Adorno, Modernism and Mass Culture. Brilliant and a bit obtuse, in the way that European academics who read way more than you are. I highly recommend the first chapter if you want a concise and fairly readable summary of critical theory in the twentieth-century. He makes me think, however, that I should really read Peter Bürger's Theory of the Avant-Garde. Have any of you smart people out there read it?

In other academic news/thinking aloud, I have decided the Cage paper I wrote last fall, and which I am revising as an article this summer, is complete rubbish. Luckily, I think I have come up with a new organizational scheme that should make its re-writing go more smoothly than it has been. Plus, I have decided to fold into this essay another paper I wrote on Cage a year ago. That will beef up the second half of the paper a good deal, and make the whole thing a bit more literate. That's the plan at least.

1 comment:

sushipjs said...

I read Peter Bürger's Theory of the Avant-Garde for my MA thesis back in 2004... Tough book, but worth reading if you want to get a sense of modernism in Art. I actually never used it in my Thesis, but I remember it turned me onto reading a lot of literature of manifestos and their relationship to Futurism. I know, off topic...