Quote:
Originally Posted by Aaron Poochigian
David, I meant that Hardy recognized WWI was an epoch-making event--the West's assumption that civilization was improving with the passage of time was no longer tenable. Twentieth century history certainly did go on to blow that assumption to bits. The war marked the beginning of "the Modern": http://www.cnn.com/2014/10/30/opinio...rt-modern-wwi/
The author argues that Victorian art was not adequate to express WWI's chaos, so Modernism stepped in.
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Thanks for clarifying that for me, Aaron. (I need a lot of clarification sometimes.) I just wish he hadn't couched it in those lofty, almost obscure terms.
Without knowing much about the intellectual history of the time, I do wonder whether he can have been the first to recognise it. There must have been others? Perhaps not. I was just wondering about Spengler, but I've never read him.