Tendentious Modernism

The category of tendentiousness-with its dogmatic, didactic, and aesthetically conservative inclinations-seems inherently opposed to the logic of modernism, which emphasized the aesthetic moment of formal innovation. While many modernists argued for the compatibility between aesthetic and political revolution, they invariably met the skepticism of those demanding a clear, ůnambiguously expressed political message from art. But was this conceptual divide unbridgeable? In this article, Peter Zusi explores this question through the case of the Czech theorist of the interwar avant-garde, Karel Teige. Teige exemplifies how the early Czech avant-garde adopted such terms asfunctionandpopular character(lidovost)from nineteenth-century Czech discourse, where they had served to celebrate the tendentious applicability of cultural artifacts to a political movement of emancipation. For Teige, however, these terms quickly shifted from accentuating to critiquing political tendentiousness. Teige's shift, Zusi argues, does not represent the trace of cultural belatedness or conceptual confusion as much as it reveals the flexibility of conceptual oppositions too often conceived as static

Aesthetics · Art history · Czech · Emancipation · Epistemology · Karel · Linguistics · Modernism (music · Political science · Politics · Popularity · Skepticism · Sociology · Technocracy · Central European national history · Eastern European Communism and Reforms · History · Law · Philosophy

• An international politics of Czech architecture; or, reviving the international in international political sociology

  Open Access•Benjamin Tallis•Globalizations•2019

  Añadir item

• Geopolitics as Architecture

  Open Access•Jaroslav Weinfurter•Geopolitics•2025

  Añadir item

• Historic Structures

  F W Galan•Historic Structures•1985

  Añadir item

• History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe

  Marcel Cornis-Pope, John Neubauer•History of the literary cultures…•2004

  Añadir item

• Roman Jakobson and the Czech Avant-Garde Between Two Wars

  Vratislav Effenberger•The American Journal of Semiotics•1983

  Añadir item

• The Unbearable Lightness of Building—A Cautionary Tale

  Derek Sayer•Grey Room•2004

  Añadir item

• Marx's lost aesthetic

  Harold Mah, Harold E Mah•History of European Ideas•1987

  Añadir item

• Karel Capek's "Pasmo" and the Construction of Literary Modernity through the Art of Translation

  Deborah Garfinkle•The Slavic and East European…•2003

  Añadir item

• Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe

  A L Rowse, D Ryazanov•The Economic Journal•1931

  Añadir item

• The Coasts of Bohemia

  Derek Sayer, Alena Sayer•Coasts of Bohemia•1998

  Añadir item