Faulkner's Pylon
The City in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8895508 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Michael Zeitlin (0000-0002-2958-7007, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1991 |
| Volume | 22 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 229-240 |
| Publication date | 1991-09-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Canadian Review of American Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0007-7720 • E-ISSN: 1710-114X |
| Publisher | University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.3138/cras-022-02-06 |
| OpenAlex | W2027935044 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 5 |
What is paradoxical about the historical experience of modernism is that it designates very precisely that period in which Nature—or the in- or anti-human-is everywhere in the process of being displaced or destroyed, expunged, eliminated, by the achievements of human praxis and human production. The great modernist literature—from Baudelaire and Flaubert to Ulysses and beyond-is a city literature: its object is therefore the anti-natural, the humanised, par excellence, a landscape which is everywhere the result of human labour, in which everything-including the formerly natural, grass, trees, our own bodies-is finally produced by human beings. This is then the historical paradox with which the experience of contingency confronts us (along with its ideologies—existentialism and nihilism—and its aesthetics—modernism): how can the city be meaningless? How can human production be felt to be absurd or contingent, when in another sense one would think it was only human labour which created genuine meaning in the first place
Absurdism · Aesthetics · Art · Contingency · Epistemology · Excellence · Existentialism · Ideology · Linguistics · Literature · Meaning (existential · Modernism (music · Natural (archaeology · Object (grammar · Political science · Praxis · Reproduction · Sociology · Art, Politics, and Modernism · History · Law · Philosophy · Walter Benjamin Studies Compilation
| Highly cited | No |
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