Intellectual Currents
This section focusses on the historical, sociological, philosophical, economic, political, and scientific context of modernism. Entries cover individuals, coteries, movements, and events. The primary criterion…
This section focusses on the historical, sociological, philosophical, economic, political, and scientific context of modernism. Entries cover individuals, coteries, movements, and events. The primary criterion…
The term ‘modernism’ is commonly used to describe some of the literary and cultural production of the early twentieth century in China, Japan, and Korea,…
Though they often escape critical scrutiny, concepts such as modernism, modernity, and modernization are at the heart of the concept of development, and thus omnipresent…
We are living in a very singular moment of history. It is a moment of crisis, in the literal sense of that word. In every…
From the Christian doctrine of original sin, through G. W. F. Hegel’s conception of freedom, and the situated subject of existentialist thought in the wake…
A major inspiration to a younger generation of Marathi ‘Dalit’ authors, Baburao Bagul’s literary and critical writing is somewhat atypical of what subsequently became famous…
American literary critic, editor, playwright, novelist and journalist Edmund Wilson’s key critical texts trace the development of twentieth-century Anglo-American writing. Wilson’s Axel’s Castle: A Study…
Founded in Provincetown, Massachusetts in 1915 and transplanted to Greenwich Village in 1916, the Provincetown Players was one of the most influential theatrical organizations in…
Dialectical Materialism is a doctrine of late-nineteenth-century German socialist philosophy, which later developed as a central tenet of Marxist political philosophy.
David Émile Durkheim was a founding figure of sociology in France. His conceptual development of the “division of labour” (1893) remains key to a sociological…
The literary and cultural movement known as négritude was started in Paris in 1932 by Black students from French-speaking colonies in West Africa, the Caribbean…
Max Ernst was a painter, sculptor and printmaker. He was born in Germany, but he lived in Paris and then New York; he returned to…
Alexander Kluge is a German author, film director, and television producer who has also worked as a lawyer, teacher, and political lobbyist. A founding figure of…
Modernism, known in Kannada as ‘Navya’, emerged as a literary movement in the 1950s. This period saw writers deliberately moving away from the Romanticism of…
The Czech avant-garde artist Bohumil Kubišta came from a rural farming family. Educated in Hradec Králové, Kubišta moved to Prague in 1903 to attend art…
Dharamvir Bharati was one of the most versatile literary figures of modern Hindi Literature in independent India. Born on 25 December, 1926 in a Kayastha…
In Mexico City, at the height of World War II, the Viennese expatriate artist Wolfgang Paalen founded and edited DYN, an international art journal that…
A manifesto is an articulation of a particular (sometimes numerically or hierarchically ordered) set of theses that correspond to a political or aesthetic movement. In…
The most salient first use of the term populism and its cognates can be found in late 19th-century Tsarist Russia. The Russian peasant Narodniki [populists]…
Communism is first and foremost the reality of long-dismantled or nearly defunct regimes in China, the (former) Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Cuba and North Korea:…
The Workers’ Theatre Movement (WTM) was an international project, largely promoted by the Workers International Relief, to conjoin left militant radical theaters during the period…
Best remembered for her metal designs, Marianne Brandt created the small tea extract pot that set a record in 2007 for the highest sum ever…
Just as ‘modernity’, ‘modernism’ too has variegated histories. Years back—to be precise in 1961—Carl E. Schorske had zeroed in on Vienna to chart out a…
Verfremdungseffekt (V-effekt), usually translated as alienation effect (a-effect), is a concept developed by the German poet, playwright, and dramaturg Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956). His V-effekt is…
André Breton was a French poet, writer, editor and critic. He is best known as one of the key founders of Surrealism. Breton published the…