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…
Search Results 1 - 25 of 422
Dadaism
Dada began in Zurich, Switzerland, in the midst of World War I. Several expatriate artists converged in the city to escape the brutal and seemingly…
Symbolism Overview
Symbolism is a late-nineteenth-century literary movement centred mostly around the work of poets such as Stéphane Mallarmé, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, Philippe Villiers de L’Isle-Adam,…
Modernism in East Asia
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,…
Modernism in the Middle East and Arab World
Exploring modernity and its intellectual trends in the Middle East is a very fitting endeavour, as ‘Middle East’ itself is a ‘modern’ term which has…
Drama, Theater and Performance Subject Overview
This brief preamble will introduce the kinds of material the reader can expect to find in the entries treating drama, theater, and performance, and suggest…
Modernism in Europe
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…
Modernism in Canada and The United States
In Canada and the United States modernism emerges from transnational engagements with global intellectual movements while also grappling with local intellectual, cultural, and political developments…
Constructivism
Prior to World War II, Constructivism attracted little interest from British artists apart from the few involved with Circle in 1937. Circle consisted of a…
Abstract Expressionism
Abstract Expressionism was a movement initiated by a group of loosely affiliated artists that came together during the early 1940s, primarily in New York City.…
Modernism in Latin America
In Latin American intellectual history, modernism is a term that can be usefully and accurately applied to at least two distinct intellectual movements: a clearly…
Cubism
Cubism is an influential modernist art movement that emerged in Paris during the first decade of the twentieth century. The term was established by Parisian…
Surrealism Overview
Soupault’s publication of Manifeste du Surréalism in 1924. Rising in the wake of the First World War, Surrealism revolted against a world that had become…
Photography
Expressionism
Expressionism was one of the foremost modernist movements to emerge in Europe in the early years of the twentieth-century. It had a profound effect on…
Cubism [REVISED AND EXPANDED]
Cubism is an art movement that emerged in Paris during the first decade of the 20th century. It was a key movement in the birth…
Vaihinger, Hans (1852–1933)
Hans Vaihinger is known chiefly for the fictionalist outlook developed in his 1911 Philosophie des als ob (The Philosophy of As-If), a text that has…
Dilthey, Wilhelm (1833–1911)
Born in Biebrich, Rhineland (now Hesse, Germany), the German philosopher and psychologist Wilhelm Christian Ludwig Dilthey founded the German school of philosophy called Lebensphilosophie (philosophy…
Lévy-Brühl, Lucien (1857–1939)
Lucien Lévy-Brühl was a French philosopher who taught philosophy at the Sorbonne from 1899 to 1927. Investigating the psychology of ‘primitive’ societies, his book Les…
Cohen, Hermann (1842–1918)
Hermann Cohen was a respected Jewish-German philosopher, who had a profound influence on various currents within the philosophical discourse of modernity. These currents included the…
Bergson, Henri (1859–1941)
Henri Bergson was a leading philosopher of France’s Third Republic. A graduate of the prestigious École Normale Supérieure, he was appointed Chair of Modern Philosophy…
Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1889–1951)
Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was an Austrian philosopher whose work, largely on the philosophy of language, had far-reaching implications for modernist intellectual history and for…
McTaggart, John McTaggart Ellis (1866–1925)
Cambridge philosopher, metaphysician, and mystic John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart was a key figure in initiating modernist shifts in philosophy by challenging traditional understandings of Christian…
Dialectical Materialism
Dialectical Materialism is a doctrine of late-nineteenth-century German socialist philosophy, which later developed as a central tenet of Marxist political philosophy.
Mingei [民芸]
Developed in Japan in the mid-1920s, “Mingei” denotes a concept that encompasses objects, aesthetics, and philosophy. Developed by three individuals—religious philosopher and aesthete Yanagi Muneyoshi…