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…
Jean Painlevé was a French scientist who was particularly well known for his documentary films about science and the natural world. He was the only…
Charles Madge is best known as a founder of Mass Observation, but he was also an accomplished poet, a journalist, and a social scientist. Madge…
Born in Brest in a family of scientists and a trained agricultural engineer himself, Alain Robbe-Grillet was a French novelist, film director, and one of…
Gregory Bateson was an English anthropologist, social scientist, communications theorist, and cyberneticist. His most famous work, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972), is a…
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…
Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt, born in Neckarau (now Mannheim, Baden-Württemberg), was a German scientist who pioneered the field of experimental psychology. His best-known work, Grundzüge der…
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,…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
Impressionism is an artistic movement that flourished in France between 1860 and 1890. The term has been widely adopted around the world to describe artistic…
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…
Science fiction films are films where plot premises generally (1) depend on a scientific development or concept not actualised at the time of filming, or…
Henry Havelock Ellis was a pioneer of sexology, the scientific study of human sexuality. As he details in his memoir My Life (1939), he grew…
The Big Bang theory is a scientific model of the universe that posits a state of dense, centralized matter before the current, observable expansion of…
Born in Ulm, Württemberg (now Germany), Einstein was a theoretical physicist who initiated a scientific revolution with his theory of general relativity. Challenging classical mechanics…
A broad notion of technocracy can be traced back to ancient Greece. The narrow notion of the term is distinctly modern, inspired by the Industrial…
Le voyage dans la lune [A Trip to the Moon] is the best-known work of special effects and film pioneer Georges Méliès (1861–1938). It is…
Paul Valéry is the author of an oeuvre that comprises several genres and shows him to have been a polyvalent thinker. Celebrated for his poetry,…
Emile Cohl (Emile Eugène Jean Louis Courtet), a renowned caricaturist and pioneering filmmaker born in Paris, is often credited with inventing the animated cartoon. In…
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…