Modernisme: Questions de théorie/Modernismo: Cuestiones de teoría/Modernism: Questions of theory

Literary modernism is a controversial term in academic research; its interpretation depends on perspective, and so critics can speak either of a modernist attitude or of a modernist movement which ranges many literatures at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. C'est grâce à cet apport de la modernité que le modernisme part toujours à la recherche de l'inattendu, du mot surprenant et choquant, source inépuisable, au moins pendant plusieurs décennies, d'originalité et d'exotisme - d'où le motif oriental, de finesse aristocratique et l'abondance des pierreries, laques, ivoires, porcelaines, velours, soies... que l'on reconnaÎt dans certaines manifestations du Jugendstil, de l'Art Nouveau et du Modern Style. Modernist artists at the beginning of the century were to a large degree moved to this unprecedented freedom and confidence in stylistic experiment by what they saw as radically new ideas, current in that periods, concerning consciousness, time, and the nature of knowledge, which were to be found in the work of Nietzsche, Bergson, Freud, Einstein, Croce, Weber, and others. Cette deuxième critique, née aux États-Unis, fixes the great artistic shift to a skepticism toward language and form in the middle of the nineteenth century, which becomes the important demarcation point in recent art history - the beginning of the phase usually referred to as modernism.