Modernism terminable and interminable
UW Helen C. White Hall 600 N. Park St., Madison, Wisconsin
press release: Jean-Michel Rabaté will examine the limits or “ends” of modernism, both as an aesthetic movement and as a period. Although as an aesthetic phenomenon modernism is often characterized in terms of formal coherence and completion, he will show how modernism exhibits tendencies towards coherence as well as fragmentation, completion as well as incompletion, comparing the works of authors such as James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and Franz Kafka. Ultimately, he will demonstrate how issues of aesthetic completion or incompletion redound upon questions of periodization and the “end” of modernism.