Modernity And Modernism: Preliminary Theoretical Considerations

Abstract

Although in the last few decades numerous studies have attempted to come to grips with exile and utopia as independent concepts, such studies have largely failed to see the close correlation between them or to consider them in a general cultural-theoretical framework. In the present study, I shall argue that the two concepts are kindred forms of ludic liminality. Furthermore, I shall demonstrate that both of them are inextricably linked to the idea of modernity. But, before I can undertake this task, I need briefly to review the principal ways in which these concepts have so far been employed in contemporary cultural theory and clarify my own understanding of them. In Part I, therefore, I shall first consider modernity and modernism, then play and liminality, and finally exile and utopia, pointing out the complex conceptual and cultural-historical links between all of these terms.