Overview

In The Decline of Modernism, Peter Bürger addresses the relationship between art and society, from the emergence of bourgeois culture in the eighteenth century to the decline of modernism in the twentieth century. In analyzing this relationship, he draws on a wide range of sociological and literary-critical sources—Weber, Benjamin, Foucault, Diderot, Sade, Wyndham Lewis, Peter Weiss, and Joseph Beuys, among others. He argues that in questioning the formal relationship between art and life, which had dominated the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the avant-gardist movements of the early twentieth century brought about the crisis of postmodernism. Bürger charts the establishment of literary and artistic institutions since the Enlightenment and their apparent autonomy from the prevailing political systems. However, he argues that the discovery of the obverse of Enlightenment—namely, barbarism—revealed the interdependence of art and society and set the scene for the avant-gardist protest against aesthetic formalism.

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9780271008905

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Reviews

Whether commenting on theorists like Benjamin, Adorno, and Foucault or artists like Diderot, Beuys, and Lewis, Peter Burger brings to bear a keenly honed intelligence and prodigious learning. The penetrating essays collected in The Decline of Modernism show critical hermeneutics at its most dazzling and incisive. Anyone concerned with the international debate on the relation between politics and aesthetics must read this book. -Martin Jay, University of California, Berkeley

Whether commenting on theorists like Benjamin, Adorno, and Foucault or artists like Diderot, Beuys, and Lewis, Peter Burger brings to bear a keenly honed intelligence and prodigious learning. The penetrating essays collected in The Decline of Modernism show critical hermeneutics at its most dazzling and incisive. Anyone concerned with the international debate on the relation between politics and aesthetics must read this book. Martin Jay, University of California, Berkeley

Author Information

Peter Burger is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Bremen. He is the author of The Theory of the Avant-Garde (1984).

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