Insuportabila versatilitate a modernismului

The unbearable versatility of modernism

Abstract

This article aims to investigate the specifics of modernism by identifying several critical moments in intellectual history that are symptoms of significant tendencies in Western literature. In the absence of viable delimitations that would give modernism the status of a literary movement, the specificity of this literary-artistic period can be depicted by dwelling in the field of ideas that shaped a common way of conceiving human existence. The issue of the newness, around which the idea of modernity is built, summarizes a whole socio-cultural process that involves attitudes moving between the fascination and the anxiety of change. Considering these two perspectives towards the metamorphoses of the age in which writers lived with enthusiasm or drama, one can identify a conception of the condition of knowledge in a developing world. The social aspects, the individual identity, the established moral and religious principles, and the possibilities of creation are subjected to interrogation and therefore cause the tensions that irrigate modernist works.