Definitional excursions

the meanings of modern/ modernity/modernism

Susan Stanford Friedman

pp. 11-32

in: Pamela L. Caughie (ed), Disciplining modernism, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009

Abstract

What is modernity? What is or was modernism? Why is the energetic, expanding, multidisciplinary field of modernist studies so filled with contestation over the very ground of study? Definitional activities are fictionalizing processes, however much they sound like rational categorization. As such, I will begin with three stories, allegorized but rooted in my own experience in an evolving field.¹