The Failure of Modernism

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The Failure of Modernism
This paper focuses upon the failings of modernism in New York literature and why modernism was inevitably doomed to failure. There do appear to be some obvious reasons why modernism collapsed: it was associated with the prevailing power structure or elite that had led the world into the blunders or horrors of the Second World War; in the aftermath of WWII, general disillusionment with what had transpired sparked a revulsion against the modernist aesthetic which still believed that art could achieve some sort of unity and transcendent insight in a world sadly fragmented and disconnected. In the case of New York and its modernist movement, it looks as though the combination of a new cultural and intellectual mind-set...

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