The contributors to The Failure of Modernism are influenced by the view that modernism has failed, and most of the essays attempt to critique specific features of modernism, often from a more traditional perspective. Modernism in philosophy is characterized by skepticism and anti-realism in epistemology, and by relativism in ethics and politics.

"One of the first books by a serious art critic to confront the social situation of contemporary art, to describe the resonance between the myriad styles, forms, and attitudes of contemporary art and the moral and economic setting in which this art occurs"--back cover.

Nobel laureate Elias Canetti wrote his novel Auto-da-F©(Die Blendung) when he and the twentieth century were still quite young. Rooted in the cultural crises of the Weimar period, Auto-da-F© first received critical acclaim abroad--in

'This book makes a significant and needed contribution to post-structural philosophy and literary theory. In this impressive analysis that delicately weaves together philosophical and literary texts, Ewa Ziarek powerfully and persuasively demonstrates that the rhetoric of the failure of traditional subject-centered rationality does not lead to nihilism or nominalism.'-Kelly Oliver, University of Texas at Austin

Modernism in architecture and urban design has failed the American city. This is the decisive conclusion that renowned public intellectual Nathan Glazer has drawn from two decades of writing and thinking about what this architectural movement will bequeath to future generations. In From a Cause to a Style, he proclaims his disappointment with modernism and its impact on the American city. Writing in the tradition of legendary American architectural critics Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs, Glazer contends that modernism, this new urban form that signaled not just a radical revolution in style but a social ambition to enhance the conditions under which ordinary people lived, has fallen short on all counts. The articles and essays collected here--some never published before, all updated--reflect his ideas on subjects ranging from the livable city and public housing to building design, public memorials, and the uses of public space. Glazer, an undisputed giant among public intellectuals, is perhaps best known for his writings on ethnicity and social policy, where the unflinching honesty and independence of thought that he brought to bear on tough social questions has earned him respect from both the Left and the Right. Here, he challenges us to face some difficult truths about the public places that, for better or worse, define who we are as a society. From a Cause to a Style is an exhilarating and thought-provoking book that raises important questions about modernist architecture and the larger social aims it was supposed to have addressed-and those it has abandoned.

From Henry James' fascination with burnt manuscripts to destroyed books in the fiction of the Blitz; from junk mail in the work of Elizabeth Bowen to bureaucratic paperwork in Vladimir Nabokov; modern fiction is littered with images of tattered and useless paper that reveal an increasingly uneasy relationship between literature and its own materials over the course of the twentieth-century. Wastepaper Modernism argues that these images are vital to our understanding of modernism, disclosing an anxiety about textual matter that lurks behind the desire for radically different modes of communication. At the same time that writers were becoming infatuated with new technologies like the cinema and the radio, they were also being haunted by their own pages. Having its roots in the late-nineteenth century, but finding its fullest constellation in the wake of the high modernist experimentation with novelistic form, "wastepaper modernism" arises when fiction imagines its own processes of transmission and representation breaking down. When the descriptive capabilities of the novel exhaust themselves, the wastepaper modernists picture instead the physical decay of the book's own primary matter. Bringing together book history and media theory with detailed close reading, Wastepaper Modernism reveals modernist literature's dark sense of itself as a ruin in the making.

In Making Dystopia, distinguished architectural historian James Stevens Curl tells the story of the advent of architectural Modernism in the aftermath of the First World War, its protagonists, and its astonishing, almost global acceptance after 1945. He argues forcefully that the triumph of architectural Modernism in the second half of the twentieth century led to massive destruction, the creation of alien urban landscapes, and a huge waste of resources. Moreover, the coming of Modernism was not an inevitable, seamless evolution, as many have insisted, but a massive, unparalled disruption that demanded a clean slate and the elimination of all ornament, decoration, and choice. Tracing the effects of the Modernist revolution in architecture to the present, Stevens Curl argues that, with each passing year, so-called 'iconic' architecture by supposed 'star' architects has become more and more bizarre, unsettling, and expensive, ignoring established contexts and proving to be stratospherically remote from the aspirations and needs of humanity. In the elite world of contemporary architecture, form increasingly follows finance, and in a society in which the 'haves' have more and more, and the 'have-nots' are ever more marginalized, he warns that contemporary architecture continues to stack up huge potential problems for the future, as housing costs spiral out of control, resources are squandered on architectural bling, and society fractures. This courageous, passionate, deeply researched, and profoundly argued book should be read by everyone concerned with what is around us. Its combative critique of the entire Modernist architectural project and its apologists will be highly controversial to many. But it contains salutary warnings that we ignore at our peril. And it asks awkward questions to which answers are long overdue.